The ex-wife of CIA agent Cord Meyer, Jr., Mary Pinchot Meyer, was trying to convert JFK to pacifism and was known to make wisecracks at dinner parties about what the CIA was doing in the world. Tragically, she was murdered 60 years ago while taking an afternoon jog by the Potomac River.
[This article, timed for the 61st anniversary of the JFK assassination, in conjunction with yesterday’s piece on David H. Byrd, continues CovertAction Magazine’s efforts to probe into the JFK assassination and wider corruption that it bred. The magazine has been publishing articles since the late 1970s trying to uncover the truth about the JFK assassination and dark forces that were behind it along with other associated murders like that of journalist Dorothy Kilgallen and Mary Pinchot Meyer, who is the focus of this article.–Editors]
Mary Pinchot Meyer was a free-spirited idealist and painter who carried on a love affair with President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s after divorcing CIA operative Cord Meyer, Jr.[1]
A graduate of Vasser College whose father, Amos Pinchot, was a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Meyer had been a member of the left-wing American Labor Party who allegedly introduced JFK to marijuana and LSD during their love-making sessions while encouraging him to adopt pacifist policies.[2]
Sadly, Meyer’s life ended abruptly on October 12, 1964, less than a year after JFK died, when she was shot twice while taking her daily lunch-time jog along the Potomac River.
About an hour after the murder, the Washington, D.C., police arrested Ray Crump, Jr., an African-American who had skipped work that day to drink whiskey by the Potomac River and have sex with a lover named Vivian, with whom he was having an extra-marital affair.
One of Mary’s friends said that “it was strange, especially the way the police and newspapers rushed to judgment about who did it. It felt wrong.”[3]
An Associated Press photographer who took pictures on the canal where Mary’s body was discovered said he had found the crime scene odd because in addition to Park and Homicide Police, there were “so many plainclothesmen there. I am curious in light of what we know about the CIA now, who those men were.”[4]
Crump was acquitted at trial because the prosecution’s two main witnesses—a truck driver named Henry Wiggins, Jr., and an Army Lieutenant named William L. Mitchell—observed a man who was taller and of heavier build than Crump hovering above Meyer’s corpse.
Also, no forensic evidence linked Crump to the crime. Meyer had put up a struggle, but none of Meyer’s blood or fibers was found on Crump or vice versa.[5]
Crump’s lawyer, Dovey Johnson Roundtree and others who scrutinized the case believed that Crump had been set up as a patsy and that Meyer had been killed by powerful people because of her connection to JFK and knowledge about his assassination.
When the writer C. David Heymann asked Cord Meyer Jr. six days before his own death whom he thought had killed his ex-wife, Cord tellingly replied: “The same sons of bitches who killed John F. Kennedy.”[6]
Mary’s Mosaic
Peter Janney takes up the unsolved mystery surrounding Meyer’s death in Mary’s Mosaic: CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace.
Janney is the son of high-level CIA operative Wistar Janney, who was close friends with Cord Meyer, Jr., Mary’s ex-husband. Peter was best friends with Mary and Cord’s son, Michael Meyer, who tragically died at age nine in 1956 after being hit by a car near his house.
Janney has great respect for Mary Meyer, whom he believes was murdered because she threatened to reveal what she knew about the JFK assassination.
The title of the book comes from a statement made by journalist Leo Damore to his attorney, Jimmy Smith: “Mary’s mosaic had been completed. She had finally put the pieces together [about the Kennedy assassination] and was getting ready to talk. Alas, it was Mary’s inside knowledge of the [JFK] hit that made it necessary for her to be terminated [by the CIA].”[7]
Meyer’s association with the CIA began when she married Cord Meyer, Jr., in 1945 during an idealistic phase of Cord’s career.
A decorated Pacific War veteran who wrote poignantly about his experiences in The Atlantic Monthly which Mary edited, Cord served as an aide to Harold Stassen, a U.S. delegate to the San Francisco conference that established the UN, and came to head the World Federalist Society which sought to establish a democratic world parliament that would prevent future wars.[8]
It was in this period that Mary first met John F. Kennedy who was covering the San Francisco conference for the Hearst newspapers.
When Cord was recruited into the CIA by Allen Dulles, Mary became estranged from him as she felt he had abandoned his principles. Cord also became a womanizer and drank excessively.
Unlike the other CIA wives, Meyer openly spoke out against her husband’s beloved Agency at cocktail and dinner parties. One CIA wife noted that Meyer would “make wisecracks” about what the CIA was doing in the world.[9]
Mary, allegedly, was well acquainted with the CIA’s drug program, Operation MK-ULTRA, because Cord had told her more than he should have. A source told Janney that “Mary absolutely detested Allen Dulles [CIA Director during the 1950s] and everything he stood for. She compared him to Machiavelli, only worse.”[10]
1960s guru Timothy Leary maintained that he had turned Mary onto LSD and that she told him that she had taken a trip with President Kennedy. Leary said that she had called him the day after JFK’s assassination, indicating that he was “changing too fast; they couldn’t control him anymore.” Mary further said: “They’ve covered everything up. I gotta come see you. I’m afraid. Be careful.”[11]
Mary’s access to JFK and his White House coterie had allowed her to quietly interrogate the few people close to Kennedy who would talk about the day of the assassination in Dallas.
She had read and collected reports and articles and critically scrutinized the Warren Commission Report, which she considered the “final narcotic designed to deaden any serious inquiry or public scrutiny into Kennedy’s death.”[12]
On the night of Meyer’s murder, James Jesus Angleton, CIA Deputy Director for Counterintelligence, and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, a CIA asset, allegedly went to Mary’s house and seized her diary, which may have been incriminating of Angleton and the CIA’s role in orchestrating what had occurred in Dallas.
Angleton boasted that he had bugged Mary Meyer’s telephone and bedroom prior to her death.[13]
According to Janney, Meyer’s diary threatened to jeopardize the Warren Report and public acceptance of Lee Harvey Oswald’s guilt, which was the reason for her murder.
James Truitt, a journalist for Newsweek and another friend of the Meyers, said he had received a letter from Angleton saying, “As to the diary and related papers, I burned them.”[14]
One danger was that the diary would tarnish Kennedy’s reputation and efforts to beautify him in the media by showing in the words of New York Post writer Leo Damore that “it wasn’t Camelot; it was Caligula’s court [where illegal drug use and sexual bacchanalia was prevalent].”[15]
Janney believes that the smoking gun in the case is the revelation that his father, Wistar, whom he believes was involved in the operation, called Ben Bradlee and Cord Meyer, Jr. (who was then in New York) to inform them that Mary was killed “shortly after lunch” on October 12. The police, however, did not establish Mary’s identity until 6:00 p.m. that night, when Bradlee identified her in the morgue in the company of Sergeant Sam Wallace of Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department.
At dinner that night at home, Wistar acted as if nothing unusual had happened during the day, and he sounded surprised when someone from the police allegedly called to notify him of Meyer’s death around 8:00 p.m.[16]
How It Went Down
Peter Janney suggests a likely scenario by which a CIA hit team carried out surveillance on Meyer to uncover her daily routine and then scoped out the crime scene early on the morning of October 12, 1964.
After identifying Ray Crump, Jr., as the patsy, they enlisted the CIA’s Technical Services Division to create a look-alike actor wearing the same clothes who would be seen next to Meyer after she was killed.
They also had a Rambler station wagon deliberately break down nearby to create ready eyewitnesses, and instructed Mitchell on what to do.[17]
The real assassin was a professional who was easily able to escape the murder scene undetected, leaving Crump as the fall guy. The only problem was that Crump was very small, so the CIA had to settle for a look-alike who was slightly bigger, which backfired at trial when the size discrepancy resulted in Crump’s acquittal.
In an interview for Steamshovel Press, Deborah Davis, author of a scathing biography of Katherine Graham, said that Meyer’s killing and the coverup that followed, “had all the earmarks of a professional assassination.” Leo Damore agreed, saying that a CIA associate told him that Pinchot’s murder was a professional hit.[18]
Angleton and CIA Identified As Killers
Five key sources identified James Angleton and the CIA as the mastermind of Meyer’s killing:
1. Joe Shimon, who served in the Maryland Police Department and was a CIA mafia liaison. He said that “Angleton ran everything, controlled everything in the CIA and was spying on Mary after the JFK assassination. The plan to take out Mary Meyer was probably carried out through Bill Harvey. Whatever Bill Harvey was up to, it always came out of Jim Angleton’s office.” Before he died, Shimon told his daughter that “Mary was eliminated because she knew too much. People are eliminated honey, you don’t know how many people are just eliminated. They just need to be disposed of. And don’t ever believe what you read in the papers. It’s all made up.”[19]
2. Author and CIA operative Robert D. Morrow, who said that his CIA boss, Marshall Diggs, told him after release of Warren Commission Report: “There is a very prominent lady here in Washington who knows too much about the Company [the CIA], its Cuban operations, and more specifically about the president’s assassination [which she knew had been carried out by Agency-affiliated Cuban exiles and the Mafia].”[20] When Morrow subsequently met with Mario Kohly, son of a former Cuban ambassador to Spain under the Batista regime who ran a CIA counterfeit money operation, Kohly, whom Morrow knew to be working under Angleton, assured him: “Just tell Diggs I’ll take care of the matter [Meyer].” A week later, Mary was dead.[21]
3. Journalist Hal Albarelli, Jr., who was told by a long-time source in 2001 that “William L. Mitchell [the supposed witness] had been involved in the Mary Meyer murder, and that he did it at the request of the Agency’s [CIA’s] domestic K contracts office in D.C.” Mitchell had told another journalist, Leo Damore: “On that murder; a CIA K contract; a CIA individual.”[22] At Crump’s trial, Mitchell significantly provided as his residence the location of a CIA safe house. He claimed to be teaching math at Georgetown University at the time, though Georgetown had no record of him and the CIA was known to have its employees claim to be faculty at Georgetown to provide a cover; soon thereafter he disappeared.[23]
4. Bernie Yoh, a CIA operative who in a 1990 interview with Leo Damore, said that Angleton told him he had Meyer’s diary, noting further: “That woman was killed in Georgetown. I took care of everything.”
5. CIA Director Richard Helms, in a heavily redacted FBI memo uncovered by Nina Burleigh, admitted the CIA was involved in the murder of Mary Meyer and named Angleton.[24]
Another key source was the CIA’s former Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations, Bob Crowley, who gave an interview to writer Gregory Douglas, in which he said that, after Dallas, Meyer had “started to run her mouth and talk,” leading the Agency to “terminate her” by “having one of our cleaning men nail her down by the towpath while she was out for her daily jog.”[25]
When Douglas pushed back and asked whether Meyer’s killing wasn’t a bit too drastic, Crowley responded: “Why? If you knew the damage she could cause us.”
Douglas then asked whether Crowley had been the man to coordinate the killing, to which Crowley responded: “No. Jim Angleton was. And Ben Bradlee, her brother-in-law, was in the know. After she assumed room temperature, he and Jim Angleton went over to Mary’s art studio to see if she had any compromising papers and ran off with her diary. I have a copy of it.”[26]
According to Crowley, despite the veneer of being a grieving ex-husband, Cord Meyer, Jr. spoke to Angleton about killing Mary and was in complete agreement about shutting her up. Crowley added: “It wasn’t my decision to terminate Mary Meyer. I was there, but Jim [Angleton] and the others made the final decision. You know how it goes.”[27]
Could There Have Been an Even Darker Element?
One theory holds that Mary Meyer could have actually been part of a CIA mind control experiment with JFK being an MK-ULTRA guinea pig.[28] If true, her murder would have been designed to ensure “plausible deniability” and to keep the covert operations secret.
CIA Director Allen Dulles admitted in 1963 that the agency used used sex as bait (ie. honey pots) during the course of intelligence gathering.
When the CIA launched MK-ULTRA in 1953, Mary was married to Cord Meyer, Jr. and she may have done contract work for the agency herself. In the spring of 1962, she sought out Timothy Leary to obtain LSD at his office at Harvard.
Leary said that after a session dropping acid with Mary that she gave a lecture on the CIA’s interest in using such drugs for brainwashing and interrogation, which she seemed to know a lot about. Leary wrote that “there was something calculated about Mary, that tough hit you get from people who live in the hard political world.”[29]
Leary is a suspicious character who some researchers believe operated as a CIA agent his entire career and helped create the 1960s drug culture that destroyed the 1960s New Left movement acting under Agency auspices.
One theory holds that Meyer was some kind of courier between Leary and CIA.[30]
While teaching in Oakland in the 1950s, Leary had developed a personality test utilized by the CIA and was subsequently recruited by CIA operative Frank Barron to work for the Harvard Psychological Drug Research Center where he carried out experiments on LSD that were financed originally by the CIA.
Leary’s mentor in this period, Henry A. Murray, was a CIA agent, and after he was forced to resign from Harvard, he came under the tutelage of William Mellon Hitchcock who founded a CIA front group called the International Foundation for Internal Freedom.
Later in the 1960s, Leary’s drug experiments were financed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which was headed by another CIA operative, Ronald Stark.[31]
The million dollar question remains as to whether Meyer acted as an intermediary between Leary-Cord Meyer-the CIA-MK-ULTRA and Kennedy and whether the purpose of her LSD sessions with him was to get him to adopt more pacifistic views (as Leary claims she insinuated to him), or whether it was to divulge family or state secrets that could be used to discredit or ruin him? Or alter his behavior in a detrimental way.
Victor Thorn wrote that “such practices weren’t foreign to the CIA…under the Operation Midnight Climax, prostitutes dosed unsuspecting johns with LSD to see how they’d react….Could Mary Pinchot and JFK simply be more prestigious subjects of Operation Midnight Climax, with the White House replacing a bordello?”[32]
If that were the case it would provide another explanation of James Angleton’s obsession with seizing Mary’s diary since it would have revealed her role in a sinister government experiment.[33]
The Cruelest of All Fates
More than 60 years have passed since Mary Pinchot Meyer’s death at the hands of the CIA. The culprits in the murder are all long dead, having gotten away with the crime.
Their ghosts, however, live on as the CIA continues to carry out criminal acts with impunity around the world as the age of the American Century lumbers on.
In his last interview with journalist Joseph Trento, James J. Angleton admitted that the CIA had gotten “tens of thousands of brave people killed,” having “played with lives as if we owned them.”[34]
One of those lives appears to have been Mary Pinchot Meyer, a wonderful woman willing to speak her mind who met the cruelest of all fates.
See Nina Burleigh, A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer (New York: Bantam Books, 1998). This affair has been verified by secret service agents who charted more than 40 visits to the White House by Mary Pinchot Meyer when JFK was president. Victor Thorn, New World Order Assassins (Washington, D.C.: American Free Press, 2011), 50. ↑
JFK allegedly told Meyer that he had previously smoked hashish and used cocaine. ↑
Burleigh, A Very Private Woman, 16. ↑
Burleigh, A Very Private Woman, 294. ↑
See Peter Janney, Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision For World Peace, 3rd ed. (New York: Skyhorse, 2016). ↑
Hugh Wilford, The CIA: An Imperial History (New York: Basic Books, 2024), 278; C. David Heymann, The Georgetown Ladies Social Club: Power, Passion and Politics in the Nation’s Capital (New York: Attia Books, 2003), 168. ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 358. ↑
A Yale graduate who came from a wealthy New York family, Cord lost an eye at the battle of Guam. A talented writer, he was considered to be a “bright intellectual star” in the 1940s before he embarked on his CIA career. Cord was a member of the American Veterans Committee who began an anticommunist purge in the organization. In Brazil and the Dominican Republic, he organized phony labor strikes in an attempt to thwart left-wing governments. CIA officer Richard Bissell called Meyer “the creative genius behind covert operations.” In the 1960s, he may have been the handler for Bill Clinton in the 1960s. Earlier, he served as chief of the International Organization Division (IOD) that infiltrated leftist groups and was a primary mainstay behind Operation CHAOS, a domestic spy operation targeting leftist radicals. Additionally, he helped to coordinate Operation Mockingbird, where CIA stories were planted in media outlets, oversaw the Congress of Cultural Freedom through which the CIA funded intellectuals, and oversaw the National Student Association, whose purpose was to co opt leftist student movements. With millions of dollars of black budget dollars at his disposal, some suspect that Cord Meyer was one of the Watergate “deep throats” and involved in the CIA plot against Richard Nixon. St. John Hunt wrote about the deathbed confession of his father, CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, who fingered Meyer as a key point man on the JFK assassination. He said: “I think LBJ settled on Meyer as an opportunist [like himself], and a man who had very little left to him in life ever since JFK had taken Cord’s wife as one of his mistresses.” Burleigh, A Very Private Woman, 19, 112; Thorn, New World Order Assassins, 48, 53. ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 32. ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 184. ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 3, 84. Leary believed that James J. Angleton ordered Mary’s murder because she knew too many of the CIAs secrets. Wilford, The CIA, 278. These secrets included the CIA’s role in manipulating U.S. politics illegally. Allegedly Meyer had told Timothy Leary: “the CIA creates the radical journals and student organizations and runs them with deep-cover agents. Dissident organizations in academia are also controlled.” ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 32. ↑
Burleigh, A Very Private Woman, 18. ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 2. ↑
Thorn, New World Order Assassins, 54. Kennedy’s vices had been carefully guarded during his presidency. ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 341. Peter believes that, rather than the police, it may have been someone from the Agency calling Wistar as part of an effort to create another illusion: that of the grieving ex-husband Cord Meyer. ↑
Mitchell’s story was fishy because he claimed to be at the scene taking a mid-day jog though he was taking this jog far away from his workplace at the Pentagon. ↑
Thorn, New World Order Assassins, 54. ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 384, 389. Shimon told his daughter: “Our government has murdered a lot of people when they get in the way.” ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 313. ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 313, 314, 315. ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 329. Angleton for his part tried to blame Meyer’s death on a Russian mole whose identity Meyer had uncovered during her visits to the White House. ↑
Sara Jordan-Heintz, The Incredible Life & Mysterious Death of Dorothy Kilgallen (Page Turner Books International, 2023), 241. The Washington courtroom where Crump was tried was filled with CIA and FBI agents. ↑
Thorn, New World Order Assassins, 54. One month after the Kennedy assassination, Angleton had Pinchot placed under 24-hour surveillance. Her phone was tapped, her house was wired, her mail was intercepted and agents broke into her residence on several occasions to search her notes and letters. ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 355. ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 356. ↑
Idem. ↑
See for example, G.J. Krupey, “The High and the Mighty: JFK, MPM, LSD and the CIA,” Steamshovel Press, 1995. ↑
Burleigh, A Very Private World, 170. ↑
Burleigh, A Very Private World, 293. ↑
Thorn, New World Order Assassins, 57, 58. Thorn writes that Meyer had an affair with Timothy Leary. ↑
Thorn, New World Order Assassins, 59. ↑
Operation MK-ULTRA was never revealed until the 1975 Church Committee hearing. ↑
Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 3 ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
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It will soon be 44 years since the CIA assassination of John Lennon.
What is very clever about this is that it took place before he became politically active again following a long sabbatical. And so, the CIA is not, perhaps, an obvious suspect. But, as he was under surveillance then we would expect the CIA to have some idea of what he was planning and to act accordingly.
I think that the real assassin was probably, like Lennon, a resident in the Dakota Building. Such a person could move about freely without attracting attention and could then quickly return to his apartment.
It is interesting that Mark Chapman was found reading a copy of the novel “The Catcher in the Rye” when the police arrived.
Just a few months later, came the attempted assassination Of President Reagan. Interestingly, William Hinckley Jr, also had a copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” in his hotel room. And so that looks like a CIA operation too in which, had it succeeded, George H.W. Bush would have been the most obvious person to benefit.
Brilliant article/overview by Jeremy Kuzmarov. Thank you. There’s a shopping center in Queens NY name after Cord Meyer, amazingly.
40% of convicted murderers have used alcohol before or during the crime. So there is a good chance that the person who committed this murder had a lot of alcohol in their system. Sober people are less likely to commit murder
Although Ray Crump Jr. was wrongly accused of a crime that he did not commit and had been fishing that morning according to his testimony it is interesting to note that a nosy neighbor had observed him leaving home that morning with no fishing tackle and wearing a dark plaid cap and light colored windbreaker that matched those worn by the assailant. However this was just a coincidence. It was also just a coincidence that the light colored jacket found in the river fit him perfectly. I would not place too much stock in all this. Coincidences are very common in life.
Based on what have read a 24 year old black mechanic who was repairing a car on canal street about one hundred yards from the crime scene heard a lady screaming for help and also heard 2 gun shots fired. He looked over a stone retaining wall and saw a five-ten Black male with a tan jacket, dark slacks, and a golf cap. The man looked back at him and stuffed something into his pocket, walking away from the body in a calm manner. It appears that this black man threw his tan jacket and golf cap into the water as a police officer found a tan jacket and golf cap in the river a few days later. Perhaps the man threw his cap and jacket in the water because he knew that the mechanic had spotted him at the scene of the accident. However this man appeared to be much taller then Ray Crump Jr thus leading to the conclusion by many that this man was not Ray Crump Jr, but that he was a another black man.
So Meyer had the facts of what the situation was but kept is as a secret, unwritten, never told anyone waiting to be bumped off. She was so smart.