Mary's Mosaic (74 page)

Page 5: Transcription

Page 5 Discussion

Damore reveals to Smith that he had talked at some length to L. Fletcher Prouty, who had created a network of clandestine agents throughout the military and other government agencies including the FBI. However, after facilitating for the CIA many coups d’état around the globe, he was deeply disturbed by the revelation of what he quickly came to discover: the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy. Prouty resigned his Air Force commission in 1964 and began to study and prepare for publication his account of the secret history of the Cold War. His two books,
The Secret Team
and
JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy
, have since become classics in understanding America’s Cold War era. So thorough and compelling had Prouty’s analysis been that film director Oliver Stone used his personage for the character of “Mr. X” in his film
JFK
.

Damore recounts to Jimmy Smith that Prouty had been in New Zealand at the time of Kennedy’s assassination. Prouty told Damore that there was a “staggering” amount of information on Lee Harvey Oswald “already there” in the news, detailing the “how where why” of the assassination when, in fact, Oswald had only been “accused that very afternoon!!” Damore says that Prouty concluded, “[Therefore] prepared in advance,” meaning the assassination.

It was Prouty who finally assisted Damore in putting certain pieces of the murder of Mary Meyer into focus, as well as identifying “William L. Mitchell” as an assassin. A similar (“Same Mod[el]”) CIA template was used for Mary’s murder whereby (1) the murder first takes place; (2) a patsy is “Caught” (arrested); (3) a “Lone Gun” (no conspiracy); (4) “case solved” via a “trial” in the media; and (5) “Home!,” perhaps meaning “home free.”

The notes indicate a powerful role played by the
Washington Post—
”Trial by newspaper!” Ray Crump’s “mug shots” were everywhere. Damore regarded the murder trial as “so contrived,” with fabricated evidence that included “William L. Mitchell” as a witness, “A Faker!” Finally, Mitchell confesses to Damore that the murder of Mary Meyer had been “a set up away from home in [a] public place.” That had been the Kennedy assassination model referred to.

Page 6: Notes of attorney James Smith’s telephone call with Leo Damore on March 31, 1993

Page 6: Transcription

Page 6 Discussion

Smith again records the date of the telephone call as “31 Mar 93.”

The setup for the murder, Mitchell told Damore, was “standard CIA procedure”—implicitly confirming that there were a number of people involved in the operation. This very likely meant that the operation was radio-controlled with a command center somewhere in the vicinity of the murder.

“Mitchell” then revealed that the young couple walking on the towpath that morning, who police officer Roderick Sylvis had briefly questioned but neglected to ask for identification, were “spotters” (“guy + woman on path…”) for the operation. They were keeping tabs on where Mary Meyer was in the course of her walk along the towpath. Leo told Smith that he “thinks this guy had 1 or 2” spotters working directly with him.

The call ends with Damore telling Smith that he believes he has finally come to “my moment of truth” after finally locating “Mitchell” and having this conversation.

“The guy [William L. Mitchell] opened up and confessed to Leo,” Smith told me in 2004. “He knew Leo had the capacity to be fair and accurate, and this guy “Mitchell” didn’t want to be another patsy like Oswald. I can remember Leo telling me that. He [Mitchell] didn’t want to be the fall guy in history.”
⁵

2
    Author interview with James H. Smith, Esq. April 2, 2011.

3
    Richard Pine, interview by the author, October 21, 2004.

4
    Bradlee, Ben.
A Good Life - Newspapering and Other Adventures
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. pp. 274-283.

5
    Author interview with James H. Smith, Esq. April 7, 2004.

Appendix 4:
Ben Bradlee’s 1952 Rosenberg Case Press Liaison with the CIA

Appendix 4:
Ben Bradlee’s 1952 Rosenberg Case Press Liaison with the CIA

(Transcribed)

N
OTES

Prologue

1
.    Erik Hedegaard, “The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt,”
Rolling Stone
, April 5, 2007.

2
.    This entire section was based on a collection of notes over a period of nearly twenty years that I began writing in the early 1970s. As a training clinical psychologist, it was part of my orientation to begin an intensive period of personal psychotherapy that lasted a number of years. All of the vivid recollections in this chapter were based on memories that had been elicited, and noted, in various psychotherapeutic encounters.

3
.    In the fall of 1966, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison reopened his investigation into the Kennedy assassination, after having made the mistake of turning over his earlier investigation to the FBI, which did nothing. Within days after Dallas, Garrison had arrested David Ferrie as a possible associate of Lee Harvey Oswald’s. Further convinced that Oswald could never have acted alone, Garrison soon widened his net to include Guy Banister and Clay Shaw.

In March 1967, Garrison arrested Clay Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy. Shaw’s trial would not begin until January 1969, but in the spring of 1968, after having been undermined by
Life
magazine, Garrison visited with
Look
magazine’s managing editor, William (“Bill”) Attwood, who had been a Princeton classmate of my father’s. Garrison, according to author Joan Mellen, “outlined his investigation through lunch, dinner, and into the night.” Attwood became so impressed with what Garrison had discovered that he called his friend Bobby Kennedy “at one in the morning.”
Look
was prepared to do a major feature story on the Garrison investigation, but Attwood unexpectedly suffered a significant heart attack, and the article never materialized. See
Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice
(Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2005), p. 259.

Introduction

1
.    David S. Lifton,
Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Dell, 1982). See also Douglas P. Horne,
Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK
., 5 vols. (printed by author, 2009).

2
.    Joan Mellen,
A Farewell to Justice
(Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2005), pp. 383–384. Mellen further discussed and confirmed this event in an interview by this author on November 19, 2006.

3
.    Gaeton Fonzi,
The Last Investigation
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993), p. 31; Gaeton Fonzi, interview by the author, February 24, 2010.

4
.    David Talbot,
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
(New York: Free Press, 2007), p. 381. See also, Anthony Summers,
Conspiracy
(New York: Paragon House, 1989), pp. 143–149. That Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a 1959 false defection program administered through the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Nags Head, North Carolina, was first discussed in an interview that Summers conducted with former CIA officer Victor Marchetti, who later confirmed this account in an interview by this author on October 4, 2007. According to author Joan Mellen, the ONI program was overseen by the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton. Upon Oswald’s return to the U.S. in 1962, he was, in fact, “debriefed” by a CIA officer named Aldrin (“Andy”) Anderson. The debriefing report was read by CIA officer Donald Deneselya, who confirmed this in an interview for this book on May 25, 2007, as well as in the 1993 PBS
Frontline
program, “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?”

5
.    Ibid. David Talbot,
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
(New York: Free Press, 2007), p. 381.

6
.    L. Fletcher Prouty,
JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy
(New York: Citadel, 1996), p. 81.