Mary's Mosaic and the Dealey Plaza Cleanup Crew - A Review

Mary’s Mosaic and the Dealey Plaza Cleanup Crew

Book Review by William Kelly

The third edition of Peter Janney’s Mary’s Mosaic – The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision of World Peace (Skyhorse, 2016) contains new information that reinforces the belief that both JFK and his mistress Mary Meyer were killed by their enemies in Washington and not by patsies who were set up to take the heat.

Forget the mysterious deaths of witnesses and suspects that Penn Jones kept track of in his Forgive My Grief series, don’t bother with the London Sunday Times’ actuary that mathematically calculated the odds of so many subjects would die, as promoted at the end of the movie Executive Action, and ignore the suspicious deaths of Marilyn Monroe, Dorothy Kilgallon and Lisa Howard, all of whom were victims of the same MO – Modus Operandi.

Instead, just focus on the officially certified unsolved homicides directly associated with the assassination of President Kennedy beginning with Dallas Police officer J.D. Tippit, Lee Harvey Oswald the accused assassin killed while in police custody, reporter Jim Kothe, mobsters Sam Giancana and John Rosselli and Mary Pinchot Meyer, the last of which is the focus of Peter Janney’s investigation and fascinating book.

Peter, the son of former CIA officer Wistar Janney, grew up in the suburban McClean-Langley nexus that included the sons and daughters of RFK, Tom Braden and Cord Meyer. Peter was shocked when home from boarding school his mother told him that Mary Meyer, the mother of his best friend Mikey Meyer, who had also died under mysterious circumstances, had been killed, shot and murdered while walking along the Georgetown Canal, a popular park in an upscale neighborhood.

Mary was the daughter of Ruth Pinchot, a wealthy conservative Republican from upstate eastern Pennsylvania, whose politically inclined family included a state governor.

Mary’s sister Toni was the wife of JFK’s friend Ben Bradlee, editor and publisher of Newsweek and the Washington Post.

They were both single when JFK was introduced to Mary Pinchot by his Choate Academy schoolmate William Attwood, and the three would remain friends. Attwood became a trusted member of the Kennedy administration as an ambassador and the chief intermediary in the secret UN backchannel communications between JFK and Castro. When that backchannel became known to rabid anti-Castro Cubans, it provided the motive for them to kill the President.

Mary and JFK remained friends even after Mary married Cord Meyer, the former marine hero who became a deputy to Allen Dulles, working with Tom Braden in the International Organizations Division of the CIA. The death of their son Mikey, Peter’s best friend, eventually led to their divorce, but Mary continued her association with JFK, with Attwood escorting her to White House social events. 

On September 24, 1963, the day Ruth Paine picked up Marina Oswald and took her and Oswald’s rifle to Texas while he went to Mexico City, the Joint Chiefs of Staff met at the Pentagon to receive a briefing by CIA officer Desmond FitzGerald about covert operations against Cuba, including the study of the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler to use against Castro. 

That same day, JFK issued an executive order authorizing Four Leaves, a new military communications system, and then headed out aboard Air Force One on his Conservation Tour, beginning with a first stop in northeast Pennsylvania to visit Mary Pinchot Meyer’s mother Ruth. She had donated land to the national parts service, and JFK wanted to meet her, so Mary accompanied him on this part of the trip and can be seen getting off a Marine helicopter on the lawn of Ruth Pinchot. JFK’s days were numbered, and Mary knew the truth.

When the Warren Report was issued labeling Lee Harvey Oswald the lone, deranged assassin, Mary was reportedly incensed and prepared to promote the truth, as she knew it, but was then murdered, said to be a victim of the Dealey Plaza Cleanup Crew. 

While Peter was shocked when his mother told him that Mary Meyer was murdered, he didn’t begin his investigation until ten years later when he learned of her association with the President, an inquiry that led to this book.

The title Mary's Mosaic stems from a quote by Anais Nin: “There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”

And it has been a laborious task for Peter Janney to put these pieces back together to make sense of a murder that, as with JFK, the authorities would rather have us forget. 

At the heart of Mary’s Mosaic, that was shattered into pieces by her murder, was a diary she kept, which presumably documented her relationship with the President, a relationship that Timothy Leary said included turning JFK on to LSD and other tidbits that would endanger the president’s legacy, if publicly revealed. But the real motive for her murder was not the sexual innuendos, but the fact that JFK was murdered by his enemies in Washington, and Cord Meyer, James Jesus Angleton and the CIA were implicated. 

As soon as she learned of her sister’s death, Toni Bradlee told her husband about the diary, and Ben Bradlee went to Mary’s apartment only to find CIA officer James Jesus Angleton trying to lockpick the door to get in. He too was after the diary. 

The two men searched the apartment for the diary, fruitlessly, but later Toni found it in a box with personal letters between Mary and JFK, and she gave the diary to Angleton, the head of the CIA’s counter-intelligence CI office. Angleton said he destroyed it. 

By the time Peter Janney got on the story, others had been before him, including Leo Damore, who had investigated and wrote about the Ted Kennedy incident at Chappaquiddick, and Damore said he had the diary and obtained a phone call confession from William L. Mitchell, a jogger who was at the scene of the murder.

While official investigators arrested a black man – Ray Crump, who was fishing nearby, his defense attorney Dovey J. Roundtree convinced the jury he was “not guilty,” which led Damore to focus on Mitchell.

Damore, who claimed to have the diary and that he obtained a confession from Mitchell, talked to his attorney on the phone the day before he allegedly killed himself, yet another victim of the still busy Dealey Plaza Cleanup Crew.

Janney got the notes Damore’s lawyer kept of their phone conversation, and got a notice from Mitchell, who Janney couldn’t locate because he had legally changed his name to “Bill Mitchell” and had even obtained a second social security number. Mitchell threatened to sue Janney, but resorted to filing a legal deposition instead, and the notes of Damore’s lawyer and Mitchell’s deposition and military records are new additions that make this third edition worthwhile.

Mitchell was a Cornell-Harvard ROTC graduate and Army officer officially assigned to the Transportation Basic Course (TOBC) at Fort Eustis, Va., but his records indicate he was also affiliated in 1964 with The Adjutant General’s Office (TAGO), in Washington.

Mitchell's commander, Lt. Colonel Ralph Heller Cruikshank was Chief of the Army War Room Data Support Command (DATCOM), having completed a year at "Monterey" - The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC), where Oswald is reported to have learned Russian before defecting to the Soviet Union. 

Besides Damore’s files, Mitchell’s deposition and military records, being the son of a respected CIA official was a big help to Peter Janney in obtaining interviews for this book, something beyond the reach of someone not connected to the closed military-intelligence society. Among these are his important interviews with Dino Brugioni of the CIA-National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC), where he examined the Zapruder film on the weekend of the assassination and prepared briefing boards for the DCIA John McCone.

The question isn’t who killed JFK or Mary Meyer, or why they did it, the most important question is why is it left to intrepid citizens like Peter Janney to investigate such unresolved homicides. Why isn’t the police, law enforcement officials, detectives and prosecutors investigating these unsolved murders directly connected to the assassination of President Kennedy.

There is no statute of limitations on murder, and if the murders of J.D. Tippit, Oswald, Kothe, Giancana, Rosselli and Mary Meyer are still open cold cases, why are they not being investigated by the police and prosecutors who are officially responsible for such things?

We might not know who killed JFK or Mary Meyer, but we know the answer to that one. 

They don’t want to.