Who was Cord Meyer Jr.? Meyer objected to Kennedy's relationship with his wife.
Raymond
Cord Meyer, the son of a senior diplomat, was born on 10th November,
1920. The Meyer family was extremely wealthy and had made its money
from sugar in Cuba and from property on Long Island.
The family settled in New York City . Cord and his twin brother,
Quintin, attended private school in Switzerland and then St. Paul's
preparatory school in New Hampshire. In 1939 Meyer went to Yale
University to study literature and philosophy. After graduating in
1942 he joined the US Marines.
Meyer was sent to the South Pacific and wrote articles about his
experiences for The Atlantic Monthly. Meyer was a machine-gun platoon
leader and took part in the assault on Guam. He later wrote: "As we
buried our dead I swore to myself that if it was within my power I
should see to it that these deaths would not be forgotten or valued
lightly. No matter how small a contribution I should happen to make it
would be in the right direction."
On 21st July, 1944, a Japanese grenade was thrown into his foxhole. He
was so badly injured that when he was found he was initially declared
to be dead. In fact, his commanding officer sent a telegram to his
parents announcing he had died. Although he lost his left eye he was
eventually well enough to be sent home. Soon afterwards his twin
brother, Quentin, was killed at Okinawa.
While recovered in New York City Meyer met the journalist, Mary
Pinchot. The couple married on 19th April, 1945. The couple then went
to San Francisco to attend the conference that established the United
Nations. Cord went as an aide to Harold Stassen, whereas Mary, who was
working for the North American Newspaper Alliance at the time, was one
of the reporters sent to cover this important event.
Mary and Cord Meyer on their wedding day (1945)
SEE Who was Cord Meyer Jr.?
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmeyerC.htm
And SEE:
Hunt's Deathbed Confession
Reveals JFK Killers
Hunt to Nixon to Bush
The coup d'etat
The Rolling Stone piece fails to go after the roles of Richard Nixon
and George Herbert Walker Bush. But the Hunt confession, if accurate,
leads directly to them, to their lifelong associates, and all the way
to the present George W. Bush administration.
A newly discovered FBI document reveals that George Bush was directly
involved in the 1963 murder of President John Kennedy. The document
places Bush working with the now-famous CIA agent, Felix Rodriguez,
recruiting right-wing Cuban exiles for the invasion of Cuba. It was
Bush's CIA job to organize the Cuban community in Miami for the
invasion. The Cubans were trained as marksmen by the CIA. Bush at that
time lived in Texas. Hopping from Houston to Miami weekly, Bush spent
1960 and '61 recruiting Cubans in Miami for the invasion. That is how
he met Felix Rodriguez.
http://www.john-f-kennedy.net/thenixonbushconnectiontothekennedyassassination.htm
The Last Confession Of E. Howard Hunt -
US government/CIA team murdered JFK
Cord Meyer: CIA agent, architect of the Operation Mockingbird
disinformation apparatus, and husband of Mary Meyer (who had an affair
with JFK).
http://www.rense.com/general76/hunt.htm
The murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer
On 12th October, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot dead as she walked
along the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath in Georgetown. Henry Wiggins, a
car mechanic, was working on a vehicle on Canal Road, when he heard a
woman shout out: "Someone help me, someone help me". He then heard two
gunshots. Wiggins ran to the edge of the wall overlooking the towpath.
He later told police he saw "a black man in a light jacket, dark
slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman."
Soon afterwards Raymond Crump, a black man, was found not far from the
murder scene. He was arrested and charged with Mary's murder. The
towpath and the river were searched but no murder weapon was ever
found.
The media did not report at the time that Meyer had been having an
affair with John F. Kennedy. Nor did it reveal that her former husband
was a senior figure in CIA's covert operations. As a result, there was
little public interest in the case.
During the trial Wiggins was unable to identify Raymond Crump as the
man standing over Meyer's body. The prosecution was also handicapped
by the fact that the police had been unable to find the murder weapon
at the scene of the crime. On 29th July, 1965, Crump was acquitted of
murdering Mary Meyer. The case remains unsolved.
Meyer, later admitted: "Mr. Meyer didn't for a minute think that Ray
Crump had murdered his wife or that it had been an attempted rape.
But, being an Agency man, he couldn't very well accuse the CIA of the
crime, although the murder had all the markings of an in-house
rubout."
----------------------------------------
Meyer told te New York Times that although the United Nations was a
step in the right direction "that the veto power was just another
alliance of the great powers and one that would surely lead to another
war." Cord proposed that the UN be granted authority to oversee
nuclear power installations inside member countries. He also argued
that the UN should be given the authority to prevent war and "the
armed power to back it up."
While at the San Francisco Conference he met John F. Kennedy for the
first time. They disagreed about the merits of the United Nations.
Kennedy was far more hopeful of its long-term success and disliked
Meyer's ideas on world government. Meyer also objected to Kennedy's
relationship with his new wife.
Meyer had been shocked by the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. After the war Meyer commissioned a film by Pare Lorentz
called The Beginning or the End. Meyer wanted this film to be the
definitive statement about the dangers of the atomic age. Cord wrote
at the time: "Talked with Mary of how steadily depressing is our full
realization of how little hope there is of avoiding the approaching
catastrophe of atomic warfare."
The following year he published a book about his war experiences,
Waves of Darkness. Meyer expressed his pacifist views in the book:
"The only certain fruit of this insanity will be the rotting bodies
upon which the sun will impartially shine tomorrow. Let us throw down
these guns that we hate."
Meyer became an advocate of world government. In May, 1947, Cord Meyer
was elected president of the United World Federalists. Under his
leadership, membership of the organization doubled in size. Albert
Einstein was one of his most important supporters and personally
solicited funds for the organization. Mary Meyer was also active in
the organization and wrote for its journal, The United World
Federalists.
In 1949 Meyer and his family moved to Cambridge. He was showing signs
of becoming disillusioned with the idea of world government. He had
experienced problems with members of the American Communist Party who
had infiltrated the organizations he had established. It was about
this time that he began working secretly for the Central Intelligence
Agency.
In 1950 Meyer formed the Committee to Frame a World Constitution with
Robert Maynard Hutchins and Elizabeth Mann Borgese. As a result of
this work Meyer made contact with the International Cooperative
Alliance, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the
Indian Socialist Party and the Congress of Peoples Against
Imperialism. It is almost certain that this had been done on behalf of
the CIA.
Allen W. Dulles made contact with Cord Meyer in 1951. He accepted the
invitation to join the CIA. Dulles told Meyer he wanted him to work on
a project that was so secret that he could not be told about it until
he officially joined the organization. Meyer was to work under Frank
Wisner, director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This
became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the CIA.
Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on
"propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including
sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures;
subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground
resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements
in threatened countries of the free world."
Meyer became part of what became known as Operation Mockingbird, a CIA
program to influence the American media. According to Deborah Davis
(Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post): Meyer
was Mockingbird's "principal operative".
One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation
Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300
different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views
of the Central Intelligence Agency included Stewart Alsop (New York
Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York
Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus
(Washington Post), William C. Baggs (Miami News), Herb Gold (Miami
News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). These journalists
sometimes wrote articles that were unofficially commissioned by Meyer
was based on leaked classified information from the CIA.
Mary and the family now moved to Washington where they became members
of the Georgetown Crowd. This group included Frank Wisner, George
Kennan, Dean Acheson, Thomas Braden, Richard Bissell, Desmond
FitzGerald, Joseph Alsop, Tracy Barnes, Philip Graham, Katharine
Graham, David Bruce, James Reston, James Truitt, Alfred Friendly,
Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen and Paul
Nitze. The Meyers also socialized with other CIA officers or CIA
assets including James Angleton (Cicely Angleton), Wistar Janney (Mary
Wisnar), Ben Bradlee (Antoinette Bradlee) and James Truitt (Anne
Truitt).
Meyer worked under Thomas Braden, the head of International
Organizations Division (IOD). This Central Intelligence Agency unit
helped established anti-Communist front groups in Western Europe.The
IOD was dedicated to infiltrating academic, trade and political
associations. The objective was to control potential radicals and to
steer them to the right.
Meyer oversaw the funding of groups such as the National Student
Association, the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Communications Workers
of America, the American Newspaper Guild and the National Educational
Association. He also provided the money for publishing the journal,
Encounter. Meyer also worked closely with anti-Communist leaders of
the trade union movement such as George Meany of the Congress for
Industrial Organization and the American Federation of Labor.
In 1953 Frank Wisner and the CIA began having trouble with J. Edgar
Hoover. He described the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) as
"Wisner's gang of weirdos" and began carrying out investigations into
their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had
been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was
passed to Joseph McCarthy who started making attacks on members of the
OPC. Hoover also passed to McCarthy details of an affair that Wisner
had with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war. Hoover, claimed
that Caradja was a Soviet agent.
Joseph McCarthy also began accusing other members of the Georgetown
Crowd as being security risks. McCarthy claimed that the CIA was a
"sinkhole of communists" and claimed he intended to root out a hundred
of them. His first targets were Chip Bohlen and Charles Thayer. Bohlen
survived but Thayer was forced to resign.
In August, 1953, Richard Helms, Wisner's deputy at the OPC, told Meyer
that Joseph McCarthy had accused him of being a communist. The Federal
Bureau of Investigation added to the smear by announcing it was
unwilling to give Meyer "security clearance". However, the FBI refused
to explain what evidence they had against Meyer. Allen W. Dulles and
both came to his defence and refused to permit a FBI interrogation of
Meyer.
The FBI eventually revealed the charges against Meyer. Apparently he
was a member of several liberal groups considered to be subversive by
the Justice Department. This included being a member of the National
Council on the Arts, where he associated with Norman Thomas, the
leader of the Socialist Party and its presidential candidate in 1948.
It was also pointed out that his wife, Mary Meyer, was a former member
of the American Labor Party. Meyer was eventually cleared of these
charges and was allowed to keep his job.
J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy did not realise what they were
taking on. Wisner unleashed Operation Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew
Pearson, Joe Alsop, Jack Anderson, Walter Lippmann and Ed Murrow all
went into attack mode and McCarthy was permanently damaged by the
press coverage orchestrated by Wisner.
Meyer became disillusioned with life in the CIA and in January, 1954,
he went to New York City and attempted to get a job in publishing.
Although he saw contacts he had made during his covert work with the
media (Operation Mockingbird) he was unable to obtain a job with any
of the established book publishing firms.
In the summer of 1954 the Meyer family's golden retriever was hit by a
car on the curve of highway near their house and killed. The dog's
death worried Cord. He told colleagues at the CIA he was afraid the
same thing might happen to one of his children.
In the summer of 1954 the Meyers got new neighbours. John F. Kennedy
and his wife Jackie Kennedy purchased Hickory Hill, a house several
hundred yards from where the Meyers lived. Mary became good friends
with Jackie and they went on walks together.
In November, 1954, Meyer replaced Thomas Braden as head of
International Organizations Division. Meyer began spending a lot of
time in Europe. One of Meyer's tasks was to supervise Radio Free
Europe and Radio Liberty, the United States government broadcasts to
Eastern Europe. According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman)
Meyer was "overseeing a vast 'black' budget of millions of dollars
channeled through phony foundation of a global network of associations
and labor groups that on their surface appeared to be progressive".
On 18th December, 1956, Cord's nine-year-old son, Michael, was hit by
a car on the curve of highway near their house and killed. It was the
same spot where the family's golden retriever had been killed two
years earlier. The tragedy briefly brought the couple together.
However, in 1958, Mary filed for divorce. In her divorce petition she
alleged "extreme cruelty, mental in nature, which seriously injured
her health, destroyed her happiness, rendered further cohabitation
unendurable and compelled the parties to separate."
Meyer's career continued to prosper and was now high enough in the CIA
hierarchy to be involved in covert operations. This included working
with people like Richard Bissell, Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, Jake
Esterline, David Atlee Phillips, William (Rip) Robertson and E. Howard
Hunt. Bissell, who was now head of the OPC, described Meyer as the
"creative genius behind covert operations".
As chief of the CIA's International Organizations Division, Meyer met
with President John F. Kennedy and his staff. On 18th October, 1961,
Kennedy consulted Meyer about the possibility of replacing Allen W.
Dulles with John McCone. In his journal he reported that Kennedy was
"much more serious and less arrogant than I'd known him before." He
added that Kennedy "still yearns for a respect that eludes him from
such as myself."
It is assumed that Cord was involved in the plot to assassinate Fidel
Castro but so far no documents have been released to confirm this.
Cord also met Robert Kennedy several times after the failed Bay of
Pigs operation.
In 1961 James Jesus Angleton asked Ben Bradlee to suggest to John F.
Kennedy that Meyer should become ambassador to Guatemala. Bradlee, who
disliked Meyer, refused. Bradlee later claimed that he did not respond
to this request because he knew that Kennedy would reject the idea.
Meyer also asked Charles L. Bartlett, another journalist friend of
Kennedy to suggest he should be given a political appointment.
Bartlett did as requested but reported back that "due to some incident
that occured at the U.N. conference in San Francisco in 1945 there was
no possibility.
At the end of 1966 Desmond FitzGerald, head of the Directorate for
Plans, discovered that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, had
discovered that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student
Association. FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a
campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for
his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt
their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were
vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we
carried off."
This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop Ramparts publishing in
March, 1967. The article, written by Sol Stern, was entitled NSA and
the CIA. As well as reporting CIA funding of the National Student
Association it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front
organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America. It named Meyer as a
key figure in this campaign. This included the funding of the literary
journal Encounter.
In May 1967 Thomas Braden responded to this by publishing an article
entitled, I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral, in the Saturday Evening Post,
where he defended the activities of the International Organizations
Division unit of the CIA.
In 1967 Meyer became assistant deputy director of plans, a post in
which he worked with spymaster Thomas H. Karamessines. However, the
publicity brought about by the Ramparts revealations did not help his
career.
Meyer role in Operation Mockingbird was further exposed in 1972 when
he was accused of interfering with the publication of a book, The
Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. The book was
highly critical of the CIA's dealings with the drug traffic in
Southeast Asia. The publisher, who leaked the story, had been a former
colleague of Meyer's when he was a liberal activist after the war.
During the Watergate Scandal President Richard Nixon became concerned
about the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. Three of
those involved in the burglary, E. Howard Hunt, Eugenio Martinez and
James W. McCord had close links with the CIA. Nixon and his aides
attempted to force the CIA director, Richard Helms, and his deputy,
Vernon Walters, to pay hush-money to Hunt, who was attempting to
blackmail the government. Although it seemed Walters was willing to do
this, Helms refused. In February, 1973, Nixon sacked Helms. His
deputy, Thomas H. Karamessines, resigned in protest.
James Schlesinger now became the new director of the CIA. Schlesinger
was heard to say: “The clandestine service was Helms’s Praetorian
Guard. It had too much influence in the Agency and was too powerful
within the government. I am going to cut it down to size.” This he did
and over the next three months over 7 per cent of CIA officers lost
their jobs.
On 9th May, 1973, Schlesinger issued a directive to all CIA employees:
“I have ordered all senior operating officials of this Agency to
report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or might have
gone on in the past, which might be considered to be outside the
legislative charter of this Agency. I hereby direct every person
presently employed by CIA to report to me on any such activities of
which he has knowledge. I invite all ex-employees to do the same.
Anyone who has such information should call my secretary and say that
he wishes to talk to me about “activities outside the CIA’s charter”.
There were several employees who had been trying to complain about the
illegal CIA activities for some time. As Meyer pointed out, this
directive “was a hunting license for the resentful subordinate to dig
back into the records of the past in order to come up with evidence
that might destroy the career of a superior whom he long hated.” Meyer
also suffered during this period and James Schlesinger moved him to
London where he became CIA chief of station in England.
In March, 1976, James Truitt gave an interview to the National
Enquirer. Truitt told the newspaper that Mary Pinchot Meyer was having
an affair with John F. Kennedy. He also claimed that Meyer had told
his wife, Ann Truitt, that she was keeping an account of this
relationship in her diary. Meyer asked Truitt to take possession of a
private diary "if anything ever happened to me".
Ann Truitt was living in Tokyo at the time of the murder. She phoned
Ben Bradlee at his home and asked him if he had found the diary.
Bradlee, who claimed he was unaware of his sister-in-law's affair with
Kennedy, knew nothing about the diary. He later recalled what he did
after Truitt's phone-call: "We didn't start looking until the next
morning, when Tony and I walked around the corner a few blocks to
Mary's house. It was locked, as we had expected, but when we got
inside, we found Jim Angleton, and to our complete surprise he told us
he, too, was looking for Mary's diary."
James Angleton, CIA counterintelligence chief, admitted that he knew
of Mary's relationship with John F. Kennedy and was searching her home
looking for her diary and any letters that would reveal details of the
affair. According to Ben Bradlee, it was Mary's sister, Antoinette
Bradlee, who found the diary and letters a few days later. It was
claimed that the diary was in a metal box in Mary's studio. The
contents of the box were given to Angleton who claimed he burnt the
diary. Angleton later admitted that Mary recorded in her diary that
she had taken LSD with Kennedy before "they made love".
Leo Damore claimed in an article that appeared in the New York Post
that the reason Angleton and Bradlee were looking for the diary was
that: "She (Meyer) had access to the highest levels. She was involved
in illegal drug activity. What do you think it would do to the
beatification of Kennedy if this woman said, 'It wasn't Camelot, it
was Caligula's court'?" Damore also said that a figure close to the
CIA had told him that Mary's death had been a professional "hit".
There is another possible reason why both Angleton and Bradlee were
searching for documents in Meyer's house. Were they looking for
material that Meyer had been collecting on CIA's covert activities?
After leaving the CIA in 1977 Meyer became a a nationally syndicated
columnist. He also wrote several books including an autobiography,
Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. In the book Meyer
commented on the murder of his wife: "I was satisfied by the
conclusions of the police investigation that Mary had been the victim
of a sexually motivated assault by a single individual and that she
had been killed in her struggle to escape." Carol Delaney, the
longtime personal assistant to Meyer, later admitted: "Mr. Meyer
didn't for a minute think that Ray Crump had murdered his wife or that
it had been an attempted rape. But, being an Agency man, he couldn't
very well accuse the CIA of the crime, although the murder had all the
markings of an in-house rubout."
In February, 2001, the writer, C. David Heymann, asked Cord Meyer
about the death of Mary Pinchot Meyer: "My father died of a heart
attack the same year Mary was killed , " he whispered. "It was a bad
time." And what could he say about Mary Meyer? Who had committed such
a heinous crime? "The same sons of bitches," he hissed, "that killed
John F. Kennedy."
Cord Meyer died of lymphoma on 13th March, 2001
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmeyerC.htm