ROCKWELL: Well, good morning. This is the Lew Rockwell Show. And how great it is to have as our guest, Dr. Peter Janney. Peter is a graduate of Princeton. He has a PhD in Psychology from Boston University and an MBA from Duke. He’s here today to talk about his very important book, Mary’s Mosaic.
And, Peter, this is such a well-written book. I mean, it’s so interesting. It could be a wonderful novel but, of course, it’s all true.
And I’ll remind everybody of the title of the book, Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace.
So, Peter grew up in Washington, D.C., in the ’50s and ’60s, the Cold War era. His dad was a high official at the CIA and his family mingled with a lot of high officials of the CIA, with people like Richard Helms, James Jesus Angleton and William Colby. He, thank goodness, decided not to go into that world himself, and is helping expose it and tell us the truth about a very important aspect of it.
Myths, Misunderstandings and Outright lies about owning Gold. Are you at risk?
Really, Peter, it was a coup, wasn’t it, the Kennedy assassination? It was a coup by the worst people of the American government. And of course, it continues to reverberate to this day.
I know, Peter, in your new book, you’ve got to depose Lieutenant William L. Mitchell. Mitchell was the famous runner on the towpath at the time of the killing of Mary Pinchot Meyer. And you’ve discovered that he was connected to the world of intelligence and had lived in an apartment complex that had known CIA safe house apartments in it. So, what did you learn from talking to him?
Maryu2019s Mosaic: The...
Best Price: $7.76
Buy New $9.99
(as of 05:25 UTC - Details)
JANNEY: First of all, Lew, thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be with you. And I’m a great supporter of your work.
And, yes, you know, I thought my work was over with this book after it came out in April 2014, but it was only a couple of months later that someone pointed out to me – I think it was an obscure journal article that had been written by Mitchell, who was a PhD engineer-type at that point. When I looked at the citation, he mentions his address in Arlington, 1500 Arlington Boulevard, and I said, my god, that could be him. So, I immediately pulled my research team back together. You’re probably aware of this guy Roger Charles. He’s portrayed by Dennis Quaid in the movie Truth that Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett starred in last year. He was Dan Rather’s chief research person. And I brought this to Roger’s attention. He said, wow, this is a major potential breakthrough, because we thought Mitchell was dead.
You know, before the first addition went to publication, I assumed that Mitchell was the assassin of Mary Meyer, and he wasn’t. Ultimately, I would discover that it’s pretty clear he was part of the conspiracy but he had one job that day and that was to frame Ray Crump, which he did very, very successfully, up until the time of the trial.
So, as I swung back into action in the summer of 2014, I found out where Mitchell lived and I showed up on his doorstep in August with a copy of my book in hand and knocked on his door. When he opened the door and saw me and saw the book, he became immediately hostile and belligerent. I actually secretly recorded our interaction because I just felt that it was absolutely essential to document, you know, that this confrontation took part.
What I didn’t realize, and which a couple of people had told me before I did this, is, “Do you understand your life is going to be in danger once again?” And I realized while I was talking to him, or while he was shouting at me, that he could have easily just pulled out a gun and shot me, and that would have been it. But I have just been on this guy’s trail for years, and if there was any chance in terms of getting this right at that particular moment, that was it. And that was when this new saga began that resulted in the third edition of Mary’s Mosaic to appear in late September.
ROCKWELL: Wow, tremendous.
And let’s go back and talk about why you think that – I mean, there could be many reasons that they wanted to assassinate Kennedy. Certainly, the CIA didn’t like him. As we know, he threatened to tear it up into a thousand pieces, like a piece of paper, and scatter them to the wind. So why was Kennedy assassinated, who did it, and why was his mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer, important to us?
JANNEY: Well, I think after 53 years, as we’re coming into November 22nd next week, I think we know a great deal more about what took place than what, of course, the Warren Commission gave us. It didn’t give us much, and what it did give us was really a rouse. I mean, there was no evidence whatsoever that Lee Harvey Oswald fired a rifle that day or was on the sixth floor of the Texas National School Book Depository shooting at the president. None.
So, during the last 50 years, I think there have been a number of people, particularly people like Mark Lane, Jim Douglass, who have really come out and shown us that the entire national security apparatus wanted to get rid of Kennedy, starting in 1963. This is where he turned away from his own national security people. He wouldn’t listen to what the CIA or the Pentagon was telling him. And he struck out on his own to, in a sense, forge a new kind of presidency. He turned away from the Cold War and became an ardent proponent of world peace initiatives. And that is certainly demonstrated by these secret letters that he and Khrushchev were writing back and forth during this time.
You know, I think the Cuban Missile Crisis alone left him so despondent, left both these leaders despondent in terms of what actually could have happened. Had not cooler heads prevailed in terms of JFK and his brother, Robert, you and I would not be sitting here talking about this right now, because we probably wouldn’t be alive.
We did not learn until 29 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, for the very first, that not only did the Russians have medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba — these were the strategist weapons with nuclear warheads attached – but they also had an additional 102 battlefield and nuclear weapons in addition to these missiles, 80 of which were cruise missiles with Hiroshima-sized warheads. And the instructions to the commanders of these missile batteries had been given. They were told that they had permission to use these tactical weapons if a U.S. invasion were to take place. And particularly, they couldn’t contact Moscow. And of course, that’s what was about to happen. There was about to be a U.S. invasion.
Even Robert McNamara, on the most dangerous day, October 27th, he himself believed, as did other civilian advisers — that they had become resigned to the fact that there would be some sort of invasion. Luckily, for all of us, that did not take place.
But even 29 years after the fact, McNamara and other people in the defense establishment were just caught with their pants down. I mean, McNamara actually cried on Larry King Live the night he was on. I mean, there were tears coming down his face when he was on the air to discuss this reality. And, I mean, talk about the most dangerous moment of all in human history, this was it.
ROCKWELL: Wow. And just as an aside, we’ve just encountered people who don’t mind at all threatening a nuclear war against Russia again.
JANNEY: Exactly.
ROCKWELL: And, of course, the U.S. put, we found out much later, Jupiter missiles right on the Russian border in Turkey, which led to the Russian missiles in Cuba.
JANNEY: Right.
ROCKWELL: And Kennedy, to his credit, of course, pulled those missiles out of Turkey and Khrushchev backed down, and we’re all alive.
JANNEY: We’re all alive. And had JFK lived, I think it’s very clear he would have won re-election. And he and Khrushchev were planning a number of initiatives to promote working together, collaboration, world peace. I mean, we forget that in November of ’63, shortly before Dallas, he was at the United Nations giving a speech that basically said, look, we are going to go to the moon but we are going to go to the moon with Russia, we’re going to be partners in this endeavor. And so this, I think, had it taken place, would have been a true symbol of the end of the Cold War. And that was just one of a number things that JFK was up to.
Of course, we have this legendary American University commencement address where JFK comes out of the closet, so to speak, and declares himself a peacenik, you know? I mean, he challenges the American population and the entire world to start thinking peace, for people to examine themselves internally and ask the question, “What is keeping you from believing we could have world peace.” So, during that speech, he also introduces the fact that he’s going to undertake a limit nuclear arms treaty with Russia, the first of its kind, and less than three months later, the Senate ratifies the treaty. All behind the backs of the CIA and the Pentagon; they were not included in this endeavor. And, believe me, that made them absolutely furious.
ROCKWELL: And they decided to kill him. I mean, to what extent was the – I think you and I think Carl Redly (?) put the finger on the CIA. Were aspects of the Pentagon involved in that as well?
JANNEY: My examination stops at the doorstep of the CIA because, logistically, they were in control of planning it. I would say it’s very clear now, given David Talbot’s new book, The Devil’s Chessboard, which I –
ROCKWELL: Great book.
JANNEY: — thoroughly recommend to anyone who wants to understand the Cold War era to read. But it’s very clear that Alan Dulles was the “project manager,” quote, unquote, for the assassination of President Kennedy. And so, the CIA had the logistical support and, of course, the overreaching intelligence to set this whole plan in motion and make it happen.
ROCKWELL: You know, it’s amazing to think that, had Kennedy lived, and had he cooperated with Khrushchev in the way that you’re outlining — how many people has the U.S. killed in its wars since Kennedy was assassinated, how many millions of people have had their lives destroyed, their lives taken, their lives destroyed, their homes destroyed, their countries destroyed? And that’s just one of the effects, a horrific effect, but it’s just one of the effects of the assassination.
JANNEY: Absolutely. I mean, Martin Luther King Jr was correct when he said the United States is the most violent country in the history of the world. I mean, he didn’t pull that out of left field. He was basing that on his understanding of history and, of course, what was starting to take place in Vietnam.
But this is why, you know, as citizens today, we must make sure that our history is told accurately. And in order to do that, I think we have to tell it ourselves, because the struggle for memory and history is a living thing, it’s a constant work in progress, and it’s an ongoing task that never ends. And this is why each generation has to wrestle with the history of what came before, and then ask, in whose interest does this history serve? How does it advance the legacy that it serves?
So, I mean, if we go back to the 1960s, we look at the power of the peace movement that took place at that time, the peace movement successfully challenged the entire national security apparatus, including the CIA and the Pentagon, on the battlefield of memory. And it is really precisely this kind of battle that is taking place now, the forces in our culture that stand for denial, which have created a kind of historical denial, that we must overcome now. And this, I think, given the recent election, is going to be one of the most important parts of people like you and me, in our age bracket, in terms of what we end up doing for the rest of our lives.
ROCKWELL: Peter, you know, your book is called Mary’s Mosaic, and that’s Mary Pinchot Meyer. Tell us about what you think her importance was and why it was so important for them to assassinate her as well as Kennedy?
JANNEY: Well, let’s go back and just remember who Mary Meyer was. She married Cord Meyer, who, after he came back from World War II, really transformed himself into a peacenik. I mean, he really felt that he had made a mistake in going into World War II, personally. He was wounded, he came back, he had a lot of time to think about it. But he was part of this whole movement in the late 1940s called the United World Federalists and he was very much in support of the United Nations that was just coming about and taking place post-World War II.
But Cord got off the rail, I think, when he saw that he was not going to be able to achieve this kind of structure that would help the world deal with impending potential world-war conflicts. He got quite depressed actually. And I think he became alcoholic at that point. And then he became seduced by Alan Dulles, who also seduced my father, in a sense, attracting a lot of these post-World War II, very intelligent, quite well off, financially, people who wanted to do something different rather than just step into the usual conventional family business, something like that.
But Cord Meyer, when he went into the CIA, almost immediately was put in touch of this operation called Operation Mockingbird. And of course, this really upset Mary to a great extent because Mockingbird was, in a sense, a usurpation of journalism. It was, in fact, the CIA having the kind of influence with all the major media outlets where they could plant stories, where they could shape opinions and, in a sense, not give people the truth, but give the media pieces of propaganda that would, in many senses, scare them, particularly about the Red Scare, Communism. You know, Russia, they’re bad, we’re good.
So, Mary was aware of what the early CIA was doing. And of course, it started to wreak havoc in her marriage with Cord and they ended up getting divorced in the late 1950s. And it was about this time, very soon after, that she reconnected with JFK. She had known him when she was a teenager, but was not really interested in him. But when she saw what he was trying to do in running for president, I think they started spending more time together. And of course, their relationship became romantically inclined.
This was not a kind of typical JFK bimbo moment. Mary was a very substantial person. And she challenged Jack Kennedy on many fronts. And I think he saw, knowing how wounded he was, particularly around intimacy with women, that Mary might be the kind of woman who could really help him heal from the wounds that he was holding with regard to his view of women. And, so, I define this relationship in my book as what I call a relationship of redemption. It’s an opportunity for JFK to really start to live and think differently about what it would be to have a real partner in his life. He ended up telling his special assistant, Kenny O’Donnell, that after he got out of the White House, his plan was to divorce Jacqui so he could be with Mary. She was one of his primary allies during the Cuban Missile Crisis and afterwards and, I think, helped him turn more ardently towards the possibility of world peace initiatives.
ROCKWELL: So that’s why they wanted to kill her. And how did they kill her?
JANNEY: Well, they wanted to kill her because after the Warren Commission came out, she made it very clear – she had read the paperback abridged version when it came out in late September and she realized, at that point, that not only had there been a huge conspiracy in Dallas but that there was now a second conspiracy, a second cover-up taking place in terms of fooling the entire population of the world about what had happened, really, truthfully, in Dallas. And she felt like it was time for her to stand up and tell the truth about who she was, about who she was in terms of her relationship with Jack Kennedy, and what the CIA was doing and, you know, all the little ins and outs that she and the president had talked about. And so, that was going to be her plan. And I think it was at that point they realized that, look, this is a serious person, people are going to listen to her, she is very well respected in Washington, and when it comes out that she was the president’s mistress, and given who she was in terms of her own education and intelligence, I think it presented a huge obstacle, and they decided that she had to go.
ROCKWELL: And so how did they perform this murder?
JANNEY: Well, the way they did it was they had her under surveillance. They realized that because they had been so successful in Dallas, they were going to use kind of a carbon-copy paradigm for this. And in watching her daily routine, they were aware of the fact that, typically, she would go to work in her studio in the morning hours, and along about noon, she would typically walk down into Georgetown and stroll out the Chesapeake and C&O towpath out to a place called Fletcher’s Boathouse, which is about a mile and a quarter of Georgetown, and then she’d turned around and walked back. So, I think they made a decision that that would be the place to take her out. They would try their best to make it look like a random act of violence.
The way I put together the pieces here is, of course, they were out there very, very early that morning waiting to see how the plan would unfold. They saw this guy, Ray Crump, walk out there with his girlfriend, and I think they decided, at some point, OK, there’s our patsy, let’s go find someone who we can dress up to look like this guy, whether we have to paint him African-American or not, but we see the clothes that he’s wearing. They had the Technical Services Division out there working with them, so it wasn’t that difficult in a matter of a couple of hours to make some carbon copies of Ray Crump’s clothes and dress someone up to look like the person who was standing over the body after she was shot. She was shot twice. It was clearly the work of a professional assassin, given where the bullet entries were. And of course, you know, as we learned during the trial, it was very well set up.
But what they didn’t count on was this African-American woman attorney by the name of Dovey Roundtree. She realized that Crump was being railroaded. She realized that Crump couldn’t have possibly committed this murder. So, she went to work and just hammered the prosecution’s case during the trial. And she was very successful.
But her biggest mountain to cross during that trial was the testimony of Lieutenant William L. Mitchell. And had she not been as exacting as she was, I think the jury might have been persuaded, because Mitchell’s testimony was very similar to that of Henry Wiggins, although she had discredited Henry Wiggin’s testimony earlier in the trial. But along comes William Mitchell and basically substantiates everything that this guy Henry Wiggins said, and it was touch and go, right up until the very end. But the jury came back and just realized, look, we’ve got the FBI report, there is no forensic evidence linking Ray Crump to the body of Mary Meyer or the crime scene, in what was described as a fairly bloody crime scene. So the jury couldn’t buy it. They acquitted Ray Crump for lack of evidence.
ROCKWELL: Well, it was a great moment. And they never came up with another patsy to blame for it either, did they?
JANNEY: No. No. The case remains officially unsolved. Although the case is closed because they were never willing to do anything further. I have talked to the D.C. police about the case, met with them several times, showed them the evidence that I have that certainly points to the very likely possibility that William Mitchell was another kind of a patsy in terms of a false witness during the trial. But the political climate in Washington I don’t think will ever allow this, or at least for the immediate future, will ever allow this to go into any kind of reexamination at this point.
ROCKWELL: And certainly, just as Operation Mockingbird, under a different name, or maybe it’s just business as usual, continues to this day, and the media, by and large, is in the pocket of the CIA and the Pentagon. Certainly, the Washington, D.C., police must be under the thumb of the CIA and some other agencies as well.
JANNEY: I think that’s very likely. You know, we forget that Bill Casey, the director of the CIA from 1981 to ’87, at the very beginning of the Reagan administration, was in a meeting with all of the cabinet heads and, you know, he made a statement during that meeting, and it is as follows, he said, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” Now that’s from a CIA director.
(LAUGHTER)
You know, that comes on the heels of what the late Bill Colby said sometime during his reign, when he said, “The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” Now there’s never been a substantiation for that quote. A lot of people think that he may have actually not said that. But it is true in terms of what came out in the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. It is true that the CIA had a number of people, as many as 2,000 journalists of one kind or another, infiltrating all the major media news outlets.
ROCKWELL: No, and I think, clearly, they have all their people imbedded, as they might say today, in television and, of course, newspapers, the Internet, Internet sites. And they are a very bad bunch.
But, Peter, you’re one of the heroes in helping expose these creeps and, as you say, explaining to us our real history, why it’s so essential if we hope to avoid some kind of horrific war in the future, as well as all the little wars that they enjoy running.
So, I just want to just highly recommend this third edition, with all kinds of new information of Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace.
So, Peter, thanks a million for coming on the show. Thanks for all the work you’re doing and continue to do. And all I can say is to keep it up.
JANNEY: Thank you so much, Lew. It’s great to be with you and your readers and listeners. Bye-bye.
ROCKWELL: Well, thanks so much for listening to the Lew Rockwell Show today. Take a look at all the podcasts. There have been hundreds of them. There’s a link on the LRC front page. Thank you.
Podcast date, November 18, 2016
