For Mary Meyer Pinchot
For Mary Meyer Pinchot
“You can’t prove what the facts are.”
One of the saddest hellos, this story. I knew the C.I.A. wasn't the Boy Scouts but I'd always got some distance from their doings as 'official business,' actions against adversary's like the Soviets. I never thought they would kill one of their own, much less the wife of one of the high ranking members. Angelton and his wife were supposed to meet with her that evening and when they found the house dark immediately panicked, thought it was her and searched her house looking for her diary. Then the next day Angleton and Ben Bradlee went to her studio found it and said all they found was a sketch book.
Mary's Mosaic. It's the most personal look into Kennedy's assassination. This is part two of the author's interview (part one is worth a gander, it's just a little slow). He knew Mary as the mother of his best friend. In writing the book he finds his father is involved. I knew some of the characters as my father was General Council of the C.I.A. Once I asked him how a bullet could make two right angle turns like that. He made a dismissive snort with a weird little smile which translated 'don't you know that's a joke/ don't ask a single thing more.
To be honest I could hardly finish the book; it cut so close to the bone.
Found this in the back of Dad’s closet in a wrinkled grocery bag along with old hair brushes. He was bald. It used to be in his study. The only time I ever heard him say anything negative about the agency was in 1994 when the Aldridge Ames story broke. It was the last time I saw him. Since it was public knowledge he could talk about. The only thing I remember was him saying “It’s a scandal!!” but with such force like I had never seen before. Aldridge Ames compromised "virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me" and had provided the USSR and Russia with a "huge quantity of information on United States foreign, defense and security policies". He is still alive, 82, living in Terra Haute Indiana, at, you might guess, a permanent address.
Allen Dulles was my Father's mentor. Allen lived around the corner and the last time I saw him was at the bank. He was in bedroom slippers. "The poor man has gout" my Mother said. Dad's reputation was that he kept the C.I.A. out of trouble by telling it what it could do and less often what it could not do. About the only comfort I could get out of this arrangement was that someone was going to do his job and he looked like a good choice what with his cool seeming dispassionate and unflappable demeanor. Richard Helm gave the eulogy at Dad's funeral and I always think of him saying, "I never felt more like an agent of the President's secret police than when I left the Oval Office carrying the baton of the order to make the economy of Chile scream in the run up to overthrowing Allende." Nixon was the only President I ever heard Dad speak against. Electoral politics was treated like as a passing show, we didn't even have the vote until Kennedy. Although I never heard him say anything against Kennedy he showed no sign of getting caught up in the Camelot euphoria either. I never knew Catholics were seen as weird and in the thrall of the Pope until then either.
It was useless to try to get anything out of Dad other than him scoffing at the newspaper's account and the standard reply, "There's more to it than that." At the end of his life I asked him about the magic bullet that made two right angle turns and continued on to him Connelly in the shoulder and the leg. As I said above, he made a sound like a horse flapping its lips. He had a whole lexicon of those sounds for use on off limit subjects, this was one of the strongest.
The above from this article https://www.democracynow.org/2015/10/13/the_rise_of_americas_secret_government?jwsource=fb&fbclid=IwAR1g31_lrhidA4sVYvf7vMgUrMEuBRTK3OOAkn784qkZTwlsGfty3bQV_8A
I found this to be about as convincing as anything on the subject of who did it
On the question was Oswald recruited by the agency: Dulles responded “I wouldn’t think he would tell it under oath, no,” Dulles responded. “He ought not tell it under oath.” Nor could one expect to find any written record of such an agent. “The record might not be on paper,” Dulles said, or might consist of “hieroglyphics that only two people knew what they meant.” He clarified later, “You can’t prove what the facts are.”
Earl Warren, born in the 19th century, died trusting in the good faith of men such as Helms, Angleton, and Dulles and of institutions such as theirs. “To say now that these people, as well as the Commission, suppressed, neglected to unearth, or overlooked evidence of a conspiracy would be an indictment of the entire government of the United States,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It would mean the whole structure was absolutely corrupt from top to bottom.” Warren evidently found the idea of a plot of any sort too monstrous to contemplate. Dulles, of all people, had once tried to make him understand that the world wasn’t quite as honest as he thought. The proof was there, if only one could see it.
https://www.vulture.com/search.html?q=JFK
Some notes on my Father
he was General Counsel and wrote the charter, the legal architecture of the C.I.A. He was in O.S.S. during the War in Cairo running people to the Balkans. He went over there and wound up in a three way dispute between partisan group fighting the Germans and each other. He was also in Italy. I have no details on that other than he liked Italy. I was amazed how difficult it was for him to tell the Balkan story which he made a point of saying it was ok because it had been more than twenty five years. He started sweating, closed his eyes and stroking his forehead. Breaking omerta. I couldn't make head or tail of the story. I know very little about any operations. He made the contract for the U-2 and landed on the front page of the Sunday Times surprising his brother in law's family who thought he worked for the State Department. That he could talk about because it was public knowledge. I know he always had a smile on his face when he came back from the skunk works or Edwards. He was close friends with James Donovan who was General Counsel for O.S.S. during the War and went on to negotiating the release of the prisoners from the Bay Of Pigs. Mr. Donovan was kind enough to get me a job when I got out of Payne Whitney. It was to be the receptionist at a building Pratt had bought, a former pharmaceutical company or lobbying group's place on Park Avenue near Grand Central. I answered the phone for the only two people there in the daytime, a guy Pratt had kicked upstairs who was a star fundraiser who nobody could stand and his secretary. No idea what they did. The guy was a hopeless artist and had an archive of his prints that he had grad students make for him. Technically complicated but when you came down to it woozy swishes of color. Then in the evening there was a class and I had to make sure these post grad "students" signed in. They needed no help. One night they invited me up to the class. It was on international affairs. Right in the middle of it I finally put two and two together. What exactly did Pratt need with an off campus evening class in international affairs? Don't think these guys went to Pratt. Did not look like art students. The surprise was very uncomfortable. I don't even remember if I stayed. I seem to remember I excused myself. I didn't last long after that. Wigged out again, I was fighting the worst depression the whole time. Eventually the brakes came off that thing and I went up again and ditched the job. A dear friend got ahold of me and said here take this blotter, let's go to the Museum of Modern Art. That's all it took and I was off.
The New York Times obituary
Lawrence R. Houston, an architect of the Central Intelligence Agency who built the legal foundation on which it rests and the facades behind which it hid, died on Tuesday. He was 82.
He died of a heart attack while vacationing in Westport, Mass., said his friend Walter Pforzheimer, a retired C.I.A. official who served with Mr. Houston.
Mr. Houston was the first general counsel at the C.I.A., from the agency's creation in 1947 until 1973. His business was keeping the secret agency out of trouble in an open democracy. Espionage is by its nature illegal. Mr. Houston's job was to tell the agency what it could do under American law -- and, more rarely, what it could not.
Mr. Houston was "truly one of C.I.A.'s founding fathers and enduring legends," said the Director of Central Intelligence, John M. Deutch. As confidant to nine directors, he brought "a special expertise" to his work, said Richard M. Helms, who ran the agency from 1966 to 1973.
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Mr. Houston's expertise was based in part on his longevity. No one else so highly placed served for a generation in the same job at the C.I.A. His 26 years as general counsel was longer than the combined tenures of his eight successors.
His craftsmanship may be measured by the fact that the agency had few legal problems that became public in his day. Shortly after his departure, many of the agency's cold war secrets began spilling out in newspaper reports and Congressional investigations; a golden era of secrecy ended.
He was a principal draftsman of the 1947 act that created the C.I.A. and the 1949 law that gave it the power to spend money in secret. Starting in 1950, he created the complex of companies that provided cover for the agency's overseas operations, most famously, Air America, a global airline whose C.I.A. ownership was hidden behind five corporate veils. In 1955, he wrote the contracts and performance specifications that guided the U-2 spy plane from conception to delivery in nine months, a small miracle of creativity.
After Francis Gary Powers was shot down in his U-2 over the Soviet Union in 1960, Mr. Houston worked to win his freedom in a swap for a convicted Soviet spy, Col. Rudolph Abel. Similarly, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, he helped secure the release of imprisoned C.I.A. agents by sending medical supplies to Cuba.
And in 1962, when he learned that the C.I.A. had hired Mafia bosses in a plot to kill the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, his efforts helped to keep the failed conspiracy secret for more than a decade.
Lawrence Reed Houston was born on Jan. 4, 1913, in St. Louis, where his father, David F. Houston, was chancellor of Washington University. Two months later, his father became President Woodrow Wilson's Agriculture Secretary; then, in 1920, Treasury Secretary. Mr. Houston admired his father and treasured $5 and $10 bills the elder Mr. Houston signed as the nation's chief financial officer.
He spent the summers of his youth sailing off Cape Cod and Oyster Bay, and fell in love with the sea, a lifelong romance he renewed in regattas. He graduated from Harvard University in 1935 and the University of Virginia Law School in 1939. After law school, he married Jean Wellford Randolph, a member of a distinguished Virginia family.
During World War II, he served in the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the C.I.A., notably as deputy chief of the Middle East theater, based in Cairo. There he became fascinated with the practice of intelligence, to which he devoted the rest of his life.
Mr. Houston was the 15th recipient of the National Security Medal, the highest honor in his field. A Washington resident for nearly 50 years, he was a board member of two local charities, the Hospice of the District of Columbia and Family and Child Services of Washington.
In addition to his wife of 56 years, he is survived by a sister, Helen Book, of Long Beach, Calif.; a daughter, Deborah Tanzi, of Darnstown, Md.; a son, David, of Berkeley, Calif., and five grandchildren.