From Steamshovel Press #12:
The High and the Mighty: JFK, MPM, LSD and the CIA (Part Four)
by G. J. Krupey
Mary Meyer's murder occurred on the afternoon of Monday, October 12,
1964, only two days before her forty-fourth birthday, and forty-one days
before the first anniversary of John Kennedy's death. Was she killed
because of what she knew, as Timothy Leary and others suggest, or was she
merely the random victim of the sort or racially-motivated crime for which
Washington, DC is so infamous, as investigative reporter Ron Rosenbaum,
for one, argues?
The facts of the case, as reconstructed by Rosenbaum, are these:
Mary Meyer was seen only moments before her death being followed by a
lone black man. They were seen by an Air Force lieutenant, William
Mitchell, who met them both upon returning from his daily jog along the
same towpath that Mary Meyer used for her daily jaunts. Mitchell described
the woman he saw as wearing a blue hooded sweater, the same sweater Mary
was wearing when her corpse was found. Mitchell got a good look at her
because he stood aside to let her pass over a footbridge rather than run
the risk of colliding with her. About 200 yards away, he passed a lone
black man wearing a windbreaker and golf cap heading in the same direction
as Mary Meyer.
Not long after, an employee of a nearby Esso gas station, Henry
Wiggins, heard a woman screaming "Someone help me!" The screaming came
from the canal area, followed by the sound of gunshots. Wiggins ran across
the street to a wall that enclosed the canal-towpath area, and saw the
black man seen earlier by Mitchell standing over the body of the white
woman in the blue hooded sweater. He put "a dark object" into a pocket of
his jacket, the disappeared into the woods. (140)
Later, when police arrived, supposedly sealing off all exits from the
towpath area, an officer Warner came across a sopping-wet black man on the
roadbed of the old C&O rail road tracks. The man, Raymond Crump, Jr.,
claimed to have been fishing "around the bend" when he fell asleep and
slid into the Potomac River, hence his condition and lack of gear. Warner
demanded that Crump show him exactly where this occurred, but by that
time, the witness Henry Wiggins, spied Crump with Warner from the wooded
bank where he was standing with other police examining the scene of the
crime. He immediately fingered Crump as the man he saw standing over Mary
Meyer's body. Later, police fished out the windbreaker that both Wiggins
and Mitchell said they saw the suspect wearing. There was no gun or other
weapon in its pockets, but when police had Crump try it on, it supposedly
fit him perfectly.
Raymond Crump was held for ten months in jail until his trial in July
1965. Crump was charged with murder resulting from a failed attempt at
rape, robbery, or both. The trial began on the 19th and ended on the 30th.
The jury spent eleven hours in deliberation; about halfway through, they
informed the judge that they were deadlocked by a vote of eight-to-four,
although they didn't indicate whether or not that was in Crump's favor.
The judge didn't consider their deadlock to be hopeless, so ordered them
to continue until they reached a verdict. Finally, they did: not guilty.
Essentially, Crump was acquitted because the evidence against him was
circumstantial; no one saw him commit the crime, no murder weapon was ever
found or traced to him, there were discrepancies in witness testimony
(especially from Mitchell regarding the height of the man he saw following
Mary Meyer).
Crump's acquittal leaves the Mary Meyer case still officially
unsolved. But after all these years, since the police never reopened the
investigation, it might as well be closed. There are those, such as
homicide detective Bernard Crooke, who was on the murder scene (and who
remarked how beautiful Mary Meyer was, even lying dead with bullet holes
in her head), who remain convinced of Crump's guilt. Others, like Crump's
attorney, Dovey Roundtree, still believe in Crump's innocence. Ms.
Roundtree believes the real killer is still out there somewhere. She
theorizes a possible jilted or jealous boyfriend as the one responsible,
noting suggestively to Rosenbaum that Mary Meyer had many men.
Ms. Roundtree claimed that the entire trial had a suspicious aura to
it. She had learned of Mary Meyer's "high White House clearance" (not a
pun, presumably) and also that the diary was burned before it could be
entered as evidence. She felt that the whole trial was rushed, and that
the prosecutor, Albert Hantman, was desperate to nail Crump. She was
convinced that "the government had something to do with it." As for Crump,
he lost no time in putting as much distance between himself and Washington
DC as possible. He believed himself to have been framed, according to Ms.
Roundtree, and wasn't about to stick around and give somebody a reason to
try it again. Oddly enough, when Crump was made to try on the phantom
windbreaker, the one that fit him so well it lead the police to charge him
with the murder, he said to Detective Crooke, "It looks like you got a
stacked deck." What did he mean? Was he admitting guilt? Or was he
implying that someone had set him up, and had gone to a lot of bother
beforehand to make sure all the evidence incriminated him?
That Mary Meyer had an affair lasting for almost two years with John
F. Kennedy is now accepted as fact, as is the mad scramble after her
murder to locate her diary which allegedly chronicled that affair. What is
still by no means certain is the LSD question: did Mary Meyer actually
drop acid and did she also initiate an "acid circle" of eight
intellectually subversive women dedicated to influencing the minds of
Washington Cold War leaders, converting them from the aggressive pursuit
of war to the pursuit of peace through sex and LSD? And did she turn on
JFK (psychedelically speaking) in that attempt?
After all, no one but Timothy Leary has ever claimed this (and the
pseudonymous Nancy Druid, who cites Leary as her source). Two women
alleged to have been part of this circle are no longer alive to answer the
question. Lisa Howard, who helped Ambassador Attwood open a dialogue with
Cuba to discuss possible renormalization, died an apparent suicide from
overdosing on one hundred phenobarbital in a parking lot in broad
daylight. The usual explanation given is that she was distraught over
being fired by ABC. The other woman alleged to have been involved in Mary
Meyer's acid circle was Dorothy Kilgallen, a famous journalist and gossip
columnist of that time period. Kilgallen was the only reporter who was
allowed to have an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby during his trial, an
interview arranged through the graces of the presiding judge, who later
bragged about the price he extracted from Ms. Kilgallen for this favor, a
price that male journalists are seldom called upon to pay (so I would
gather). Whatever Ruby told Kilgallen, she never made it public. But she
came away from that interview convinced that Kennedy's death was the
outcome of a conspiracy, and vowed that she was going to break the real
story. She never got that chance, needless to say; she was found dead in
her apartment on November 8, 1965, the same year as Lisa Howard's death.
The initial report was that Kilgallen died of a heart attack, then it was
changed to due to an alcohol-drug overdose. Yet her death certificate,
while listing these as the cause of death, also noted, "circumstances
undetermined". Even her biographer was compelled to conclude that her
death was not an accident, and that "a network of varied activities,
impelled by disparate purposes, conspired effectively to obfuscate the
truth." If Dorothy Kilgallen made any notes of what Jack Ruby told her,
they have never been found. Strangely, only two days later, a close friend
of Kilgallen's, Mrs. Earl T. Smith died, also of undetermined causes. Of
course, those familiar with the fates of witnesses to the Kennedy
assassination and various investigators of it know that these people had
the darnedest bad luck, dying--all coincidentally, of course--of unusually
high rates of suicide, violent accident, and crime.
I Get High with a Little Help from My Friends...
As recorded in a report prepared for a congressional committee
investigating the CIA's mind control experiments (171), among the goals of
the MK-ULTRA project were to develop:
--"substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness
to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public"
--"materials to render the induction of hypnosis easier"
--"substances which will produce 'pure' euphoria with no subsequent
let-down"
--"materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for
events preceding and during their use"
--"substances which alter personality structure in such a way that
the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is
enhanced"
--"substances which will lower the ambition and general working
efficiency of men."
As examined above, the CIA planned to use LSD as an aid in the
interrogation of captured enemy agents, as well as a sort of prophylactic
for training American agents in resisting interrogation in the event of
capture. Another usage, of the drug planned by the Agency was as a
clandestine confusion agent, to be slipped in food, drink, or whatever to
foreign leaders and politicians of a leftist slant in order to reduce them
to quivering, hallucinating blobs of flesh gibbering deranged nonsense in
public speeches, embarrassing and disgracing themselves before the public
and in the eyes of the world.
Of course, the CIA claims that such a use of LSD was never
contemplated against domestic targets. But the Agency, in violation of its
own (pre-Reagan) charter, gathered domestic intelligence right from the
start, and during the height of the anti-war movement, coordinated
Operation CHAOS with the FBI, military intelligence, and various police
departments, to infiltrate and disrupt those pesky peaceniks. The CIA
intercepted and opened mail, tapped phones, ran smear campaigns. During
the heyday of MK-ULTRA, the Agency tested LSD on unwitting-US citizens, in
conditions that were far from clinical and in ways that were nowhere near
being "scientific". They even used each other as guinea pigs. And there
are still unanswered questions about what role, if any, the CIA might have
played in inundating the 1960s counter-culture with LSD and other drugs
during a crucial period, or even if they possibly created the
counter-culture, through unforeseen circumstances, or even as the ultimate
MK-ULTRA experiment in mass psychological control and manipulation through
drugs.
Too absurd to even consider? Then stop reading now, you won't be able
to take what's coming next...
There is something about the story of Mary-Meyer-as-JFK's
LSD-mistress that, if true, is naggingly bothersome. Like the
assassination itself, it demands clarification, insists on being solved.
Recall the plans of Al Hubbard and Humphrey Osmond to make the world a
better, more peaceful place with the application of psychedelic chemical
therapy to certain hand-picked politicians, and their claims of some
success. All this quite a few years before Mary Meyer's similar campaign:
was it a case of like thinking evolving from acid insight happening in two
different places and times, or was Mary Meyer possibly acting as an agent
for Hubbard and Osmond, or someone who was their direct agent? Consider
the Leary connection to Mary Meyer in light of his connections to Hubbard,
Osmond, and Aldous Huxley. Consider Hubbard's career as an under-cover
agent for various government agencies and defense -related industries,
including his connection to the CIA. Consider his later career spent
fighting against the youth counter-culture that one would otherwise think
he would have been proud of as being the fruit of his labors. Then
consider Mary Meyer herself, estranged wife of one of the CIA's seminal
top operatives, and her affair with a president who developed a mutual
distrust for the CIA, a president who swore he would shatter the CIA into
a the and pieces and scatter the remnants to the wind. A president
believed by many to have been assassinated by that same CIA. Consider the
CIA sex and drugs safehouse experiments conducted by George Hunter White.
Consider the proposed use of LSD as a means of discrediting foreign
leaders. Consider the list of substances developed by the CIA, or
attempted to be developed by the CIA listed above.
Now consider this: was John F. Kennedy, president of the United
States, the ultimate MK ULTRA guinea pig? Was Mary Pinchot Meyer playing
some sort of clandestine game, was she some sort of Mata Hari? Or was she
perhaps unwittingly being used by someone in that capacity?
--much more in Steamshovel Press #12
Research on Mary Pinchot Meyer, alleged her acid circle, her murder and
any subsequent cover-up continues at Steamshovel Press, which is currently
following several interesting leads in this regard. Contact editor Kenn
Thomas or author G.J. Krupey at Steamshovel's address if you have any
information or additional leads on the topic. Confidentiality assured to
those who request it.
Currently available in Steamshovel Press #11:
JFK, LSD and the CIA, Part 3, with rare photographs;
Chicago Conspiracy Researcher Sherman Skolnick Speaks!
Dr. Alan Cantwell on Genetically Engineered AIDS;
An Ugly American in Dallas? Ed Lansdale and the JFK Tramps
Inslaw-Whitewater Connection
BioSphere 2 Shakedown
John Mack's UFO Abductees
Beat Poet Lew Welch Alive?
Jack Nicholson and Wilhelm Reich
$5 postpaid in the US; $6 postpaid elsewhere from: Steamshovel Press;
POB 23715; St. Louis, MO 63121 USA. Foreign Subsciptions: $26; US
Subs: $20.
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Topic: JFK, MPM, LSD and the CIA (Read 1910 times)
