From the Radio Free Michigan archives ftp://141.209.3.26/pub/patriot If you have any other files you'd like to contribute, e-mail them to bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu. ------------------------------------------------ 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. Back issues available. ------------------------------------------------ (This file was found elsewhere on the Internet and uploaded to the Radio Free Michigan archives by the archive maintainer. All files are ZIP archives for fast download. E-mail bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu)