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Sept. 16, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
58:34
Edition 269 - Peter Janney

Controversial author Peter Janney believes a close friend of JFK was murdered after hisassassination to silence her...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Recording in the middle of a bit of a heat wave here in the middle of September in London Town.
It's going to probably have cooled down by the time you hear this, but we've had a few days of temperatures in the 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the 30s Celsius or thereabouts, and it's kind of making things a little difficult here.
So I hope that you can't hear the effects of it.
But, you know, keep going.
I've just got to keep drinking lots of water and I'll be fine.
I'm going to do some shout-outs this time.
Thank you very much for your emails, which you've been sending through theunexplained.tv, my website, designed and created and maintained by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Thanks for the emails.
And as ever, when you get in touch, please say who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
Very grateful for your emails.
If you can make a donation to the show while you're at the website, theunexplained.tv, then please do so.
And I've made a big decision recently to do with the show.
I think you know that I do work in mainstream media, newsreading, that kind of stuff, to be able to keep eating.
None of it pays brilliantly, but it just keeps me ticking over and allows me to do this, for example.
I've decided to drop a little bit of that work to give me more time to develop the unexplained.
For me personally, it's something I think I had to do if this show was to get anywhere and to go to the places I wanted it to go.
It is a bit of a gamble financially, but I'll keep you posted on how it works out.
But I think it was a step that the time had come for, really, so I've taken it.
Sometimes you have to be a little brave in this world, and I've never been a great one for taking big risks and chances, but, you know, I might just have done that.
Anyway, shout-outs.
I had of a great guest, Peter Janey, talking about the death of a woman called Mary Pichot Meyer.
And this woman was, let's say, a close friend of JFK and was found dead in the year after he was assassinated in very mysterious circumstances.
It is a story that I hadn't heard before now, but is a story that is incredibly chilling and very well told by Peter Janney, a man who, as you'll hear, has a personal connection to the story himself.
So the book is called Mary's Mosaic, Peter Janney coming up soon.
Shout outs now.
First off, Ishmael at Birkbeck University in London.
Thank you for your email and the suggestion, Ishmael.
Tim in Funk, Nebraska, nice to hear from you again.
Jay, near Gatwick Airport, 30 miles or so outside London, says I listen when I'm working.
I work at nights and I'm often on my own and I won't see anybody for about nine hours.
So in some ways, you're keeping me company.
Nice to know that I'm doing that and keeping my brain working and stopping me from going into a zombie-like state.
Nice to be of service, Jay.
I've enjoyed your show for years.
My name is Ron.
I live in Cranston, Rhode Island.
May I suggest a guest for the show?
He's 81 and his name is Ruguero Santilli.
I'm going to check him out.
Bob in Gosport, Hampshire.
Interesting suggestion.
Thank you.
Needs a bit of research.
I'll try and do that.
Paul Schipas in Cape Town, South Africa.
Thank you for the great email and the piece of music, Paul.
Hope I pronounced your name right.
I think it's, is it Afrikaans?
Paul Schipas in Cape Town.
Let me know.
But thank you.
That was a great email.
Fabulous email from Daryl in Somerville, South Carolina says, I started listening about two years ago and find your podcast to be one of the most professional and produced on the net.
While working today at an airport, I met a wonderful lady from London who now lives in the US.
Of course, after hearing her accent, I thought of you.
And after we talked for a bit, I mentioned you and her smile beamed as she stated that you were one of her favourite UK broadcasters.
Wow.
Please tell radio stations about this.
Maybe they'll employ me more.
She had no idea of your podcast and couldn't wait to get home to begin listening.
So I took her phone and now she can get both the podcast and your show on Sunday Nights in the UK on Talk Radio.
Good news and thank you very much, Ron, for that.
Roger Sanders, finally, my friend in California, told me a very cool tale by email.
He says, my son works at the English village in Osaka, Japan.
The other day he walked into a colleague's office and she was listening to The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Small world, says Roger.
Apparently she listens to me a lot.
Well, I don't know your name, but thank you very much.
And please let me know what you think of the show.
If you want to get in touch, theunexplained.tv is the website.
Follow the link from there and you can do it.
Let's get to Peter Jani now, West Coast time zone of the US.
So he's eight hours behind where I am.
And we're going to talk about his book, Mary's Mosaic, to do with the most unusual case.
Peter Jani, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Great to be with you, Howard.
Now, Peter, I have to say that the story that we're about to discuss, first of all, if I'd seen it, if somebody had given me the outline details of this story of Mary Pichot-Meyer, I'm hoping I'm pronouncing that right.
If anybody told me that story, I would have thought that it is a work of fiction and I would be seeing Leo DiCaprio playing a leading role in a movie about this.
I would not have believed that this is for real, but these events really unfolded, yeah?
Absolutely.
I have researched this since, you know, beginning in 1976, when the affair of Mary Pincho-Meyer and President Kennedy was revealed through the National Enquirer, believe me, that's when bells, whistles, and sirens went off in my head.
And I have followed this story relentlessly, off and on, for, you know, God, 40 years.
And it's unusual in that you have a personal, and we'll get into this, a direct and personal connection to the story.
Yes, I knew Mary Pincho-Meyer.
She was a close friend of our families.
My mother and Mary went to college together.
My father was a CIA colleague of Cord Meyer, Mary's husband.
And I was best friend with Mary and Cord's middle child, Michael, up until the time of his accidental death when we were both nine years old.
And in a way, from reading the book, that accidental death of this little boy at a time when you were a little boy too, that kind of brought you Even closer to Mary and her family, didn't it?
Just by looking at the book and reading it?
It did, Howard, because Mary was an extraordinary woman and an extraordinary human being in that era.
No other adult in my family's, my parents' social circle, was there anyone like Mary Meyer?
Not only was she arguably one of the most beautiful women of an entire generation, she was the kind of person who really let you know when she was with you or talking with you that you mattered.
And particularly, you know, to children of her son's age, I was just very impressed when I was in her midst.
I just felt very cared for, very loved.
And again, she just was not like any other adult that I had seen in that era.
Okay, now this is, you know, it does sound to somebody listening to the story from this side of the Atlantic, it does sound like a movie plot or script or synopsis because here you have a boy whose father is in the CIA, which was your dad, connected with a woman who is described online and various other places as a Washington socialite.
You know, it's quite a recipe.
Yes, it is.
You know, I don't think of Mary as a sort of typical Washington socialite.
I don't know who gave her that label.
You know, she was a very well-respected woman, very independent.
She was an artist in her own right.
People listened to her.
But, you know, she wasn't the kind of person that was going off giving dinner parties every other week or, you know, big parties of that kind.
She was, you know, quite a private person in many respects.
That's the impression that I get.
I get the impression that you liked her tremendously, that you are an enormous fan of hers, and I think you respected and admired her creativity, her ability as an artist, but also her charisma.
Well, you know, my level of affirmation was, you know, she was my best friend's mother.
And when Michael was killed, this was a huge event.
Michael, her son, who was my best friend, when he was killed, this was a huge event for me.
It precipitated a major grief reaction.
And both my parents, who were, from my point of view, you know, alcoholics, just did not have the capacity to, in a sense, be with me in a way that I needed to be with.
And Mary Meyer did.
I spent time with her and her family after Michael's accidental death.
And she was a very important figure to me in terms of helping me emerge or re-emerge after the loss of my best friend.
The story that you recount, and you do it in a book that runs 650 or so pages or so, is a truly remarkable story, a chilling story, and to some extent a frightening story because people who have been involved in trying to recount this story, some of them have not met with the best possible fates, have they?
No, they have not.
And that would also include me.
You know, when I got very serious about writing this book back in 2006 or so, I had lunch with Victor Marchetti, who's a well-known former CIA figure.
He's written a couple of books about the CIA.
Victor worked for my father within the agency at one point.
So I knew him a little bit, but he agreed to talk with me.
And, you know, during the interview, I said, Victor, do you think the CIA is going to come after me?
Do you think they're going to threaten me?
And he gave me a very funny look, and he said, no, they'll just do it.
They'll just take you out.
It was at that moment that I realized, okay, this now has gone into a whole different realm.
And I have to get very sober and face the fact that if I'm going to continue with this effort, it's likely to be dangerous.
I was never overtly threatened by anyone, but I always had the sense that I was being watched and the agency was well aware of what I was up to.
And do you feel, and we will start to unfold the story here in a moment, but do you feel that the fact that you are now, it's the second, I think, version of your book that's out now.
I think it was first out in 2013.
This is the latest version, the 2016 version.
Do you feel that publicity is perhaps, as we often hear in cases like this, perhaps your best friend?
Yes, I do.
The original first edition came out in April of 2012.
And then there was a second edition, paperback edition, a year later in 2013.
This is the third edition, and I think the final one, given what has taken place in this final chapter in the third edition.
Now, those who will be tut-tutting and saying, you know, this sounds like a string of fantasy here will probably want to put the point and want me to put the point that, you know, you're saying that perhaps it is a dangerous enterprise to be telling this story, which we are about to tell and has been dangerous for other people.
And they would say, well, look, four than 50 years have elapsed since these events unfolded.
Mary Meyer was killed in 1964.
That was the year after JFK.
It's a hell of a long time.
It stretches credulity to believe that anybody would want to keep a lid on anything that may be claimed at this stage, because let's face it, anybody making claims can be easily knocked down in many, many ways.
Their story can be ripped to pieces, and just like the assassination of JFK himself, there will continue to be a million different stories about it, and the absolute truth of it all will probably never come out.
So, what I'm saying is, those people would say, it is something that you might wonder, why would you be concerned now?
And it stretches credulity to think that anybody would want to come after you 50 years since the events.
Well, I agree with you.
You know, I think now that the book is out and it's gotten considerable reviews, I don't think there is anyone, you know, for instance, in the CIA who is going to come after me.
But, you know, I have to be realistic and realize that there are probably always going to be, you know, a needed state of vigilance on my part to stay awake.
But this is an amazing story, and it's a story that is quite heartrending to read because here is a bright spirit, it seems to me.
Mary Meyer looks like a very bright spark in humanity.
Looks like somebody that many of us would want to know.
But she was involved in an affair with JFK, we are told.
Now, she was a socialite, and she was somebody who JFK came to confide in.
And the short way of putting the story is that after JFK was killed, she knew too much.
And if you follow the theory, had to be removed, which is a polite way of saying killed.
Correct.
I think she did know too much.
She made it her business after what took place in Dallas in November of 1963 to find out as much as she could.
And she was the kind of person who had access to a lot of JFK's inner circle.
I know Kenny O'Donnell essentially told her the same thing that he told Tip O'Neill, which Tip O'Neill recounts in his book, which was both Kenny O'Donnell and Dave Powers said, look, we were driving into an ambush in Daly Plaza.
There were shots coming from the grassy knoll.
And Kenny O'Donnell and Dave Powers go on record with Tip O'Neill making this point.
But of course, Tip says, well, why didn't you say that to the Warren Commission?
Why didn't you tell the FBI that?
And what their response was, was that they were told that they wanted to put this to bed, and the FBI didn't want to hear it.
And so, in a sense, that shut them up.
Right.
Now, one of the things you say in the book, and not until later in the book, not in the early stages, you unfold a very, a very neat tapestry of Mary and the people around her.
You weave this story quite beautifully.
I think it's a lovely piece of writing, and other people have said that.
But you say that she is the kind of person, because of who she knew, that if she started to spill the beans and started to talk, unlike most people, there would be ears for her story.
People at the highest levels would listen to her, and that was what caused alarm.
If you follow the train of thought and you follow the theory, that's what caused alarm among the people who may have been complicit in the death of JFK.
That's absolutely correct.
Right.
Let's tell the story then of exactly what happened.
Mary Pincho-Meyer, shot dead while walking on a canal towpath in 1964.
A man was arrested for this, a man you described as a meek man accused of a crime he couldn't possibly have committed.
And later you describe the details of the murder in very great detail.
So let's unfold this then.
Tell me about the circumstances of how Mary came to die.
Well, Mary had a routine as a painter.
You know, she was very devoted to her artistry.
And so her routine was essentially she would go to her studio early in the morning and paint for three or four hours.
Her studio was in the garage of former Newsweek Washington Post editor Bed Bradley.
Bradley was married to her sister.
So she had set up this little studio in the garage.
And each day at about noontime, after her painting, she would walk down to Georgetown and cross the street and walk out the towpath for a couple of miles out to what's known as Fletcher's Boathouse.
So this was her routine.
And she was, you know, very assiduously committed to her work.
So they knew that this was the kind of activity she would be undertaking on any given day.
And so the towpath became essentially a kill zone, which if you read in the book, I go through the steps of how the CIA likely engineered this hit.
And that's really, you know, how the mechanics of the murder took place.
Now, you talk in the book, one phrase I took out of it, about the CIA in terms that I've never heard before.
You talk of the CIA as a cancerous tumor on the soul of America.
Now, the CIA included your own father.
Yes, it did.
It did.
And, you know, my relationship with my father was essentially lost as I emerged from high school, going to college, and I began to seriously contemplate what my father was doing in the CIA and what the CIA was doing in the world.
And of course, that was at the height of the Vietnam War.
And the more educated I became about what was really going on, I knew that I would not be engaging in that war as a soldier.
And in fact, I became an ardent anti-Vietnam War protester who was repeatedly arrested.
Of course, this raised holy hell within my family.
And my Relationship with my father basically never recovered.
He died very early, you know, before his 60th birthday in 1971.
So, like some people do in this world, of course, they do.
Every day you read stories about it, you rebelled against your father and what he stood for.
Were you part of the counterculture back in those days then?
Would you have said?
Yes, I would.
I was totally enchanted with what was taking place in the United States in the late 1960s.
I mean, there was just an incredible opportunity to learn, to grow, to transform.
I was just on fire in terms of coming alive in that period during my life.
And what about the claim that some people might make saying, well, that's his background.
He rebelled against his father and he was part of the counterculture, that you were a dropout who didn't want to be involved in Vietnam.
You rebelled against everything.
And in making the claims that you're making, you're just having a kick at the system.
Well, you know, I don't think that that would be an accurate way.
I mean, it's a very complex era.
You know, I was an undergraduate at Princeton University, and of course, it's a very rigorous academic program.
And, you know, I was learning, Howard.
I mean, I was just coming alive.
And it wasn't all about just rejecting everything.
It was about wanting to know what was really taking place in our country.
Okay, back to Mary Meyer, who, of course, is the center of your story in Mary's Mosaic.
This creative person, very connected, known by an awful lot of people at the highest levels, very much part of the circle back in the 60s around JFK.
And she was killed.
Talk to me first, before we get into the details of how she was killed on that towpath, about her relationship with JFK.
To me, when I read in your book about it, it sounded to me like, well, this is another Marilyn Monroe.
Well, you know, Mary Meyer was a very highly educated, informed woman.
And I think of their relationship as a relationship of what I call redemption for JFK.
As we all know, JFK had some serious intimacy problems with women.
And, you know, in today's parlance, we could argue very forcefully that he had a sexual addiction.
And a great part of that is true.
And I think what took place is that this was a relationship where JFK realized that in his midst was a woman who was capable of holding him in a way that no other woman could.
And this presented a real opportunity for, you know, Jack Kennedy.
It also, I think, was probably in certain moments very terrifying for him.
I think you imply in this book, and we've all read about JFK and the womanizing down the years, but you imply in the book, tell me if I'm right, that he appeared to actually love this woman.
This was the woman who shook him up a bit.
Yes, that's right.
I think he fell deeply in love for her.
And people, you know, close to him, I talk about one journalist, Charlie, God, I can't think of his last name at the moment.
But, you know, he remembers JFK coming to him and telling him how deeply in love with Mary he was.
And Charlie telling me, you know, this was a dangerous relationship.
What is this guy doing?
But, you know, he was very attached to her.
And he did, according to one reputable source, another author by the name of Leo DeMoore, tell his chief assistant, Kenny O'Donnell, that when he left the White House, he was going to divorce Jackie so that he could be with Mary.
Okay.
Now, when JFK was assassinated in Dallas in 63, how did she react?
Well, she was devastated.
I think she was just shocked beyond belief.
There is an anecdote that I think is fairly accurate where she calls up Tim Leary, which is in the book, and basically tells him amidst her sobbing that they killed him.
He was changing too fast.
They couldn't control him.
And she said, I'm scared.
And so, you know, Tim made reference of that call, and it was in his book, Flashbacks.
I think he also made some comments about it to another author, Nina Burley, with her book about Mary Meyer.
You know, Mary was upset.
There was just no way around it.
But, you know, I think what she decided to do was that she was going to try and find out everything she possibly could.
And that was really what the last year of her life, 1964, was all about.
And the fact that you quote Timothy Leary in the book absolutely proves, if you needed any more proof, that this woman was connected to just about everybody.
Timothy Leary, the man who was on the face of magazines all over the world, this great character of the 60s, one of the key firebrands of the 1960s.
She was connected with him collected politically.
So she really was in an absolutely powerful position and a dangerous position, too.
Yes.
And I think Mary was possibly a little naive as to what could happen here.
But nonetheless, she really, I think the more she got involved with Jack Kennedy, The more she realized that there was a lot she could assist him with, which she did.
She became one of his closest allies.
And I think she was really in a pivotal position where she helped him transform his frame of reference from a Cold Warrior to a world peace advocate.
And of course, Kennedy's turn away from the Cold War takes place in June of 63 when he gave his American University commencement address.
And it's right there that he tells the world that there isn't anything more important than world peace.
And he announces during that speech that he is planning the first limited arms nuclear treaty with Premier Khrushchev.
Now, there would have been people, of course, who wouldn't like that.
So they'd equally dislike the person who put that idea into his head.
Well, isn't it interesting that that treaty was created in a matter of less than three months behind the backs of the CIA and the Pentagon?
You know, the treaty was actually ratified in that following September.
It was ratified the day Jack Kennedy was at the Pinchot family estate in Milford, Pennsylvania, dedicating the Pinchot Institute of Conservation.
And that is when both Mary and JFK find out that the Senate has ratified their treaty, his treaty for the limited nuclear arms treaty.
And so here we clearly see this turn away from the Cold War toward pursuits of world peace.
And he and Khrushchev are friends.
They are co-creators in realizing, having just come out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that this kind of thing can never happen again.
That this unrelenting Cold War mentality is going to doom the planet.
And they both know that, and they both realize that they have to turn away from that mindset to something much more important, world peace.
The Warren Commission and Oliver Stone and many, many, many other people have tried to decode what exactly happened to JFK and who was behind his death.
I think an awful lot of Americans accept that the official story was never really going to cut it.
And so it will forever be thought off of some kind of conspiracy, and nobody's quite sure how.
But look, here we have Mary, a woman of great intellect, very close to him.
He gets killed.
But there's nothing that you've said about her that would give me the impression that she would be somebody who'd go screaming to the press.
I think at that point, when she found, when she, you know, she bought a copy of the Warren Commission the day it came out, the paperback abridged edition.
And I think she was so outraged by what she saw in what they had done that she made a decision to go public with what she knew.
And that was the last thing the Warren Commission needed at a time when it had come out.
I mean, you had people like Mark Lane, who was very vociferous about getting out in front of this and saying, look, we're being cheated here.
We're being lied to, and very skillfully using the basis of evidence to show that the Warren Commission couldn't be right in what it was telling us.
And so Mary, I think, in her position, realized that she could do something very profound in terms of warning people what was taking place.
And that's the kind of thing, knowing Mary as I did, that she would have done in a situation like that.
She felt so strongly about what was taking place in terms of our country being stolen from us.
Before she died, do you think anybody tried to warn her that she might potentially be playing with fire?
Yes.
There was one, another CIA girlfriend had a talk with her and told her that what she was about to do was not going to be, you know, particularly good.
And Mary didn't listen to her.
Right.
And so in 64, she was walking along a towpath, a place of peace for her, and she was shot.
And a man called Ray Crump, who sounds to me like the archetypal victim in all of this, but who knows, is arrested and is made to carry the can for it.
Ray Crump was a Patsy, okay?
And the person that I talk about in the book at the end of the book, his job was to, in my opinion, based on all the evidence that I've uncovered, his job was to frame Ray Crump and to show up as an upstanding person at the trial in July of 1965 and testify to that effect.
What the government didn't count on was a very skillful Afro-American attorney woman by the name of Dovey Roundtree, who emerges as a hero in terms of her defense of Ray Crump, thoroughly convincing the jury that there's just no way in hell Crump could have committed this crime.
There's one quote from the evidence there that Ray Crump gave, and it was very compelling to me.
He said, look, you know, I was there fishing.
I nearly lost my fishing rod, and I nearly got shot myself.
I heard shots.
Well, you know, he wasn't just fishing.
He was down there having a tryst with a girlfriend.
And Debbie Roundtree, the attorney, actually did speak to the girlfriend, but she was so terrified of testifying because she was afraid her husband would find out and she feared for her life that she would not cooperate with Mrs. Roundtree for the trial.
So there was a witness, but Dubby realized that she was going to have to get an acquittal on her own on the basis of the evidence, which she did.
The second shot that killed Mary ruptured the aorta, didn't it?
So it would have produced vast amounts of blood.
And yet, according to what I see in your book, Ray Crump didn't have any of this blood on him.
That's exactly right.
The government withheld the FBI crime report right up until the time of the trial.
And that was really a tip-off here that there was some real shenanigans going on.
The FBI crime report found no evidence at all in any way, shape, or form that Ray Crump was in any way connected to the crime scene, to Mary Pinchot's body, or anything like that.
He would have been, he and his clothes would have been splattered with a certain amount of blood, given how the shots went down.
And even though our knowledge of forensics was not as great at that time, obviously, as it is now, and we didn't understand the science of crime like we do, you know, that is a pretty obvious point.
I think it's quite obvious.
And what's even more obvious is why, I mean, if the government was so sure of its case, why did they feel the need to keep the FBI crime report away from the defense?
I mean, that's just simply outrageous.
It's the kind of thing one would hope would not happen in this day and age, but who knows?
What became of Ray Crump?
Well, Ray Crump, I think, was severely traumatized in the nine months that he was in jail before the trial.
He ended up after the trial, even though he was acquitted, in a life of crime, which, you know, people who have post-traumatic stress disorder generally can go in that trajectory if that's what's available.
So I mean, Ray Crump's life was essentially ruined on the day of Mary Meyer's murder and was never to recover.
And I think one of the suggested motives or the suggested motive for the crime was robbery.
But when Ray Crump was arrested from your book, he had $1.50 on him.
Not only did he have $1.50, but Mary carried no purse with her.
She wasn't wearing any jewelry.
What was he going to rob?
And then, of course, they tried to turn it into, well, it must have been a sexual assault.
Well, there was no evidence, no forensic evidence whatsoever of any kind of connection between Ray Crump and Mary Meyer.
So Ray Crump didn't go to jail for this.
He was acquitted, but he had a nine-month, as you say, better part of a year ordeal, which completely ruined his life.
How was the crime then noted down?
What did they say?
The investigation goes on.
Is that how it was left?
Well, they didn't.
What else were they going to do?
It has remained until this very day, till this very moment, as Washington, D.C.'s most famous unsolved murder.
And given the fact that I grew up in Washington, I can't get anyone in Washington to even review the book.
The Washington Post won't touch it.
The New York Times won't touch it.
I could not get any media reviews or venues in Washington, D.C. Here we are again, you know, with a piece, a body of research that unequivocally, you know, challenges what the government would like us to believe.
And yet there is no venue in mainstream media for this book to receive any attention.
The only reason I got a story in the Boston Globe is that I knew the former editor of The Globe.
I knew his children, and they went to bat for me.
And so The Globe decided to take the story on, and they did a very nice piece about it.
And what happened after that?
Nothing.
Okay.
That's astonishing.
I mean, the only reason I can think that mainstream media would not grab hold of, well, I can think of some very deep and dark reasons, but the other thing being that perhaps they just regard this as a work of fantasy, a work of fiction by somebody who writes beautiful.
I mean, if you were to write novels, you'd write beautiful novels.
Well, the book does read like a novel, Howard.
But don't forget, there are over a thousand footnotes in this book.
And that's where I knew I had to really go the extra mile and document everything as much and as fully possibly as I could.
Because it's not a work of fiction by any stretch of the imagination.
This is a true piece of history.
And I think Mary Meyer is one of those people in American history who deserves to be noticed, who deserves to be reckoned with.
And that's why, you know, after this current book tour that I'm doing for this third edition, I am going to push like hell to transfer this story into a Hollywood drama.
Now, look, America is a land where people are allowed to hold different opinions, and those opinions are represented within government.
Has anybody within government given you a pat on the back and said, way to go?
You know, even quietly said, you're on the right track here?
Quite the opposite.
If you do a Google search, you will see that right after when the first edition came out in April 2014, CNN invited me on their show for an interview.
Because I didn't go after CNN, they came to me.
And during this interview, which is online, you can see it, the interviewer read a letter from the CIA basically saying that my book was a work of fiction and tried to, for 10 minutes, discredit it.
Well, let's be fair about that.
When I read the account of the chronology, the unfolding of the killing of Mary, there were details in there and the florid way that you'd written it.
I thought, how could he possibly know this?
There were things that you'd assume.
There were leaps in the dark that you'd taken, and it did read like fiction.
Well, I was very careful, for instance, on the day of the murder to say things like, well, Mary may have thought about this.
You know, she may have thought Phil Graham's death was initially a murder, but maybe it was a suicide.
You know, I was very careful not to put words in her mouth.
However, I had done such meticulous research in terms of the police report, the trial transcript.
You know, if there was a detail there that I thought was relevant, you know, that became part of the story.
And that, you know, for instance, the court transcript, the trial transcript, was really one of the mainstays of the foundation that I used for making the statements that I did.
You say that in 1993, somebody was as close as you are to this story and about to publish about it, but this person got involved in a spiral of depression and paranoia, you say, and killed himself ultimately.
So that was an opportunity for the story to get out, but it didn't for that reason.
You're talking about the author Leo Damore now.
And I knew Mr. Damore.
I had a very, towards the end of his life, a very close relationship with him.
And, you know, he believes, I think, that he was poisoned.
And, of course, the CIA had the technology to do this, to induce cancer, to induce heart attacks.
You know, this was the kind of thing that they had a very significant capability of doing.
But of course, to put the other side of this, if they do have that capability, which who knows, they might, they might not, but they might.
You know, from what I can hear down the line, you sound fine.
Yes, I am fine, and I've been very, very careful.
But let's make no mistake about this, Howard.
They do have that capability.
William Colby, under investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, testified during a session there where he brought in this dart gun that the agency had created that shot darts into people and incapacitated them and killing them eventually.
So, you know, he admitted that they had this kind of capacity.
This is not a theory.
This is a fact.
So if that is so, are you a very frightened man then?
Not anymore.
You know, I feel like I have done a very profound piece of work that is going to be on this planet long after I am.
And, you know, I'm not going to stop pushing in terms of bringing this story out into the open.
I think were a Hollywood drama to be created for this story, it could just be a riveting film.
You know, I know Oliver Stone a bit.
He loves the idea of it.
Of course, he's way past that era now and doing other things with his new film of Ed Snowden coming out.
But he's been very encouraging to me.
And I think it's only a matter of time before the right person comes along who understands the importance of a story like this and wants to make a film out of it.
Now, the collection of information and evidence that you put forward in the book, you come to conclusions, which we've discussed about that evidence.
And you write it beautifully.
It's a great narrative.
It would make a terrific screenplay.
But don't you feel that after you've done that, it's time to, you know, you've had your say, it's your view?
A lot of people would say, well, bearing in mind, you know, I've been banging my head against a brick wall and a lot of the media won't talk to me about this.
A lot of people would say, well, maybe it's time to park this now and go and live the rest of my life.
Well, I'm sure there will come a time where that becomes the next thing to do.
I'm not there yet, Howard.
I think right now in the United States, we are living in a very critical moment.
Our country is really being flushed down the toilet.
And I think the essence of what is taking place here, all of this emanates from what happened in Dallas, Texas in November of 1963.
The American experiment in democracy ended on that day, Howard.
It's over.
This was a coup d'état.
It's clear that this took place.
The evidence is overwhelming.
The evidence is also overwhelming that the CIA was orchestrating it.
So we are living in a period now where people in droves, increasingly by the millions, are losing trust in their government.
And that's a very dangerous moment.
I think that this is really backfired.
Government secrecy is really, as Senator Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, secrecy is for losers.
We have done a great disservice by, our government has done a great disservice by not being honest with what has taken place.
I mean, if Germany can deal with the Holocaust and they have dealt with it incredibly well, why can't the United States deal with the Kennedy assassination and give us the truth?
Maybe nobody really properly knows the truth.
Well, we certainly know that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill President Kennedy.
I think a lot of people would agree with that.
Yes, okay.
And so we can begin there.
But the point is, is that we've been lied to by so many things.
I think we've been lied to about 9-11.
We can go there if you want, but, you know, there are just so many pivotal historical events that clearly have been, the truth of which have been kept from us.
I think if you read David Talbot's new book, The Devil's Chessboard, about Alan Dulles, this is a seminal piece of work for understanding why the Cold War took place.
I think that book and Jim Douglas' book, JFK and the Unspeakable, really are the essential pieces of reading that anyone who truly wants to know a big piece of the truth can get from reading those two books.
You have a big uphill job, though, don't you?
Because an awful lot of people, especially this side of the Atlantic, they see America as being stuffed to the rafters with wacky and wacko conspiracy theorists.
And a lot of people over here would be much inclined to just put you in that pile.
Well, you know, people have free will.
They get to choose, you know, what they, and people are entitled to their opinions.
But what they're not entitled to, Howard, is their own set of facts.
And the facts in this case, as in the JFK assassination case, clearly point to the fact that these were orchestrated murders by elements within our own government.
Talk to me about Mary's diary, because like Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe had a diary, and that was pivotal around the time of her death.
We are told that Mary had a diary.
What became of that?
We don't know.
We do know that James Jesus Angleton, who was the chief of the counterintelligence department at the CIA, absconded with the diary on the night of the murder.
He kept it.
Then I think the Bradleys and others conspired to tell us that, you know, oh, no, it wasn't a diary.
It was just Marisa's sketchbook.
Right.
And I got this from the book.
There are two distinct things, you think.
There was a sketchbook where she produced her art, her sketchings, and there was another book that was the diary with all the material in it.
That's right.
That's right.
And Angleton absconded with the diary on the night of the murder, with the help of Ben Bradley, by the way.
So what about the emergence of the diary in the book you say 1976, her sister had something to do with the re-emergence of the diary?
Is that right?
Well, Angleton gave them back the sketchbook.
I mean, he had both the sketchbook.
They gave him the sketchbook, thinking or wanting the public to believe that that was the diary.
But, you know, there was a sketchbook which had little cribblings and little words in it about JFK here and there, but it was mostly had a lot of color swatches in it.
And then there was the real diary, which she had been keeping, you know, since she was in her late teens, early 20s.
I mean, this is how she was putting the pieces together of what had taken place in Dallas.
She was recording a lot of her thoughts and her own research.
There were, I think, parts of the diary had to do with her affair with JFK and what they had done together.
But I am persuasively led to believe that Leo DeMore did have certain parts of her diary, that he got it through a friend of Angleton's after Angleton had died, but that the complete diary that Angleton absconded with was never to be seen again.
Right.
So you got the book out.
You're going on a tour to promote this edition of the book, the third edition.
What do you do now?
What do you do once that's done?
Once you've done the last venue and signed the last book, where do you go from here?
Well, as I said earlier, I think, you know, there is a couple of people, you know, in the Hollywood community that I'm working with to try and position this story in such a way that, you know, a rather high-profile figure in Hollywood will,
you know, decide that he or she is very committed to it, and we will begin, you know, development of some kind of mini-series or Hollywood drama film feature, that kind of thing.
So that would, I think, probably be my next step after I finish promoting the third edition.
Okay.
And what would you say if it was put to you that here you are trying to make a Hollywood screenplay out of this?
If you really believe it is an absolutely true story and a work of absolute solid record that needs to be taken further, what on earth are you doing getting entertainment involved in it?
Well, that, you see, that's a very credible question.
And of course, I would never allow anyone to option the book that I've written unless they agreed to respect the historical record in making of the movie.
I mean, this is a story, Howard, that does not need any Hollywood embellishment.
What it does need is someone who has a lot of moral courage, who really wants to get behind a greater piece of the truth and make that the circumference of the story and give it to the public.
Let the public decide after they see what gets created here as to what they want to believe or not.
Well, that's a crucial point, isn't it?
Because at this length of time, at this stretch of, what, 52 years, whatever, beyond the events, it's going to be very hard to pin down, nail down the truth because a lot of the people aren't here anymore and memories of those who remain are going to be foggy.
And so ultimately, it's going to come down to people's opinion, isn't it?
Yes, but given the level of research that I did in the book, there is quite a bit of factual information that is well established and can be counted on to provide part of the foundation for the story.
But yeah, I mean, look, there was no 24-hour video camera running the entire time of Mary and JFK's life, you know, where we could, you know, actually see these things.
But there are certain pieces of historical record that do function to give us a more apt and accurate picture of what took place and what didn't take place.
And, you know, at the end of the day, you'll get the clearest picture you can.
And that's about as far as you're going to be able to go.
I mean, even at this distance, looking back at the events around Dealey Plaza in 63, you know, there are people who say, well, there are all sorts of people who were present there on the day.
What were they doing there?
And, you know, a lot of people make all sorts of claims about who was there and who was later involved in Watergate and all that kind of stuff.
And at this length of time, it's really hard to prove any of it.
You're going to fall into the same difficulty, aren't you?
Yes.
I mean, in terms of how you're framing this, yeah, I mean, there's no way to get it 100%.
I will say, for instance, though, in Oliver Stone's film JFK, I think that that was possibly one of the most accurate pictures the public can ever understand as to what took place.
You know, I've researched the Kennedy assassination for, you know, 20 years, and there's only one scene in that movie that isn't historically accurate, and that's the scene, you know, where he's talking to Fletcher Proudy toward the end of the film, and Proudy's telling him, you know, what actually went down.
Now, it turns out that Mr. X, the character of Mr. X, is based on a real person by the name of Fletcher Proudy who believed everything that that character said and wrote two books about it.
So, yes, that did not take place in real life, but the essence of what was said in that scene is absolutely factually correct.
So, a question that maybe I should have asked right at the beginning of this, but I think it hangs nicely at the end.
You know, you risk an awful lot by doing this.
At the very least, you risk ridicule from people, or you risk the naysayers saying, you know, this man's put together a tissue of nothing.
There's an awful lot that you have to put on the line there to do this.
And the question that I have to ask at the end of it is, why?
Why did you feel, I know that you have the close personal connection with your father and knowing Mary, but why did you feel you had to write this book?
Which, you know, I will say again, is a fabulous piece of writing.
But why did you feel you had to do it?
Because I think as citizens in a democracy, we need to know the truth of what our government is about.
And if each of us do not do our part in terms of trying to ensure the continuity of our democracy, that it is truly democratic, we will lose it.
And that is what is taking place today.
We are losing part of the efficacy of the principles by which this country was founded on.
And if we don't take it back as citizens, everyone on the entire planet will suffer.
And what about those who would say, by doing this, by putting yet more questions in the minds of the American and the global public about the nature of government and the things that are done in its name, you are sullying the work and the reputation of every decent politician whose mantra is public service?
Well, if politicians aren't willing to speak the truth and act with integrity, then we as citizens need to see that.
We need to know who these people are and elect different leaders.
That's why the candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the primaries was such an important political event.
I mean, this guy came out of nowhere.
He had no axe to grind.
He has espoused the things that he was espousing all his life.
This was a huge moment in the reclamation of the potential reclamation of our country.
And so that's the kind of politician that really should be running this country.
Okay, well, I have to say that is your view.
I always get told if I ever say anything about the current presidential campaign or anything to do with American politics, even though I studied at University American Politics, I get told, you know, butt out, you're a brick.
We like your show, but don't get involved in American politics.
So I'm not going to say anything either way on it.
I'm just going to watch this presidential campaign unfold as it will.
But I have to say, it's the most fascinating one of my lifetime.
But that's a whole other story for a historian to write some other time, I think, Peter.
Thank you very much, Peter, for talking with me.
It's a hard road that you tread, but I wish you well and, you know, stay safe.
I will, Howard, and I really appreciate talking with you this morning.
And I hope your readers will, you know, find this interview really intriguing.
Thank you.
The very chilling story of Mary Pinchot-Meyer.
I still don't know what to make of that.
Maybe you can help me.
Tell me what you think of that.
And Peter Janney's account, email me at theunexplained.tv.
Tell me what you thought about this edition and what you've just been listening to.
I think I'm going to have to have that long cold drink that I promised myself now.
I think I'm beginning to overheat.
But thank you very much for being part of this show.
Please keep your emails coming when you get in touch.
Please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
More great guests coming soon here on The Unexplained Online.
Until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London, and please stay safe.
Please stay colour and please stay in touch.
Thank you.
Take care.
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