Guest: Peter Janney, author of Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace.
Mary’s Mosaic is the best-written of all the JFK assassination books I’ve read. It provides unparalleled insights into the depths of several larger-than-life characters involved in this amazing Shakespearean drama:
John F. Kennedy: A shallow womanizer who suffered from debilitating illnesses and chronic severe pain, JFK’s character flaws stemmed from deeply troubled relationships with his parents…until he miraculously grew into his role as the greatest President America was never allowed to have, thanks in large part to the influence of the love of his life, Mary Meyer.
Mary Meyer: A brilliant and beautiful lifelong peace activist, as well as an accomplished artist, she helped convince her lover JFK to “turn towards peace” during the final summer of his life…then tried to expose the truth about his assassination – until she was herself murdered by the same people who had killed the President.
Cord Meyer: Mary’s ex-husband, a literary and conceptual genius, Cord lost an eye in World War II and spent several years with Mary campaigning for world peace…until he was recruited to the CIA and the “dark side” by Allan Dulles, created the CIA’s media-control program Operation Mockingbird, participated in the CIA’s murder of JFK, and was present at the CIA meeting that ordered the assassination of his ex-wife Mary to keep a lid on the JFK assassination.
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s sometimes a better story. Mary’s Mosaic is a murder mystery, a psychological novel, and a horror novel beyond your worst nightmares. It’s one of the best and most important books I’ve ever read.
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Kevin Barrett Interviews Peter Janney 11/9/13
Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Radio. I'm your host, Kevin Barrett, bringing on the best guests with the most to say about the critically important issues that the mainstream media isn't going to tell you about—and that unfortunately, even the mainstream academy of which I'm sort of a half-expelled member isn't really interested in, at least in terms of going all the way and exposing what's really going on in this country and what our true history is. Well, today I have a guest I've been eagerly awaiting to interview for many months now. He's an author and he actually lived through some events related to the JFK assassination, the 50th anniversary of which is coming up in just a few weeks.
And before we jump into the interview, I want to plug the events that we're having here in Madison, Wisconsin, on Sunday, November 17th. We will have a book release party for a brand new book entitled Dynamic Duo a White Rose Blooms in Wisconsin. It's a book with a lot of JFK assassination content. It's about me and Jim Fetzer, one of our leading JFK assassination researchers. And this event will be held at the Frugle Muse Bookstore. That's the West Side Frugal Muse Bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin, at two p.m. on Sunday, November 17th. And then on Wednesday evening, that would be November 21st, there will be a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of America's last day as a free nation.
Kevin Barrett: That will be happening at the Red Dragon Lounge in Madison, Wisconsin. For more information about these events, you can go to the University of Wisconsin Sifting and Winnowing Club website, which is you uwsw.blogspot.com. And these events will be advertised quite prominently in the local media here in Madison, Wisconsin.
All right let's move on to the show today. Peter Janney is my guest. Peter Janney is the author of what may be the best written of all of the JFK assassination books out there. As I was just saying to Peter, it has genuine literary value. As a literary scholar, I can tell you that. It's called Mary's Mosaic: the CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer and their Vision for World Peace. It's a fascinating book with all sorts of revelations, not only about the JFK assassination and the subsequent assassination of Mary Meyer, but I think it tells you more about the folks who are really ruling this country, and the world, than the vast majority of exposé books out there. And it tells it brilliantly. So without further ado, welcome. Peter Janney. Thank you for this incredible book.
Peter Janney: Good to be with you, Kevin. Thank you so much for having me.
Kevin Barrett: I've long been interested in this topic, the murder of Mary Meyer and its relation to her affair with John F. Kennedy, especially during this last year of Kennedy's life, when he had the turn towards peace that James Douglass told us about in his book JFK and the Unspeakable. I first heard about this back in...Oh, it was quite a while ago. I think maybe the 80s, possibly even the late 70s. Timothy Leary had spoken about it, and it appeared that Mary Meyer was part of a conspiracy of eight Washington women to turn on powerful men to LSD and world peace, and that her jealous husband, her ex-husband Cord Meyer, a CIA Operation Mockingbird chieftain, had perhaps been involved in the CIA's taking revenge on her, as well as, of course, covering up the murder of JFK. It's an amazing and bizarre story. Truth is stranger than fiction. When I first heard this stuff, I was somewhat skeptical but interested. And well, your book has put the final word out there. As far as I'm concerned, this is for real. And you've been living with this stuff for a long time. So maybe we could just go back and you can tell us a little bit about how you got involved with this amazing story.
Peter Janney: Well, I grew up in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s and 1960s, and that was because my father was recruited by Allen Dulles into the CIA in 1948. And he was really right at the top echelon. Right up with Cord Meyer, James Jesus Angleton, Richard Helms. They were all socially acceptable and together with one another. So I knew all of these people and I knew their families. And my parents would socialize with them and I knew their kids. But with particularly with the family of Cord and Mary Meyer. I was best friends with Michael Meyer, their middle child who was unfortunately killed when we were nine years old. He was hit by a car right around Christmas time. So I knew the Meyer family intimately. And of course, as people will see when they read my book, I had a very unique and special relationship with Mary Meyer. She was the mother of my best friend, but she was also an extraordinary human being and an extraordinary woman, arguably one of the most beautiful women in an entire generation. And she was just so kind to me in particular, particularly around Michael's death. It was a real major life event for me as a young boy, and it really affected me profoundly. And Mary Meyer was really, I think, the only adult who really understood my grief—and, in a sense, tried to include me in that way of helping me through it, much more so than either of my parents could.
Peter Janney: So I had this relationship with her and the family. And of course, I didn't really know what was going on. (She was) taking care of me in a certain way that my parents, for whatever reason, were not able to. I mean, both my parents, in my opinion as a clinical psychologist, were alcoholic, and this had something to do with it. Mary was not a drinker. Not that she never drank once in a while, but she was not someone who used alcohol to self-medicate herself, unlike her husband, Cord Meyer. So I developed a strong relationship with her. And then, of course, when she was murdered in 1964, I was away at boarding school. And I did not find out about it until that Thanksgiving of 1964, and the murder had happened in October. So I was shocked to find this out. It really affected me. And it wasn't until 12 years later in 1976, where it came out in the National Enquirer that she had had this affair with JFK, and there was this insinuation of recreational drugs, where it really started to open my eyes. And that sort of began my journey in terms of getting to the bottom of this. So this story has taken me 35 years or so to put together.
Kevin Barrett: Your personal relationship with Mary Meyer, which was apparently a substantial relationship, and your relationship also with Cord Meyer and some of these other people—you went fishing with James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA skullduggery specialist who supposedly descended into extreme paranoia— the relationships that you've had with these people really brings depth to this book that very few other books that touch on these topics have. These characters are both deeply real, and also larger than life. Mary is larger than life in a good way, and Cord Meyer and James Jesus Angleton are larger than life in a bad way.
Peter Janney: Well, that was part of the effort in my book. Having grown up in this milieu and having known these people, having been around them, I wanted to bring that dimension into the book. I mean, because, you know, a lot of people write about Jim Angleton. And a number of others have written about Cord. But they don't really know them as people. And it's not that I had tremendous amounts of access to them. Of course, I was a child. They were adults. But I was still observant enough as a child to watch them and to understand their impact on me and other people I knew. Jim Angleton had children. I knew one of his daughters, Tracy Angleton. So I kind of had a bird's eye view, so to speak, to other dimensions of these people that most people didn't get. And that's one of the avenues in the book that I think is so important for people, because they can sit down and read this book and get engrossed in it on any number of levels. It's a detective story. It's a mystery thriller. It's all kinds of things. And I think that has to do with some of the popularity of the book and why it's done relatively well in terms of sales.
Kevin Barrett: Yes, I'm sure it has. It's a book I would recommend to anyone, including people who usually sort of turn up their noses at so-called conspiracy stuff. And the deep characterization of some of these principals is, I think, the key. It is what makes this book really stand out. And it addresses a mystery that still troubles me, and I still haven't really managed to wrap my mind around, which is: How can these people commit such unspeakable acts of evil, as James Douglass put it in his title, JFK and the Unspeakable. How? What leads them to do this? And Cord Meyer in particular is the the centerpiece of a real mystery for me. I didn't realize that he had been such a devoted peacenik before he was corrupted by the CIA and alcohol and became, according to the confession of Saint John Hunt—who I will be interviewing perhaps later today— the leader of the chain of command that killed President Kennedy? How could Cord Meyer go from being such a dedicated peace activist to participating in murdering the president of the United States because the president was working for world peace?
Peter Janney: I agree with you. It's a fascinating question. And Cord's downfall will, I think, always remain a bit mysterious. You know, certainly alcohol had a role in this, because Cord was alcoholic. There's just no way around that. And understanding alcoholism and what it does to one's character and one's being, is the subject of many, many clinical books. And it's devastating. It's more devastating than most people understand. But with Cord...you know, he was such a star in the late 40s. He really was like a rock star. He was just everywhere and speaking very eloquent for world peace. He was head of the United World Federalists, which was this organization that wanted to bring a bureaucracy into being that would do what the United Nations should be doing. So Cord really did his best to bring that into existence. But as Russia and the specter of communism came to pervade American culture in the very late 40s and early 50s, it just wasn't going to work. And I think it really depressed Cord. But then he met Allen Dulles. I believe it was his father who set up an interview with Allen Dulles. And Dulles was just a master at seducing people like Cord. And this is exactly the kind of person that Allen Dulles wanted around in the CIA: A very bright Ivy League aristocracy will continue to rule the world, but we'll do it in a way where everyone will come out a winner. He seduced a lot of people, including my father. And these people just really began to feel that they were above and beyond the law, and that they were making the world safe for democracy—and, of course, putting into place the maintenance of the American Empire. And they were damn good at it.
Kevin Barrett: Well, they they did build an empire pretty efficiently, but the ruthlessness of their efficiency certainly left some major scars on democracy, to say the least.
Peter Janney: Absolutely. It did, and we haven't recovered from it, in my opinion.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I got involved in this sort of thing in a serious way due to 9/11, which is kind of the JFK assassination for the next generation. And it seems that these people pulling off these big lie types of crimes, which repeatedly seem to be all about preventing peace from breaking out... If you look at these murders of the Kennedy brothers, of Martin Luther King, Senator Paul Wellstone, and of course, the false flag operations like 9/11, and earlier deceptions like the Gulf of Tonkin, the Kuwait Baby Incubator hoax...Over and over and over, we see that there seems to be a war party that is willing to commit murder and put out Big Lies in order to keep its war agenda going. And I guess you're leaning towards the opinion that the people behind this think that what they're doing is best for the country. They can keep the people as sort of well-meaning innocents, and they can manage their empire in the way it needs to be managed without interference from these idealistic peacenik types. I mean, is that their mentality?
Peter Janney: Well, I think that's part of it. But people talk about the CIA as capitalism's invisible army. And I think it does come down to who can maintain the biggest economic stranglehold on the rest of the world. And there is, in my opinion, a small group of individuals, whether you want to call them the Bilderberg Group or the Illuminati or whatever. But the people who are really in position to maintain economic control on this planet-they have an agenda. And I think until very recently, and possibly even as we speak, their agenda is economic control. And they are not going to give that up. They want to control the resources, they want to control governments. But what they really want to control is people's heads. Because they don't want you to know what is truly, really going on. And I think that's starting to crack, largely because we have the internet, and that has just been possibly the most important tool in terms of leveling the playing field for information and history that we have had, certainly in my generation.
Kevin Barrett: I agree completely. And that's one reason that I've moved from academia into talk radio: to be part of this new independent media of what seems to me to be almost a new kind of Gutenberg revolution that will change consciousness almost as much as the printing press did when it brought in mass literacy. Well, Peter, the powers that be that want to control people's heads, they don't want people to understand what's really going on. It seems, though, that they're willing to resort to more murder than they really need to sometimes. It appears that there were two authors that were working on books on the same topic of Mary Meyer's murder and its relationship to the murder of JFK in the 90s. And both of them may have been injured or killed by the forces of cover up. And so all that did was keep the story hot for your book, which is probably even better than those earlier books would have been. So they didn't really need to do that. And it seems to me there's surplus repression here with this violence directed at people who are trying to get out the truth.
Peter Janney: Well, I agree with you. I mean, if I think the author Jim Marrs has been very eloquent and correct in terms of putting together the list of people who have died mysteriously or who have been out and out killed in not so mysterious circumstances subsequent to the Kennedy assassination.
Kevin Barrett: And Belzer and Wayne's Hit List is another.
Peter Janney: That's right. Exactly. And they talk about Mary Meyer in that book quite a bit. And of course, Mary was was one of the the the first. She was murdered literally just under three weeks after the Warren Commission Report was released. And I believe the timing of her murder was no accident. Because when the Warren Commission came out, she was very, very upset. She was just infuriated that the country was going to be blinded by this outright lie, this outright piece of propaganda, that Lee Harvey Oswald had done it, and that would be the end of it. And she had spent most of the year of 1964 doing her own research, and she was ready to go public. She was ready to go public about her relationship with JFK and what she had discovered about what had taken place in Dallas. And of course, that was going to take her right to the doorstep of the CIA. And when Angleton and her ex-husband Cord Meyer found out about this, according to Robert Crowley, another CIA person who was at the meeting where they made the decision to take her out, Cord didn't have any ambivalence about it at all.
Kevin Barrett: That's pretty shocking. Here's this guy who seemed like such an idealistic character working for world peace all those years before he got corrupted by Dulles, the CIA and alcohol. And here he's willing to go along with the guys in the gray suits and the CIA when they say that his ex-wife, this beautiful, both physically and spiritually, person needs to be taken out to cover up the truth of the JFK assassination. That's just horrific.
Peter Janney: It is. But you know, by that time, I think Cord was really lost. He had been, you know, taken over, so to speak. And I think clearly Cord was involved in the planning and logistics of the JFK assassination, even though there's been very little written about Cord's actual role. I'm suspicious of what E. Howard Hunt says about this, because I believe E. Howard Hunt would say anything as he neared his deathbed. And he made a very salacious story about Cord being jealous because Mary had gone to JFK. I mean, I'm sure that dimension is real and on its own level.
Don't you think Hunt's not going to out-and-out lie to his son? This was a kind of a gift of truth to his son, who had been pestering him for decades. So I think that as far as Hunt's story went, it was probably largely true.
Peter Janney: Well, it could have been. It's hard to know with Howard Hunt. I just always have been very suspicious of him. He was a real rascal. And the fact that Mark Lane took him apart in court and exposed him for the liar that he was back in 1985, where Hunt was trying to sue Liberty lobby to get $600,000, saying that he had not been in Dallas that day—when in fact, not only had he been in Dallas, he was the paymaster for one group of the assassins. I mean, it's just it's incredible, frankly.
Kevin Barrett: Well, yeah, but of course Hunt is going to lie to the court! And fortunately, he got exposed. But again, I've had Saint John Hunt on my show before, and I'm hoping to have him on again very soon. And in the context here, remember, Saint John had been bugging his dad for the truth about the JFK assassination forever. He'd been put off, put off. Remember, his mom went down in a plane with a suitcase full of cash. This was related to her activities with Hunt during the Watergate scandal. And there had been a lot of emotional estrangement. And as somebody whose own father worked for the CIA, and was one of the bad guys too, I'm sure you could relate to this situation where Saint John Hunt had an estranged relationship with his father, and then his father sort of tried to mend the relationship towards the end of his life. And then this little kernel of truth, which I'm sure was far less than what he actually knew, was given to his son, kind of as a gift at the end of his life. And I find it absolutely credible as far as it goes.
Peter Janney: Well, I'm not disagreeing with you. I think there probably is some truth in it. It's just one of those things that still leaves me with a few questions. I mean, there's no question in my mind that Cord Meyer had sold his soul to the devil. Just none at all. And it's so utterly tragic because his other two sons have really just been, you know, very taken apart by what happened. His oldest son, Quentin, has largely made a career out of being a mental health patient and has been pretty much dysfunctional his entire adult life. His younger brother Mark turned into an evangelical and lives down in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife, proselytizing for a certain church. This guy went to Yale and was one of Yale University's first Chinese undergraduate majors. He's a brilliant kid. But I think the family was just so traumatized, first losing their brother when he was nine years old, but then losing their mother in the way that she was murdered. And of course, all the suspicion. I mean, this is Washington D.C.'s most famous unsolved murder. And the interesting thing, Kevin, is that there hasn't been one media outlet in Washington—radio, television, literary, anything—that will touch my book, that will review it, that will talk about it. I mean, it's probably the most comprehensive account ever written or that ever will be written about what happened to Mary Meyer. And it involves a lot of former prominent people in Washington. But there's a blackout on the book in the entire Washington area.
Kevin Barrett: How does that work? You would think that D.C. is such a gossipy place. How can it be exempt from this sort of aspect of human nature that we even saw in the old Soviet Union, where even when everybody kind of believed in communism, there were still the rumors, there was still the samizdat. How could anyone in the D.C. inner circle not be interested in your book?
Peter Janney: Well, I think there are people, a lot of people, who are interested. But you won't hear, or you will not see, any of the mainstream media outlets taking it on. And that's what I find. This is the influence of Ben Bradlee that that is going on down there. It's the influence of the national security apparatus. When my book came out, the first thing that the CIA wanted to do is they got me on CNN and then just tried to lambast me. You know, I printed tha. The interview was posted on the book's website, if you ever want to watch it. But I do think the book is thorough enough that it should be examined thoroughly. I mean, look, no one gets it completely right, but I maintain that I got it more than 93 percent right. I'm sure there are details that I've missed here and there. But basically the story is there. And it's supported by nearly a thousand footnotes in the book. And just for the life of me, I can't get over the fact that in and around Washington, no one will take it on in terms of being on television programs down there, having it reviewed in The Washington Post or the Washington Observer or anything like that. No one in Congress will take it on. I just find that incredible.
Kevin Barrett: I do, too. One of the most shocking things that I went through when I discovered the 9/11 cover up, was the fact that I had been living for two years in this country after this event had taken place and I had never heard of Building Seven coming down. (It was) the CIA's number two headquarters on Earth after its Langley, Virginia, first headquarters, and the number one national security building in New York. Boom! Six and a half seconds, straight into its own footprint, for no reason whatsoever, after a countdown to demolition went over police radio. And then the Mafiosi landlord, who's a close friend of Netanyahu, confessed to having demolished it. And none of this made it into the national media. And then the more I looked at 9/11, the more I realized that there wasn't a single shred of evidence for any aspect of the official story. And in fact, it was completely contradicted, and the media had completely missed all of this. They have missed hundreds of (what should have been) the biggest stories that would have ever existed in the American media, in all of history, hundreds of these stories. And they're just completely overlooked. And that boggled my mind, because I still thought that there was a certain taste for scandal. They wanted to sell newspapers, they wanted to sell TV ads. How could they completely ignore this stuff? And maybe Cord Meyer is an interesting person to look at in terms of the history of how our media got so controlled. Because he was the head of Operation Mockingbird. And you have some really interesting observations about how successful Operation Mockingbird was.
Peter Janney: Yes, I think what it proves to us is that to this day, the CIA and the national security apparatus are embedded in the media. They are largely controlling mainstream media. And so this is why you'll never see any mainstream media outlets on television, for instance, really take on the Kennedy assassination and talk about the actual evidence. The same with 9/11. I mean, my God, when you have over 2000 licensed structural engineers and registered architects all going on record, that these buildings were brought down not by the planes that ran into them, but by controlled demolition! I mean, it just takes my breath away.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, it is quite stunning. You mentioned in your book that Cord Meyer was heavily decorated for his extremely successful attempts to infiltrate, co-opt and basically take over both the U.S. media and a lot of the global media as well, through a CIA program called Operation Mockingbird.
Peter Janney: Radio Free Europe was another one of his little projects. Cord was a brilliant guy. He could have been successful at anything he took on. He was also a beautiful writer. This guy won the Henry Award for the best new short story, right when he came out of World War Two. It's an incredible story that was published in The Atlantic. And his book Peace or Anarchy did very well when it first came out in the late 1940s. His second book, Facing Reality, I thought, was just a complete whitewash, and it didn't do well at all. But by that time there was really no one home in Cord Meyer. This beautiful, young, pacifist soul had been co-opted by evil. I think that's the only way to say it. And he was gone.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, it'd be really interesting to be a fly on the wall, watching Cord in his first interactions with Allen Dulles, who recruited him for the CIA and apparently turned him away from his path of seeking world peace. Somebody should maybe try to make a movie out of it or write fiction about it. He's such a larger than life character. Your book is by far the best thing that's yet been done about this.
Peter Janney: Well, it's interesting that you say that. Because I shared that one chapter on Cord with a couple of CIA people who who knew him. And both of them independently came back to me and said it was by far the best thing they had ever read about Cord, that it really captured something about him that no one else had been able to capture. And I considered that a real feather in my cap, because it was a very hard chapter to write. It took me a long time. And I had to spend quite a bit of time in the Library of Congress reading his diaries and things like that. But it was gratifying finally to get it done in the way that I did, because I really felt in the end that I had largelly portrayed Cord in terms of who he was and what he turned into.
Kevin Barrett: And you also succeeded in a kind of a deep characterization of Mary Meyer and JFK and their relationship, which apparently had a lot to do with turning JFK towards world peace during the last year of his life. And that's another amazing and quite impressive story. JFK's trajectory kind of mirrored Cord Meyer's. It was sort of a mirror image of it. Of course, Meyer went from a peace activist to hard line sort of Cold Warrior willing to employ evil methods. And JFK was sort of following the opposite trajectory. He was a Cold Warrior and spoke out against Eisenhower being too much of an appeaser. And then in once in office, he had his turn towards peace, apparently stimulated by a number of things, including the CIA deceiving him about the Bay of Pigs and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, in which all of his advisers wanted him to attack Cuba, which we now know would have set off a nuclear exchange. And then there's his relationship with Mary Meyer. And so he comes across also as a three dimensional, larger than life in-depth human being in your account in a way that he doesn't in most other accounts. We see that kind of change in him, and we see these weird paradoxes of his capacity for idealism and purity of heart, as well as his sort of other less benign characteristics, especially in the the earlier periods of his life.
Peter Janney: Yes, I think that's a very good point, and I think that's particularly important for your listeners to understand that JFK did go through a transformation, which I think largely took place during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. That was really a huge turning point for him. And it was at that time, Kevin, that his relationship with Mary Meyer was really primary. He was seeing a lot of her, and I think she was having a real impact on him. This was a relationship with a woman that he had never had before. And I think she was the first woman to really stand up to him emotionally, and basically say, "Look, I'm not going to put up with any of your crap. I'm going to give it to you straight. And if you don't want to be with me, that's fine. Believe me, I'm not going to be devastated. But you know, if you do want to be with me, you're going to have to show up in a way that you don't really know much about." And I think that really intrigued him, because this became a relationship of redemption for JFK. I do maintain in the book that there is credible evidence that they took a mild LSD or psilocybin trip several weeks before he made his legendary American University commencement address in June of 63. I think the combination of things really had an impact on him, where this was the moment when he was turning away from the Cold War toward world peace. And Mary was part of that process for him.
Kevin Barrett: And it's such a fascinating and kind of heroic story in a way, JFK having this character of— he was always in pain from his physical ailments, living with a tremendous degree of pain that he had to medicate for with a lot of drugs, including some bad ones like amphetamines. It's kind of amazing that this guy was even functional at all. But he kind of got through life, repressing that pain and turning on this amazing charisma that he had. And then he was kind of using women, seducing them, throwing away women who were almost like playthings for him. For such a long time, he was in that marriage with Jackie. His father had forced him into it. It was never much of a real marriage. And then this guy, this amazing character who's not entirely sympathetic by any means, meets Mary Meyer. And it seems that the sparks that flew between those two sort of turned him into a real person.
Peter Janney: Well, those sparks began, I think, the moment they met back in February of 1936. He was really taken with her. She could have cared less. She saw him at that point for what he was. She was interested already, at age 15 and 16, in someone more serious. And, you know, they knew each other in college. They didn't date as far as I know. But Mary really falls for Cord Meyer because Cord comes back from the war and he's been wounded. And he said, This is terrible. We're doing the absolute wrong thing. I should never have gone into this war. I gave up my most cherished beliefs in terms of non-violence and pacifism. And I've got to turn this around. And so Mary and Cord were the sort of post-World War Two glamour couple, and really made an impact to one degree or another. That was the kind of relationship that Mary wanted to have with a man, who JFK was not at that point. He wasn't evolved enough to have that kind of relationship with a woman. He had tremendous hostility and mistrust toward women, largely because he had such a terrible relationship with his mother, which I try to point out. But that changed, because I think Mary's influence was strong enough where JFK knew he had some really severe emotional problems. But as I said earlier, there was the possibility of redemption with Mary, and that was really worth fighting for.
Kevin Barrett: And there's something about this story that seems to mirror the larger trajectory of the U.S. in the post-World War Two era. The country faced a choice of how it was going to react to its World War Two experience. It could have turned towards peace and towards leading the world towards peace, by being a role model and trying to behave with a certain amount of ethical probity on the world stage. And that was the kind of trajectory that Cord Meyer the peace activist would have advocated, and the same trajectory that JFK was leading us toward during the last year of his life. But unfortunately, I think we made the wrong choice, which was to take the horrific slaughter and pain of World War Two, which left so many scars on so many people, and rather than healing those scars and trying to emerge healthy and ethical, our country became cynical and repressed the pain and then moved in this Machiavellian direction of using whatever it takes to make sure that whatever suffering there is in the world, we're the ones inflicting it, rather than the ones on the receiving end of it.
Peter Janney: Well, I largely agree with you. At the end of World War Two, we have the rise of the American Empire and the invention of the national security state with the advent of the Central Intelligence Agency. And the CIA basically changed the historical and cultural landscape of the United States post-World War Two. I still maintain that we don't know the half of it in terms of some of the things that they did. It's only beginning to come out in dribs and drabs in terms of what the CIA has been up to since its inception, particularly in the 1950s and 60s. And this is where the The Cold War historian and former intelligence person Fletcher Prouty, who was the character that Oliver Stone based Mr. X on in his film JFK, has been really eloquent about, with the two books that he wrote about the impact of what the CIA did during that time. And I credit Prouty with being one of the first people who was willing to stick his neck out. He resigned his commission after Kennedy was assassinated because he knew what had gone on, and he could not stomach the role that he had taken beforehand. And he turned his life into becoming a real historian and wrote two great books. One is called The Secret Team, and the other is JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. You know what George Kennan said at the end of his life about the CIA: that giving the CIA the kind of power that it had was the biggest mistake of his life. He told that to Congress, and he told that to a Yale historian, John Lucas. I just think that we still have really not dealt with the full impact of the influence of our own national security apparatus.
Kevin Barrett: Indeed. And Truman actually published an op-ed in The Washington Post after the JFK assassination, and it was printed in the morning edition, and then it was killed and taken out of the subsequent edition of the same day's newspaper, which amounted to Truman all but coming out and saying "The CIA just killed the president. I really wish I hadn't created this agency."
Peter Janney: Well, right. "I wish I had not allowed it to have these paramilitary dimension where it can go off and do anything that it damn well pleases and then claim plausible deniability," that kind of thing. But Truman could have done more to stand up to what had taken place. So could have Eisenhower. This is what Eisenhower says at the end of his administration to Dulles: "You've left me a legacy of ashes." That was a book title that someone won the Pulitzer Prize for about the history of the CIA. I think there's so much, Kevin, that we still don't know about what took place. I mean, Richard Helms destroyed all the MK Ultra files. And I think that's really where we would have seen what the CIA was really up to.
Kevin Barrett: And let's remind the listeners that MK Ultra was the secret CIA mind control program. It defined success as creating a mind controlled assassin who would kill someone and not have the slightest idea why he did it, or perhaps believe a false narrative about why he did it. And that, of course, may have given us real life so-called assassins like—of course Sirhan Sirhan is the obvious one, the guy who tests out at ninety nine point nine percent on the scale of how hypnotizable you are. But this this mind control work wasn't just the stuff that's been revealed about MK Ultra. As you say, there was so much more, including many, many dozens, minimum, cases of CIA people torturing people to death in mind control experiments. I was very shocked when I encountered that, because I guess I still had the idea that even if these guys are professional assassins and so on, that's just too much, torturing dozens or even hundreds of people to death in mind control experiments, that sounds like Dr. Mengele. That's not something that our tax dollars should be paying for, but apparently they did.
Peter Janney: The whole concept of The Manchurian Candidate: I think it's increasingly clear that Sirhan Sirhan was programmed to show up in the way that he did for the RFK assassination. There's legal work going on now by the attorney William Pepper that completely blows this case out of the water in proving that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill RFK, but that someone else did. His shots came from the front. The shots that killed RFK came from behind. There's just such a wealth of conspiracy that we really do not know about. And of course, "conspiracy theorists" have gotten a very bad rap in our culture only because the CIA infused into the media, during Jim Garrison's investigation of Clay Shaw in 1967, that the CIA sent out a memo asking all of its stations to really start to push this idea that anything that diverges from the Warren Report should be labeled as a conspiracy theory, and that people who talk about these things are conspiracy theorists. And this was all set up to malign and defame people. They were just alternative assassination theories, but the concept of conspiracy theory was generated by the CIA itself.
Kevin Barrett: That's right. Lance DeHaven-Smith's book Conspiracy Theory in America goes into this quite brilliantly. And it's it's pretty ironic because if you try to simply tell the truth about these things, you look quite paranoid. If you speculate a little more about what the big picture is, you sound even more paranoid. And then when you find out what really was going on, it turns out that it was worse than your most paranoid nightmares could ever have come up with.
Peter Janney: Exactly, exactly. Ironically, most of history, or a great deal of history, is made or changed by conspiracies that (actually) took place.
Kevin Barrett: It's the most commonly charged federal crime. And the term conspiracy theorist has become so mindless that it can even be used in the case of 9/11, which obviously was a conspiracy. The term "conspiracy theorist" was invented by the CIA to be applied against JFK researchers because this was a crime that had been attributed to a lone gunman, Oswald. So anybody who thought that there was more than one person involved, which is what a conspiracy is, was maligned with this term. But today you're called a conspiracy theorist if you have an alternative theory of 9/11. And yet everyone admits that obviously more than one person was involved with the events of 9/11. Therefore, everyone is a conspiracy theorist. The term makes no sense whatsoever, and yet it's still being applied mindlessly and robotically, almost like the bleating of sheep, in a case which it doesn't fit.
Peter Janney: Yes. I could not agree with you more. I really think that this has gone way farther than it should have. But fortunately, again, I think largely because of the internet, people are waking up. And I see it as a very hopeful sign that there is a gradual awakening on the part of the citizens of our country to what our government is doing and has been doing. And I'm particularly encouraged, as we come into the 50th anniversary in another couple of weeks on the 22nd of November, I think there really is a larger population of our country that is awakening to the fact that what our government tried to do was essentially lie to American citizens and cover this up completely.
Kevin Barrett: And this critical mass of people that's slowly gathering is understanding some of these hidden truths about our history, which are really shocking. In many cases, it seems to me to be contributing to a crisis that the national security state is facing and will be facing in the future as people are awakening to these things thanks to the internet among other things. It seems that this is happening at exactly the moment that the U.S. petrodollar empire is being threatened by a lot of other forces as well, including the rise of China, which will have a much larger economy than that of the U.S. in just a few years. The rise of these other countries, the BRIC countries, means the US is no longer going to be able to dominate the world economically the way it has. And soon the West will not be dominating the world militarily, either. And so it seems that this empire is seeing its power slipping away, both on the domestic front with the spread of the truth and on the international front with a change in global relative economic power. And I'm concerned about how they're going to react to this. Their past record would indicate that they're capable of the most immense crimes. Many folks are worried about Halliburton detention camps and things like that, or preemptive wars designed to rally the public and make them forget about what's really going on. And then, on the other hand, maybe they'll go gently into that good night and make up for their past crimes by allowing the Empire to sort of slowly make way for a multi-polar world. So how do you think that they'll react?
Peter Janney: Well, I think that's a quintessential question, because the credibility of our government right now is really headed into the toilet, in my opinion. What is really going to, in a sense, upset this in the most dramatic way possible will be, I believe, in the next five to 10 years, maybe even sooner, the revelation that we are being visited by extraterrestrials. I think the evidence is overwhelming. I've studied it for years. I've talked to people in the know about this. I mean, this is happening. And yet our government has done everything that it could to cover this up. And when this finally. breaks, and it will, it will, of course, be biblical. But the fact of the matter is what will come out is the amount of just complete sheer criminality that took place in terms of our government obfuscating the truth about this certainly back until the mid-1940s. And you know, if we look at history, I think this has been going on for possibly a couple of thousand of years. Of course, we won't know until we know. But I am utterly convinced that this is going to be the next big event on our planet.
Kevin Barrett: Very interesting. I think you may be right. I've looked at this too. I have a PhD minor in folklore, and I did work on Moroccan stories of amazing and supernatural events, miracle stories of various kinds. So I read up on the UFO lore. UFO stories in many parts of the world have parallels to traditional stories of kidnappings by so-called jinn (genies), things like that. And yeah, there's something going on. There's so much smoke around the UFO issue that there's obviously some kind of fire, but I've never been able to figure out exactly what in the world that fire is. I can't get a coherent narrative out of the information in that field. I can with JFK, with 9/11, et cetera. It's pretty simple. Well, not that simple, it's a little work. You can come up with a coherent narrative that probably roughly covers the material just like your book does with the JFK and Mary Meyer issue. But with a UFO issue, oh my goodness, you have so many different approaches. None of them are really very satisfying in terms of a comprehensive explanation or a narrative that can help us make sense of this issue. So if you have any suggestions about where I should be looking to get a better sense of what in the world is going on with this UFO issue, please let me know.
Peter Janney: One of the best books I've seen is by Richard Dolan, who was actually a Rhodes Scholar finalist, went to Oxford, studied history. He's a very knowledgeable guy. He wrote UFOs and the National Security State. He's just come out with a new book called A D, After Disclosure (when the government finally reveals the truth about alien contact). I respect Richard quite a bit because he brings a real scholarly approach to the subject matter, and he's done his research. He knows what he's talking about. So I think he's certainly one person (worth reading). There's another man, journalist Timothy Good, who I whose some of his work I've read and I liked a lot. His new book is called Earth: An Alien Enterprise. Philip Corso also wrote a good book about this subject matter. There is some good work out there. There's also a lot of junk. But you see that with the Kennedy assassination as well. You just have to look for (the good work) and I do believe it's there. And as I said, I think this is going to have a biblical-proportional effect on on the entire planet when it breaks, and it is going to break sooner rather than later.
Kevin Barrett: Richard Dolan, as I recall, finds credible the story that Eisenhower...the simple version of the story, which is a brilliant story, a perfect metaphor, whether or not it's true. But the story goes that Eisenhower was approached by representatives of these spiritual aliens who are supposedly tall, Nordic looking characters. And what did they offer him? If we enter into a relationship with these spiritual aliens, we can pursue spiritual development more effectively. And then along come these little grey aliens and they come up to Eisenhower and say, "If you cut a deal with us, we can get you all kinds of really great technology to help you dominate Earth." And guess what? Eisenhower cut a deal with a bad aliens, and the rest is history. Well, I don't know if this is true or not. It's certainly, as I said, a very good metaphor that explains a lot. But Dolan seems to take that seriously. Do you think that story might actually be true?
Peter Janney: I actually interviewed one of Eisenhower's attachés, a man by the name of Brigadier Steve Lovekin, and we talked about this at length. And he's convinced of it because he knew Eisenhower and what he was up to. I've also talked to a couple of other people (who said) that clearly Eisenhower was very into this subject matter. It was a phenomenon that was near and dear to him. As to the actual events that took place, I can't say. I wasn't there. But I do think that, uh, Eisenhower was approached. In Timothy Good's new book, he says there's an account where JFK was approached. It's not like I can agree with this wholeheartedly, because it presents all kinds of research problems in terms of verifying stories like this. But the point is, I really don't think it's extraordinary to think that way. And I am just utterly convinced through a number of different things that I have seen and read, and people I've talked to, that the phenomenon is, by and large, very, very real. I mean, we are being visited.There's great concern about this planet, about what's going on on this planet in terms of the ecological damage that we are doing to it, the nuclear fallout from this planet, both from the nuclear industry and the atmospheric testing back in the late 40s and 50s. So, I just think that it's something that very few people, and of course no one in the mainstream media, wants to talk about. Yet. But they will. That's my prediction. They will. And it will be sooner rather than later.
Kevin Barrett: OK. Despite my having a skeptical bent in general, I think you're probably right about that. And sorry, if I have any listeners that I've offended with that opinion, just go on and read some of these books that we've just recommended. Well, thank you so much, Peter Janney. It's been a fascinating conversation. Your book Mary's Mosaic, The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Meyer and Their Vision for World Peace is a minor masterpiece, maybe even more than minor. Keep up the terrific work, and I hope to have you back sometime because there's always more than enough to talk about.
Peter Janney: Thank you, Kevin. It was great to be with you.
