Mary's Mosaic by Peter Janney Page A

getting rid of people when it became necessary. For the CIA, murder became ‘standard operating procedure,’ as demonstrated by CIA Director William Colby in his testimony before the Church Committee in 1975. 1 In April 1953, James Speyer Kronthal, a brilliant, young Allen Dulles protégéand deputy, who was in line for a high-level job at the Agency, was found dead in his Georgetown home in what police said was a suicide. The night before, Kronthal had been confronted by his boss Dulles for his sexual orientation. His “crime” was that he was gay. Years later, it was revealed that Soviet intelligence had identified Kronthal as a homosexual through its review of captured Nazi files from World War II. Then, while working for the CIA in Switzerland, Kronthal had been secretly filmed with young boys by the Soviets before blackmailing him into becoming a spy.
    “Allen [Dulles] probably had a special potion prepared that he gave Kronthal should the pressure become too much,” the CIA’s Robert Crowley told author Joseph Trento. “Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and the medical people produced all kinds of poisons that a normal postmortem could not detect. Kronthal, from a powerful family in New York, could not bear having his secret homosexuality become a new case for Senator Joseph McCarthy.” 2 Nor could Allen Dulles allow anyone, or anything, to threaten his intelligence empire.
    Leo Damore’s “suicide” had become all the more disturbing, not only to me, but to his dear friend Jimmy Smith as well. Smith became convinced that Leo had been driven to take his own life. “Leo didn’t know anything about guns,” said Smith. “Where in hell did he get a gun?” For years, Smith had warned his friend to “take precautions.” He was sure Leo was becoming involved in dangerous matters. “For Christ’s sake, Leo, be careful,” said Jimmy at the end of almost every phone call. And so, in the wake of Leo’s death, trailing my own journey’s conclusion, Bill Corson’s echo kept dogging me at every turn: “Anybody can commit a murder, but it takes an expert to commit a suicide.”
    T here comes a time when every journey approaches a conclusion. It took me by surprise, when I met a kindred soul whose father, too, had been a CIA officer. There’s a kind of unwritten, sometimes unacknowledged, bond among those of us whose fathers were involved with the fledgling CIA during the Cold War era. Author Nina Burleigh’s interview with Jane Barnes, daughter of the elite CIA covert operative Tracy Barnes—who Robert Morrow believed was part of Jim Angleton’s inner circle that decided Mary’s fate—underscored not only the experience of living within the “shadowy” world of never really knowing what our fathers were doing, but the fantasy life we as children invented to compensate for this emptiness.
    “We thought of Daddy as James Bond,” Jane Barnes recalled to Burleigh. Apparently a Barnes family neighbor, acquainted with all the gadgetry, murder,and intrigue described in Ian Fleming’s and John le Carré’s books, had once said to Tracy, “These books must be nonsense.”
    “On the contrary,” Tracy Barnes had replied. “They’re understated.” 3 Like Jane’s father, my own had also revered Ian Fleming’s mythic character. He took great delight in family outings to the latest James Bond films that so glamorously dramatized and glorified the swashbuckling world of “secret agents.” But we as children, the Cold War’s “CIA brats,” were not allowed to know the real life our fathers had chosen. “Most people,” said the character of Noah Cross (played by John Huston) in the film Chinatown , “never have to face the fact that at the right time, at the right place, they’re capable of anything.” Such was the double life our fathers led; and eventually, one way or another, it exacted a karmic retribution on us children.
    Quentin Meyer, Mary and Cord Meyer’s oldest son, would no longer talk to me after he