Cord Meyer - CIA Career

CIA Career

Circa 1949, Meyer started working for the Central Intelligence Agency, joining the organization in 1951 at the invitation of Allen Dulles. At first he worked at the Office of Policy Coordination under former OSS man, Frank Wisner. In 1953 Meyer came under attack by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which claimed he was a security risk for having once stood at the same podium of a "notorious leftist", and refused to give him a security clearance. An internal CIA inquiry summarily dismissed the claims. According to Deborah Davis in her 1979 book Katharine the Great, Meyer became the "principal operative" of Operation Mockingbird, a plan to secretly influence domestic and foreign media. Meyer befriended James Angleton, who in 1954 became the CIA's counter-intelligence chief. From 1954 until 1962, Meyer was head of the agency's International Organizations Division. On December 18, 1956 Meyer's nine-year-old son Michael was hit by a car and killed. Meyer and his wife Mary divorced in 1958. Meyer headed the Covert Action Staff of the Directorate of Plans from 1962. On October 12, 1964, his former wife Mary was shot dead by an unknown assailant alongside the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Her sister and brother-in-law Benjamin C. Bradlee, the later Washington Post executive, caught Angleton breaking into Pinchot's residence. Angleton apparently was looking for Mary Meyer's diary, which contained details of a love affair with John F. Kennedy, then U.S. President.

From 1967 to 1973 Meyer was Assistant Deputy Director of Plans under Thomas Karamessines, and from 1973 to 1976 was CIA station chief in London. He retired from the CIA in 1977. Following retirement, Meyer became a syndicated columnist and wrote several books, including an autobiography. He was long incorrectly considered by some to be Deep Throat.

Writer C. David Heymann in The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club (2003) told of Meyer's response when, near the end of his life, he was asked to comment on his wife's still unsolved murder case:

Meyer held court at the beginning of February 2001 - six weeks before his death - in the barren dining room of a Washington nursing home. Propped up in a chair, his glass eye bulging, he struggled to hold his head aloft. Although he was no longer able to read, the nurses supplied him with a daily copy of The Washington Post, which he carried with him wherever he went. "My father died of a heart attack the same year Mary was killed," he whispered. "It was a bad time." And what could he say about Mary Meyer? Who had committed such a heinous crime? "The same sons of bitches," he hissed, "that killed John F. Kennedy."

He died of lymphoma on March 13, 2001.