Conversations With the Crow Read online

  Conversations with the Crow:

  The Final Conversations of Robert Trumbull Crowley - Former Director of Clandestine Operations for the CIA

  Crowley as a Member the Skeet Club at West Point (1944)

  One of only five known photographs

  of Robert T. Crowley

  by Gregory Douglas

  with a forward by Dr. Peter Janney

  Conversations with the Crow

  The Final Conversations of Robert Trumbull Crowley

  Former Director of Clandestine Operations for the CIA

  by: Gregory Douglas

  Kindle Edition

  Published on Amazon by Basilisk Press

  Copyright 2001 by Gregory Douglas

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-9911752-0-8

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. This ebook, remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Amazon.com, where they can also discover other works by this author and others from Basilisk Press. Thank you for your support.

  About the Author

  Gregory Douglas started out as a newspaperman in a small town in Illinois, wrote four books on Heinrich Müller, once chief of the German Gestapo and later an asset for both the U.S. Army and the CIA.

  His revelations of a number of unpleasant facts prompted Robert Crowley, a specialist in counter-intelligence for the CIA, to contact and with an eye to finding just how much Douglas actually knew.

  This turned into several years of weekly phone conversations in which Crowley and Douglas engaged in the most cynical observations imaginable.

  When the authorities in Washington found out about this, they tried for some time to convince Crowley that Douglas was not a nice person and to stop talking with him.

  Crowley was so impressed with their arguments that he sent Douglas two large foot lockers of his personal files and after he died in 2000, the CIA spent a great deal of money trying to lay their hands of their errant members' unfortunate activities.

  They were not successful.

  One of Douglas' most successful books was "Regicide: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy from Inside the CIA."

  Table of Contents

  Forward:

  Dramatis personae:

  Conversation No. 1

  Conversation No. 2

  Conversation No. 3

  Conversation No. 4

  Conversation No. 5

  Conversation No. 6

  Conversation No. 7

  Conversation No. 8

  Conversation No. 9

  *Conversation No. 10

  Conversation No. 11a

  Conversation No. 11 b

  Conversation No. 12

  Conversation No. 13

  Conversation No. 14

  Conversation No. 15

  Conversation No. 16

  Conversation No. 17

  Conversation No. 18

  Conversation No. 19

  Conversation No 20

  Conversation No. 21

  Conversation No. 22

  Conversation No. 23

  Conversation No. 24

  Conversation No. 25

  Conversation No. 26

  Conversation No. 27

  Conversaton No. 28

  Conversation No. 29

  Conversation No. 30

  Conversation No. 31

  Conversation No. 32

  Conversation No. 33

  Conversation No. 34

  Conversation No. 35

  Conversation No. 36

  Comment: Flying Saucers of the Third Reich

  Conversation No. 37

  Conversation No. 38

  Conversation No. 39

  Conversation No. 40

  Conversation No. 41

  Conversation No. 42

  Conversation No. 43

  Conversation No. 44

  Conversation No. 45

  Conversation No. 46

  Conversation No. 47

  Conversation No. 48

  Conversation No. 49

  Conversation No. 50

  Conversation No. 51

  Conversation No. 52

  Conversation No. 53

  Conversation No. 54

  Conversation No. 55

  Conversation No. 56

  Conversation No. 57

  Conversation No. 58

  Conversation No. 59

  Conversation No. 60

  Conversation No. 61

  Conversation No. 62

  Conversation No. 63

  Conversation No. 64

  Conversation No. 65

  Conversation No. 66

  Conversation No. 67

  Conversation No. 68

  Conversation No. 69

  Conversation No. 70

  Conversation No. 71

  Conversation No. 72

  Conversation No. 73

  Conversation No. 74

  Conversation No. 75

  Conversation No. 76

  Conversation No. 77

  Conversation No. 78

  Conversation No. 79

  Conversation No. 80

  Conversation No. 81

  Conversation No. 82

  Conversation No. 83

  Conversation No. 84

  Conversation No. 85

  Conversation No. 86

  Conversation No. 87

  Conversation No. 88

  Conversation No. 89

  Conversation No. 90

  Conversation No. 91

  Conversation No. 92

  Conversation No. 93

  Conversation No. 94

  Conversation No. 95

  Conversation No. 96

  Conversation No. 97

  Conversation No. 98

  Conversation No. 99

  Conversation No. 100

  Conversation No. 101

  Conversation No. 102

  Conversation No. 103

  Conversation No. 104

  Conversation No. 105

  Conversation No. 106

  Conversation No. 107

  Conversation No. 108

  Conversation No. 109

  Conversation No. 110

  Conversation No. 111

  Conversation No. 112

  Conversation No. 113

  Conversation No. 114

  Conversation No. 115

  Conversation No. 116

  Conversation No. 117

  Conversation No. 118

  Conversation No. 119

  Conversation No. 120

  Crowley and Me

  Appendix 1

  Forward:

  On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA's Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer's Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley's widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley's CIA files.

  Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

  Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

  After Corson's death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson's bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled 'Zip
per.' This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

  The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento's house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

  When published material concerning the CIA's actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA's horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA's activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious 'Regional Interrogation Centers' in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy.

  A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid "historians" and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

  The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley's survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files our of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement , secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

  Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also known as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

  One of Crowley’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA, who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany. Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay.

  Crowley’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up

  After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author.

  Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all of the material in later publications.

  In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery, he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas in Wisconsin with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley’s death. These documents, totaled an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War.

  After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Müller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

  All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy. Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley.

  In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later.

  While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

  These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because
Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!

  Dr. Peter Janney

  Boston, Mass

  Dr. Janney, a Boston-based psychologist, is the son of Wistar Janney, a prominent member of the CIA and co-worker with many of the legendary early CIA officials, including Robert Crowley. Dr. Janney is acquainted with Emily Crowley, widow of Robert Crowley and has interviewed both Mrs. Crowley and members of Robert Crowley’s staff in the Clandestine Action division. Editor

  Dramatis personae:

  James Jesus Angleton: Once head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence division, later fired because of his obsessive and illegal behavior, tapping the phones of many important government officials in search of elusive Soviet spies. A good friend of Robert Crowley and a co-conspirator with him in the assassination of President Kennedy

  James P. Atwood: (April 16, 1930-April 20, 1997) A CIA employee, located in Berlin, Atwood had a most interesting career. He worked for any other intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, that would pay him, was involved in selling surplus Russian atomic artillery shells to the Pakistan government and was also most successful in the manufacturing of counterfeit German dress daggers. Too talkative, Atwood eventually had a sudden “seizure” while lunching with CIA associates.

  William Corson: A Marine Corps Colonel and President Carter’s representative to the CIA. A friend of Crowley and Kimmel, Corson was an intelligent man whose main failing was a frantic desire to be seen as an important person. This led to his making fictional or highly exaggerated claims.

  John Costello: A British historian who was popular with revisionist circles. Died of AIDS on a trans-Atlantic flight

  James Critchfield: Former U.S. Army Colonel who worked for the CIA and organized the Gehlen Organization at Pullach, Germany. This organization was filled to the Plimsoll line with former Gestapo and SD personnel, many of whom were wanted for various purported crimes. He hired Heinrich Müller in 1948 and went on to represent the CIA in the Persian Gulf.