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GD: Do you have any problems if I publish it?
RTC: That’s not my call, Gregory. They would have a fit over there but I’m not in service anymore and I can plead ignorance of the whole thing. Is there more like that in these diaries?
GD: That’s mild, very mild, Robert. Getting paid to kill the Iranian prime minister.
RTC: That I know about. Who was the prime mover here?
GD: Anglo-Iranian and Angleton.
RTC: Could you make a copy of that one and send it to me? We don’t need to discuss it on the phone. My God, the burned darkies were bad enough.
GD: Where do your people recruit?
RTC: St. Elizabeth’s does occur to me as a natural source.
GD: A church?
RTC: No, a local asylum.
GD: Robert, thanks for the patience and watch for the box. If it gets lost, I can have another made. Let me leave you now and I will get back to work on the Mueller material. OK?
RTC: I have a nice new name for you, Gregory. Try Mr. Sunshine.
GD: That’s such a happy name, Robert. And it does fit me so well.
RTC: I’ll call you the moment the package arrives. I’ll thank you for the poems.
GD: For sure. Goodbye.
RTC: Goodbye, Gregory.
(Concluded at 11:59 AM CST)
Conversation No. 11a
Date: Monday, April 29, 1996
Commenced: 9:17 AM CST
Concluded: 10:11 AM CST
GD: Good morning, Robert. Interesting news on the wire.
RTC: Good morning. What news is that, Gregory?
GD: I see that Colby [13] appears to have had a boating accident.
RTC: So I understand.
GD: I believe you mentioned this earlier.
RTC: I very possibly may have, Gregory. We live in dangerous times indeed.
GD: Apparently he went out for a midnight excursion on the Potomac and did not come back.
RTC: A terrible loss. They haven’t found him yet have they?
GD: Not yet. Depends on the temperature of the water. When gasses build up in the body, it will rise like Jesus to the surface. We used to call them floaters when I was doing pathology and believe me, they stank badly. That is unless the bottom feeders got to him first. I can foresee a closed casket and lots of air freshener, Robert.
RTC: Graphic side to a great national tragedy. When we shot Paisley in the back of the head and chucked him off his sail boat, we put weights on him so he wouldn’t come up. When divers did find him, he was rotten to the core. Had to cut off his hands to try to get fingerprints.
GD: What was his transgression?
RTC: We let it get out he was suspected of dealing with the Soviets but actually, it had to do with the Kennedy business. Now that the box has arrived here, we will discuss this historical event much further. By the way, Gregory, when I turn it on, all the birds vanish from the area like magic. I can only imagine what must be going on inside. At least it works with the birds and one other thing I noticed. Some local was walking his dog on their side of the street and the dog began to yelp and howl when he came in range. Do you think the Swiss are more sensitive than dogs? I was halfway expecting to hear screaming from over there. Well, I followed your advice and only left it on for about twenty minutes for the first time and a little longer for the second.
GD: I’m glad you’re happy, Robert.
RTC: Well, another DCI gone.
GD: And lamented?
RTC: Certainly not by me, Gregory. Nor, I should think, by many others over there. A nasty man who had a mouth problem.
GD: I hope for the sake of all of us they find him but without a bullet in the back of his head. If the body never comes up, there will be endless books and articles about his vanishing. Some drooling pinhead will swear they saw him playing golf in Madrid. When Kitchener went down with the Hampshire, years later there were claims he was alive and well in Patagonia, running a penguin farm.
RTC: Yes, there’s a lot of that. The Kennedy business has the myth makers working overtime. Have you read any of the fantasy books? Men with umbrellas? People hidden in the sewers? Hoover shooting at him from some bank building? The Hunt brothers potting away from a black helicopter? Well, we’re responsible for a lot of that. Feed silly rumors to the babblers in the nut fringe and they stir up so much mud, you can’t see the truth.
GD: Maybe it’s on the bottom with Colby.
RTC: Remind me to avoid crab cakes for a few months.
GD: Mueller was telling me about Dulles.
RTC: Which one? Allen or John?
GD: Both, actually.
RTC: What did he say about Allen?
GD: Mueller knew him before he became DCI, when?
RTC: In ’53.
GD: Yes.
RTC: Kennedy forced him out in ’61. Kennedy did not trust us and threatened to break up the CIA. Not a wise move.
GD: No, it wasn’t. And Kennedy is dead and the agency lives on.
RTC: Yes, it does. What did Mueller tell you about Allen?
GD: Oh, that he met Dulles in Switzerland during the war. Dulles had no idea who Mueller was. Heini told me Dulles was a sucker for the plant and he loaded him up with all kinds of fake information about what was going on in Germany and Dulles ate the whole horse, saddle and all.
RTC: Allen was never too bright. His brother was a dyed-in-the wool Nazi, just like another one of our DCI’s father. Prescott Bush. But Allen was not a particularly deep or thoughtful man all in all. His son got shot in the head in Korea and came back an idiot so Allan was very bad to him.
GD: Beat him up?
RTC: Worse. He ignored him. Allen was not a kind or thoughtful man. But his wife really did a number on him at the end. Allen was dying in ’69 and they had a Christmas party at his place. Wife was downstairs with the guests, having a wonderful time. Not a word about Allen except that he was not feeling well. Finally, one of the boys decided to go up and wish Allen a Merry Christmas. Guess what he found?
GD: Tell me.
RTC: Allen lying in a urine and shit soaked bed, completely out of it and mumbling to himself. She had left him up there for quite a while. Ugly. She really must have hated him. The boys picked him up, wrapped him in a clean blanket and took him to the hospital where he died about a month later. She didn’t care at all and was very upset that they used one of her good blankets.
GD: You mentioned Prescott Bush. I have an original medal presentation paper giving a high Nazi decoration to him. Signed by Hitler in 1938. I’m surprised this never got out. I also have a picture of IBM’s Watson with a higher decoration, sitting in opera box with Hitler. The IBM people have been trying to buy that from me for ten years.
RTC: You asking too much for it?
GD: No. I thought it might look good in a book. Was George a good DCI?
RTC: George was a sly, effeminate creature as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. When he was VP, they attended a state dinner in the White House and he brought his older boy with him. That one was a chronic boozer and during an intermission, he went out and pissed in one of the downstairs halls. I understand Nancy Reagan 86’ed him out of the White House. His brother is a con-man, unconvicted of ripping banks off because Daddy put on the pressure. And his wife is like something out of a Norse legend. A real dominatrix-type. You never know what goes on behind the curtains, Gregory, but I do. It’s enough to shake anyone’s belief in the honesty of our leaders, who hasn’t worked inside the Beltway long enough. Bush was only DCI for a year and I never had any use for him. Smiled a lot and as vicious and back-stabbing as anyone I ever knew. But then so many of them are.
GD: Did you know a William King Harvey?
RTC: Oh, indeed I did. What do you know about Bill?
GD: Mueller knew him and was boffing his wife. Mueller said he was an ex-FBI man whom Hoover fired for being a chronic drunk.
RTC: That’s true. Hoover was a prim and proper one.
GD: And Harvey used to carry a gun around an
d point it at people.
RTC: Harvey was fat and apparently hung like a stud cricket so the gun made up for what nature had forgotten.
GD: What is it that they said about the flat-chested woman? What nature has forgotten she can remedy with cotton?
RTC: I’ve heard that somewhere before.
GD: Nothing is original. Well, if and when Colby floats, will you go to his funeral?
RTC: That would be a little hypocritical, wouldn’t it Gregory?
GD: Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, Robert.
RTC: You’re a very wise person, Gregory. No wonder Bill and Tom are so upset with you.
GD: And don’t forget Wolfe.
RTC: I don’t like to go to the archives for fear he’ll slink up to me with more hate stories about you.
GD: He’s supposed to be such an expert on the Third Reich but he fakes it mostly. His great triumph was to discover an old record with an alleged speech of Himmler’s in which Reichsheini is talking about killing off all the Jews. Bob made such a fuss over his discovery. I got him to send me a tape of it because it’s in the archives and I got ahold a friend of mine who collects German newsreels. He had a 1939 ufa newsreel with a part of a speech by Himmler so he made a tape of that and I got another friend of mine to compare the speech patterns. Not the same. Either Bob’s precious record that he used to play for Jewish groups or the original newsreel was a stone fake.
RTC: I don’t think it takes a Harvard graduate to see which was which. Do you think he made it? And planted it?
GD: Not personally. His wife is German but Bob is not fluent enough to pull that one off. Probably got it from some co-religionist, planted it, discovered it and exploited it. Or, of course, they faked the Himmler speech on the newsreel. So much of these things are invented and of course the public believes it.
RTC: Tell me, Gregory, what does Wolfe think about our hiring the head of the Gestapo?
GD: Oh and many others. What? Well, he’s a torn person. He’d love to expose this but he can’t because he sucks up to officialdom and can’t have it both ways. I love to tell him about Krichbaum and others and when I do, I suppose he would like to kill me. Kill the messenger, not the message is the hallmark of the very small of mind.
RTC: True enough. And Bill and Tom are highly annoyed that we talk. I think they’re afraid of what I might say to you. Wouldn’t you agree?
GD: Yes. Another convocation of the small of mind.
RTC: But large of ego. When he was younger, we used to call Tom the Arrow Shirt Boy. Ring a bell?
GD: The clean-cut drawings?
RTC: Yes. Really handsome men and beautiful women tend to be very shallow in their social relationships. That’s because they don’t have to make any effort to attract attention. Uglier people have to rely on personality.
GD: Yes, that’s true. My first wife was really beautiful but stupid as a post and very greedy. It’s amazing how we can delude ourselves, isn’t it? She wanted me to give a lot of money to her brother to buy a gas station. He fell off his motorcycle and did damage to his head. I don’t think he could run a bicycle pump, let alone a gas station. I refused and she retaliated by moving her bloated mother in with us. Mom brought four nasty cats with her. I like animals but these loved to shit on the carpets and one loved to take dumps on the kitchen counters. Talking about this did no good so one day while Mom and her hatchling were out trying to spend my money, I took the dear pussies, stuffed them into a potato sack and tossed them into the apartment house pool. When the bubbles stopped, I dove in, fished them out and laid them in a nice, wet, row at the edge of the garden. Threw the bag away. Mom and the Other came home and she started looking for the dear felines. When I told her I had put them outside to do their nasty business, Mom waddled outside, shrieking for her lovelies. Then she really started to wail when she saw the line-up by the pool. When I was at work the next day, they both moved out and took all the furniture with them. This was not a good idea because I had rented the place furnished. I had to pay for the furniture, of course.
RTC: Did she leave the cats behind?
GD: No, they were gone. I think they had a state funeral for them. Burial at Arlington.
RTC: I take it you got a divorce?
GD: Actually, no, I did not. A friend of mine saw the Other passing out drinks in Vegas but when I called personnel at her casino, they said she’d left the place about a month before. She did surface about twenty five years later. Someone sent me a package of old books from LA and wrapped them in the local paper. By God, there was the Other playing golf out at Palm Springs. The long and short of it was, Robert, that she had married a wealthy real estate developer and had two kids by him.
RTC: No divorce?
GD: No, she was too stupid to think of that. I took this to a lawyer I knew but he was not interested until he found out that her husband, who had serious IRS problems, had put all his assets in Other’s name. Then he got very interested because, as he pointed out to me, in California, property acquired by either party in a marriage is considered community property. He was suddenly very eager to take the case on a contingency fee basis because half of what she had was mine as we were still legally married. Here we’re talking about bigamy as well. Much uproar, threats by massive legal firms in LA and in the end, they settled before we made a public filing. I lived on the rewards of my patience and misjudgment for years. And then we were divorced, very privately. Love is a wonderful thing, Robert. Do you know the difference between Herpes and love?
RTC: I can’t say that I do.
GD: Herpes is forever, Robert.
RTC: Now that’s not kind, Gregory.
GD: A very shrewd observation. If I had been a kind person, I would not have sent you those wonderful poems.
RTC: That was not meant unkindly. Let’s say a joke.
GD: Well, we can talk about Kennedy one of these days, can’t we?
RTC: As I said. I can get in touch with you later this week if you want.
GD: Let me call you. I’m sure you’ll be watching and waiting for Colby to emerge from the depths.
(Concluded at 10:11 AM CST)
Conversation No. 11 b
Date: Monday, April 29, 1996
Commenced: 2:09 PM CST
Concluded: 2:28 PM CST
GD: Back again, Robert. Are you OK for time?
RTC: I have enough time, Gregory. What is it?
GD: I had a chat with Kimmel today and I made a mistake. I had read something once about forged evidence and innocently mentioned faked fingerprint evidence used in a Federal case. He got very testy about this and tried to lecture me about minding my own business.
RTC: That would be a very sore spot with Kimmel. He has to defend his turf. Faked evidence? The Bureau has been known to stoop to that on a number of occasions. If they know, or believe you did something but can’t quite get you, why lo and behold they find your fingerprints all over something. Possibly a gun used in icing Martin Luther King or a blood stained print at the scene of a mob killing. Faking evidence and suborning perjury is nothing new for the Bureau. No one likes to talk about it because of the uproar it would cause. All kinds of lawsuits by innocent and framed convicts would follow. Kimmel is very protective of the Bureau but I think he spends more time trying to rehabilitate the Admiral. Still, I don’t know if he dirties his hands with such goings on but he surely knows about them. I certainly do
GD: Tell me something, Robert. Do you think Kimmel hooked up with you to spy on you?
RTC: Probably but I never tell him, or Bill, anything.
GD: Kimmel was mad I am talking to you. He said you were an old man and to leave you alone.
RTC: Tom can fuck himself. I’ll talk to anyone I wish, whenever I wish. All Tom thinks about is getting his grandfather the Admiral pardoned.
GD: I know. I tried to help the family out on that because of some of the documents Mueller had. I told him the Roosevelt/Churchill conversation papers came from Mueller, not you.
GD: Why would he get so upset about the question of fingerprints? I don’t see how you can fake these seriously.
RTC: Fingerprints? A piece of cake for the FBI. They know just how to put someone’s prints just where they want them. I could tell you about this if you kept quiet about it. If it ever got out how they fake evidence, as I just said, the appellate courts would be jammed up for years.
GD: I won’t say a word.
RTC: For your own sake, don’t. All right, here goes. If the FBI has a copy of your fingerprints, they can make molds of them and put them onto a rubber glove. It goes this way: They make a photographic negative of the prints , make a reverse negative and…do you know what a zinc is?
GD: Yes, I do. It is a metal copy of a negative. I learned this when I was getting some of my earlier books printed. They use this for rubber stamps.
RTC: Oh yes, just so. And then they get a pair of thin rubber surgeon’s gloves and paint liquid latex onto the zinc. When you peel the very thin, dried latex off of the zinc, you glue the prints down on each finger by using spirit gum. You can buy both the liquid latex and the spirit gum in any theatrical supply house right over the counter.
GD: Jesus, how simple, Robert. And you can go into a murder scene in private, say as an FBI technician, put on the gloves and touch things.
Conversations With the Crow