Frederick Wistar Morris Janney

Frederick Wistar Morris Janney (March 15, 1919 – January 18, 1979) was a career Central Intelligence Agency officer who was recruited by Allen Dulles in 1949. He held a number of positions during his thirty-year career and was awarded the Agency’s highest honor, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal four days after his death.

Early and personal life
Janney was born on March 15, 1919 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania on Philadelphia’s main line.

Wistar Janney attended the Fessenden School in West Newton, Massachusetts and then Phillips Exeter Academy, graduating from Exeter in 1937. He then attended Princeton University and pursued a major in Politics, graduating in June 1941. The youngest of six children, "Wistar," as he was affectionately called by his family, was the son of Walter Coggeshall Janney and Pauline Flower Morris. In addition to maintaining a large estate in Bryn Mawr, his father was a prominent Philadelphia investment banker, who built a second summer estate on Cape Cod near Woods Hole, Massachusetts for his family.

World War II
Soon after graduation from Princeton, knowing that he would be quickly drafted, Wistar reportedly watched the film Flight Command starring Robert Taylor, and then impulsively enlisted in the Naval Air Corps, much to the chagrin of his father. He trained at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station in Texas in the newly designed Grumman Avenger Torpedo Bomber and became a designated Naval Aviator in April 1942. He was immediately assigned to Torpedo Squadron 13 (VT-13) on the USS Franklin aircraft carrier.

With two tours of duty in the Pacific Theater during World War II, Lt. Janney quickly became a seasoned combat pilot who distinguished himself with two Distinguished Flying Crosses and three Navy Air Medals. On October 25, 1944, as the Flight-Executive Officer for Torpedo Squadron 13, he led the squadron into the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history. He personally scored a direct torpedo hit on the Japanese aircraft carrier Zuihō, which eventually sank. For his leadership at Leyte Gulf, he was awarded the Navy Cross.

CIA career
He married Mary Draper of Brooklyn, New York in January 1944 before his second Pacific tour, and returned from combat in the Pacific in 1945. The two entered Yale University graduate school on the G.I. Bill, she in sociology, and he in in Russian Area Studies. They both graduated in 1948.

World War II had had a profound impact on a number of elite, well-educated combat veterans. Like Cord Meyer, Jr., Tracy Barnes, Desmond FitzGerald, Frank Wisner and others, Janney was a part of an idealistic young group who were determined to prevent another nuclear conflict. Along with Meyer, Barnes, FitzGerald and others, he was soon recruited by Allen Dulles into the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He and his wife moved their family from New Haven to Washington, D.C., where others they had known growing up, and in college, were gathering to raise their families and start careers as well.

Early in his CIA career, Janney was assigned to the Office of Current Intelligence. Victor Marchetti reports that Janney was appointed Chief of the Sino-Soviet Bloc Area in 1965. Janney later served in the Agency’s new Science & Technology directorate (DS&T), which was formed in late 1963. He initially worked for Col. Lawrence K. “Red” White, before becoming chief deputy to directorate head Carl Duckett, according to Dino Brugioni, who worked at the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) which was part of DS&T.

Janney was appointed the Agency’s Director of Personnel in 1975. The CIA was involved in several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits involving CIA operations around this time. "In many fields," said Janney in his role as CIA personnel director, "it is absolutely essential that the agency have available to it the single greatest source of expertise: the American academic community." The agency has also argued that revelations of academic involvement with the Agency would expose certain academics to "shame and ridicule" of their peers, "clearly a tacit admission that at least some of these people have something to be ashamed of," wrote author Ami Chen Mills.

Death of Mary Pinchot Meyer
At approximately 12:24 p.m. on October 12, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of CIA officer Cord Meyer and paramour of President John F. Kennedy for the last three years of his life, was violently murdered as she took her customary walk along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown after her usual morning of painting at her Georgetown studio. Her body had two bullet wounds, one in the left temple and one in the back. Her identity remained unknown to police until her brother-in-law Ben Bradlee identified her corpse at the D.C. Morgue at approximately 6:00pm that evening. However, at approximately 2:00 p.m. on the day of the murder, Ben Bradlee had received a call from his friend Wistar Janney. He asked Bradlee whether he had been listening to the radio; Bradlee said no. "Someone had been murdered on the towpath," he [Janney] said, "and from the radio description it sounded like Mary."

Author Peter Janney (son of Wistar Janney) maintains in his book Mary’s Mosaic that the CIA orchestrated Pinchot Meyer’s murder and controlled the operation from start to finish. Wistar Janney's call to Bradlee occurred after suspect Ray Crump had been arrested at approximately 1:15 p.m. and the Deputy Coroner had pronounced the unknown victim dead at 2:05 p.m. According to author Janney, "the only thing left to do for the 'operation' was to establish the victim's identity."

Wistar Janney also called Pinchot Meyer's ex-husband Cord Meyer, a close friend and CIA colleague, later that afternoon in New York.

CIA’s infiltration of Jim Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw
In 1993, after the JFK Records Act became law (1992), the CIA Historical Review Program released a number of documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In this collection were the minutes of two high-level internal CIA meetings known as the "Garrison Group Meetings" the first of which took place on September 20, 1967. Both meetings were chaired by Wistar Janney, who wrote memoranda summarizing the proceedings. During the first meeting, Raymond Rocca, who was James Jesus Angleton's chief assistant in the counterintelligence directorate, was recorded as stating: "Rocca felt that Garrison would indeed obtain a conviction of [Clay] Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy." Author Peter Janney has argued that the Rocca statement "was nothing less than prima facie evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of a sitting U.S. President, which amounted to an open, documented admission by a high-level CIA officer—during an internal CIA meeting—that Clay Shaw (as well as the CIA itself) was 'indeed' part of the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy." The Agency launched targeted assassinations as well as smear campaigns to prevent a conviction in the trial of Clay Shaw in 1969. Their effort ultimately proved successful; Clay Shaw was acquitted of all charges, and he denied throughout the proceedings that he ever had any association whatsoever with the CIA.

In 1979, Richard Helms, former director of the CIA, testified under oath that Clay Shaw had been a part-time contact of the Domestic Contact Service of the CIA. In 1992, Chief Historian of the CIA J. Kenneth McDonald, in a Memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence, stated that Clay Shaw "was a highly paid CIA contract source until 1956."