Soledad O'Brien
speaker
904 appearances
45 recordings
7 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 28 Feb
Soledad O'Brien’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Damore said Angleton had given the diary to someone Damore knew, and through that person, Damore read what was inside of it. He claims that Mary confronted her ex-husband, Cord, after the Warren Commission report came out. She apparently told Cord that more than one gunman was involved, and the CIA, too.
From there, Cord supposedly told James Angleton about Mary's growing agitation over the commission's findings. Janney seized on this reporting from DeMoore, then argued that Mary was ready to raise a stink publicly about the CIA's involvement in JFK's death. So what could she have known?
After JFK's assassination, Mary allegedly sought answers from two of the president's closest advisors, Dave Powers and Kenny O'Donnell. By then, O'Donnell had told conspiracy theorist Leo Damore in an interview that things in Dallas went down differently than the commission reported.
And those two presidential advisors told Mary herself that they'd seen two bullets come from in front of JFK's motorcade. Meaning, at the very least, more than one gunman had been involved in the shooting. Right around this time, Mary told her friends she felt she was being followed.
She'd found a garden door and a basement door to her Georgetown home open after she'd been out, and told another friend she was scared of finding someone inside. Meanwhile, Angleton bragged that he tapped Mary's phones and her bedroom. The wife of another CIA official confirmed this with biographer Nina Burley. And if you believed Moore and Janney, that was the beginning of the end for Mary.
Angleton was a godfather to Mary's children. But more importantly, in this case, he was chief of the CIA's most secretive department. In the far-fetched world of conspiracy theories, the CIA had a motive for wanting to kill Mary. But whether you find that to be plausible or not, whether you believe in this conspiracy or not, two facts from the time of Mary's murder don't really add up.
The first is her diary, and the second is a phone call. No one close to Mary agrees on what her diary contained. No one agrees on how it was found. No one agrees where it was found. All anyone seemed to agree on was that Mary's diary eventually ended up in the hands of CIA spy James Angleton.
Well, what's even weirder about Mary's diary is that widely respected journalist Ben Bradley gave it to the CIA agent. That fact first became public knowledge when Bradley's memoir was published in the mid-90s.
When you've got an esteemed journalist in cahoots with a spy, it fans the flames. Lance Morrow felt the same way.
But to this day, the diary is the missing piece of the puzzle that leads so many to believe there's a conspiracy behind Mary's murder.
So what was in Mary's diary that made it so dangerous? No one really knows.
What adds to the enduring mystery is that no one close to Mary told the same story. They each told different accounts of how Mary's diary was retrieved and, in some cases, destroyed.
Each story about Mary's diary starts out, more or less, the same way. On the night of Mary's murder, the story goes, Tony Bradley, Mary's sister, got a call in Georgetown.
If you think something about this sounds strange, you wouldn't be alone. No one knows how Anne Truitt in Japan learned about Mary's murder. Anne died in 2004, but while she was alive, she remained quiet on the matter. And had Mary really told her best friend that she wanted Angleton to have it if she died? This was hard to believe, given Mary's distaste for the CIA.
The most fleshed-out version of the diary hunt comes from Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote about Mary's murder in 1976. According to Rosenbaum's conversations with various sources, the diary hunt turned into a sort of impromptu memorial party for Mary, five days after her murder.
Several people were at Mary's house, including Mary's sister, Toni, Cord, and Angleton and his wife. Angleton showed up with spy gear, white gloves, a drill, in his little black spy bag. There was wall tapping. Bricks were turned over in the yard. Rosenbaum reported that everyone drank whiskey and Mary's ex-husband, Cord, lit a smoky fire.
someone else walked out into the yard and called to mary up above mary where's your damn diary According to Rosenbaum, Tony located her sister's diary in her painting studio, along with artwork she was preparing for her next show. The diary itself was in a locked steel box. And according to Tony, it was more of a sketchbook with some vague references to an affair.
Angleton is reported to have taken it. Ben Bradley's account, meanwhile? It varies so dramatically from what Angleton said that it caused a rift between the men.
In his memoir, A Good Life, Bradley claimed he first arrived at Mary's studio the following day, just him and Tony. And that's when he found Angleton already present. C-SPAN interviewed Bradley about this episode in 1995 during his publicity tour for his memoir. Here's Bradley himself saying he saw Angleton at Mary's studio, already looking for Mary's diary when he arrived.
Nina Burley fleshes it out a bit more. When Tony and Ben Bradley arrived at Mary's studio.
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