The Puzzling Paisley Case

What happened during the CIA man's last sail?

A 31-ft. sloop, under full sail, runs aground on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay. No one is aboard the vessel, which contains CIA papers and sophisticated radio gear. One week later a bloated body is found in the bay. There is a bullet wound behind the left ear. Two diving belts weighing 38 lbs. are strapped to its waist. The body is identified as that of the sloop's owner, John Arthur Paisley, 55, a former deputy director of the CIA's Office of Strategic Research.

So began in late September the intriguing mystery of an ex-spook's last voyage, aboard a sloop that he had fancifully but appropriately named Brillig, from the "Jabber, wocky" in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. After the body was discovered, the CIA insisted that there was no mystery. Paisley was not a spy, said a CIA press spokesman. He was an intelligence analyst. Moreover, he had retired from the agency in 1974. The CIA had no quarrel with Maryland state police theories that Paisley had committed suicide. Six months before his death, he had left his wife of 19 years--the mother of his two children--and developed a close relationship with another woman. He had been depressed over his personal life and had been seeing a psychiatrist.

Since last fall, the mystery of John Arthur Paisley has deepened. The woman he had been seeing, Betty Myers, 51, a psychiatric social worker, says that "suicide was a valid option to him." Among his problems, she said, was that "he had ambivalence about his desire to be close to someone and his desire for freedom." But his estranged wife Maryann maintains that he was not the sort of man to kill himself. She has hired Washington Lawyer Bernard Fensterwald to try to find out what happened. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence also has been looking into the case and is expected to complete its inquiry in a few weeks.

The facts about Paisley's fate are as elusive as anything conceived by Lewis Carroll. The questions start with the identity of the corpse found in Chesapeake Bay a week after the Brillig ran aground. The body was badly disfigured by immersion and was not viewed by any member of Paisley's family before it was cremated. To obtain fingerprints, the FBI had severed both hands from the body and peeled back layers of decomposing skin. These prints could not be compared with the ones that the CIA said it had sent to the FBI when Paisley was hired in 1953; the bureau reported that they had inexplicably been lost from its files. But the prints did match a set voluntarily submitted to the FBI by a "Jack" Paisley in 1940. The age (17) of the youth at the time, his home town (Phoenix) and his parents' names all matched with John Arthur Paisley's past.

As further evidence, the Maryland state police reported that Virginia Dentist Albert F. Brendes had examined an upper plate of teeth from the corpse and said that the denture was the one that he had made for Paisley several years ago. Brendes was relying on memory: Paisley's dental records were destroyed, the dentist explained, when he recently reorganized his office.

There were some seemingly puzzling discrepancies between the corpse and Paisley. It weighed 144 lbs., while he weighed 175. The body was clothed in size 30 undershorts; Paisley had a 34-in. waist. Paisley's height, however, matched that of the recovered body: both were 5 ft. 11 in.

There were also questions about the assumed manner of death. Two unexpended 9-mm cartridges were found on the boat. A 9-mm slug was found in the head of the corpse. Paisley was known to have owned a 9-mm pistol. Unfortunately, it is missing. But if he shot himself on the boat, would not the gun have been found on it? Replied Maryland state police: not if he jumped in the water first or shot himself in such a way that both he and the gun fell overboard.

The weights on the body could be readily explained: Paisley was a scuba diver. There was also an explanation for the radio equipment aboard the Brillig. Paisley was an amateur radio operator (call sign: K4BM), who carried two different portable transceivers on his boat, one for short-range and one for long-range chats with other hams. In addition, he had two-way marine radiotelephone equipment aboard.

The CIA's initial action after the sloop was found was not entirely helpful to state investigators. Representatives of the agency, accompanied by Mrs. Paisley, visited both the sloop and Paisley's apartment before police were called in. Exactly what they found at either site is not known, but police consider this kind of entry an unwelcome "contamination" of evidence. Said former State Police Captain Paul Rappaport, who led the investigation last year: "Contamination certainly hurt the investigation. There were no eyewitnesses. We could only rely on physical evidence." But there was little physical evidence left by the time police were called in.

The CIA depicted Paisley at first as an expert on the Soviet economy. In fact, his job was to analyze the Soviet Union's military capability, meaning he had access to CIA data about Soviet nuclear weaponry and was aware of how the CIA acquired the information. After retiring from the CIA in 1974, Paisley had been working full time for a private accounting firm, and part time as a CIA consultant. He was helping to coordinate a highly sensitive assessment of Soviet strategic strength, which gave him continuing access to secret CIA data. A draft of his final report on this study was found aboard the Brillig.

The CIA denies that Paisley was a key interrogator of famed Soviet Intelligence Agent Yuri Nosenko, who defected to the U.S. in 1964 and has been suspected by some CIA officials of being a Kremlin plant. But other Government officials insist Paisley not only helped question Nosenko but defended him as a true defector and became his friend.

TIME has learned that a longstanding internal CIA search for a Soviet "mole," or double agent, within its ranks had been focusing on Paisley's department at the CIA just before his retirement. In addition, Paisley faced a fresh round of interrogation by CIA officials as part of a routine double check of his background.

Some investigators believe that these prospects could have led to Paisley's suicide, or his disappearance. If so, the implications are tantalizing. Could Paisley have been a mole who thought he was about to be exposed? Was he murdered or spirited away by Soviet agents before he could be unmasked? That would not have been difficult: the Soviet embassy has an estate on the Corsica River, from which its large speedboats could easily reach Paisley's known cruising point near Hooper Island lighthouse in Chesapeake Bay. On the other hand, did the CIA arrange his murder--or his disappearance --to avoid the humiliation of having to admit publicly that it had been deceived by a double agent? Or was Paisley just a middle-aged man who had changed jobs and left his family and could not cope with those personal upheavals?

Whatever the truth, the Paisley case probably will remain one of those frustrating detective stories without a tidy ending. Unless, of course, John Arthur Paisley is still alive and some day reveals what really happened on the sloop Brillig 's final, fateful voyage.

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