Newman - Where Angels Tread Lightly: The Assassination of President Kennedy Volume 1

WHERE ANGELS TREAD
LIGHTLY

THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY
VOLUME 1

John M. Newman

Original Publication 2015; revised 2017

Copyright 2017 John M. Newman

All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 1478302410

ISBN-13: 9781478302414

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014922513

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

North Charleston, South Carolina

I dedicate this book
to the many good men and women
in our government and armed forces
who refused to look the other way
and willingly paid the price
for telling the truth.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank my long time friend and research associate, John, Jay, C. Harvey, Jr. Jay has been a tremendous help to me for more than twenty years. He lived fairly close to where I lived in Maryland. After reading my book JFK and Vietnam, he picked up the phone and called me. After that call, we spent innumerable hours doing research in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and on the Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF) once it came online.

I want to thank my wife and best friend, Sue Newman. Sue has been a true soldier and has tirelessly helped me with my research for nearly forty years. She is a great editor, and her determination to ask tough questions improved the quality of the manuscript, Quest for the KingdomThe Secret Teachings of Jesus in the Light of Yogic Mysticism, and this volume too. I want to thank my children, Alexandra Kahler, Mary Singer, and John Newman III for their continuing support and understanding.

The mistakes in this book are mine.

Peter Dale Scott is a role modelcertainly my role modelfor researchers of any subject. His works have profoundly impacted mine. Malcolm Blunt has a sharp eye for detail and has shared an enormous amount of documents with me for several years. During that time I have had the benefit of meeting and discussing the case with Malcolm, meetings that often took place in the cafeteria at NARA in College Park. I thank the many prolific researchers whose published works have helped shape my views on the JFK case, including Gaeton Fonzi, Anthony Summers, Tink Thompson, Jefferson Morley, Dave Talbot, Jim DiEuginio, Lisa Pease, Warren Hinckle and William Turner, Michael Canfield and A. J Weberman, and, more recently, Bill Simpich.

I extend my gratitude to Fabian Escalante, who shared his sharp insights on the JFK case with me personally. His important work on the CIAs operations against Cuba has stood the test of time and proved valuable in my research for the present volume.

I extend a special thanks to Rex Bradford. His many years of hard work on the MFF data base and website have made it possible for so many of us to work on this case. I want to thank several of the members of Assassination Archives Research Center (AARC), including Dan Al-corn and Brenda Brodie and, especially the president, James H. Lesar. Jim and I have spent countless late nights picking over the details of discoveries, large and small. Jims Freedom of Information Act requests have led to the release of many gigabytes of documents on Cuba without which several of the chapters in this volume would not have been possible.

I am very grateful to a new associate of the AARC, Dan Hardway, who has shared his thoughtful insights on this case with me. And although it is not a recent work, I want to extend a hardy thank you to Dan Hardway and Eddie Lopez for their trenchant work for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) on Oswald and Mexico City, aka The Lopez Report. It is hard for me to imagine where we would be today without their work thenand the great work of their close associate, Gaeton Fonzi.

I want to thank Debra Conway, Sherry Fiester, Alan Dale and their associates of the JFK Lancer organization; and Cyril Wecht, Gary Aguilar, John Judge, and Bill Kelly and their associates for their work and support of the former Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA). Lancer and COPA have helped a great many researchers hone their skills and share their works with others over the past two decades.

I thank Alan Dale for his generous help and outstanding work as a reader of this manuscript. I am especially grateful to the many JFK soldiers who, instead of writing books, help the authors that do. For me, that began with Mary Ferrell and includes Malcolm Blunt, Larry Haapanen, Alan Rogers and many others over the years. I would also like to thank my good friend Steve Brown, who was an excellent discussant as the manuscript developed. I want to express my gratitude to two researchers with whom I have collaborated for more than three years on a large number of possible multiple identity cases. For now, they will remain anonymous in order to protect serious and valuable ongoing work.

And, finally, as I begin a new attempt to move the chains down the sidelines of this case, I reflect back to acknowledge and thank two people who gave me an opportunity to run with the ball: Oliver Stone and Eric Hamburg.

PRELUDE:

WHERE ANGELS TREAD LIGHTLY

April 24, 1961: New York City

M y dear Mr. Kennedy, the type written letter began. It had been placed in a plain white envelope and addressed, Mr. Robert Kennedy, Attorney-General of U.S., Department of Justice, Washington D.C., (Personal Correspondence). Writing exactly seven days after the disastrous failure of the CIAs Bay of Pigs operation, the author of this letter used what may have been a pseudonym. Whether or not it was her true name, it had, with very few exceptions, vanished from U.S. intelligence files since the summer of 1960. The name was Catherine Taaffe. This name appeared often in the governments files as far back as the Korean War. It had disappeared in the wake of its association with a murder and kidnapping plot of a former Cuban Senator from the Batista regime in Cuba.

Taaffe was unhappy with U.S. policy in Cuba and the Bay of Pigs failure had lit her fuse. She intended to blast her message to the top of the U.S. government. Taaffe knew full well that letters arriving at the Department of Justice (DOJ) addressed to the Attorney General (AG) did not arrive on the chiefs desk unopened. She had anticipated that the AGs staff would check the name Taaffe against the DOJs files, and she knew what they would find. She understood that this would ensure that her letter would be read by Robert Kennedy, along with many of her voluminous FBI files. By April 1961, those files were bursting at the seams. Much of them remain classified in 2015 but what has been released so far exceeds a thousand pages.

My letter may be presumptive, Taaffe told Kennedy, but I have heard of women being forgiven for tramping where angels tread lightly. This turn of phrase was her adaptation of the phrase Where Angels Fear to Tread, a line originally from An Essay on Criticism, written by the British poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744)the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson. Two hundred years later it became the title of E. M. Forsters novel Where Angels Fear to Tread.

Taaffes use of the adjective presumptive to describe her letter to Kennedy was an understatement. To tell the Attorney General that where she was tramping would, by inference, strike the fear of God in men, was outrageously immodest. But it was also true. The presidents brother would understand this once he began to leaf through her files.

PROLOGUE:

DARK OPERATIONS

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. James Madison,