Tape of Kennedy's Killing Is Getting Digital Analysis

Michael Janofsky, New York Times

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 — About a year from now, one of the most
vexing mysteries in American history may finally be solved:
Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?

Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
have begun work on a digital scanning apparatus that they
believe will be able to reproduce sound from the only known
audio recording of the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.The recording was made through an open microphone on a
police motorcycle during Kennedy's motorcade into Dealey
Plaza, where the president was shot to death. The sounds
were captured onto a Dictaphone belt at police
headquarters, but scientific analyses of them over decades
proved anything but conclusive, fueling arguments about how
many people were actually involved in killing the
president.

The federal government's official inquiry into the
assassination, the Warren Commission, concluded in 1964
that Oswald was a lone gunman, firing three shots from the
Texas Book Depository building high above the plaza. But a
House committee that investigated the shooting 15 years
later concluded that four shots were fired, including three
from the book depository and one from another location,
giving rise to all manner of conspiracy theories.

Like old 78 r.p.m. records, the Dictaphone belt became worn
and damaged through constant replay for analysis using a
stylus. When it became property of the National Archives in
1990, the technical staff recommended that no further
efforts be made to replicate its sounds through mechanical
means.

That left preservationists with a daunting and historically
important challenge: How could the sounds on the old
plastic belt be captured for posterity, and if they could,
would they provide unequivocal evidence of how many shots
were fired?

Leslie C. Waffen, an archivist with the National Archives,
said he believed not only that the sound could be captured
but also that, using digital analysis to map the sounds,
scientists could remove extraneous noise like static and
distant voices to reveal gun shots.

"This is big," said Mr. Waffen, whose unit has custody of
the belt as well as the original 8-millimeter home movie by
Abraham Zapruder, which showed the assassination in color
but utter silence. "That's why we called the experts in.
They came up with a recommendation to do this."

After a June meeting of the National Archives Advisory
Committee on Preservation, the job was left to Carl Haber
and Vitaliy Fadeyev of the Berkeley laboratory, who have
used a digital optical camera to replicate sounds on
fragile Edison cylinders and long-play records. The process
involves scanning the grooves of the Dictaphone belt
electronically to create a digital image of the sound
patterns.

Once that is achieved, Mr. Waffen said, the scientists
could "clean it up, like peeling layers off an onion to get
down to the sound floor" of the recording. And that, he
said, could reveal how many shots were fired.

It is a question that has bedeviled government officials,
law enforcement agents and historians since the actual
event, leading to an array of conspiracy theories involving
the mob, Fidel Castro, Lyndon B. Johnson, Russians or, as
the film director, Oliver Stone, would have audiences
believe, the "military industrial complex."

Among the strongest and most persistent alternative
theories to the Warren Commission report has been the
involvement of a second gunman on a sweep of land above the
motorcade route that came to be known as the grassy knoll.
It gained widespread currency after the 1979 Congressional
investigation, which relied, in part, on a graphic
comparison of the sounds on the Dictaphone belt and a test
of gunshots in Dealey Plaza.

They produced evidence that four shots were fired, with
indications that the first, second and fourth shots came
from the book depository and the third came from the grassy
knoll.

But three years later, in a subsequent acoustical analysis,
the National Academy of Science concluded that the noise
that others ascribed to gun shots was merely static or
something else. That was the last time the belt was played.

Once it became the belt's custodian, the National Archives
was faced with two questions: What should be done with it?
And how could its evidence be accurately captured and made
public?

For years, the questions were unanswered, until it became
clear that new technologies might produce evidence that was
unreachable through older, less sophisticated analytical
methods that risked further damaging the belt.

The advisory commission concluded that the National
Archives had a responsibility to provide a true copy of the
sound, if not enhance it. That, the panel members said,
could be left to the researchers.

"People want to know," said Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth
Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which opened in the book
depository building in 1989. "The Warren Commission said it
was one guy. The House Committee said it was Oswald and
someone else. There hasn't been any resolution."

Mr. Waffen said it was about time to get one.

"Scientists
have studied these sounds for 25 or 30 years and have still
reached different conclusions," he said. "But with today's
technology, we can get a better reading and answer the
question, one way or the other."