FOIA on Martin Luther King

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

vearing a ring?" In fact, his yes to that accompanied by such stress as I had only once or twice in the class slides. a next morning Kradz called on me. he suspect take the money, he asked. I didn't think so. Kradz nodded. Did suspect who took the money? Yes, I right he did. Very good, said Kradz. Did ce anything else about the interroga- Well, yes, there was this business the ring. Perhaps the suspect had it. Kradz smiled. No, the kid hadn't in the ring, but he was gay. He had anged rings with another guy. Nobody

situation, I wondered if it could be used the way I had hoped, as a tool for historical research.

During the lunch break I took Kradz aside and asked him. Could the PSE be used outside interrogations, where the speaker was telling what may or may not have happened? Yes, he said, the PSE could be used for that. Where there was no stress, I could be confident that the speaker was telling the truth. However, when I did find stress, I had to be very careful about reaching conclusions about its cause; it could result from something other than deception. But if I

details of the controversy dimmed in my mind, leaving only a dull residue of doubt. I had despaired of ever learning the truth. Now I knew what to do with the PSE.

It was all there: the statements made before television cameras by eyewitnesses, policemen, medical examiners, members of the Warren Commission. Somewhere in a network-television vault were the sound tracks, with the tiny, inaudible variations in voice frequency that could settle once and for all the question, "Did Oswald, acting alone, shoot and kill John F. Kennedy?"

My immediate problem was getting

about it. The kid didn't really expect asked about it, because Kradz had over all the questions with him. Still, the ring was mentioned, he panicked. the third day of the course, I had begun some thought to what I might do the PSE. I was particularly interested fact that the device works from a tape ing. Sound-recording technology is a century old (Edison invented the graph in 1877), and an enormous it of history is stored on phonographs, sound tracks, and tape and wireings. I thought how many press cones, interviews and public pronounce are stored away in the film and tape es of the world, and how many quesould be settled if we knew for certain

found a stress pattern in the testimony of several witnesses to the same event, I would very probably have uncovered deception.

Encouraged, I reviewed the list of recent mysteries. Watergate was, of course, the first to come to mind. The ITT affair was also of recent interest. The Kent State incident had never been fully cleared up. But one subject seemed to loom above all the rest—the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Like many others, I have found it difficult to believe the Warren Report. When Mark Lane's book came out, I read it carefully. I read much of the other criticism of the Warren Commission's findings. The more I read, the more I doubted the official account of what happened that day in Dallas. I waited for the real story to emerge. It didn't.

access to the recordings. I was certain the television networks would have them, but I wasn't sure exactly what to ask for. There must be thousands of hours of sound recordings relating to the assassination. Where, among all this talk, was the critical testimony?

I started digging and soon discovered the existence of a group called the National Committee to Investigate Assassinations, located in Washington, D.C. I called the number listed in the telephone directory and was soon speaking to Bob Smith, the Committee's Research Director. I told Smith that I was a writer and wanted to do a piece on the John F. Kennedy assassination. I asked him for an interview, and he agreed.

We met in the offices of Bernard Fenster-