FOIA on Martin Luther King

It's the first lie detector that can be used on a dead man. It works on tapes and other voice recordings

by George O'Toole

# Assassination Tapes

The rulers of the state are the only ones who should have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.

Plato: The Republic, Book Three

It's a little frightening. The machine can listen to what you're saying and tell, with a high degree of reliability, whether or not you are lying. It's called the Psychological Stress Evaluator, and it is, in effect, a lie detector. Unlike the polygraph, it needs no physical connection to the subject; therefore it can be used without his knowledge. It works from recordings of his voice, so anything on tape, sound track or phonograph record is fair game for the machine. It is the first lie detector that can be used on a dead man.

Early this year, one of these instruments came into my hands. I resolved to use it to probe one of the darkest mysteries of recent history, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I set about collecting every recording I could lay my hands on of anyone who had any direct knowledge of the affair. Soon I had compiled the tape-recorded testimony of twenty-two persons—eyewitnesses, Dallas policemen, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy, members and staff of the Warren Commission, Jim Garrison, Clay Shaw, and even Earl Warren.

I ran the tapes through the PSE systematically, taking each controversial point in turn. Did the rifle which belonged to Lee Harvey Oswald kill President Kennedy? Was Oswald the killer? Were others involved? What of those mysterious autopsy photographs which the Warren Commission never saw—do they support the Commission's lone-gunman, single-bullet theory? And what about the Warren Commission itself? Did its members conspire to cover up the truth?

Slowly a picture emerged. It is blurred, and it is not the picture I expected. Not all the details are there, but I guarantee this: you may believe the lone-gunman theory of the Warren Report, or you may believe the government-conspiracy theory of Mark Lane, Jim Garrison and others, but either way you are wrong.

The PSE is not a crystal ball. It was invented as an interrogation aid, a function it performs well. To my knowledge, this was the first instance of its use as a tool for historical research. To understand what I did with the PSE, one should know something about the device itself.

I first heard of the Psychological Stress Evaluator last year, when I met two of its inventors, Allian D. Bell, Jr., and Charles R. McQuiston. Bell and McQuiston, both former lieutenant colonels, retired from Army Intelligence several years ago to form a company called Dektor Counterintelligence and Security, Inc. It was a logical second career for the two men. Both are experts in the technology of espionage. Either one could pick the lock on your front door in less time than it takes you to find your key. Colonel Bell wears a Black Belt in karate, is an accomplished swordsman and small-arms expert, and has a dozen inventions to his credit, from anti-bugging devices to a miniaturized microdot camera. Colonel McQuiston is one of the foremost polygraph experts in the U.S., a specialist in radio and audio surveillance, and a qualified locksmith.