THE MAN WHO DIDN’T TALK

And other tales from the new Kennedy assassination files

"The first suspect sound on the DPD recording matched to a test shot that was recorded on a test microphone on Houston Street near the intersection with Elm Street," Thomas writes. "The very next suspect sound on the Dictabelt matched to a test shot recorded at the very next microphone, eighteen feet to the north on Houston Street. The third suspect sound matched to a test shot recorded on a microphone in the intersection of Houston and Elm Street. The fourth sound matched to a test shot recorded on a microphone on Elm Street, and the fifth suspect sound matched to a test shot recorded on the next microphone to the west."

In other words, he says, "the chronological order of the suspect sounds had matched to the topological order of the microphones that produced matches to the test shots. To a scientist this sort of orderliness is very significant because there are 125 ways to sequence five events, only one of which is 1-2-3-4-5."

Not only are the matches precisely in the order that would be expected of a motorcycle traveling with the motorcade, Thomas notes, "the spacing on the sounds on the Dictabelt matched the spacing of the test microphones in Dealey Plaza. The first three suspect sounds are each separated by a little more than a second. The first and second are 1.6 seconds apart, while the second and third are 1.1 seconds apart. Then there is a 4.8 second gap before the fourth putative shot which is only a fraction of a second (7/10ths of a second) before the final suspect sound."

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Compare those time differences with evidence of gunshots on the Zapruder film, Thomas says. "The fatal shot... is gruesomely obvious at frame 313" of the film. "The only other" visible "wounding... occurs between frames 234 to 250 during which Governor Connally" is clearly in pain. A frame-by-frame analysis of the film, by Failure Analysis Associates, a firm contracted by the American Bar Association in 1992, "discovered that the lapel of the governor's jacket flapped outwards at frame 224. Because the governor did sustain a chest wound caused by a bullet which exited through the front of the jacket," the "lapel flap" supports the idea that a bullet wounded Connally at that moment.

The time between the two wounds is easily calculated. The shot at frame 224 was followed by the shot 89 frames later at frame 313, Thomas reports. "Because Zapruder's camera had a film speed of 18.3 frames per second, the separation between two impacts was 89 divided by 18.3 which equals 4.8 seconds."

"This," writes Thomas, "exactly matches the separation on the police tape between the acoustically identified grassy knoll shot and the immediately previous acoustically identified shot from the Book Depository: 4.8 seconds."

In other words, the sound impulses left by the gunshots correspond in their timing to the sight of the shots striking Kennedy and then Connally in the Zapruder film. Therefore, Thomas says, Dictabelt #10 is the virtual soundtrack to the Zapruder film.

Hogwash, says Richard Garwin in a telephone interview. He says that the impulses that Barger and Thomas say are gunshots were recorded simultaneously with Decker's command, recorded on DPD channel I, to "hold everything secure." As for what caused the sound impulses attributed to gunshots, Garwin says he likes a theory now being tested by Michael O'Dell: that the very words "hold everything secure" created those impulses. In a follow-up interview, O'Dell said that he had not been able to confirm this hypothesis, but said such proof is not really necessay to prove his point. "To claim the impulse pattern is unrelated to the speech sound, you would have to claim that the speech is audible without having its own effect on the pattern," he said. "That is impossible."

III. "The perfect man for the job"

Now let us put the crime scene in a larger context, the context of CIA intelligence gathering and psychological warfare operations in late 1963. Let us return now to the man who didn't talk.

What was George Joannides's reaction to Oswald's appearance at the Dallas scene?

"We called him right away," says Tony Lanuza, a Miami businessman who was active in Cuban politics in 1963. He served as the coordinator for the far-flung delegations of the Cuban Student Directorate. When he and his friends heard that a man named Oswald had been arrested for killing Kennedy, Lanuza immediately recalled the confrontations between Carlos Bringuier and the obnoxious interloper from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee the previous August. They rushed to the Directorate's headquarters in South Miami, where someone called their CIA contact to inform him the group had evidence about the communistic ways of Kennedy's killer.