Kennedy assassination tape to get digital upgrade

11.45am - By ANDREW BUNCOMBE

WASHINGTON - One of America's most enduring and bitterly-debated controversies - whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin who killed President Kennedy more than 40 years ago - could be finally resolved.

Scientists are to produce a digital copy of the only known audio recording of the assassination to allow researches to analyse the sound of the gunshots captured on the recording. The original recording, preserved on an analogue tape, has not been played since the early 1980s because it is so fragile.

"[There have been] requests since 1979 to make copies of that recording but they have been refused," Gary Mack, curator of the VIth Floor Museum in Dallas, Texas, where Mr Kennedy was shot and killed on the November 22, 1963, said yesterday.

"There have been bootleg copies floating around but you never know what you are getting."

The recording was made through the open microphone of a motorcycle policeman's radio when Kennedy's motorcade drove into the city's Dealey Plaza and captured on a Dictaphone tape back at headquarters.

The federal government's official inquiry into the assassination, the Warren Commission, concluded in 1964 that Oswald was acting alone, firing three shots from the Texas School Book Depository building, which now houses the museum of which Mr Mack is curator.

But an investigation by a congressional committee in 1979 concluded that an analysis of the recording revealed four shots were fired, including three from the book depository and one from another location. Over the years this has given rise to all manner of conspiracy theories, most famously that there was a second gunman on the infamous "grassy knoll" on the edge of the plaza.

The digital transfer of the recording presented scientists with the challenge of how to recover the sound without damaging the tape by playing it. Experts from Berkeley, California, will use a digital optical camera to replicate the sounds by scanning the grooves of the Dictaphone tape to create a digital image of the sound patterns. The sound could then be cleaned up, peeling away layers of static as well as the sound of the motorcycle engine.

Leslie Waffen, an archivist with the National Archives, which has custody of the tape, along with the famous but silent Zapruder film footage of the shooting, told the New York Times: "This is big. That's why we called the experts in. They came up with a recommendation to do this."

But Mr Mack is not convinced the mystery will be solved. "They are only producing a copy, they are not going to analyse it - that will be up to others. The only certainty is that the Kennedy killing will continue to be a puzzle."

- INDEPENDENT