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Brehm passed away on August 11 in his Dallas home.

In an emotional interview given November 22, 1963, Brehm said, "I happened to be about fifteen feet away from the President when the first shot hit him. There is some discussion now as to whether there was one or two shots that hit him, but the first shot rang out and I was positive when I saw the look on his face and saw him grab his chest and saw the reaction of his wife, that he had been shot. And just at that time, which was probably a few seconds later, the second shot rang out and he just absolutely went down in the seat of the car... But the only thing that I did witness, and something I'm sorry I did witness, very honestly, was the look on his face when the shot hit and the look again on him and his wife's face when the shots started to ring out, and it was very obvious that he was hit."

Brehm was standing on the south side of Elm Street at the time of the shooting. Just after the shots were fired, he pulled his five year old son to the ground and fell on top of him.

Though Brehm was one of those closest to the assassination, he was not called to testify to the Warren Commission. He always maintained the shots that killed Kennedy were fired from one of two buildings at the corner of Elm and Houston Streets.

Charles Brehm was also a decorated war hero who was wounded in World War II, during the Allied invasion known as D-Day.

The first issue of The Dealey Plaza Echo contains articles ranging from an analysis of the recently "recovered" Patsy Paschall film of the assassination, a review of the ARRB-Harry Connick-Gary Raymond situation in New Orleans, to an engrossing Hal Verb piece about assassination witness Roger Craig.

Commenting on the perception that the JFK case is an American issue only, Dealey Plaza UK Secretary Ian Griggs said, "Just as the British were among the first to question what really happened in Dealey Plaza in the 60s, so we are proud to carry on that tradition in the 90s. The number of people outside the North American continent who are still concerned and who still demand the truth is far greater than you can imagine."

Chris Mills, editor of The Dealey Plaza Echo, estimates there will be three issues of the new journal per year. They will appear irregularly, he says, since producing it is not his full-time occupation. A monthly newsletter will keep Dealey Plaza UK members up to date on group activities. Even more information is available at the group's Web site (accessible from Fair Play's links page).

For information on subscriptions, contact Ian Griggs via email at igriggs@easynet.co.uk, or snail mail at 24 Walton Gardens, Waltham Abbey, Essex, EN9 1BL, United Kingdom.

The boyfriend tells her that Lee Harvey Oswald, the reputed assassin, was just an innocent bystander and that others fired the fatal shots. Top-secret government codes are found on papers in his house. Evidence about the man's possible complicity in the assassination is given to congressional investigators and then disappears during a burglary in Washington. The CIA refuses to talk about it.

And then, years later, the boyfriend dies of a heart attack just hours before he is to be interviewed by the district attorney and a sheriff's detective.

Oliver Stone, where are you?

This may sound like the kind of farfetched tale concocted by wild- eyed conspiracy theorists, but in fact it is the stuff of a lawsuit filed in federal court in Fresno by a respected Madera County judge acting as a private citizen, one who does not like it when the CIA tells him to get off its case.

The judge, who was the district attorney at the time, is David Minier, 61 -- and he now sits on the Municipal Court bench in Chowchilla. He gained a certain fame in the 1970s for prosecuting three young men who had kidnapped 26 Chowchilla schoolchildren and their bus driver.

Two years ago, using the Freedom of Information Act, he sued the CIA after the agency refused to tell Minier whether Claude Barnes Capehart had ever been employed by the CIA and whether Capehart was in Dallas in November 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated.

A federal judge dismissed Minier's suit, but Minier, who is doing all the legal work himself, is appealing the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The judge may be tilting at windmills -- thousands of books and articles over the past 33 years have failed to come up with a definitive solution to Kennedy's death, the Warren Commission's report notwithstanding. But Minier says he is suing the CIA to release the Kennedy assassination documents as a way to preserve this ``historical research'' on the public record for generations to come.

``I wanted to get it into some form of permanent record,'' he said earlier this week, ``so that if there's any validity to this thing, then the information will be there as a resource. Anything you file in court is there for all time. And someone may come along who has a lot more ability in doing research than I do, and the material will still be there.''

Minier's odd quest about the Kennedy assassination started nearly 20 years ago, when Capehart moved to Chowchilla and opened a well-drilling business. Soon Capehart came to the county sheriff's office and said some men had been sent from ``back East'' to kill him. Sergeant Dale Fore said he would look into it. But after scouring the dusty Central Valley town (population: 6,000), he could find no assassins.

But Capehart seemed like an interesting guy to Fore, and soon he was confiding to the sergeant that he had done some work for the CIA. After a while, Fore called a friend at the FBI and asked about Capehart. Both men concluded that Capehart was a fake, but Minier and Fore were later told by a retired FBI agent that Capehart had been employed by the CIA.

Capehart had told his female friend that he once worked on industrialist Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer, a deep-sea research vessel that, under CIA sponsorship, raised a Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in 1968.

In 1978, Kennedy assassination theories were at such a full boil in the United States that Congress formed the House Select Committee on Assassinations and began digging into the tons of muck raked up over the preceding 15 years by dozens of investigators.

Back in Chowchilla, Capehart's female friend, who had seen newspaper photographs of possible assassination conspirators being sought by the committee's investigators, came to Fore and said Capehart's face was in one of the pictures.

The woman, who still fears retribution and declines to be publicly identified even years after Capehart's death, said Capehart told her he was ``in the (Texas School Book) Depository when the president was shot, and Oswald wasn't the only one involved at that time,'' Fore wrote in his police report, which ended up as part of Minier's lawsuit.

She also reportedly said: ``Oswald was not the person who shot the president. Capehart showed (her) a handgun with a silencer, automatic firearms, a cyanide pistol, and passports under an assumed name.'' Capehart, apparently disturbed by the publicity of the congressional investigation, moved to Pahrump, Nev., to lie low.

Then the woman brought Fore a sheet filled with what appeared to be ciphers. She said she had found it in Capehart's papers. Fore added it to his file.

In early 1979, while the House assassinations committee was in full-bore operation, Fore traveled to Washington to attend an FBI training course, a routine career assignment for many local law enforcement officers. While there, he called up committee staffers and told them his tale. They seemed interested and took his information, including the cipher sheet.

When he finished his training course several weeks later, Fore stopped by and asked to have his evidence back. The FBI agents who had interviewed him at the time gave him some of it, but kept the code sheet, saying the ciphers were ``classified government codes.'' When Fore got back to Madera County, he heard that the committee office he had visited had been burglarized, and the evidence he had given the committee's investigators had been stolen.

In July 1979, the assassinations committee concluded that conspiracies were ``likely'' in Kennedy's death. But 17 years later, no government agency has confirmed or refuted that conclusion.

In 1989, Fore and Minier prepared to interview Capehart at his home in Nevada. A few hours before they were to meet him, Capehart, 64, dropped dead of a heart attack.

``After he died,'' Minier said, ``things kind of dried up, in terms of information, and so there was nothing else to do but ask the CIA about it.''

So far, the CIA is saying nothing about Claude Capehart.

David Minier, 61, acting as a private citizen, sued the CIA two years ago under the Freedom of Information Act after the agency refused to tell him whether it had employed a Chowchilla man, possibly as an assassin. A three-judge panel of the appellate court said the ``plain language'' of federal law ``expressly provides that the CIA is exempted from disclosing the names of its employees.''

Minier, a Chowchilla Municipal Court judge, said he had not yet seen the ruling and therefore could not say whether he will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case.

``I'm not really too optimistic,'' Minier said of his chances that the high court would agree to review Minier's brief against the CIA. ``I'd have to think of (some legal tenet) that would interest the court enough for them to take it.''

In Sacramento, Assistant U.S. Attorney Camil Skipper, who represented the CIA, said, ``We are, obviously, pleased with the court's decision.'' The appeals court was upholding an earlier decision by U.S. District Court Judge Garland Burrell in Sacramento.

Minier's crusade began after the CIA refused to tell him whether Claude Barnes Capehart, a mysterious well driller who moved to Chowchilla in 1976, was ever an agency employee and whether he was in Dallas in November 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated.

Capehart himself had told Madera County Sheriff's Detective Dale Fore that he had done some work for the CIA. Minier and Fore later learned, through a friend at the FBI, that Capehart had worked on the Glomar Explorer, the deep- sea research vessel that had raised a Soviet submarine from the Pacific Ocean floor for the CIA. A woman who was Capehart's friend told detectives that Capehart had told her he was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Capehart died of a heart attack in 1989 at the age of 64.

The appellate court, while rejecting Minier's claims, was clearly intrigued by this tale and particularly with the idea that Minier may have unearthed information that could shed new light on the Kennedy assassination.

``Certain historical facts are unassailable, while others are constantly subject to attack and, ultimately, remain shrouded in mystery and confusion,'' Judge A. Wallace Tashima wrote in the court's unanimous opinion. ``Both types of facts surround the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.''

Tashima said it is indisputably known that Kennedy was ``tragically shot and killed'' in Dallas and that ``Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested and portrayed to the public as the sole assassin.''

``Over the past 30 years, however, many people have debated the accuracy of the sole assassin theory, positing that one individual could not have accomplished the task alone,'' Tashima wrote. ``Although many conspiracy theories have been generated through the years, the most infamous theory alleges CIA involvement in the assassination.''

In 1975, Tashima said, the Rockefeller Commission found ``no credible evidence of any CIA involvement.'' But in 1979, without specifying the CIA or any other government agency as a conspirator, the House Select Committee on Assassinations reported that conspiracies were ``likely'' in Kennedy's death. That assertion has been neither confirmed nor denied.

The appellate court judges found, in their new ruling, that because federal law exempts the CIA from saying whether Capehart ever worked for the agency, at any time, the agency ``. . . may also decline to disclose Capehart's alleged CIA activities during November 1963. Release of such information would not only tacitly reveal whether Capehart had an employment relationship, but would also provide a window into the CIA's `sources and methods.' ''

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