I went to Dealey Plaza for the first time on November 22, 1993, for the 30th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. I didn't know a single other person studying the assassination. I didn't know that there were any research organizations pursuing the evidence and I had never heard of the Assassination Recors Review Board. I didn't even know that the Plaza was to be designated an historical site on that day. I simply felt that it was important for people to be there, to show that the murder had not been forgotten.

A lot has changed in my life since then, and a lot has changed within the research community. A disclosure process, albeit imperfect, has resulted in a flood of new information on the case. The Martin Luther King murder case has come alive again; information on U.S.-Cuba relations has surfaced; and a jury in Los Angeles found the police guilty of the destruction of evidence in the Robert Kennedy murder investigation.

Last November, I made my second trip to Dallas when the Coalition on Political Assassinations and Lancer held conferences there over the anniversary period. The events attracted prominent speakers and presented the opportunity for wider exchange of information in the case. The general public had two venues to find out more about the assassination and researchers could network. I had the pleasure of meeting Mary Ferrell for the first time and the opportunity to chat with Peter Dale Scott in Dealey Plaza. I also had a piece of Robert Groden's birthday cake in a Chinese restaurant in the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas and no, I do not know what "ellum" means.

In 1993 I visited the museum on the sixth floor of the Depository. I looked at the exhibits and stood by the enclosure at the southeast corner window, where the assassin supposedly waited for his victim. It never crossed my mind to go up there this time; I couldn't see any point. All I could think of was a line from a Chicago comedian who had been in Dallas and visited the museum. He thought the "sniper's nest" display was very realistic --- because Oswald wasn't there!

Given developments in the Kennedy and King cases, one topic on people's minds in Dallas was amnesty. On July 6, 1997, an editorial in The New York Times discussed a Truth Commission in the U.S. modeled after the Commission in South Africa. The Times suggested amnesty for those who might come forward in the Kennedy or King murders. Unanswered questions provide "fodder for conspiracy theorists" --- as distinct from "thoughtful, fair-minded students of history" who merely suspect that the record of the crime might be "incomplete." Supposedly, amnesty will invite "a flood of crank claims" and so it must be "carefully supervised by a responsible and experienced investigative group" that can identify "credible" new evidence.

The Times has long championed the incredible claim that there were no conspirators. Even so, the paper now acknowledges that recent disclosures "cast new doubts on the single-bullet theory." Inquiries into both the King and Kennedy murders may be needed. According to the paper, the King family's "wild flinging of unsubstantiated allegations can only deter serious debate" about the use of amnesty to resolve a "national trauma." But there's little time left "to determine if the official findings are complete."

Newspeak from The New York Times is nothing new, but the utility of amnesty in these cases is nevertheless a question. COPA board member John Judge observed that South Africa was a powerfully divided country emerging from a long period of violence. Amnesty offered relief from a cycle of revenge involving large segments of the population. The situation is very different in the United States. Limited amnesty for people at lower levels of the operations could be useful to gain new information. But the authors of our political violence face no retribution and no threat of prosecution. They already have immunity. Why would amnesty prompt them to come forward?

As I listened to Judge's views, I found myself thinking about Lloyd Jowers. He confessed his role in the King murder and nobody arrested him. If James Earl Ray went to trial, or if there was a Truth Commission, what would Jowers fear more: prosecution for murder or retaliation for talking?

Another topic in Dallas was Seymour Hersh's book, and Judge described a cartoon which caught the matter clearly. Two kids are walking by a book store, with Hersh's book in the window, and one says to the other, "Gee! Can you remember exactly where you were when you heard that President Kennedy's character had been assassinated?"

Peter Dale Scott focused on the developing paper trail behind the intelligence files generated on Oswald, illustrating his remarks with numerous slides of the relevant documents. Scott followed file numbers, references and signatures, making it clear that several agencies, including the Navy, the Marines and the State Department, covered up their connections to Oswald. They suppressed or edited existing files, or produced new ones.

Scott also raised the Lee Harvey/Harvey Lee question, since "Harvey Lee Oswald" is "a widely reoccurring name in the files of at least nine agencies." Scott has found instances of file number alterations with respect to this material and has pinpointed specific files on Harvey Lee Oswald which have never been released. Scott urged the Assassination Records Review Board to seek those documents and depose individuals connected with the handling of that material. As Scott put it in his COPA conference abstract, "Establishing the true relationship between these agencies and Lee Harvey Oswald is a matter of immense historical importance, whether or not this discovery tells us anything about the killing of President Kennedy."

Scott and researcher John Armstrong have been approaching the same question from two different directions. Scott, like Armstrong, noted that when the FBI questioned Robert Oswald, they asked Robert whether his brother's name was Lee Harvey or Harvey Lee. I couldn't help wondering if they also asked how tall Lee was.

Robert Groden came to Dallas with pictures of Governor Connally's coat. At the Warren Commission's re-enactment of the assassination, the location of the hole in Connally's coat associated with his back wound was marked with a white dot in a white circle drawn on the coat. The dot was roughly 6-7 inches down from the top of the shoulder and an inch or so to the left of the seam joining the sleeve to the coat.

However, photos of Connally's actual coat show that the real bullet hole was in the sleeve of the coat, to the right of the seam. The relative positions of Connally's right upper arm and torso are shown in the Zapruder film. Dr. iobert Shaw, who treated Connally's chest, and Dr. Charles Gregory, who treated his wrist, saw stills from the Zapruder film. They concluded that Connally was hit between frames 234 and 23well after Kennedy was first hit. That's why their accounts have been distorted ever since. Connally's coat proved them right, so the "bullet hole" was moved with a bit of paint.

Counting Kennedy's back/shoulder/neck wound and low/high skull wound, the left/right hole in Connally's coat is the third wandering bullet hole in this case. This could "cast new doubts" on the Magic Bullet theory!

According to the Chicago Tribune, on November 17, 1997, the Miami Herald reported that Cuban exiles were linked to the hotel bombings in Havana in 1997 which killed an Italian tourist. The exiles paid $15,000 to criminals from El Salvador to set the bombs. The money was allegedly raised by Luis Posada Carriles, "a veteran of the ... secret war against Cuba."

And from whom has that war been kept secret? And for how long? At the close of COPA's Saturday night session in Dallas, members received an unexpected bonus --- nearly 30 pages of recently declassified documents from Joseph Califano, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairmen Lemnitzer, Taylor and Wheeler, and central JCS files on operations against Cuba. A sampler:

Operation SMASHER: To disrupt/disable military and commercial communications facilities in Cuba through the introduction of special vacuum tubes designed to produce a short when the tube was heated.

Operation BREAK-UP: To clandestinely introduce corrosive materials into machinery and engines.

Operation FULL-UP: To degrade fuel supplies through the insertion of "a known biological agent" into storage facilities.

Operation COVER-UP: To convince the Cubans that the fleet assembled for the project Mercury space flights was cover for an invasion force. With the addition of a genuine force not connected with Mercury, COVER-UP could then work in conjunction with Operation DIRTY TRICK, a plan to "manufacture various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference" by the Cubans in the event of a failure in the Mercury program.

If astronaut John Glenn had plunged into the sea and died, how would the public have reacted when they learned that the Cubans had killed him?

Operation BINGO: To create the appearance of a Cuban attack on the U.S. base in Guantanamo as a pretext for a counter-attack. Reportedly, a version of BINGO was prepared for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, but the landing of friendly forces "over the fence" was cancelled.

It is said that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. But sometimes those who do know history try it again because it worked the first time. Less than a year after Kennedy's murder, the Vietnamese supposedly attacked a U.S. ship on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin, and the nightmare of Vietnam began.

Other anti-Cuba operations included the faked downing of a U.S. plane in international waters, complete with phony rescue operations. Another option was the sinking of a boat filled with Cuban refugees, to be blamed on Castro. Looking beyond these few documents, we see crop burnings, smuggling, infiltration, and the introduction of disease agents to the island. Simultaneously, the U.S. pointed to the worsening conditions in Cuba as proof of Castro's failure. And when Kennedy was killed, an attempt was made to blame that on Castro, too.

Those operations were not directed only against the Cubans, who at least knew the U.S. was responsible. Those plans were designed to manipulate events in the United States. We have those documents today because they are assassination-related documents.

Let's meet in Memphis in April, and in Los Angeles in June. The shooting battles were lost, but the history war is still in contest.

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