I can’t believe I just wrote that headline. One of the cardinal rules of writing a true crime blog is to not paint oneself into a corner. Present some new theory, sure, but remember to use words like “may” or “could” so you have a way out if new info turns up that doesn’t support that theory. (Please note that I did say “I think,” but still…it’s risky.)
Nevertheless, I’m sticking with it because I have evidence that Ron—our Ron—nice, quiet, studious Ron Tammen, who, then as now, HAPPENED TO BE MISSING, was being looked at by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1976 as they investigated President Kennedy’s assassination. What’s more, I think the HSCA, not to mention the FBI, had lumped him into the same category of people as mobsters Sam Trafficante and Sam Giancana, the Cuban Revolutionary Board, CIA operatives James McCord and E. Howard Hunt, and Lee Harvey Oswald himself. (The committee was also looking into Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, though I don’t have evidence that Ron’s name had turned up in that case, at least so far.)
First, a little background about how we got here. It has to do with the ST-102 stamps on Ron’s missing person documents. Those stamps had become so easy for me to ignore. I suppose it’s because we as humans tend to prefer words when we’re reading documents as opposed to indecipherable numbers and initials. But one day, roughly 14 years after having seen Ron’s FBI documents for the very first time, I started paying attention to those stamps and the people who shared the same numbers and initials with Ron. I was soon startled to discover that these were some seriously high-profile people, many of whom were what you might refer to as bad guys. Other stamp sharers weren’t at all bad—they were just very idealistic. They were fighting for civil rights, speaking out against the war in Vietnam, and sending telegrams to the FBI out of concern for the safety of farm workers in the Coachella Valley. But bad or good, noble or ignoble, the FBI considered the above diverse crowd to be somehow similar. The Coachella telegrams were stamped with an ST-102, just like the ST-102 that the FBI stamped on memos concerning renowned mobsters, just like the ST-102 they stamped on a memo from Mexico City having to do with Lee Harvey Oswald, just like the ST-102 that they stamped on Ronald Tammen’s missing person documents.
In my last post, we discussed another weird discovery: that Ron shared both the ST-102 stamp and an accompanying stamp, REC-19, with James W. McCord, Jr.—and only James W. McCord, Jr.—who is best known for being one of the Watergate burglars. But James McCord did a lot more in his life than just bungle a political burglary. He’d been with the CIA from 1951 to 1970. From 1955 to 1962, he was part of the CIA’s Security Research Staff, which was ground zero for Projects ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA. In 1953, he was on assignment in NYC to investigate bioweapons expert Frank Olson’s fall from a 10th-story window and to help steer the investigation away from the CIA, according to H.P. Albarelli, Jr.’s book A Terrible Mistake. McCord had also been tied to the Kennedy assassination.
There are other stamps on Ron’s documents as well, which we can discuss a little later if you’d like, maybe in the comments. But the real reason I feel compelled to interrupt your Father’s Day concerns a couple other marks on his documents that weren’t stamped. These marks were handwritten by someone in pen or pencil. They are:
- “Hac,” which is written at the top righthand corner of ten of Ron’s pages, and,
- The number “F-189” on the bottom left of seven of Ron’s pages, near the date stamp. A similar-looking number appears on two of Ron’s pages—number 149, minus the F—but it’s the F-189 that we’ll be focusing on today.
Let’s start with “Hac.” At first, I wondered if it stood for the first three letters of someone’s last name. Then I thought it might represent the first letter of someone’s first, middle, and last names, which is how FBI officials usually initialed their documents, although these appear as a word as opposed to three capital letters.
But now? Now I think it stands for the House Assassination Committee.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “That’s not its true name. The true name was the House Select Committee on Assassinations, or HSCA.”
Correct! But you know what? Humans prefer their acronyms to be short, and, if at all possible, they like them to be pronounceable as made-up words. Also, most of us don’t like the word “Select” to be used in any official names, like ever. It’s too pompous-sounding for government work. Because you know what happened? People didn’t refer to the HSCA as such unless it was for official communication with the biggest of big wigs, such as the actual people on the HSCA. When it was just one run-of-the-mill fed writing to another fed, or if it was a news reporter writing about the activities of the committee, it was most commonly referred to as the House Assassination Committee. That was the committee’s working title. And the working abbreviation of the House Assassination Committee was HAC. I believe that’s what was being referenced on Ron’s documents.
As for Ron’s F number, I think it’s important too. I’ve noticed F numbers on many an FBI document, from the highly marked-up to the relatively clean, but not all FBI documents carry them. Here are some general observations I’ve made about the FBI’s F numbers:
- The numbers aren’t terribly large—never more than three digits and I don’t believe I’ve seen any F numbers that exceed 500.
- A person might be assigned one F number on one document and a different F number on another document.
- Rarely have I found two or more people sharing the same F number, but it does happen at times, as you’ll soon see.
- Although I don’t know the exact purpose for the F numbers, I think they probably have something to do with an oversight group trying to keep track of the morass of information generated by the FBI. The FBI had its Central Records System which was cross-referenced to its many indices, but the F numbers appear to fall outside of those usual FBI record-keeping systems.
- An oversight group might be internal, such as the FBI’s Inspection Division, whose responsibility was to audit other FBI divisions. Or the oversight group could have been external, such as the House Assassination Committee.
OK, I think that’s pretty good for starters. Let’s stop here, and do the rest as a Q&A.
Do you have hard evidence that led you to conclude that Hac stands for House Assassination Committee?
The first time I entertained the thought that Ron’s Hac notation might stand for the House Assassination Committee, I went looking for other Hac notations. I needed someone else to have Hac written on their document. Extra points if that person was indeed investigated by the House Assassination Committee.
Well, I’ve found a document that indeed has the letters “Hac” written on it, though it’s in the bottom lefthand corner, on the signature line reserved for the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of an FBI form. This particular document is written from the SAC of the Las Vegas field office to the FBI director. The document has to do with a Rose Bowl gambling ring and a guy named Edward Kiper Moss.
What really got my attention though is that this Hac appears to be written in the same handwriting as the one on Ron’s documents. There’s the same “H” with a loop that strays past the left vertical line. There’s the seemingly same “a.” Ditto with the “c.”
So…that’s exciting, right? I mean…was Ron a known commodity to the Las Vegas FBI? Well, hold on. The Las Vegas field office did have an SAC with two out of three of those initials. His name was Harold E. Campbell. He retired in April of 1972. The three letters “ret” probably stand for “retired.”
But that’s weird too, since the memo from the SAC is dated March 18, 1971. Harold was still in charge of the Las Vegas FBI then. Why didn’t he sign it in 1971? What’s more, did someone bring him out of retirement to sign his form and he accidentally got his middle initial wrong? Yeah, no. Methinks that someone else signed Harold’s form years later and added the “ret” to make it more honest and less like a forgery. That same person signed another of Harold’s forms, this one from August 1968 dealing with the Las Vegas division of La Cosa Nostra. (Harold wasn’t much for signing the bottoms of his forms, apparently.) The 1968 form has JFK verbiage at the top. Also, this one looks like they got the middle initial right.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that even if Ron’s missing person forms and Harold Campbell’s Las Vegas forms appear to have been signed by the same person, they don’t necessarily point to the House Assassination Committee.
Maybe not. But I’ve noticed other FBI documents in which a handwritten H has a strikingly similar wayward loop, though, admittedly, they slant a little differently sometimes. Instead of preceding the acronym Hac, these H’s precede the word Hess, the last name of Jacqueline Hess, who was the deputy chief researcher on the House Assassination Committee. You guys, I’ve been staring at Ron’s and Jacqueline’s H’s for a very long time, and as of this writing, I believe that whoever wrote the “Hac” on Ron’s FBI documents was the same person who wrote Jacqueline’s last name at the top of other FBI documents.
After all, it’s not Jacqueline’s handwriting. Her handwriting looked like this:
So it appears to me that the person who wrote Hac on Ron’s forms was somehow knowledgeable about matters pertaining to the House Assassination Committee. That person also appears to have been the one who supplied the after-the-fact signatures for Harold E. Campbell and the Las Vegas field office. And why would those signatures be necessary to supply years later? Probably because they were being reviewed by an oversight group of some sort.
But the Hac notations aren’t the only interesting detail about Harold’s memo about Edward Kimper Moss.
I’m listening.
Do you see Edward Moss’s F number? It says F-189. Ron’s says F189 too. For Edward K. Moss and Ronald H. Tammen, Jr., to share the same F number tells me that someone felt those two individuals had enough in common that they should be grouped together. In my view, that someone had something to do with an oversight group, such as (again, in my view) the House Assassination Committee.
Who was Edward Kiper Moss?
The name Edward Kiper Moss may sound like some boring accountant from the East Coast, but he was anything but. Officially, he’d been a PR analyst for the federal government at one time, but he was known to do business with gangsters and Cuban exiles who wanted to overthrow Fidel Castro. He also was a PR adviser to foreign governments and a CIA operative. According to the book One Nation Under Blackmail, by Whitney Webb, as well as Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by Peter Dale Scott, Edward K. Moss was a powerful person with deep ties to the Mafia, foreign governments, and the CIA. He was most definitely investigated by the House Assassination Committee with regards to JFK’s assassination. So far, I’ve only read what’s available online. Now that I know that Edward K. Moss and Ron Tammen were assigned the same F number, I’ll be reading those books pronto.
Plus, don’t forget Ron Tammen’s link to James W. McCord, Jr.
Yeah, what about that? What did James McCord have to do with JFK’s assassination?
He didn’t admit it, and he threatened to sue two individuals and the magazine The Realist for libel when an article published there mentioned the alleged tie-in.
Here’s what I can tell you. In a follow-up article written by Paul Krassner titled “Dear James McCord,” Krassner discusses McCord’s threatened lawsuit and he doesn’t back down. The original article, which was written by Mae Brussell, had referenced a passage in a book titled The Glass House Tapes, by Louis E. Tackwood. Brussell paraphrased that “James McCord, according to Louis Tackwood, was in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot, and flown afterwards to the Caribbean.” Tackwood had also divulged that McCord went by the alias of Martin, a fact that Brussell had repeated.
I don’t know if James McCord was in Dallas that day, but I can at least provide corroboration that McCord’s alias was Elwood Martin. You can see it for yourself on the below FBI document. Also, for a person who claimed not to have anything to do with JFK’s assassination, I find it interesting that his name has turned up on so many JFK documents that were released to the public over the years.
What could Ron have been up to?
Great question. Based on the resumes of some of the people he’s been tied to, it doesn’t look good.
Good day, Ms. Wenger, forgive my ignorance as a South African, what is/are “The Coachella telegrams”? I tried Google search, however, nothing came up.
Thank you.
Hello, and thanks so much for visiting my website. Very sorry for the confusion. I was referring to telegrams that had been sent by concerned individuals and groups to the FBI and DOJ seeking protection of the United Farm Workers in California’s Coachella Valley from the teamsters. For example, a telegram from the American Friends Service Committee dated 6-24-73 was stamped ST-102, REC-56. Another telegram dated 6-27-73 asking Attorney General Elliott Richardson to intervene isn’t clear who the sender is, and it was not stamped. However a memo on that same topic from the FBI Director to the Sacramento Field Office is stamped ST-102, REC-59.
Basically, in the paragraph you’ve referenced, I was speaking broadly about the range of different kinds of FBI documents that carry ST-102 stamps, and the Coachella/UFW documents were just one of several examples.
Ah I see, thank you so much for the clarification. I love this blog and keep up with it regularly. Thank you for all your hard work on this. It makes for interesting reading.
Thank you so much. And thanks for your question. Now that I think about it, “the Coachella telegrams” kind of has a “Pentagon Papers” ring to it, so I understand why you asked!
I’m struggling with this. And maybe a little dense. I guess I am another who is allergic to JFK assassination theories. But can someone help me out with what it could mean that Ron kind of resembles Lee Harvey Oswald. I do sort of see it. (Although I agree that Ron was more handsome.) What are we getting at, here?
Deena, I’m not there yet, and I’m no expert, but there were reported sightings of Oswald look-alikes in various locations before JFK’s assassination. Also, it’s known that the CIA was attempting to create a Manchurian candidate thru MKUltra…someone who could be hypnotically programmed to assassinate a leader and then to experience amnesia, not remembering anything about it. Hypnosis has been suspected by some to have played a role in RFK’s, MLK’s, and even JFK’s assassination. The CIA claims their Manchurian candidate efforts were unsuccessful, but they’re not always on the up and up with us. My goal is to follow the documents (and the scribbles and stamps on those docs) to see what they can tell us. My original theory has been that Ron was recruited as some sort of undercover operative. That’s still my hope…that he lived a good and full life.
Thank you.
This is wild, Jen. I’ve always been “allergic” to JFK conspiracy theories, but what you turned up can’t be ignored. And Ron does bear a striking resemblance to Oswald – only 6 years his junior – to be sure.
I looked up some details, and apparently Oswald was 5’10, 165 lbs at the time of his arrest.
Ron was 5’10, 155 lbs according to his draft card.
No further comment.
Thanks so much for these thoughts, Mike. I’ll try to keep an open mind and follow the docs to see where they take us. Stay tuned…
First off, I just want to say the physical comparison of my Uncle Ron with Oswald is off. (My uncle was a much more handsome man…haha.)
Reading this gave me the chills. I know you said that you can only say “think” when it comes to your findings but there are so many variables that prove that he was still alive after his disappearance. So, it’s not a stretch to make the conclusions you have in this post. As someone who served and had a career with bureaucratic/government administration, those codes most likely do point to more specific information about the persons and/or document. Bottom line, there would not be any need for these codes on his documents for a college kid that just disappeared and presumed dead. I only wish that my Aunt Marcia and my father were still alive and could have heard this new theory about their brother.
Thank you so much for being so diligent and astute with my uncle’s story.
Hi AT: Thank you so much for taking the time to provide these comments. I appreciate your input so much. I agree 💯 that your uncle was a looker. 😁 I also agree that those marks make no sense for a missing college kid. I’m working on a more detailed tour of Ron’s missing person docs, which I think will drive that point home even further. In addition, I’ve been developing a list of REC numbers under the ST-102 umbrella, and it’s pretty wild to see who Ron falls between. Basically, the subjects progress in this order: JFK, JFK, Ron’s missing person docs plus James McCord’s Watergate burglary, JFK, JFK, JFK, JFK, etc. Very strange. Thank you again for your support!
Holy crap… apologies in advance for the self indulgent comment, but this gave me the creeps: the 1972 interview of David Decker took place less than a mile from where I lived at the time, and long thereafter. Used to run past that house and I think I remember his daughter.
😬
Here’s a theory that’s drifted through my head more than once, but I discounted especially more recently, because it just seemed far-fetched. And keep in mind it’s complete speculation (as I heard someone say, in the absence of facts, speculation thrives). Also I’d like to point out that nothing I’m proposing has to do with dead fish pranks, which is a completely separate issue.
So, what if one of the reasons the CIA wanted Ron was as a mafia liaison? He wasn’t Italian, but he was from the Cleveland area and grew up in a working class family, which I think would have strongly resonated with a lot of those mob guys back then. And this is why – Cleveland was a HUGE mob town, because it’s basically half-way between NYC and Chicago.
I’ve also wondered if the mysterious incident at the Hawthorne country club during the summer of ’52, referred to in Ron Sr’s letter, was mafia-related somehow. There’s too much missing information to even begin to guess how, but I feel like the possibility exists.
Another thing – in the case most similar to Ron’s, the disappearance of Richard Cox, Cox was known to frequent mafia establishments while attending West Point. He also has regional Ohio ties (although further afield, Ashland county I think?) The last alleged sighting was shortly before Bay of Pigs, and we know the mafia was eager to overthrow Castro because they lost a lot of money getting kicked out of Cuba. And given Cox’s military experience in post-war Europe, I could definitely see him as part of Operation Gladio among other things between vanishing (perhaps before?) and winding up in Miami.
I also want to point out that until 1957, J. Edgar Hoover refused to admit there was such a thing as a mafia or organized crime, because he didn’t think criminals could BE organized. That made for a real fox-in-the-hen-house situation (which we can probably assume the CIA took full advantage of). The incident that forced Hoover’s acknowledgement was the Apalachin meeting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apalachin_meeting) in Apalachin, NY. Of note, Google Maps informs me the drive in the year 2024 is almost 2 hours directly east of one Wellsville, NY. Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it’s certainly interesting in light of the supposed “Adirondack Hotel” sighting.
So this definitely brings up more questions than answers, but they’re probably ones that need to be asked.
Interesting theory! And there are LOTS of mobsters who have the ST- stamp…to the point where I was getting a little freaked out. My only issues are a) it would pretty much remove Switzer/Artichoke/LJ West/hypnosis studies/university cover-up behaviors, etc from the equation, which I feel are important. Also b) this is a smaller point, but the Summer ‘52 incident was (ttbomk) when he was working for the city of Maple Heights as opposed to Hawthorn CC. But your points are good and may factor in in some way. Thanks!
That’s fair, particularly the second part. I’m not even particularly convinced of this myself. But I think there’s ways both the mafia and Artichoke/hypnosis/etc could be meshed together. First, there’s good ol’ George White, who was both a Federal Narcotics Agent and CIA consultant with mob connections (IIRC, he was the one who laced a cigarette with THC, gave it to a prominent made man, and got the guy to spill “family” secrets while high). One famous mobster, Whitey Bulger, was an experimentee while incarcerated, and intended to kill the doctor who conducted the experiments because they were so terrible. But also, especially for a new secret spy agency, I’d think the mob would have a lot to teach them: how to hide bodies, launder money, move drugs and weapons, some light torture, stuff they tend to leave out of college courses. And the CIA needed distributors, especially once they started flooding the streets with LSD.
Or, maybe it’s much simpler: CIA needs a domestic black site to keep Ron for whatever reason, it needs to be something not tied to them, but hey, someone knows a guy with some property that people aren’t going to look at too closely at and is more or less defended cause that guy also runs a crime family and will keep quiet. Might have to do him some favors eventually, but that’s how you play the game.
Great points. And the CIA and Mafia did intersect a lot in those days. I just can’t see Ron working within the mob full-time, but we’ll see what we find out. What’s extremely cool about those stamps is that they’re actually giving us a glimpse into what the FBI actually knew about Ron. Anyone can create a sanitized cover story for outsiders but those stamps were a coded language among FBI employees. I’ll never crack the code totally, but I can still get a sense of what Ron was doing based on how they labeled him. At any rate, I’m extremely grateful to the person from Welco Industries who’d called the Cincinnati FBI about the Ron lookalike in April 1973. I think that phone call kicked off the internal investigation that gave us those noteworthy stamps.
He does favor Oswald in looks and build!
That was my first reaction, too: Ron does look like Oswald.
Playing devil’s advocate…. Could ‘Hac’ just be the Latin word ‘here’ or ‘on this page’ calling someone’s attention to a page the way we now use a sticky yellow arrow? Then whoever’s attention is being requested makes a check mark after review. Just my initial reaction.
Interesting. Yeah, no worries. All suggestions welcome. The thing is…even if I’m wrong about the specific
meaning of Hac, and I very well could be, Ron’s ST-102 number was high on the FBI watch list. He would have been on the FBI’s (and HAC’s) radar regardless. The whole Domestic Intelligence/Internal Security issue (which was what the ST numbers fell under, I’ve come to learn) will be a topic for another day. This is one deeeeeeep rabbit hole. Thx👍
Wow, that is crazy! What on earth would tie Ron to JFK? I mean, more than likely there was something more than “Hmm, this college student has been missing for ten years, sounds like a good suspect for assassinating a president, right?”
If anything, I think his documents are telling us that our government knew way more about his case than they were letting on…something we’ve been discovering over and over. Also, bear in mind that a lot of people were being investigated by the House Assassination Committee. I’ve been reading so many names. Nevertheless, he seemed to have a presence, which is so ironic.
This is bonkers!
No questions at this moment.
I need a moment to think and consider.
Wow. And does he look a little like Oswald? Am I the only one who thinks so?!