Ronald Tammen’s FBI documents have been put in the same category as 1) an alleged plot to assassinate Spiro Agnew and 2) an alleged plot to assassinate Sirhan Sirhan

By now, I think we’ve all come to terms with the notion that Ronald Tammen in his adult years wasn’t the same person everyone had known when he was in his teens. Mind you, we still don’t know Ron’s whole story. We don’t know what predicaments he experienced after he disappeared, nor do we know the sorts of things he did when presented with said predicaments. But judging by his surviving FBI documents, we can see that Ron’s life after his disappearance was wildly different from his days as the solemn and studious business major from Maple Heights, Ohio. It was almost as if the day he went missing, he’d entered a bizarro world where up became down, where dull became exciting, where cash-strapped became cash-solvent, where good became, well…I’m not quite ready to go there.

At least for now, let’s cut him some slack and leave it at this: after Ron Tammen disappeared, his life had grown complicated.

Someday, in the not-too-distant future, I plan to share with you just how complicated his life had become. We already know that the FBI had added him to their infamous Security Index. That alone would complicate matters for any person. 

When I started researching Ron’s disappearance, I can remember reading about some of his attributes, and someone close to him would sometimes be quoted saying that he’d been on the Dean’s List or that he’d been asked to join Phi Beta Kappa or something like that as examples of how smart he was. To date, I’ve found no evidence of either of those things being true. For Ron to be listed on the FBI’s Security Index, which is something for which we do have evidence, is the bizarro opposite of Phi Beta Kappa times 100.

Hopefully soon, I’ll be providing a grand tour of every stamp and squiggle on his missing person documents and giving you my most educated guess of their meaning as well as some of the people in our country’s history who shared those same marks with him. And trust me, you will be surprised—even those of you who feel that nothing more can surprise you about Ron Tammen. But I want to be 100% certain I’ve done my due diligence, which is why I’m being so slow and methodical before writing that post.

In the meantime, I want to discuss a couple dots that are easier to connect. They have to do with the following stamps on Ron’s records, two of which we’ve already discussed somewhat in prior posts:

ST-102, REC-19, and MCT-49.

I’m still not sure what most of these letters and numbers stand for, and it’s not because I haven’t tried. I’ve shown Ron’s records to every FBI contact I’ve ever met over the past 14 years, and no one has offered an explanation. As I mentioned in the comments section on my last post, recently, I asked an online history group from the National Archives, and they kindly consulted with their contacts at the FBI. Their response was that they were likely the stamps of the Records Division to help with indexing and serialization. 

I respectfully disagree. The Records Division may have had a say in assigning the actual case numbers, but they wouldn’t have been involved in assigning these stamps, which were repetitive and erratically placed and which seemed to convey coded information about the case itself. And so, using my eyes and my ability to compare and contrast one FBI document from another, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

ST stamp

The ST stamp appears on some the most sensitive FBI documents I’ve found online. Not all documents that share the same ST number are on the same topic, but they all seem to be a bigger deal than a run-of-the-mill FBI record. Here’s what I’ve ascertained:

• They seem to deal with serious crimes or highly sensitive topics.
• They deal with topics that pertain to the FBI’s former Domestic Intelligence Division and specifically with internal security, which is why I think they were assigned by people in that division.
• The lower the number, the more important they seem to be, starting at ST-100. Therefore, ST-101 appears to be more sensitive than ST-141, and so on. Ron’s number, ST-102, seems to have been assigned to some of the steamiest hot-potato cases in the eyes of the FBI.
• The ST numbers are invariably accompanied by a stamp with the letters REC.

I’ve come to notice that earlier intelligence documents didn’t use the ST designation. They started with the letters SE instead of ST. This makes sense since, before the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division came to be, there was the Security Division. SE could be short for Security. So far, the documents that I’ve found that started with SE did so from around 1946 through the late 1950s. To the best of my knowledge, the documents with ST designations were date-stamped from the early 1960s through 1974, or thereabouts.

REC stamp

I now know that the letters REC stand for RECORDED, and they include a number to the right of them. In Ron’s case, that number is 19. According to the book “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been In the FBI Files?”, to be recorded means that “a document has been placed in the appropriate file, and has been given a case and a serial number.” But, in my view, the REC number can’t just mean that alone. Otherwise, why would there be different numbers—why not a little box to check? And why would they always accompany an ST number? From what I can tell, the REC numbers seemed to provide additional info about a given case. For this reason, I believe that the FBI viewed documents with the same ST/REC numbers as somehow similar or related and ostensibly that they should be grouped together. More on this in a second.

MCT stamp

From what I can tell, the MCT numbers are tied to the Security Index. If a person was listed in the Security Index, it was extremely likely they had an MCT number. Ron was in the Security Index and his MCT number was 49. One thing I’ve noticed is that if a person was on the FBI’s radar in the early 1950s, around the time that the Security Division was handing out SE’s and not ST’s, they didn’t appear to be assigning MCT numbers. Even if a person was of extreme interest to them in the area of internal security, they didn’t have an MCT number.

So keeping all of the above in mind, do you know what I think about Ron’s missing person documents? I think the FBI stamped his pages in June 1973 after the Cincinnati Field Office had sent the guy from Welco’s fingerprints to FBI Headquarters for comparison to Ron’s prints. The reason is that they weren’t using either the ST or the MCT stamps in 1953. To date, the earliest MCT stamp that I’ve found was assigned in 1958 and the earliest ST stamp was in 1962. I think Ron’s papers had been languishing for decades in the Missing Person File Room, room number 1126 of the Identification Building, and were only known to a chosen few, J. Edgar Hoover being one of them. After Hoover died in 1972, and after the Cincinnati Field Office had inquired about Ron’s prints on May 9, 1973, other staffers had to come up to speed on Ron’s case which is when I believe he received his steamy stamps of the hot-potato variety.

This information is especially useful to us as we compare Ron’s documents to other records from 1973, which is why I’ve called all of us together at this time when many of you would like to get back to watching the Olympics. (P.S. Weren’t the Opening Ceremonies amazing last night?  Wasn’t Celine Dion INCREDIBLE??)

Here’s a document with an MCT-49 stamp from February 1973. The document has to do with the Black Panthers and an alleged plot to assassinate Vice President Spiro Agnew.

Here’s an ST-102, REC-19 stamp on a document from August 1973. The document has to do with an alleged plot to assassinate Sirhan Sirhan. To see the full report, click on the below image.

And here’s page one of Ron’s FBI docs, for comparison.

What I’m trying to say here is that Ron was given his MCT-49 stamp four months after a document telling of a potential assassination plot against Spiro Agnew had been given the same stamp. He was given his ST-102, REC-19 stamps a mere two months before someone who was given the same stamps, a guy named Vladimir Zatko, claimed to have been paid $25K in advance to assassinate Sirhan Sirhan.

Incidentally, I found the Sirhan Sirhan/Vladimir Zatko documents tucked inside some of the James W. McCord records, the former CIA operative and Watergate burglar about whom I’ve written before. We’re interested in McCord because he and Ron both have ST-102, REC-19 stamps, though McCord’s extensive FBI file has other ST/REC stamps as well. But here’s what’s interesting about Zatko and McCord: James McCord’s name isn’t listed anywhere in the Vladimir Zatko letter, yet they were assigned the same ST-102, REC-19 stamps and someone from the FBI felt that McCord and Zatko should be filed together. E. Howard Hunt, a fellow CIA operative and mastermind of the Watergate burglary, is mentioned, but not McCord. (Apparently anything or anyone having to do with Watergate was filed under McCord, which doesn’t exactly seem fair.)

I just thought this development was important enough to warrant putting the TV on pause for a second.

Have a good weekend.