The official Ronald Tammen FBI doc walking tour —stop #1: Guess who else was listed on the FBI’s Security Index?

OK, I think I’m ready. I’ve been reading and reading and OMG perusing so many FBI documents like crazy and comparing them to Ron Tammen’s missing person records, trying to make sense of it all. And even though I don’t have the end-all, be-all answer for us as to what it all means (and I don’t), I think I have enough information to share with you to get this conversation going.

Plus, if I don’t spill some of this now, I’m going to forget it. I swear I will.

So here’s what’s going to happen: over the next several…let’s say weeks…I’m going to pop into your inbox every once in a while with an announcement. Do NOT plan your days around these announcements. That’s way too much pressure. They will be appearing at random times of the day, when I’m feeling at my creative best, which obviously can vary. One thing is certain: it will NOT be before I’ve fed Herbie his breakfast and had my coffee, so nothing before 8 a.m. Eastern time. Cool? Cool.

The announcement will be something to the tune of “I think blibbidy blah,” and then I’ll be providing documentation in the form of scribbles on FBI records as to why I think that. Or I may not phrase it so tentatively. I might state outright that “I’m 100 percent positive that so-and-so did such-and-such,” and that’ll be pretty much it. 

In essence: I’ll be saying something and then showing you the documentation, and then we’ll all get on with our day. Some announcements will be illuminating, others will be confounding, while others may make you go “meh.” But make no mistake: all announcements will be very, very short.  

Before I make the first announcement, I need to thank two people, without whom we could never conduct this exercise. They are: 1) the anonymous caller who called in a tip to the FBI’s Cincinnati Field Office in April 1973, saying that they felt Ron Tammen was working at Welco Industries in Blue Ash, Ohio. Thank you, anonymous caller!! Though some might consider you a snitch or a tattletale, I think of you as a patriot and a hero! If not for you, Ron’s missing person documents probably wouldn’t have been retrieved from their hiding place in the Missing Person File Room, and passed around from one division to the next, gathering a bunch of new stamps and jottings in the process. And 2) John Edgar Hoover. Without your legendarily iron-fisted style of micro-management in which anyone having to do with a case had to initial the memos and scrawl in other coded messages, we wouldn’t be privy to details concerning who saw Ron’s missing person documents and what they did with them. Thank you, Edgar!!

And now, the announcement that is stop #1 on our tour:

Richard Cox was on the FBI’s Security Index too.

(Coming next: So Richard Cox and Ronald Tammen were both on the FBI’s Security Index. Guess who WASN’T on the list.)