I think I’ve found a clever little way to tell us roughly when Ron—or whatever his new name turned out to be—was added to the FBI Security Index. Was it 1953? 1973? After that?
I think we can tell by the handwriting.
I’m not talking about handwriting analysis, for which I don’t hold a license and am completely unqualified. I’m talking about the side-by-side comparison of two signatures or initials or phrases to see if they look as if they were written by the same person. Unlicensed people with two good eyes have been asked to compare signatures in a variety of important ways over the years, not the least of which is when we go to the voting booth, or to a bank deposit box, or remember traveler’s checks? That’s how businesses could tell if the check you handed them was yours or if it had been stolen—by comparing your signature while you were buying your traveler’s checks to your signature while you were on vacation.
I’ve gotten to know an awful lot of FBI initials and signatures in this exercise, and I’ve also seen a lot of ways that someone might write the words “See index” in the lefthand margins. Here are just a few of the ways.
As a reminder, here’s how “See index” is written in the left margin of the first page of Ron’s missing person documents.
Now, look at this “See index,” which is written on a document that was created on July 30, 1973.
They look the same, don’t they? (The ‘s’ is the giveaway.) This tells me that they were written by the same person, likely at roughly the same time.
So here’s today’s announcement:
I think Ronald Tammen was added to the FBI’s Security Index sometime after the Cincinnati Field Office had sent in the Welco guy’s fingerprints for comparison to Ron’s in May 1973.
If you’re wondering why we’re only looking at the left side of the document, it’s because I’m saving the right side for our next announcement.
Coming next: you guys, I think we’ve been hacked…in a good way.
I wonder if all these guys were not in the index initially (or taken out) because the FBI assumed the CIA had their people on a leash. Still monitored them, because J. Edgar was such a micro-manager, but they weren’t elevated until 1963 and realized the call was coming from inside the house. (And not adding Ron til ’73-ish could have been another oversight in the chaos of the 1960s.) I’d love to see what intelligence those two organizations collected on each other, lol.
I have a feeling that we’re seeing a fraction of the documents–and that applies to pretty much everyone on the Security Index, not just Ron. It could be that when Ron’s docs were removed from the Missing Person File Room, they were of such an eye-popping nature that FBI officials added him to the Security Index for what was already in there. Or it could be that he was involved in something significant in 1973 or possibly later, and they added the “See index” note to the first page of his file, which I believe was common. As we’ll discuss in the next post, I do think that he was actually involved in something in 1973…in addition to whatever he’d been up to before that.
I agree, especially since everything was in hardcopy, that’s a lot of paper to store and keep track of. They measured that St Louis warehouse in acreage, and that was before the existance of Amazon. It’s a little surprising that, for example, there was ONLY one cache of MKUltra documents the CIA forgot to destroy (that we know of). Plus, how much was misplaced, misfiled, or accidentally went home with someone?
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