We’re going to take a break from the “see index”es for a little while—but, trust me, we’ll be circling back. There’s something I’m saving for the end of the tour that (in my view) is a rather big deal.
In the meantime, let’s talk about a scribble that’s noticeably prominent in the left margin of a bunch of Ron’s missing person documents. It looks like a lowercase p and h written in cursive—or is it a lowercase p and capital L?
Whatever it is, it’s another one of those identifying marks that seems to be rarely seen on other FBI documents in general, but when you do, it’s an instant thrill. It’s like when a 10-point buck warily steps out of the woods to peer at you from the opposite end of a one-lane underpass just as it’s your turn to drive through (which happened to me a week or so ago!). Or a hummingbird that swoops in out of nowhere and hovers over your friend’s hostas as you’re standing a foot away knocking on her front door (which happened to me in July!). The magnificently elusive ph (or pL…it’s very hard to tell sometimes) was typically reserved for people who weren’t regarded as choir boys. To be sure, many, though certainly not all, of the recipients lived some seriously sordid lives. Other recipients were wonderful people whom the FBI didn’t trust—people like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Harry Belafonte.
Today I’ll be showcasing all of Ron’s ph’s and/or pL’s along with a gallery of others I’ve found that were unmistakably written by the same person.
I’ll also be presenting similar handwriting that occurs on an FBI document that discusses…well…I’ll tell you at the end when I make today’s announcement.
Here are Ron’s documents that have the ph/pL on them:
And here are other people’s documents. If you’d like additional background, click on the link for each subject.
Angleo Bruno was boss of the Philadelphia crime family from 1959 until his assassination in 1980. He was referred to as “The Gentle Don” because he preferred to resolve issues without resorting to violence.
The FBI’s Extremist Photograph Album (actually, there were more than one) was just that… photo albums of extremists to supply background information and to assist in identification. In this memo, the FBI’s Intelligence Division is discussing the Secret Service’s request for a copy.
HERMAN MILTON GREENSPUN, aka Hank
Hank Greenspun was the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun whose office safe was the target of an “alleged planned burglary” in 1972 by E. Howard Hunt, James W. McCord, and G. Gordon Liddy, among others. In my last post, I wrote about how Greenspun’s FBI documents share notations with Ron Tammen, namely “see index” and Hac. Now we have another notation that they share. By the way, I’m excited to announce that there’s a movie about Hank Greenspun that’s narrated by Anthony Hopkins!
Richard Cox, from Mansfield, Ohio, was a cadet at West Point Academy who disappeared January 14, 1950. His story has some interesting parallels to Ron’s, which we’ve detailed on this blog.
John Roselli was a famous mobster who was recruited by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro.
BAPBOMB was FBI shorthand for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, by the Ku Klux Klan.
COINTELPRO was a program in which the FBI surveilled and engaged in other illegal activities to disrupt organizations that they felt were dangerous, including the Communist Party, the KKK, the New Left, the Black Panthers, and others. COINTELPRO stands for Counterintelligence Program. NEW LEFT refers to a broad umbrella of people advocating for liberal-leaning social causes. (Note that the ph is on the right side, while all of the others were like Ron’s, on the left.)
SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHP CONFERENCE, RACIAL MATTERS
The SCLC continues to thrive as a human rights organization that had its start with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the organization’s first president.
Klaus Barbie was a notorious Nazi who was nicknamed “the Butcher of Lyon” for the atrocities he committed as Gestapo chief in Lyon, France. After WWII, the U.S. Army helped him escape to Bolivia in exchange for his assistance in reporting communist activities. In 1983, he was spotted in Peru and was extradited to France to face trial for war crimes. He was convicted and died of cancer in 1991 while serving a life sentence.
Now, as promised, I’d like to share with you two pages from a lengthy FBI document that has handwriting that, in my view, looks quite a bit like our ph or pL, though not exactly. The document was sent to members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence in August 1975 in response to a request they’d made. (The House Select Committee on Intelligence preceded the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which was created the following year, in 1976.)
Written at the top of the first document, among other notes, are the words “Place in file in folder.” I’m thinking that the “Pl” in “Place” looks a lot like our ph’s or pL’s. On the second page is a ph or PL or pl in front of the word Dean. Again, it looks a lot like the same handwriting to me.
Once you get past the telephone directories, the lion’s share of this FBI document discusses “Informants” and it appears to be part of the FBI’s Manual of Instructions on how agents are instructed to work with and reimburse criminal or security informants. I have no idea if that topic applies to our documents—in fact, I highly doubt that they do. What I do find intriguing and helpful is the source of these documents. On the title page of a section called “Policy – Informant and Informant Payments,” a page that’s near the end of a lengthy “Item H,” someone has written “Cregar Copy.” In fact, “Cregar Copy” has been written on several pages in this document, which leads me to believe that all of the informant pages came from someone named Cregar.
As it turns out, the Cregar in question is William O. Cregar, who headed up the Counterintelligence Section of what was, by then, called the Intelligence Division (as opposed to Domestic Intelligence). Earlier in his career, he’d been the FBI’s liaison with the CIA, though the person in that role in 1975 was Leon F. Schwartz.
I have a guess as to who the person was who made the ph or pL marks on the aforementioned documents, but I don’t think today’s the day for me to go public with that. But here’s what I think we can deduce, which is my next announcement:
I think that whoever made Ron’s ph’s or pL’s was either part of the FBI’s Intelligence Division (likely a staffer in Bill Cregar’s Counterintelligence Section) or someone on the House Select Committee on Intelligence. And if I have to choose between the two of them, I choose the former.
Coming next: 2-D or not 2-D; that’s the conundrum
Thanks to maryferrell.org and blackvault.com for access to these documents.
I have never seen it used in marginalia before, but within a text, “ph” is used to denote “phonetic.” It is used to mean that the author used spelled the named based on how they heard the word. [i.e. to let the reader know the spelling could be incorrect.]
Alternatively, “ph” could be used to let the reader know they should pronounce the word phonetically as spelled.
For the Tammen documents, that seemed to jive. The “ph” was roughly in line with the use of the word “Tammen.” And the name was underlined.
My speculation was that these may be notes from or to a stenographer who was dealing with the document for some archival purpose.
However, I’m not sure this theory of my holds out up with the non-Tammen documents, as I don’t see that “ph” lining up with a word/name that would require attention drawn to its phonetic pronunciation.
Happy new year, and thanks for your comments. I’ll be responding to both of your comments here, since they’re related.
It’s an interesting theory, but I don’t think “ph” stands for “phonetic,” for the following reasons:
First, if the memo/report writer was spelling out Tammen’s name as best he could, without asking Marjorie Tammen for the correct spelling (which seems negligent on his part), he would type in the word “phonetic” immediately after Tammen’s name within his own memo. I’ve seen FBI reports on other cases where the writer had obtained info from an informant and was unsure of a spelling, and that’s how they handled it. On the other hand, if one of the memo’s recipients knew the correct spelling, they’d jot in the correct spelling within the document (they’d cross out the word and write in the correct spelling overtop) as opposed to making a general “phonetic” notation in the margin. I’ve come to learn that Hoover’s FBI was super vigilant about spelling, so they really did try to get it right. What I haven’t found through all the documents I’ve been reading is any attention to how a name was pronounced. I don’t think they really cared about that, at least in their official reports. So spelling yes, pronunciation, no. But even if the FBI officials back then did care about how someone’s name was pronounced, I’d be more inclined to see them making those kinds of notations for a name that’s harder to figure out how to say, such as someone from Cuba or Russia who they were watching closely. There’s no other way to pronounce Tammen than TAM-men, with a short ‘a’ and a short ‘e’ (or is that what they call a schwa? I forget), because of the double m’s. Have I heard some people pronounce it TAY-men? I have, but those people are wrong.
With that said, I think it’s possible that the ph is someone’s initials or a variation thereof. The reason I think this is that they’re so similar looking and, from what I can tell, the ph’s fall within a short timeframe–beginning in 1960 and running through the late 70s–spanning the length of a typical 20-year FBI career. Even so, the location of the ph’s is telling, since the left margin of the FBI documents wasn’t used for people’s signatures. FBI special agents generally signed or initialed memos at the top, the bottom, and maybe occasionally in the right margin. That includes FBI Directors J. Edgar Hoover, Patrick Gray, and Clarence Kelley, as well as their top assistants. But that left margin was reserved for the more serious notations, like “see index,” for example. So if ph was a person, I think that person had a very special role within his or her division and the placement of those initials was to convey an important message to whomever the reader was.
Any chance the marks were made by a clerk who operated a camera and/or (ph)otocopier to make facsimiles of documents?
While it definitely could be someone lower on the chain of command, I don’t think it would be someone with copying/faxing responsibility, since I would be seeing a lot more ph’s on docs. I’m afraid I’ve spoiled you all, since I’ve placed these docs all on the same blog page and it makes it look like the ph’s were used frequently. They really weren’t. I mean, whenever I spot one, I kind of fist pump the air, I get so worked up.
But as long as we’re discussing who it could be…the person I have in mind is someone’s assistant, and, OK, I’ll say it…that person was Leon F. Schwartz, the FBI’s CIA liaison in 1975. In fact, I had a hunch that Leon’s assistant was the possible ph writer even before I found the letters at the top of the two pages of the informant document. Still, I could be wrong that it’s her, which is fine. I think basically, the take-home is that the informant document came from William O, Cregar while Cregar was head of the Counterintelligence Section of the Intelligence Division. (He retired from the FBI in 1980.) And other than Cregar and his staff, the only other people who could have written those letters at the top of the informant document were individuals associated with the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which I don’t think was the case. That’s why I think it’s a pretty safe bet that they were made by someone in Intelligence. And when you think about it, it really doesn’t matter who it was. For Ron Tammen, who was ostensibly still missing, to have his FBI documents scribbled on by the same Intelligence staffer who scribbled on John Roselli’s, Klaus Barbie’s, and Hank Greenspun’s documents…that’s significant.
Another commenter asked me if I’d consider having a handwriting analyst look at these documents, and I answered that I’d like to narrow things down first. I think this would be one of things that I’d like to get confirmed by a professional–that the ph’s on Ron’s documents were made by the same person who wrote at the top of the informant document and, if so, if that person happened to be Leon F. Schwartz’s assistant. That would be really good to know.
It may be stenographer’s shorthand/note for “phonetic.” Used to indicate:
1. I spelled a word as it sounded when spoken; or,
2. The word should be pronounced phonetically as spelled.
Stenographer and shorthand aren’t much of a thing anymore. But I recall my mother telling me that, in her day, many of the girls learned it in high school. (As secretarial work would have been common for young women back then.)
IMO, the letters look more like ph than pl.
Sad that the U.S. government would help and use some Nazis instead of bringing them to justice.
Would the FBI know the CIA was trying to get a mobster to kill Castro?
I agree with you. Some of the things that the U.S. government did in the name of “national security” (e.g., helping Klaus Barbie escape justice, Operation Paperclip, MKULTRA/ARTICHOKE, etc…) were (in my view) indefensibly abhorrent. As for what the FBI knew about the Castro assassination plots, I don’t know what they knew, though the plots weren’t made public until 1975. But as a Chicago/LA/Las Vegas mobster, John Roselli would have been on their radar anyway.