Walking tour stop #7: Counting the lb’s

I know—this title is very lame and likely to attract perhaps the smallest number of visitors yet, but it’s all I could come up with, considering the scribble we’ll be addressing today. But if you do get past the title and read to the bottom…first, thank you! and second, you’re going to be glad you did. You know why? 

Because we’re getting very close to a major revelation.

The scribble in question looks like this, and Ron has four of them on his missing person documents, always in the righthand column, about midway down.

The first letter is a lowercase l. Usually it looks like a straight line, but sometimes they gave it its characteristic loop, which enables me to state with confidence that it’s an l. The second letter could be a lowercase b, or it could also be an f. (I actually lean toward the latter.) It’s always underlined–always. But bear this in mind: this is not a common mark on FBI documents. In fact, I was just about to give up on finding a match until I delved further into James W. McCord, Jr.’s Watergate records. Then: pay dirt.

Here’s just a sampling I found on McCord et al.

Our friend Hank Greenspun has one as well.

Also Daniel Ellsberg, patriot and hero who risked going to prison to publish the Pentagon Papers, finally exposing the truth about the Vietnam War, has one.

All of these individuals are bound together by none other than James W. McCord, Jr., and they all involve burglaries: one of the DNC Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, one “alleged planned” burglary of Hank Greenspun’s office safe at the Las Vegas Sun, and one at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding. All of these burglaries or planned burglaries were coordinated with “the White House plumbers,” and James W. McCord, Jr., played a lead role.

A few things I’ve noticed about the maker of the lb’s/lf’s:

• They are privy to sensitive intelligence information.

• The mark doesn’t match the initials of the usual FBI assistant directors. It could be that he or she is attempting to conceal their identity.

• Judging by the date stamps on Ron’s documents, it appears that the person wrote his/her mark on them in June 1973. Interestingly, that same person was making that same mark on the Watergate docs during that same time period.

And this brings me to our next announcement:

You guys, I think Ronald Tammen was palling around with James W. McCord, Jr., and may actually have been working for him.

Just a quick word that we have one last announcement to make on our tour, which I’ll be making later this week. Then, shortly thereafter, I’ll be throwing a Walking Tour After-party, where we’ll be discussing some of the less prominent, but still important scribbles on Ron’s docs. At that point, the tour will be officially over, and we’ll be going back to more in-depth reporting. Because…I mean…I don’t know about you, but I think we have a lot to discuss.

Coming next: A Korean War POW who worked at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club in 1963 and who bought a Sears & Roebuck rifle shortly before Kennedy’s assassination but who then disappeared has something on his FBI docs that looks very much like one of Ron’s docs

Thanks to maryferrell.org and TheBlackVault.com for making these documents available.