Ron, Dan, Jim, and Hank: four all-American ‘bad boys’ in the summer of ‘73

It’s been a while since we last communicated, and for that, I apologize. It’s just that reading hundreds of pages of FBI documents morning, noon, and night can wear a girl out. Also, I don’t like to post updates unless I have something noteworthy to tell you. I respect you and your downtime that much.

Today, we’ll be discussing the very small window of time when everything came to a head with regards to the mystery of Ron Tammen. I’ll also be providing the names of a couple people whom I (currently) believe were responsible for two of the more prominent marks that appear on Ron’s FBI documents, along with a surprise discovery concerning someone else we know. Aaaaaand I think we’ll also be throwing in a little pop culture here and there, because the early 1970s played a very big role in helping this girl blossom into the Good-Hearted, Hard-Headed, Do-Right, and, at times, Witchy Woman who has been chasing this story down for the past 15 years.

(Speaking of the latter, I’m afraid my witchiness was on full display this week when I was on a run and some guy almost hit me with his car even though I clearly had the right of way. Let’s just say that I doubt that he’ll be making any right or left turns without first checking in every possible direction to make sure I’m nowhere in sight. Neither will any of the eyewitnesses.)

First let’s talk pop culture. I can barely recall the sorts of things I was doing in the summer of 1973, which is probably a good thing. I was woefully immature back then. I will say this: the music was pretty good, though, admittedly, there was some seriously awful stuff being churned out too. No matter what the Billboard chart says, the best song that year was, in my opinion, Midnight Train to Georgia, which was released on August 4, 1973. It’s weird to think back to a time when no one had heard Gladys Knight and the Pips sing their iconic song, but these are the days we’ll be primarily focused upon here. Put another way, in May, June, and July of 1973, Ronald Tammen, Daniel Ellsberg, James McCord, and Herman Greenspun didn’t have the opportunity to crank up that soulful tune and belt out some of the best back-up lyrics EVER as they were stress driving their sedans down D.C.’s Constitution Avenue, or the Vegas Strip, or wherever else they happened to be—at a time when they were being investigated by the FBI for acts of subterfuge that were (ostensibly) committed by or against them. 

But make no mistake: Ronald Tammen, Daniel Ellsberg, James McCord, and Herman Greenspun were being closely watched by key people at the FBI and they were being linked together in some way. (We haven’t discussed Daniel Ellsberg much, so for those who need a quick tutorial, he was actually a hero, despite the federal government’s treating him like a traitor. Ellsberg was responsible for leaking a report on the Vietnam War that showed that the government had been lying to the country all along about how things were going. The report came to be referred to as the Pentagon Papers, and its release helped bring the Vietnam War to an end. Needless to say, Nixon was not pleased with Ellsberg, and in September 1971, Ellsberg became the first victim of a now-familiar scheme by which the former president dealt with his perceived adversaries. More on that in a few.)

Instead of writing this up as a Q&A, which is usually my favorite way of reporting something important quickly, we’re going to go with a timeline. We’ll also be focusing on three familiar identifying marks that were stamped or scribbled on the FBI records of two or more of the four men during the summer of 1973. All of the men have one of the marks in common, two of the men share two of the marks, and one of the men, Ron Tammen, was given all three of the marks. The marks in question are: 

lf, 

ST-102/REC-19,

and Hac. 

Ready, set, go!

—1970—

July 1970

To set the stage, we need to start three years earlier, in July 1970, when famed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was still very much alive and in charge and carrying a festering grudge against the CIA. At the time the CIA was established in 1947, Hoover had believed his FBI was perfectly capable of protecting the safety and security of American citizens, both domestically and abroad, and he didn’t want anyone invading his turf. Nevertheless, Congress went ahead and created the CIA anyway and, up through the 1960s, the two agencies attempted to stay in their own lanes—with the FBI gathering its intelligence at home and the CIA being responsible for international operations. They kept abreast of each other’s activities through the FBI’s liaison program, which was part of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division. 

For many years, Sam Papich was the FBI’s liaison to the CIA, and he kept the communication channels open as best he could with people at high levels of both agencies. However, there were times when one agency would cross a boundary, be it inadvertently or advertently, causing the infringed-upon agency to add a new transgression to its list of grievances. By the middle of July 1970, Hoover had had enough. He discontinued the FBI’s Liaison Section, which not only had coordinated activities with the CIA, but also with some 80 other federal agencies as well as legal attaches in the FBI’s foreign offices. The Liaison Section was drastically reduced and renamed the Special Coordination Unit, which limited its coordinating activities to the FBI’s foreign offices and the White House, Office of the Vice President, and National Security Council. The CIA and FBI were officially incommunicado.

—1971—

June 13, 1971 (Sunday)

The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, which, as we just discussed, were leaked by RAND Corporation’s former analyst Daniel Ellsberg. Richard Nixon is furious. They publish two more installments on June 14 and 15, but are ordered to stop.

June 15, 1971 (Tuesday)

In response to the New York Times series, the FBI begins investigating Daniel Ellsberg at the request of Attorney General John Mitchell.

September 3, 1971 (Friday)

Individuals affiliated with the White House, CIA, and FBI, aka the “White House plumbers,” break into the office of Lewis Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, looking for documents they could use to discredit Ellsberg. The burglars include former FBI special agent G. Gordon Liddy and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt. We’ll be bumping into those names again very soon.

—1972—

May 2, 1972 (Tuesday)

On this day, the world was informed that J. Edgar Hoover had died in his sleep. I won’t be getting into all the details, but suffice it to say that this was a big deal for the FBI. Soon, his “official and confidential” files would become public knowledge, as would his scurrilous special file rooms, and the illegal means by which the FBI was getting some of its intel. That’s the trouble with guarding so many secrets when you’re alive—when you die, eventually those secrets are going to come out. As the public learned of the FBI’s unscrupulous surveillance methods, Hoover’s image, as well as the image of his beloved FBI, would be severely tarnished.

May 28, 1972 (Sunday)

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but, up until yesterday, I hadn’t realized that there were in fact two Watergate burglaries. The first break-in into the Democratic National Headquarters in D.C.’s Watergate Hotel occurred on this day—Sunday, May 28—and it involved a familiar cast of characters. G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt were there as the planners and overseers, while seven burglars, including former CIA operative James Walter McCord, Jr., and six Cuban expatriates, did the work. The point of the break-in was to plant bugging devices and to photograph documents, and apparently, everything went swimmingly.

June 17, 1972 (Saturday), part 1

THIS is the date that’s best known as Watergate. In the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, a little over six weeks after Hoover’s death, five men wearing blue surgical gloves are caught in DNC Headquarters on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel. According to one FBI record, the five were discovered in an executive conference room area. In another document, they were discovered in the office of Phillip Seib, an assistant to DNC chair Larry O’Brien. No matter where they were standing when they were caught, this is the beginning of what will forever be known as the Watergate scandal. Eventually, it would come out that G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt were the masterminds, though they weren’t arrested that night. The five so-called burglars who were arrested were James McCord, Frank Sturgis, and three Cuban expats. As we’ve discussed in another blog post, Sturgis has been described as a soldier of fortune who’d become heavily involved in Cuban affairs, including (allegedly) helping the CIA with the Bay of Pigs. 

The FBI reports during this early period of the Watergate investigation are messier than usual, probably because new info was coming in as fast as they could type it up. There are lots of handwritten edits. The lists of the burglars’ names and aliases are marked up in a chaotic fashion. McCord’s name isn’t even included on an early report, though his alias, Edward Martin, is. In the ensuing reports, we begin to see an underlined loopy lowercase “L” in the right margin. It appears to mean something significant, like “liaison” maybe, even though, as we all know, the FBI doesn’t have a liaison dedicated to the CIA anymore. But I’m 100 percent positive that someone from the FBI would have contacted someone at the CIA about the burglary early on. They would have been nuts not to, given Hunt’s, McCord’s, and (allegedly) Sturgis’ ties to the CIA.

Here’s the underlined loopy l. Remember its location in the right margin because it’s going to be replaced soon.

June 17, 1972, part 2

The memo stating that the burglars were discovered in Phillip Seib’s office was written by the Miami Field Office at 3:10 p.m. Eastern time the day of the break-in. What’s interesting about it is that it looks as if the word Hac is written at the top, similar to the Hacs at the top of Ron’s documents. Someone has also assigned a number 1 with a dash nearby, similar to the number 10 that Ron was given. But there are obvious differences between Ron’s Hacs and the word written here. Even though the letters are nearly impossible to make out, we can see that there are at least five or six of them instead of the three in Hac. I think it’s someone’s name.

I have about 10 people in mind who might have written Hac at the top of Ron’s documents, and that doesn’t include the office assistants who might have been the authors as well. Plus, it could be that more than one person was involved in writing Ron’s Hacs. But this H looks so much like Ron’s, especially the one from November 29, 1963, that I can’t discount it. It’s in the right location and it has an accompanying number.

As for the name of the person who wrote the H-word at the top of the Seib memo? I think it was…

Russell H. Horner.

Russell Horner has been one of my top ten contenders for Ron’s Hac writer, and I think this Seib memo bolsters that theory. My reasons are: 1) The H resembles the H in Hac on Ron’s documents, especially the one from November 1963; 2) It looks as if the word written at the top of the Seib document could be Horner; and, most telling of all, 3) “Mr. Horner” is cc’d at the bottom of page two. 

Here’s why Russell Horner’s name is significant: The Watergate scandal was principally overseen by the FBI’s General Investigative Division (Division 6), which was headed by Charles A. Nuzum. However, Russell Horner was part of the Domestic Intelligence Division (Division 5), in the Internal Security Section. Although I can’t confirm his job title in 1972, I can say with confidence that he was the chief of the Special Records and Related Research Unit immediately before he retired, which I believe was sometime in 1974. 

What’s the Special Records and Related Research Unit, you ask? According to a Domestic Intelligence inspection report filed in August 1972, the SRRR Unit was responsible for the administration of some of the most sensitive records created by the FBI, including the FBI’s defense plans; records pertaining to “electronic surveillances and other sophisticated investigative techniques” (the inspector’s words); and records pertaining to the Administrative Index (ADEX), which was the successor to the FBI’s extremely hush-hush, never-to-be-spoken-of-aloud Security Index.

Because Horner is cc’d on the Seib document, we can state unequivocally that Domestic Intelligence was brought into the Watergate investigation on day 1. Domestic Intelligence was also the division that I believe added a number of stamps and scribbles to Ron’s pages as well—including Ron’s “see index” notation—which tells me that we’re in the right place. 

I filed a FOIA request for Russell Horner’s personnel file on December 16, 2024, to see if it might provide some additional details. I’m still waiting for the FBI to acknowledge that request. (Usually, it takes no more than a few days for them to send an acknowledgment, but I’m going to presume that their tardiness is due to the holidays and not because they don’t like my request.) Admittedly, if Russell Horner is the Hac author, then the letters H-a-c can’t possibly be an acronym for the House Assassination Committee, as I’d suggested in my June 16, 2024, post. The House Select Committee on Assassinations wasn’t established until 1976 and, as I said, I believe Russell Horner had retired from the FBI in 1974. We’ll see what I can learn from his file when I eventually get it. 

June 29, 1972 (Thursday)

Twelve days after the second Watergate break-in, and 57 days after Hoover’s death, David D. Kinley, assistant to Acting Director L. Patrick Gray, sent a memo to W. Mark Felt, now the number two man in the FBI, seeking his thoughts on how they might go about reestablishing the Liaison Section. Obviously, there was an enormous need to bring back the liaisons, particularly with regards to the CIA, and now that Hoover was gone, they didn’t have his massive ego to worry about. The next day, Felt sent a memo to Kinley offering up his thoughts, and suggesting Leon F. Schwartz, who was then chief of the Special Coordination Unit, as the potential head. Schwartz had the proper skill set and had fostered valuable contacts as a liaison with the U.S. Air Force and other agencies including those in intelligence. Edward S. Miller, head of Domestic Intelligence, let Mark Felt know that he had other people in mind as candidates to head up the Liaison Section. It would take the FBI a few months to set up the new chain of command, and by October 1972, Leon F. Schwartz was the new liaison to the CIA.

July 17, 1972 (Monday)

To the best of my knowledge, the lf mark first appears on the McCord Watergate documents on this date, replacing the loopy lowercase L in the right margin. Although he isn’t officially named as the liaison to the CIA until October, I think Leon F. Schwartz would have been the most obvious person who could immediately step in to assist in communicating with the CIA during the early months of Watergate. He was still the chief of the Special Coordination Unit at this point. Also, the lf marks appear on the McCord documents through at least June 25, 1973, when Schwartz had been the official liaison to the CIA for 8 months. The initials often appear near sentences in which a topic relevant to the CIA is mentioned. Quite simply, he had to have seen these documents. For this reason, I think lf stands for Leon Francis, the FBI’s main conduit to the CIA. I think he kept his last initial off to keep his identity secret.

—1973—

We’re now into 1973, when everything eventually comes together for our foursome. Unfortunately, this is also where the timeline can get a little confusing. One day we’re talking about one guy and the next day, we’re totally focused on someone else. I suppose that’s what happens when four people’s lives seemingly converge in the eyes of the FBI. But note that we’re still primarily concentrating on the three marks—the lf, the ST-102/REC-19, and the letters H-a-c. And don’t worry about trying to keep everything straight. I’m going to summarize it all at the end and (spoiler alert!) I’m including a colorful chart.

January 8, 1973 (Monday)

The Watergate trials begin. By the end of the month, five of the seven have pleaded guilty, while two (McCord and Liddy) were convicted. Because James McCord cooperated with the prosecution (he wrote a letter to Judge Sirica explaining that Watergate was much bigger than people realized), he served only 4 months in prison. Frank Sturgis served 13 months in prison, E. Howard Hunt served 33 months, and G. Gordon Liddy served the longest time—52 months.

January 17, 1973 (Wednesday)

The trial of Daniel Ellsberg and his friend and former colleague Anthony Russo begins. This was actually their second trial. The first had been declared a mistrial after it was revealed that the FBI had illegally wiretapped a conversation between Ellsberg and his attorney. According to an extremely helpful and detailed write-up from the University of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law, the men faced “fifteen counts related to the theft of government documents and espionage. If convicted on all counts, Ellsberg faced the prospect of a 105-year prison sentence.” 

May 8, 1973 (Tuesday)

In response to a request from Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, Edward S. Miller, of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, wrote a memo to Mark Felt describing everything the FBI knew pertaining to the CIA’s involvement in the Daniel Ellsberg case. The memo, which has sizable redactions, includes details concerning the break-in into Lewis Fielding’s office by Hunt, Liddy, and several others, including several Cubans. Someone signs lf on this document.

May 9, 1973 (Wednesday)

After receiving an anonymous tip, the Cincinnati Field Office writes to FBI Headquarters asking for a comparison of fingerprints between Ron Tammen and an employee of Welco Industries. The reason for the tip is that Hamilton Journal-News reporter Joe Cella had written a 20-year anniversary article about Ron Tammen’s disappearance, and the tipster thought Ron’s photo looked like someone they knew. I’m forever grateful to Cella for writing his article and to the anonymous tipster too. If this sequence of events hadn’t happened, I don’t think we’d have the stamps and scribbles on Tammen’s documents that we’re able to use for comparison today.

May 11, 1973 (Friday)

Judge William Byrne dismisses all charges against Daniel Ellsberg, citing government misconduct. He lists the Hunt-Liddy break-in into Lewis Fielding’s office and the FBI’s illegal wiretaps among his reasons.

May 14, 1973 (Monday)

This is the first date-stamp appearing on Ron’s records after the Cincinnati Field Office sent in their fingerprint request. Other date-stamps, which I believe represent various divisions or sections within the FBI, include June 5, June 8, June 14, and June 27. This is intriguing, since FBI Headquarters had written to the Cincinnati Field Office on May 22 letting them know that Ron’s fingerprints weren’t a match to the man from Welco Industries. But they continued to be interested in Ron’s case, and passed around his documents for at least another month. 

June 14, 1973 (Thursday)

Most of Ron’s documents carry a stamp dated June 14, 1973, in the lower lefthand corner, which is preceded by the number 70. (The 70 means something to the FBI, no doubt, but I have no idea what.) Nine of Ron’s documents received the June 14 date-stamp, four of which carry the initials lf.

June 15, 1973 (Friday)

The VERY NEXT DAY, Richard G. Hunsinger signed his initials as the “approving official” at the bottom of a report from the FBI’s Chicago Field Office with the subject “JAMES WALTER MC CORD, et al.” As you may recall, Richard G. Hunsinger is the FBI official who’d grown up in Oxford, Ohio, graduated from Miami University, and served in the Administrative Division at FBI Headquarters for most of his career. His mother, Leah Hunsinger, was a cashier at Oxford National Bank for many years, the same bank that was headed up by people with extremely close ties to Miami, and where Ron Tammen and Dorothy Craig both had checking accounts. 

For comparison, here are two samples of his initials that I’d retrieved from other documents:

What’s odd about this discovery is that, normally, Richard Hunsinger had nothing to do with the Watergate investigation. Why would a guy who mostly dealt with personnel matters throw himself into the middle of the FBI’s high-profile investigation of James McCord? Also, how coincidental was it that the Watergate document that he’d signed and that someone marked lf was dated one day after Ron Tammen’s missing person documents had reached someone’s desk, and that they, too, would receive 4 lf’s? It almost appears as if someone had alerted Richard Hunsinger about Ron’s documents and he stepped in to help out in some way.

If that’s what happened (and I have no idea if it did), the next question is why would someone think to alert him? I have a theory. In a Cincinnati Enquirer article datelined April 29, 1953, an FBI representative had visited Oxford “on his own time this week to discuss the case and to give advice” despite the fact that the FBI had told them that they had no jurisdiction over the case. Could the FBI rep have been Richard Hunsinger, who may have been home visiting his parents and, like a good fed, he was letting it be known that this trip was not being funded by taxpayers? If so, perhaps he’d written up a report on the Tammen case back in 1953—a little summary perhaps, not unlike a tip they might receive from anyone off the street. Twenty years later, one of his colleagues might have found his summary while investigating the newly invigorated Tammen case, and gave him a heads up. Maybe it’s just serendipitous, but it does seem weird and I thought you should know.

July 9, 1973 (Monday)

By this point, the Senate Watergate hearings were in full swing, and some fascinating new details were coming to light. For example, James McCord had revealed that E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy had been planning to burglarize someone else—a guy named Herman (Hank) Greenspun, the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, in early 1972. On July 9, Acting Director L. Patrick Gray sent a memo asking the special agents in charge (SACs) of the Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., offices to investigate the Greenspun case at the request of the Special Prosecutor’s Office. Someone has written lf immediately next to E. Howard Hunt’s name in this memo.

July 13, 1973 (Friday)

The SAC from Las Vegas submits a report on the Hank Greenspun planned burglary. Hac is written in the righthand corner, just like Ron’s, and nearby is the number 4 with a dash. Four Domestic Intelligence agents have signed their names or initials immediately adjacent to the number 4, which makes it appear as if that’s the division where the number came from. Admittedly, Russell Horner isn’t one of them, although, if he’s the man responsible for the Hac notation, I suppose he’d already left his mark.

July 26, 1973 (Thursday)

On this date, documents for James McCord et al are given the ST-102/REC-19 stamp combination for the first time. For the next 13 days, up through August 8, his records will receive these two stamps. 

July 30, 1973 (Monday)

The FBI Director’s Office writes a memo to the SAC in Las Vegas, instructing him to interview Hank Greenspun. Hac is written in the top right of the document, again, just like Ron’s, along with the 4 dash. And even though we’re really not discussing this notation in detail today, the words “see index” in the left margin look to me as if they were written by the same person who wrote “see index” on Ron’s record.

This is where we’ll end our timeline, with the caveat that James McCord’s ST-102/REC-19 stamps extended through August 8, immediately after the release of, you guessed it, Midnight Train to Georgia. I wish we could end on a more exciting note—it would have been cool if Richard Hunsinger had initialed the July 30 memo—but that’s another downfall with conducting a timeline of FBI documents. The documents say what they say and the timeline ends when it ends. 

Summary and a chart

As promised, below is a chart that shows when the various marks were made on the documents pertaining to the four men. To simplify things, we’re looking at ranges of time to help you visualize how the notations on Ron’s documents either overlapped with some people’s notations, or, at other times, preceded or succeeded them. Either way, these four men’s documents (and, to the best of my knowledge, only these men’s documents to date) received the same marks within a short period of time, which tells me that they were being handled by the same people and were considered somehow related.

Oh, we’re in luck. It looks as though we have time for two Q&As before we open this up to comments. 

Q: What does this tell us about Ron?

A: As I’ve said before on this blog site, it appears as if Ron might have been working with James McCord in some capacity. But it makes you wonder…what about Watergate? Was Ron Tammen on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972, and did he somehow manage to evade the police? 

Remember when I told you about the letter James McCord had written to Judge Sirica that helped him get a reduced sentence? In that letter, he told the judge that “Others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial, when they could have been by those testifying.”

If McCord is to be believed, there were more people involved in the Watergate break-in than the seven people who were tried. Do I think that one of the “others involved” might have been Ron? I’m not ready to say that yet. But I think it’s something worth pondering.

Q: You said that if Russell Horner is responsible for the Hacs on Ron’s and Hank Greenspun’s documents, then there’s no way it stands for House Assassination Committee. Does that mean that you don’t think Ron was among the people who were included in the JFK assassination investigation?

A: Glad you asked. I honestly don’t think we can rule it out yet. Here’s why: I think everything we’ve discussed above establishes some close connections between Ron Tammen, James McCord, and Hank Greenspun. (Daniel Ellsberg’s situation was different. He was an anomaly in my view—a heroic anomaly, but an anomaly nonetheless.) Both McCord and Greenspun were included in the HSCA’s investigation. You can see for yourself by visiting maryferrell.org and running searches for “McCord AND HSCA” and “Greenspun and HSCA.” So I think it’s still a possibility.

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Thanks to the Mary Ferrell Foundation, TheBlackVault.com, and the National Archives and Records Administration for making these documents available.

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Sending heartfelt care and concern for everyone who is currently dealing with the LA wildfires. If you, like me, are feeling a little powerless during this crisis, here’s a fairly comprehensive list of resources we can contribute to:

https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=1014-resources-to-support-those-during-the-l-a-fires

This too:

https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/how-to-help-la-fire-victims