(You OK? Day 4)
July 1, 2025
This next update will probably be discouraging for you, but that happens in research too. Plus we’re ramping up to more…um…colorful revelations later this week, so we’re bound to have at least one slow day, right? Welcome to your slow day.
Do you remember MSL, the person who (ostensibly) wrote “Removed from Ident files” on Ron’s missing person documents on June 4 and 5, 1973? For years, I’ve tried to identify who that person was. If they’re still alive (which is growing less likely), imagine the intel that person could share about why they removed his documents from the Ident files, as well as, gosh, just what was up with the mysterious Missing Person File Room? Unfortunately, to this day, the name of the person with the initials MSL remains unknown.
With that said, I may have found a few clues regarding their career trajectory at the FBI.
MSL shows up in two ways on Ron’s documents. The first was in 1967, when Ron’s father wrote to J. Edgar Hoover to ask him if the soldier pictured in his newspaper could be Ron. It was MSL who, with assistance from someone with the initials mjb, wrote J. Edgar Hoover’s response to Mr. Tammen on October 11, 1967.
This aligns well with an MSL whose initials are typed at the bottom of Teletypes that are sent from FBI Headquarters to designated field offices and attaches in the early 1960s. For this reason, I think that MSL worked in the FBI’s Communications Section from at least August 1961 up through at least October 1967.
The next time we bump into MSL is in June 1973, when Ron’s documents are removed from the Ident files. I think MSL was fairly high up the chain of the Identification Division by this time, because, on a document dated May 22, 1973, they initialed the line next to Fletcher Thompson’s name. Thompson was the head of the Identification Division.
Our final encounter with MSL is on March 3, 1975. They’ve added their initials to an addendum of a memo with the important subject head of SENSTUDY 75. SENSTUDY 75 was the FBI’s nickname for the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. You and I know it better as the Church Committee, named for its chair, Senator Frank Church. MSL initialed the document behind the initials JH, or John Hotis, of the FBI’s Legal Counsel Division. John B. Hotis was a highly regarded official who’d held a number of supervisory roles for the FBI. He worked as a special assistant to William Webster when he was director of the FBI, and, in 1987, when Webster moved over to the CIA to direct that agency, he took Hotis with him.
I’m thinking that MSL must have been a pretty big deal by 1975 to be working for John Hotis.
As it turns out, that’s also the year that I think MSL may have retired or found a job outside of the FBI. Or, just my luck, if MSL was a woman, she may have gotten married in April, May, or June and changed her name. Whatever happened to MSL, I think it happened sometime after they initialed the SENSTUDY 75 memo and before the July 1 edition of the FBI telephone directory was printed. They’re not in it.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: how do we know that the MSL who worked for John Hotis in 1975 is the same MSL who worked for Fletcher Thompson in 1973 or the MSL who worked for the Communications Section from at least August 1961 through October 1967, and possibly later.
All I have to go by is MSL’s initials and how they wrote them. For Ron’s documents, MSL is written in all caps, but for the others, everything is in lowercase. What makes me think it’s the same person is the “m.” Whether it’s lowercase or capitalized, that “m” always has a little flourish in the front.
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1962: Communications Section
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1973: Identification Division
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1975: Legal Counsel Division
It has crossed my mind that MSL might have been a special agent versus an administrative staff member. If so, they should be included in the FBI’s “Dead List,” which is a compilation by the Records/Information Dissemination Section of deceased FBI officials as well as random famous people and criminals. Unfortunately, there are no individuals with the initials MSL in the 2022 version, which I believe is the latest online version, and the most comprehensive listing available.
I know, I know…I could be wrong. We could have three different people with the initials MSL for all I know. However, in all my searching, I’ve yet to find anyone—anyone—with those initials. I’m no math whiz, but wouldn’t that increase the chances that it’s the same person?
Thanks to the Mary Ferrell Foundation for making these documents available.
