In Part 1, I cheekily claimed that I thought Ron Tammen was living in Miami, Florida, in the early 1970s, and possibly much earlier, and I based my claim on two scribbles on his records that, in my view, looked as though they either originated from the FBI’s Miami Field Office or were somehow related to the city of Miami, Florida. One unresolved issue you might have with that theory is that one of those symbols, a face-down z, was also found on several of Richard Cox’s FBI records. As I recall, at the end of Part 1, you asked a question…can you ask it again?
Did Richard Cox live in Miami too?
I think Richard Cox lived in Florida for at least part of his life after he disappeared, and, more specifically, he’s been identified as having been in the lower-eastern side of the state. Whether he was living in Miami proper or somewhere near there, I don’t know.
But I definitely think he was living in Florida. On May 27, 1960, an FBI report was submitted describing a potential sighting of Richard Cox in a popular dive bar in Orlando. The report was written by the Miami Field Office’s special agent in charge (SAC), who at the time was Lee O. Teague, and his source was a trusted PCI—FBI-speak for a potential criminal informant. A potential criminal informant was an informant who was described as “under development” by the FBI. I know that this potential criminal informant was trusted because a reliable source that I’ve spoken with had access to a separate FBI record that referred to the person as “an informant of known reliability.” So, in a nutshell, my reliable source was in possession of a document quoting the FBI’s reliable source, which is double the reliability in my view.
Which is just…so…interesting. Because, even though, in 2013, I requested all of the FBI’s Richard Cox records that had been released in the past, my reliable source’s record wasn’t released to me personally. Or if it was, most of the words were covered up on my version.
And that brings us back to the May 27, 1960, report, which is quite the wild read, but you wouldn’t know it from the record the FBI had sent me in 2013. What they sent me, three decades after they’d sent an unredacted version to my reliable source, contains big blocks of redactions and page 2 is missing entirely. Here’s what they sent me:
I get it. Not helpful. What version did they send your reliable source?
Here’s the version that they sent to my reliable source and should have sent to me, with the name and personally identifiable information of the informant and several others redacted.
The only thing I can surmise from their decision to redact all of those details after they’d already released them to a member of the public is that either the FBI thinks it might have been Richard Cox sitting in that bar or that they absolutely, without a doubt know that it was Cox. If they didn’t think it was him or if they still didn’t know whether it was or wasn’t, why would they care if I saw that report? It would just be one of many red herrings in the case. But to declassify information and then turn around and reclassify it? That tells me that they felt the need to rescind their earlier decision because the information contained within it was too hot for you and me to handle. It also tells me that the FBI doesn’t have its heart in the Freedom of Information Act. To them, FOIA is a nuisance, the American public doesn’t have a right to know the truth, and redacting pertinent information for reasons other than what’s permitted by law is how they maintain control over our national narrative. (Note: As always, if you happen to be with the FBI and you feel that I’ve depicted you and your colleagues unfairly, please don’t hesitate to contact me. If all remains quiet, I’ll presume you agree.)
I encourage you to read the report, because it really is fascinating. For now, here are the most pertinent details: The informant was at the Sho-Bar Tavern in Orlando, Florida, sometime “shortly before 5/16/60,” when he met a woman named Allie, from Key West. Allie was there to meet up with her date, a guy who, upon his arrival, introduced himself as R.C. Mansfield, though Allie called him Richard. Mansfield had arrived with a white male by the name of Welch, who appeared to be about 40 years old. The report doesn’t state Richard’s age or race, but you get the impression that he was younger than 40 and was probably also white. Welch soon left the bar and didn’t return until much later that night. The informant had no idea where he went.
This left Richard, Allie, and the informant with hours to kill talking and drinking, which I imagine is an ideal scenario for any informant. The conversation wound its way to the topic of military service, and, as two manly men who’ve been drinking are inclined to do, Richard and the informant got into a (ahem) pissing contest over whose was better—Richard’s service in the Army or the informant’s service in the Marines. (Answer: all branches are equally valuable, and we are grateful to all who have served.) Richard then bragged about his unit in Germany being the finest, and when the informant said, “Oh, yeah? Well, if it was so great, why don’t you go back to the Army?” (or something to that effect), Richard said that he couldn’t. He said that, as far as his family and the Army were concerned, he’s been dead for roughly eight years. He then admitted that his last name wasn’t Mansfield. It was Cox.
This all tracks for several reasons. First, Richard Colvin (aka R.C.) Cox was from Mansfield, Ohio, so it would make sense for him to choose his hometown as an alias. Second, Richard Cox had served in the Army from September 1946 through late 1947, right before he received his congressional appointment to attend West Point. In February 1947, he was stationed in Germany, first in the Sixth Constabulary Squadron in Marburg, and later transferred to the 27th Constabulary Squadron at Schweinfurth, which, according to one document, was renamed the 28th Constabulary. (This could explain why I’ve noticed discrepancies in this detail in some Richard Cox write-ups, a fact-checker’s nightmare.) While he was in Schweinfurth, he worked in intelligence. And third, although he was declared dead by the state of Ohio in 1957, seven years after his disappearance, Cox likely was unaware of that development. In his mind, he probably figured that everyone had presumed him dead a couple years after he went missing. So his “eight years” estimate fits too.
Harry J. Maihafer, author of the book “Oblivion” about Marshall Jacobs’ research into Richard Cox’s disappearance, pointed out that Richard’s story is believable because all of the details he’d shared came completely out of the blue. There hadn’t been newspaper articles concerning Cox’s disappearance for years, so it’s not as if the guy had just read something about the case and was intentionally misleading the informant. Maihafer and Jacobs were right, by the way. I checked Newspapers.com, and the only newspaper that had written anything on Cox’s disappearance during 1959 or 1960 was the Mansfield News Journal. What’s more, it was a short item that appeared on December 8, 1960, about a book that had recently been published about people who’d disappeared. That book, titled “They Never Came Back,” by Allen Churchill, was published on October 7, 1960, according to the New York Times. There’s no way Richard Cox, or Richard Mansfield, or R.C. Mansfield for that matter could have read the book five months earlier, in May. (Strangely enough, Churchill didn’t discuss Ron Tammen’s case in his book. Go figure.)
The juiciest part of the May 27, 1960, report was when Richard Cox had a few things to say about Fidel Castro. He told the informant that Castro’s time in office was “limited, and that the Cubans would be getting rid of him in a matter of weeks. Keep in mind that Cox was ostensibly saying these things in May 1960, 11 months before the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. It makes me wonder where he was getting his info. Marshall Jacobs had wondered the same thing. My reliable source once told me that he suspected that Richard Cox had taken part in the Bay of Pigs.
The report goes on to say that, at Cox’s request, the two men met again days later, in Melbourne, Florida, so that the informant could introduce Cox to several people the informant knew. Later, the informant asked one of those persons about Richard Cox’s whereabouts and was told that he might be “on the lower east coast of Florida,” though they didn’t specify where. Although the informant attempted to find him again due to the FBI’s piqued interest, he ostensibly never saw Richard Cox after that day in Melbourne.
Are you sure you haven’t found any more face-down z’s?
Actually, I might have found one more. I think a record concerning Antonio Veciana may have a face-down z, though you have to look hard and a portion of the z’s loop at the end is cut off. The memo originates with the FBI’s field office in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and it has to do with a double agent operation called Ocelot involving the CIA, Veciana, and Cuban Intelligence. Antonio Veciana was an anti-Castro Cuban exile who took part in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. He and several others started a group known as Alpha-66, a counter-revolutionary group dedicated to the overthrow of the Castro regime. According to his autobiography, he was recruited by the CIA in 1959 to assassinate Castro. Veciana also lived in Miami.
So what are you saying…that Ron Tammen was friends with Meyer Lansky, Antonio Veciana, and Richard Cox?
At this point in our series, let’s just say that Ron’s face-down z’s and 1-gamma are indicators that he may have been a known commodity in the FBI’s Miami Field Office. Maybe he was an operative working out of the CIA’s highly clandestine Miami field office known as JM WAVE; maybe he helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion with Cuban exiles and the CIA; maybe he was assisting the Mafia and CIA in plotting Castro’s assassination—heck, maybe he was doing all of the above. Or, alternatively, maybe he was doing none of the above.
Whatever Ron was doing, the possibility that he was living in Miami could help explain why his FBI records closely resemble those of the White House Plumbers, a nickname used for the men who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972. With the exception of G. Gordon Liddy, every other man who’d been linked to the Watergate “burglary” had Miami ties, including E. Howard Hunt and James McCord. When it came to Watergate, Miami was the epicenter of where it all began.
Watergate?
Yeah. This seems like a good stopping point. See you for Part 3.
