I can’t believe I’m doing this right now, because I have to be dressed and ready to go somewhere in exactly T minus 20 minutes, but I feel like it’s big enough to stop everything and post this.
Remember when I had that online afterparty in which we discussed a few more of Ron’s scribbles on his FBI records? At the end of the post, I had a little game where I highlighted a couple mysterious phrases and asked people to offer up their suggestions on what they might mean. Both were on a record dated May 9, 1973, in which the FBI’s Cincinnati Field Office had sent in the fingerprints of a Ron look-alike from Welco Industries to FBI Headquarters and asked them to compare them to Ron’s prints. Here’s one of the notations, beginning with the numbers 366:
“366 m hau” at the top right of Ron’s FBI record; click on image for a closer view
Ron’s full FBI document with the “366 m hau” notation; click on image for a closer view
It looks like an address, beginning with the numbers 366, which are unmistakable. I just haven’t been able to figure out the rest of it, which looks like an “m” followed by an “hau” or something like that.
Well guess what, you guys. I found another “366 m hau” (or something like that) on another FBI record! Here it is:
The “366 m hau” on Ash Resnick’s FBI record; click on image for a closer view
Ash Resnick’s full FBI record with the “366 m hau” notation (top center, under the Subject heading); click on image for a closer view
The record with the new “366 m hau” in question belongs to someone whose name has been redacted for the attempted bombing of a 1973 Lincoln four-door sedan in the parking lot of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. The owner of the car was Irving “Ash” Resnick. According to his Wikipedia page, Ash “has been credited with helping to organize gambling in Las Vegas,” which is news to me. I’d known about Bugsy Siegel, but somehow Ash Resnick had slipped by me.
For those of you keeping track at home, this is Ronald Tammen’s second tie to Sin City, a town that would be completely out of character for him if it weren’t for everything else we’ve been discovering about his FBI docs. The first tie was when we found the letters “Hac,” which are written in the top right corner of ten of Ron’s records, in the same handwriting on documents for Herman “Hank” Greenspun. Greenspun was the former publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, and his Hacs had to do with an attempted burglary of his office by G. Gordon Liddy, James W. McCord, and likely others associated with Watergate.
So to recap: Ron Tammen has marks on his FBI records that match marks on records having to do with two bigger-than-life figures in Las Vegas. One man was the target of a planned robbery by the Watergate burglars, including James W. McCord, who, by the way, had other stamps and scribbles in common with Ron’s FBI records. The other man was the target of an attempted car bombing in the parking lot of Caesar’s Palace.
Are these just coincidences? It’s starting to feel like they aren’t.
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.
Here’s a close-up of the word at the top of the Phillip Seib memo. You can see at least 5 or 6 letters, and 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.
Here’s the Hac at the top of Ron Tammen’s doc from November 29, 1963. I think the H looks very similar to the one on the Phillip Seib memo, plus there’s a number nearby.
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.
Mr. Horner is cc’d on the Phillip Seib memo. The person above his name is Mr. Bates, who was part of the General Investigative Division.
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.
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.
RGH’s initials can be seen midway down the page on the left side. Also, note the lf in the right margin.
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.
CAPTION (click on image for a closer look):
Ron Tammen — The approximate timeframe in which Ron likely received his lf, ST-102/REC-19, and Hac notations was May 14-June 27, 1973. My logic is that this is the range of dates in which he received date-stamps after the Cincinnati Field Office reached out to FBI Headquarters. There’s a chance that he received one or more of the marks after June 27, however, I want to be safe in my estimate and I need to specify an end date.
James McCord — McCord’s documents have two separate timeframes. His lf timeframe is approximately July 17, 1972 – Jun 25, 1973, the range of dates in which I’ve seen that notation on his documents. His ST-102/REC-19 timeframe is roughly July 26 – August 8, 1973, the range of dates when his docs have both of those stamps. Although our chart cuts off at July 30, I extended his ST-102/REC-19 line to symbolize that we’re incorporating a little of August.
Daniel Ellsberg (and CIA involvement) — To date, I’ve found one document with an lf mark that pertains to Daniel Ellsberg’s case, and it’s dated May 8, 1973. I believe he likely received the lf on that day or shortly afterward.
Hank Greenspun — Evidently, the FBI didn’t know about the potential burglary of Hank Greenspun until James McCord disclosed that info during the Senate Watergate hearings. Based on the documents that carry the notations, the range of dates in which his documents likely received the lf and Hac is roughly July 9-July 30.
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.
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:
Hi there, and welcome to the Ronald Tammen walking tour after-party. You’ve waded through so many scribbly, scrawly FBI docs with me over the past several weeks that I thought we all deserved a little celebration.
Let’s see…beverages are in the cooler, food is over there, and I have some royalty- and copyright-free music all cued up. If you could press play any time you encounter one of these mp3-player thingys ⬇️, that’d be great. As you know, music is essential to any party, even if it happens to be unrecognizable and damn near impossible to dance to.
Catching up with old friends: To help get things rolling, we’ll do a quick run-down of the marks we’ve already discussed, whether it was on the tour or at another time. That way, we’ll have all the marks with their proposed meanings together in one place. I also have some updates for you with details that I’ve uncovered since the first time I wrote about a topic.
Meeting new ones: Once we’ve covered the marks we know, I’ll be introducing you to a few of the less prominent ones that we haven’t discussed or that I’ve only mentioned in passing.
Let’s play a game: Finally, I’ll be posting a couple significant marks I’ve been trying to figure out but haven’t been able to. We’re not just talking about someone’s initials. We’re talking about 1 address or phrase and 1 full-on sentence that has been scrawled in and scribbled over on Ron’s docs that I can’t seem to make heads or tails of, no matter how long I stare at them. This is your chance to offer up your ideas, Wheel of Fortune-style. Only in our version, there are no wrong answers!
These two stamps which appear together on nine of Ron’s docs got the ball rolling for our analysis of FBI markings. Not only did I find a long list of high-visibility cases and people who carry the ST-102 stamp, but I found one person—and, to date, only one other person—who has both the ST-102 and REC-19 stamps together on some of his records. That person is James W. McCord, Jr., who is known for his role in Watergate, but who had a long career before then working for the CIA’s Security Research Staff, which oversaw Project Artichoke. Before he joined the CIA, McCord had been employed by the FBI, so he was well known to them too. That the FBI would assign Ron Tammen, who was ostensibly still missing, the same stamps as James McCord—at roughly the same time, no less—is significant. And by significant, I mean it’s level 10 in hugeness. You can’t get much more significant, except for the “see index” notation, which we’ll be talking about right after this one.
From what I can surmise:
I’ve never seen an ST stamp without an accompanying REC stamp. However, I have, at times, seen an REC stamp either alone or with another type of stamp.
REC means “recorded.” I still don’t know what the letters ST stand for.
ST numbers were assigned to cases of high sensitivity, beginning with 100 and reaching at least into the upper 120s.
The lower the ST number, the more sensitive and/or explosive the case appears to be.
ST numbers appear to have been assigned by the Domestic Intelligence Division, which oversaw cases involving espionage, foreign agents, internal security, communists, racial matters, sedition, sabotage, etc.—all of the top-tier topics of the day. The FBI’s liaison to the CIA worked in the Domestic Intelligence Division as did the person who oversaw the Security Index.
Before ST numbers, there were SE numbers, which appear on records for older cases, beginning when the Domestic Intelligence Division was called the Security Division. (Thomas Peasner and Richard Cox both have documents with SE numbers.) In 1975, Domestic Intelligence was renamed the Intelligence Division.
When I organized the ST-102 stamps in order by their accompanying REC stamps, the list of people is…impressive. Not only is it wild that Ron Tammen was given the same ST-102, REC-19 stamps as James McCord, but he was also tucked in between Santo Trafficante (ST-102, REC-18) and Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo (ST-102, REC-20), both of whom were investigated for possible ties to the Kennedy assassination. That’s just plain weird, don’t you think? Here’s what that list looks like to date:
A screen shot of the ST-102 folders on my laptop, arranged by REC-numbers. Click on image for a closer view.
Update! In an earlier post, I’d noted how strange it was for Ron to have those stamps on his FBI documents because he was still listed as missing. And make no mistake, I still believe that it’s very strange. However, I’ve found one other formerly missing person with an ST number on his FBI records, though it wasn’t an ST-102 like Ron’s. Charles McCullar, who went missing after hitchhiking to Crater Lake National Park in January 1975, and whose skeletal remains were found in an area of the park in October 1976, has an ST-126 stamp on one of his documents. The ST-stamped report was written in 1978 after someone had contacted the Portland, Oregon, Field Office to dispute the crime lab examiner’s conclusion that he was killed by exposure to the elements and not foul play. I have more to say about the McCullar case in the next two categories.
See index
This is the holy grail of FBI notations. If you should ever encounter someone who questions us as to where this story appears to be heading, kindly direct them here. The words “see index” written in the left margin of a person’s FBI documents indicates that they’d been added to the FBI’s Security Index. And if a person was on the Security Index, the FBI and DOJ had determined that they were a danger to society (for whatever reason) and would need to be incarcerated in the event of a national emergency.
Say it with me three times: Ron Tammen was on the Security Index. Ron Tammen was on the Security Index. Ronald Henry Tammen, Jr., was on the freakin’ Security Index!
Several other people who were on the Security Index are listed below. Note that people who were investigated for possible ties to the assassination of President Kennedy are indicated with the letters JFK. They are:
Ruth Alscher (associate of Julius Rosenberg), Frank Chavez (racketeering/JFK), Judith Coplon (Soviet spy and DOJ employee), Richard Colvin Cox (U.S. Army fugitive), Salvatore Granello (racketeering/JFK), Hank Greenspun (convicted of arms shipments to Israel/JFK), Loren Eugene Hall (Nicaraguan revolutionary activities/JFK), John Timothy Keehan II (potential bombing suspect), Egil Krogh (Watergate), Stanley David Levison (MLK’s speechwriter), Jeb Magruder (Watergate), Edward K. Moss (PR exec who had close ties to the CIA and organized crime/JFK), Thomas Peasner (POW accused of being brainwashed/JFK), Gilberto Rodriguez (Cuban/JFK), Morton Sobell (Russian spy), Charles Tourine (gambling and racketeering/JFK)—the list goes on and on!
Weirdly enough, Lee Harvey Oswald, who has been blamed for singlehandedly carrying out what could be considered the most horrifying, historically impactful crime of the 20th century, had been on the Security Index in 1959, when he’d defected to the Soviet Union. However, by 1963, despite his pro-Castro and Soviet activities, someone high up in the FBI and the DOJ had determined that he wasn’t a danger after all, and his name should be removed.
As for when Ron’s name was added to the Security Index, it appears that he was added in 1973, at roughly the same time that someone had anonymously phoned in a tip to the FBI’s Cincinnati Field Office that a guy working at Welco Industries was probably Ron. (He wasn’t.) In my opinion, the “see index” handwriting on Ron’s document closely resembles the “see index” written on a July 1973 report regarding an alleged plot to burglarize records stored in the office of Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun of which James W. McCoy, Jr., was an alleged accessory. (Note that Hank had been on the Security Index in his own right for illegally shipping machine guns and ammunition to Israel, an offense for which he was convicted in 1950, but that President Kennedy pardoned in 1961.) Because it appears as if the same person wrote both notes, I think Ron was probably added to the Security Index sometime that same year. I also think that Ron was somehow tied to that alleged burglary plot, or at least the people who were associated with it. It’s still a theory, and I’ll continue investigating.
Update! As it so happens, Charles McCullar was also listed on the FBI’s Security Index. You may recall that we’d spoken of Charles McCullar a while ago and, like Ron, his missing person documents had been stored in the FBI’s “Ident Missing Person File Room,” which was a separate location from where typical missing person records were stored. My theory is that tips called in that might have been considered a little unsavory and NSFW would have been put in the Missing Person File Room. Depending on how jaw-dropping the accusation, it could have also gotten someone onto the Security Index. At any rate, it appears that the FBI may have had some dirt on Charles McCullar.
Here’s what’s different between McCullar’s and Tammen’s cases: I believe that whatever McCullar did to get onto the Security Index, he probably did it before he went missing in January 1975. My reasoning is that I’ve seen no reports of index-worthy activities while he was ostensibly missing, and in 1976, the examiner had deduced that he’d been dead most likely soon after he’d disappeared. The FBI didn’t add dead people to the Security Index—they’re neither dangerous nor incarcerable. Ron’s case was different. My feeling is that whatever got him onto the Security Index happened sometime during the two decades after he went missing.
MCT-49
MCT numbers appear to be another way that FBI agents can inform one another that a case is unbelievably huge while keeping this info hidden in plain view from an unsuspecting, FOIA-wielding member of the public. I’ve tried to find out what the letters stand for, but the FBI isn’t saying. Ron’s MCT number, MCT-49, was assigned to him several months after it was given to a case having to do with an alleged assassination plot against Spiro Agnew. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. But from what I can tell, MCT numbers were closely tied to the Security Index. If a person had been on the Security Index, then they were extremely likely to have an MCT number. Lee Harvey Oswald, who was on the Security Index in 1959, had been assigned MCT-41. Salvatore Granello was also given MCT-41. Frank Chavez was MCT-3. Interestingly, so was Hank Greenspun. Edward K. Moss was MCT-23. So was Klaus Barbie, a Nazi war criminal, who was also on the Security Index.
There’s one exception to the above rule: if the case was older, such as from the early 1950s, and the person had an SE versus an ST number and they were also listed on the Security Index, then they don’t appear to have needed an MCT number. I guess the SE number was all that was needed to convey the message that “this one’s huge.” Two people who had SE numbers and who were on the Security Index but who didn’t appear to have MCT numbers are Richard Colvin Cox and Thomas Rodman Peasner, Jr.
Update! Charles McCullar had three MCT numbers (MCT-13, MCT-21, and MCT-23), which may lead you to wonder, whoa, who was this guy? Actually, this is in keeping with our theory that MCT numbers were assigned to people on the Security Index, though, admittedly, three MCT numbers seem excessive for an outdoorsy guy who liked to hike and take photos. Also his numbers are interesting. I mean, good heavens, his MCT-23 matches Edward K. Moss’s and Klaus Barbie’s numbers.
Another possible reason for his MCT numbers may have to do with the heightened degree of interest from U.S. representatives and senators who wrote letters to the FBI and DOJ on behalf of the McCullar family. Charles McCullar’s MCT-21 and MCT-23 stamps were placed on letters to Attorney General Edward Levi from U.S. Senator William Scott, of Virginia. His MCT-13 was stamped on a note from Representative Joseph L. Fisher of the 10th District. Regardless, I continue to believe that Ron Tammen’s and Charles McCullar’s cases are different despite having some similar markings. The next four markings were found on Ron’s documents but not Charles McCullar’s.
Hac
This past June, I brazenly suggested that the letters Hac appearing in the upper righthand corner of ten of Ron’s FBI records was someone’s way of referring to the House Assassination Committee. I theorized that it could be shorthand for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). I said this because Ron’s ST-102 stamp was shared by a large cast of characters who were indeed investigated by the HSCA for JFK’s assassination, as you could see in the graphic above. To be honest, I’m not married to my original theory, since, to date, I’ve only found two other Hac notations in all of the JFK documents. Both were on FBI records for an alleged plot to burglarize records in Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun—a burglary plot in which Watergate participants E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and James W. McCord were implicated. Both appear to have been written by the same person who wrote Hac on Ron’s documents.
Update! At the time of the House and Senate investigations into the intelligence community, which began in 1975, the intelligence agencies had created an ad hoc committee to the United States Intelligence Board (USIB) to keep tabs on what materials Congress was seeking and, you know, make sure everyone was in cahoots. Its official title was the Ad Hoc Coordinating Group on Congressional Review of the Intelligence Community, but sometimes they referred to themselves as “The Ad Hoc Group” or just “The Group.” You can tell which memos the FBI provided to The Group by the words “Ad Hoc” written in the bottom lefthand corner.
Although I’m still attempting to figure out who wrote Hac at the top of Ron’s and Hank Greenspun’s documents, I have a theory. My theory is that it was written by the FBI’s liaison to the CIA at that time, a guy named Leon Francis Schwartz. (He went by Frank.) The reason I think so is because the Hoc in Ad Hoc looks a lot like the Hac at the top of Ron’s pages. Also, Frank’s initials, LFS, are written beneath one of those Ad Hocs.
I need to point out that the Ad Hoc notations were made on documents from 1975 and beyond and my current theory is that the Hac from Ron’s and Hank Greenspun’s documents were made in 1973. Also, Schwartz ended up leaving his post in December 1975 to work for the House Appropriations Committee, whose acronym also, sadly, sadistically happens to be HAC.
Mind you, it’s still a theory, and I have a couple other possible contenders in mind as well—one from Domestic Intelligence and one from Legal Counsel. But if the FBI official who had an inside line to the people at the top of the CIA and, by extension, the Ad Hoc group, was the same person who was writing Hac on ten of Ron’s docs, that seems, again, huge.
2-D
The 2-D on page one of Ron’s documents indicates that two copies of Ron’s file were sent to the Department of Justice. It’s a big enough deal for one copy to be sent to the DOJ, so for two of them? Say it with me: huge.
Update! Oddly enough, with all of the documents that the DOJ should have on Ron Tammen—namely the FD-122 form that the FBI submitted to them in order to add Ron’s name to the Security Index, plus two copies of his file—they don’t appear to have them anymore. I’d submitted a FOIA request to them seeking his FD-122, and they suggested I contact the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which, yeah, they don’t have it. I’d already asked NARA for anything on Tammen back in 2016 to no avail. I’ll continue trying to find someone who has Ron’s FD-122. Also, I’ll submit a FOIA request reminding the DOJ about the two copies of Tammen’s file that the FBI had sent them, and asking for one of them. I think we can all guess what their answer will be.
lb or lf
The weird little lf notation (I’m pretty sure it’s an lf, not an lb) shows up on four of Ron’s documents. From my experience, they’re incredibly rare. In my blog post, I shared only two other cases that had lf’s on their documents, and they had to do with James W. McCord and his Watergate accomplices and the alleged burglary plot of Hank Greenspun’s office implicating James W. McCord and his Watergate accomplices. After writing my post, I found one more lf on a document having to do with the Watergate hearings. Are you detecting a theme here? Same. For this reason, plus all of the other reasons discussed above, I think Ron Tammen was somehow affiliated with James W. McCord and may have been working for him.
ph
The letters ph (or pL, but I’m going with ph) are scribbled in the left margin of ten of Ron’s documents, and as I discussed in walking tour stop #5, I think it was written by someone in the Domestic Intelligence Division (or, if it was after 1975, Intelligence). My reasoning is that someone made similar markings on a document dealing with FBI informant protocol from the files of William O. Cregar, who was in charge of Counterintelligence. Cregar also happened to sit on the Ad Hoc Group, by the way.
By now, this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. We already know that Ron was on the Security Index. The person who oversaw the Security Index was housed in Domestic Intelligence. I believe Ron’s ST-102/REC-19 numbers were assigned by Domestic Intelligence as well, not to mention his MCT-49. And my current theory is that a person in Domestic Intelligence had written the Hac at the top of his documents. Honestly? During the summer of 1973, as I was turning into my adorably angsty, self-conscious, and perpetually embarrassed 15-year-old self, I’m picturing a bunch of serious and sedate Domestic Intelligence agents handing off Ron’s papers to one another while occasionally being called into impromptu side conferences, usually behind closed doors.
Update! My theory is that the person who made the ph’s was an assistant to one of the bigwigs in that division. The person I have in mind is Theresa D. Poston, who was an assistant to Frank Schwartz, the CIA liaison, in addition to other higher-ups. She often typed up Schwartz’s memos. She was clearly a trusted employee who was privy to sensitive intelligence information. Included below are Theresa’s initials, which I think look as if they were written in the same handwriting as the ph’s. I have another person in mind as well, but I thought I’d open this possibility up for discussion.
As for the meaning of the ph, I don’t know. Although it’s possible that it could mean an informant of some type, it doesn’t appear as if every person with that mark would have served in that capacity. I’ll continue digging.
Ron’s missing person (MP) numbers
Ron’s most commonly cited missing person number is 79-31966, which is the number that was assigned by FBI Headquarters. Because Ron’s case originated with the Cleveland Field Office, his number there was 79-0-615-B. (The B is likely a subcategory.) It’s perfectly normal for a case originating at a field office to have one number from the field office in addition to another number assigned by Headquarters.
What’s not normal is for Headquarters to assign a second missing person number. At the top of page one of Ron’s documents, they’ve written “MP# 17699, Posted 6-2-53,” accompanied by the letters Jh. Note that the 79, which precedes all missing person cases, is left off, probably to save the writer a little time.
In general, the FBI numbered its missing person cases in chronological order, whereby a new case would be given the next available number under the 79 classification. I’ve stumbled upon the occasional outlier, but for the most part, this was the system. At the FBI’s Cleveland Field Office, Ron was the 615th missing person case on the books. At FBI Headquarters, he was listed as the 31966th missing person case according to their most cited number. But what about the other number—the 17699? It’s interesting, because 17699 is so much smaller than 31966—to the tune of roughly 14,267 missing person cases smaller.
As I described in my November 27, 2022, blog post, my theory is that Ron was assigned number 79-17699 on June 2, 1953, when the FBI was younger and more nimble and only had 17,698 other missing person cases to contend with. However, that number was ostensibly retired at some point, as if the case had been, I don’t know, closed or canceled or something? When the Cincinnati Field Office wrote to Headquarters 20 years later, in May 1973, asking them to compare the man from Welco Industries’ fingerprints to Ron’s, the folks in the Identification Division were likely pretty confused. They had to look around for wherever Ron’s missing person documents were hiding and then they had to assign a new missing person number to them, with the next one available being 79-31966. Then, inexplicably, they turned around and removed Ron’s newly renumbered missing person documents “from Ident files,” which sounds very much like they didn’t view him as missing anymore.
Update! I continue to view June 1973 as a pivotal time when a lot was happening with Ron’s missing person documents. Considering how other notations and stamps were ostensibly added during that period as well—namely ST-102/REC-19, “see index,” MCT-49, Hac, lf, etc.—this theory still stands. I’d just really love to know what led them to retire the 17699 number to begin with.
F 189
The F numbers are perhaps the most flummoxing of all the FBI’s marks. (Maybe the F stands for “flummox.”) Lots of people and subjects have one, and they’re assigned with no discernable rhyme or reason. The F numbers are handwritten in the bottom left corner of an FBI document, and as far as I can tell, always near a date stamp. Most F numbers are three digits and, as of today’s date, I haven’t seen an F number that exceeds 500.
Ron’s F number is F 189, which is at the low end, and in his case, there are a couple repeats. The other two men who appear to have been assigned that number are Edward K. Moss, who has both the F and the 189, and gay activist Harry Hay, who has the 189 in the correct spot, but not the F.
Update! Currently, I’m not putting a ton of stock in someone’s F number in comparison to other marks. That may change if any clear patterns emerge.
Ron has a pitchfork-looking mark on three of his documents. The document dated May 26, 1953, has one pitchfork to the right of the first paragraph, which was a description of the items Ron had left behind as well as the law enforcement agencies who’d been notified. The undated letter from Ron’s father referencing an Associated Press photo of a soldier in Vietnam published in the October 2, 1967, Plain Dealer has a pitchfork next to the first paragraph mentioning the FBI and the Selective Service Act. The document dated 5-9-73 has three pitchforks: one is next to his name, a second is next to his official fingerprint jacket number (358-406-B), and the third is next to a stamp that is most interesting of all. I’ll discuss that stamp a little later.
Click on image for a closer view.
When I consulted the book Are You Now or Have You Ever Been in the FBI Files, I found no mentions of pitchforks. I did however find discussions about free-floating letters that looked like C’s or U’s, which I surmised someone may have drawn a line through. Ron’s marks look more like the letter U, which has two possible meanings. If it’s found on a search slip that agents filled out when researching case files, the U means “unavailable reference.” If it’s on a regular FBI doc, the U stands for “Unclassified,” which means that the classifying officer had made a conscious decision not to classify a key detail that they perhaps could have classified if they felt like it. It’s kind of like they’re telling their superiors that “I’m not shirking my duties. I’m very much aware that this is a detail that would normally be classified, but I think it’s better if we leave it unredacted this time.” As for the long line through the U, that’s not addressed in the book. Could it mean that a conscious decision was made to undo the unclassified decision? If so, shouldn’t there be a redaction instead? Or maybe it’s an indication that someone else looked it over and agreed that the info shouldn’t be classified. I have no idea.
Lots of FBI documents have C’s and U’s, and some also have slashes through them. What I’ve been looking for are U’s with lines through them that are up-and-down versus slanty and longer than normal. One document that I’ve found so far that fits the bill is dated March 21, 1975, and has to do with the Rockefeller Commission, which was also investigating CIA activities at that time. The memo is from W. Raymond Wannall, who headed up…wanna take a guess?…the Intelligence Division. (Its name was changed from Domestic Intelligence that year.) In the “to” line is James B. Adams, who was an associate director at the FBI overseeing all of the investigative divisions: Intelligence, Legal Counsel, General Investigative, and Special Investigative. He was a big deal. (Remember his name. You’re going to need it later.) In the bottom lefthand corner is the pitchfork, next to the word “Enclosures,” and the letters FJC:aso. FJC are the initials for Fred J. Cassidy, who was another senior official in Intelligence who’d worked as a CIA liaison before Fred Schwartz. (Alas, I can’t find who aso was.)
I’m sure there are more pitchforks out there, and I’ll let you know when I find them. But for now, the takeaway is that if you see a pitchfork on Ron’s documents, I believe it signifies a detail that the FBI felt could have been classified or redacted, but, for some reason, they chose not to. More on this at the end.
Jas cy per WSH
I’d now like to direct you to the letter dated October 11, 1967, from J. Edgar Hoover to Mr. Tammen, This was Hoover’s response to Ron’s father after he’d written to Hoover, asking whether the soldier in the Associated Press photo might be Ron.
Click on image for a closer view.
Hoover’s letter couldn’t have been more of a cop-out. Rather than having someone like Helen Gandy or Clyde Tolson contact the AP to find out who the soldier was and having his Identification staff run a comparison of fingerprints between the soldier and Ron, both of which they had on file, Hoover told Mr. Tammen that he should check with the adjutant general of the Army. Yeah, no. Not helpful.
At the bottom of Hoover’s dismissive missive are some notes that were typed onto the FBI’s copy about Ron’s Selective Service violation and whatnot, and above that is a scribbled message that looks something like “Jas cy per WSH.”
Well, guess what, you guys? I know precisely who wrote that incomprehensible scrawl, thanks to some similar scrawls below. We can all be grateful to the person who asked him to spell out his last name in the third example since his first name is consistently illegible:
It was written by James B. Adams of the March 1975 Rockefeller Commission memo fame! In 1967, Adams was working in Personnel, which was part of the Administrative Division, and his boss was William Stewart Hyde, aka WSH. It appears that Adams was signing memos for WSH quite a bit at that time. (Don’t ask me what the cy stands for. I have no idea. There’s also a chance that it could be an M, in which case I have no idea what an M would stand for either.)
I have a few thoughts about James B. Adams’ signature on Hoover’s letter to Mr. Tammen. First, I wonder why someone in Personnel would be signing off on it. Wouldn’t someone in Personnel be concerned with, you know, personnel matters as opposed to a letter from the parent of a missing person? Was Ron employed by the FBI in some way? Who knows—maybe Ron was on the FBI’s payroll as an informant, as the ph notation we discussed above might represent.
Second, you might wonder if Adams had helped the folks in Identification figure out who Ronald Tammen was when Cincinnati sent them the Welco guy’s fingerprints in 1973. Hoover could have told Adams everything he knew about Ron back in 1967, and I imagine those would be details a guy couldn’t easily forget. The folks in Identification would have seen Adams’ signature on the Hoover letter and asked him about it. In 1972, Adams was 1600 miles away from D.C. serving as special agent in charge of the San Antonio office, but in 1973, he was back at Headquarters heading up the Office of Planning and Evaluation. The next year, in 1974, he was named deputy associate director and was overseeing all investigative operations. So it’s possible that Adams would have been able to shed some light on the Tammen case.
Lastly, do you remember when I told you about the FBI official from Oxford, Ohio, whose mother used to work for the Oxford National Bank at the same time that Ron Tammen and Dorothy Craig had checking accounts there? His name was Richard G. Hunsinger and, according to the university’s website, he graduated from Miami University in 1947 after having served in WWII. In 1971, Hunsinger was in the Administrative Division overseeing the FBI’s Equal Employment Opportunity program. James B. Adams was the FBI’s personnel officer, and by all indications, he was Hunsinger’s direct boss. Several years later, in 1975, Hunsinger was the deputy assistant director of the Administrative Division when James B. Adams was deputy associate director of investigative operations. Both men were at the top of their respective ladders at the FBI, they knew each other well, and they also knew something about Ron Tammen. Do you think they ever talked about him?
LFP
In my July 3, 2024, post, I pointed out a three-letter stamp at the bottom of the 5/9/73 memo from the Cincinnati Field Office which had been scribbled over so thoroughly that it looks purposely redacted. I theorized that it stood for ESP, as in espionage, and I thought that might be proof that the FBI had determined Ron was working as a spy, which has always been my hope for Ron. What wasn’t working for my theory was that whenever I’ve seen the letters ESP stamped on FBI documents, the letters SEC follow, as in the Espionage Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division. So I don’t think it’s ESP after all.
Today, I am revising my theory and saying that the three-lettered stamp is actually LFP, which stands for latent fingerprints. I believe that people in the Latent Fingerprint Section of the Identification Division were consulted to compare the guy from Welco’s fingerprints to Ron’s fingerprints. In my July post, I posted two versions of the memo: a lighter version, which I’d obtained from the FBI’s FOIA office in 2010, and a darker version, which I’d obtained from the Butler County Sheriff’s Office. The darker version shows the L and F quite clearly. Mystery solved.
Here’s the rub though: A latent fingerprint is generally a poor-quality, partial print that’s left at a crime scene on such items as wine glasses and windowsills and door handles or on evidence such as guns thrown into wooded areas or murky ponds. Because they’re incomplete, they’re a lot harder to examine than when the FBI has a full set of inked prints. But the FBI had 10-finger inked prints for the Welco guy as well as Ron Tammen, albeit from when he was in the second grade. Why did they ask the latent fingerprint experts to step in?
Maybe they didn’t think Ron’s prints were very good, although they should have been satisfactory. He’d been fingerprinted by a law enforcement officer in his town. Alternatively, is it possible that they had a set of latent prints from a 20- or 30-something year old Ronald Tammen that had been left at some sort of crime scene? In addition, why did they feel the need to cross out the LFP stamp so that it was basically unrecognizable? They didn’t feel the need to blacken the LFP stamp when they were looking at James Earl Ray’s possible latent prints in their investigation into the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., as shown in the below memo.
Click on image for a closer view. Thanks to the Mary Ferrell Foundation at maryferrell.org for access to this document.
Division numbers
Throughout this post, I’ve been referring to the FBI’s various divisions by name. However, to simplify things, the FBI assigned each division a number, which would periodically be written or stamped on a relevant FBI report. Let’s review each division’s assigned number, at least two of which, and possibly three, were stamped or written on Ron’s missing person documents.
It should be noted that one division number, and possibly two, doesn’t appear on Ron’s documents even though we know people from that division were reviewing his documents. (I’m looking at you, Domestic Intelligence! Also possibly you, Legal Counsel!) Perhaps they didn’t want the FOIA-wielding members of the general public to know they were somehow involved.
The division numbers and their associated divisions in 1975 are as follows:
ONE – Identification Division
TWO – Training Division
THREE – Administrative Division
FOUR – Files and Communications Division
FIVE – Intelligence Division (formerly Security Division and Domestic Intelligence Division)
SIX – General Investigative Division
SEVEN – Laboratory Division
EIGHT – External Affairs Division
NINE – Special Investigative Division
TEN – Inspection Division
ELEVEN – Legal Counsel Division
TWELVE – Computer Systems Division
THIRTEEN – Office of Planning and Evaluation
Here are the numbers that appear on Ron’s documents:
ONE
No surprises here. Ron’s FBI documents have the number ONE either stamped or written on multiple pages. In fact, his docs were probably living in Division ONE, the Identification Division, and more specifically the Ident Missing Person File Room, for roughly 20 years after he went missing. Because of the words “Removed from Ident” on several of his documents, we know that they were moved out of the Identification Division in June 1973, after the Cincinnati Office requested a comparison of Ron’s fingerprints with the guy from Welco Industries.
NINE
On the same memo where the LFP stamp resides (5-9-73 Cincinnati memo), the number NINE is stamped at the bottom right. This tells us that Ron’s documents had made their way to the Special Investigative Division. According to the booklet Know Your FBI, published in 1969, the Special Investigative Division oversaw investigations dealing with organized crime; the Security of Government Employees program, which investigated government employees who were potential security risks as part of Executive Order 10450; and fugitives.
10
Whenever you see the word Hac in the top righthand corner of Ron’s documents, you also see the number 10 close by. Every single time. While it’s possible that the number signifies the Inspection Division, which was the division that annually evaluated the activities of every other FBI division and field office, I’m not so sure if that’s what it means here. First, it doesn’t make sense that an inspector would write the number 10 on every document he or she had reviewed. If that were the case, you’d think that pretty much all FBI documents would have the number 10 on them at some point. Other than Ron’s, I’ve seen none.
Second, the placement isn’t correct. Typically, division numbers are written or stamped in the bottom right, not the top right.
Lastly, I’ve seen various single-digit numbers in the top right corner of other people’s FBI files. For example, Charles McCullar has 7’s on many of his records. On Hank Greenspun’s documents that, like Ron’s, have Hac written in the top right, there’s another number nearby. On one document, it’s 4- and on another one it’s 4-1. I still don’t know their meaning, but I have a theory, which we can discuss more if you’d like. Regardless, I feel it’s worth mentioning and I’m still working on it.
Sealed Encl.
Let’s revisit the 5-9-73 Cincinnati memo with the LFP stamp and the three pitchforks. The pitchfork in the bottom left is drawn directly through a stamp that says “SEALED ENCL.” From what I can tell, very few people have the word SEALED stamped on their FBI record. Charles McCullar most definitely doesn’t have that stamp. Neither does anyone else on the Security Index that I’ve found so far. I’m sure there must be others—otherwise, why have a stamp made?—but it isn’t common.
At least for now, the only person for whom I’ve seen the words “Sealed” (which is written) and “Enclosure” (which is stamped) in the bottom left corner of his records are, wait for it, Hank Greenspun.
Click on image for a closer view. Thanks to the Mary Ferrell Foundation at maryferrell.org for access to this document.
This particular record is from 1967 when he was a victim of extortion. I did manage to find a document from 1977 that discusses the need to seal envelopes having to do with the relocation plan for members of Congress in the event of a national emergency. Those sealed envelopes were to be kept in a “strict security location” in Los Angeles.
If the word sealed is as loaded as I think it is, then it makes sense that someone at the FBI would need to make the conscious decision regarding whether it should be classified or not. As for why they chose to unclassify it on Ron’s documents, well, I have an idea about that. We can talk about it in the comments if you’d like.
Whew! I feel as if I’ve been doing all the talking at this party! It’s now time for me to shut up and let you all take a look at two notations and provide a little help. Both can be found on the 5-9-73 Cincinnati memo. I won’t be giving you my thoughts so I don’t bias you in any way.
Here they are, all blown up. What do you think they say?
Mark #1
366 what?(don’t worry about the date)
Click on image for a closer view.
Mark #2
What does the writing in the left margin say?
Click on image for a closer view.
Thanks for coming!
OK, I think it’s time to wind things down tonight. Thanks so much for coming. Also, as usual, a big thanks to The Black Vault and the Mary Ferrell Foundation for access to these documents.
I think I’ve found a clever little way to tell us roughly when Ron—or whatever his new name turned out to be—was added to the FBI Security Index. Was it 1953? 1973? After that?
I think we can tell by the handwriting.
I’m not talking about handwriting analysis, for which I don’t hold a license and am completely unqualified. I’m talking about the side-by-side comparison of two signatures or initials or phrases to see if they look as if they were written by the same person. Unlicensed people with two good eyes have been asked to compare signatures in a variety of important ways over the years, not the least of which is when we go to the voting booth, or to a bank deposit box, or remember traveler’s checks? That’s how businesses could tell if the check you handed them was yours or if it had been stolen—by comparing your signature while you were buying your traveler’s checks to your signature while you were on vacation.
I’ve gotten to know an awful lot of FBI initials and signatures in this exercise, and I’ve also seen a lot of ways that someone might write the words “See index” in the lefthand margins. Here are just a few of the ways.
As a reminder, here’s how “See index” is written in the left margin of the first page of Ron’s missing person documents.
Click on image for a closer look.
Now, look at this “See index,” which is written on a document that was created on July 30, 1973.
Click on image for a closer look.
They look the same, don’t they? (The ‘s’ is the giveaway.) This tells me that they were written by the same person, likely at roughly the same time.
So here’s today’s announcement:
I think Ronald Tammen was added to the FBI’s Security Index sometime after the Cincinnati Field Office had sent in the Welco guy’s fingerprints for comparison to Ron’s in May 1973.
If you’re wondering why we’re only looking at the left side of the document, it’s because I’m saving the right side for our next announcement.
Coming next: you guys, I think we’ve been hacked…in a good way.
OK, I think I’m ready. I’ve been reading and reading and OMG perusing so many FBI documents like crazy and comparing them to Ron Tammen’s missing person records, trying to make sense of it all. And even though I don’t have the end-all, be-all answer for us as to what it all means (and I don’t), I think I have enough information to share with you to get this conversation going.
Plus, if I don’t spill some of this now, I’m going to forget it. I swear I will.
So here’s what’s going to happen: over the next several…let’s say weeks…I’m going to pop into your inbox every once in a while with an announcement. Do NOT plan your days around these announcements. That’s way too much pressure. They will be appearing at random times of the day, when I’m feeling at my creative best, which obviously can vary. One thing is certain: it will NOT be before I’ve fed Herbie his breakfast and had my coffee, so nothing before 8 a.m. Eastern time. Cool? Cool.
The announcement will be something to the tune of “I think blibbidy blah,” and then I’ll be providing documentation in the form of scribbles on FBI records as to why I think that. Or I may not phrase it so tentatively. I might state outright that “I’m 100 percent positive that so-and-so did such-and-such,” and that’ll be pretty much it.
In essence: I’ll be saying something and then showing you the documentation, and then we’ll all get on with our day. Some announcements will be illuminating, others will be confounding, while others may make you go “meh.” But make no mistake: all announcements will be very, very short.
Before I make the first announcement, I need to thank two people, without whom we could never conduct this exercise. They are: 1) the anonymous caller who called in a tip to the FBI’s Cincinnati Field Office in April 1973, saying that they felt Ron Tammen was working at Welco Industries in Blue Ash, Ohio. Thank you, anonymous caller!! Though some might consider you a snitch or a tattletale, I think of you as a patriot and a hero! If not for you, Ron’s missing person documents probably wouldn’t have been retrieved from their hiding place in the Missing Person File Room, and passed around from one division to the next, gathering a bunch of new stamps and jottings in the process. And 2) John Edgar Hoover. Without your legendarily iron-fisted style of micro-management in which anyone having to do with a case had to initial the memos and scrawl in other coded messages, we wouldn’t be privy to details concerning who saw Ron’s missing person documents and what they did with them. Thank you, Edgar!!
And now, the announcement that is stop #1 on our tour:
Richard Cox was on the FBI’s Security Index too.
The words “see Index” written in the left margin tell us that Richard Colvin Cox, who went missing from West Point Academy in January 1950, was listed in the FBI’s Security Index in addition to Ron Tammen. If you don’t know who Richard Cox is or what the Security Index is, you can run a search on my blog to catch up. I consider it a big deal that two missing persons who the FBI ostensibly had no idea where they were made it onto their Security Index.
(Coming next: So Richard Cox and Ronald Tammen were both on the FBI’s Security Index. Guess who WASN’T on the list.)
By now, I think we’ve all come to terms with the notion that Ronald Tammen in his adult years wasn’t the same person everyone had known when he was in his teens. Mind you, we still don’t know Ron’s whole story. We don’t know what predicaments he experienced after he disappeared, nor do we know the sorts of things he did when presented with said predicaments. But judging by his surviving FBI documents, we can see that Ron’s life after his disappearance was wildly different from his days as the solemn and studious business major from Maple Heights, Ohio. It was almost as if the day he went missing, he’d entered a bizarro world where up became down, where dull became exciting, where cash-strapped became cash-solvent, where good became, well…I’m not quite ready to go there.
At least for now, let’s cut him some slack and leave it at this: after Ron Tammen disappeared, his life had grown complicated.
Someday, in the not-too-distant future, I plan to share with you just how complicated his life had become. We already know that the FBI had added him to their infamous Security Index. That alone would complicate matters for any person.
When I started researching Ron’s disappearance, I can remember reading about some of his attributes, and someone close to him would sometimes be quoted saying that he’d been on the Dean’s List or that he’d been asked to join Phi Beta Kappa or something like that as examples of how smart he was. To date, I’ve found no evidence of either of those things being true. For Ron to be listed on the FBI’s Security Index, which is something for which we do have evidence, is the bizarro opposite of Phi Beta Kappa times 100.
Hopefully soon, I’ll be providing a grand tour of every stamp and squiggle on his missing person documents and giving you my most educated guess of their meaning as well as some of the people in our country’s history who shared those same marks with him. And trust me, you will be surprised—even those of you who feel that nothing more can surprise you about Ron Tammen. But I want to be 100% certain I’ve done my due diligence, which is why I’m being so slow and methodical before writing that post.
In the meantime, I want to discuss a couple dots that are easier to connect. They have to do with the following stamps on Ron’s records, two of which we’ve already discussed somewhat in prior posts:
ST-102, REC-19, and MCT-49.
I’m still not sure what most of these letters and numbers stand for, and it’s not because I haven’t tried. I’ve shown Ron’s records to every FBI contact I’ve ever met over the past 14 years, and no one has offered an explanation. As I mentioned in the comments section on my last post, recently, I asked an online history group from the National Archives, and they kindly consulted with their contacts at the FBI. Their response was that they were likely the stamps of the Records Division to help with indexing and serialization.
I respectfully disagree. The Records Division may have had a say in assigning the actual case numbers, but they wouldn’t have been involved in assigning these stamps, which were repetitive and erratically placed and which seemed to convey coded information about the case itself. And so, using my eyes and my ability to compare and contrast one FBI document from another, I’ve come to the following conclusions:
ST stamp
The ST stamp appears on some the most sensitive FBI documents I’ve found online. Not all documents that share the same ST number are on the same topic, but they all seem to be a bigger deal than a run-of-the-mill FBI record. Here’s what I’ve ascertained:
They seem to deal with serious crimes or highly sensitive topics.
They deal with topics that pertain to the FBI’s former Domestic Intelligence Division and specifically with internal security, which is why I think they were assigned by people in that division.
The lower the number, the more important they seem to be, starting at ST-100. Therefore, ST-101 appears to be more sensitive than ST-141, and so on. Ron’s number, ST-102, seems to have been assigned to some of the steamiest hot-potato cases in the eyes of the FBI.
The ST numbers are invariably accompanied by a stamp with the letters REC.
I’ve come to notice that earlier intelligence documents didn’t use the ST designation. They started with the letters SE instead of ST. This makes sense since, before the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division came to be, there was the Security Division. SE could be short for Security. So far, the documents that I’ve found that started with SE did so from around 1946 through the late 1950s. To the best of my knowledge, the documents with ST designations were date-stamped from the early 1960s through 1974, or thereabouts.
REC stamp
I now know that the letters REC stand for RECORDED, and they include a number to the right of them. In Ron’s case, that number is 19. According to the book “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been In the FBI Files?”, to be recorded means that “a document has been placed in the appropriate file, and has been given a case and a serial number.” But, in my view, the REC number can’t just mean that alone. Otherwise, why would there be different numbers—why not a little box to check? And why would they always accompany an ST number? From what I can tell, the REC numbers seemed to provide additional info about a given case. For this reason, I believe that the FBI viewed documents with the same ST/REC numbers as somehow similar or related and ostensibly that they should be grouped together. More on this in a second.
MCT stamp
From what I can tell, the MCT numbers are tied to the Security Index. If a person was listed in the Security Index, it was extremely likely they had an MCT number. Ron was in the Security Index and his MCT number was 49. One thing I’ve noticed is that if a person was on the FBI’s radar in the early 1950s, around the time that the Security Division was handing out SE’s and not ST’s, they didn’t appear to be assigning MCT numbers. Even if a person was of extreme interest to them in the area of internal security, they didn’t have an MCT number.
So keeping all of the above in mind, do you know what I think about Ron’s missing person documents? I think the FBI stamped his pages in June 1973 after the Cincinnati Field Office had sent the guy from Welco’s fingerprints to FBI Headquarters for comparison to Ron’s prints. The reason is that they weren’t using either the ST or the MCT stamps in 1953. To date, the earliest MCT stamp that I’ve found was assigned in 1958 and the earliest ST stamp was in 1962. I think Ron’s papers had been languishing for decades in the Missing Person File Room, room number 1126 of the Identification Building, and were only known to a chosen few, J. Edgar Hoover being one of them. After Hoover died in 1972, and after the Cincinnati Field Office had inquired about Ron’s prints on May 9, 1973, other staffers had to come up to speed on Ron’s case which is when I believe he received his steamy stamps of the hot-potato variety.
This information is especially useful to us as we compare Ron’s documents to other records from 1973, which is why I’ve called all of us together at this time when many of you would like to get back to watching the Olympics. (P.S. Weren’t the Opening Ceremonies amazing last night? Wasn’t Celine Dion INCREDIBLE??)
Here’s a document with an MCT-49 stamp from February 1973. The document has to do with the Black Panthers and an alleged plot to assassinate Vice President Spiro Agnew.
Here’s an ST-102, REC-19 stamp on a document from August 1973. The document has to do with an alleged plot to assassinate Sirhan Sirhan. To see the full report, click on the below image.
Click on image to access the full report.
And here’s page one of Ron’s FBI docs, for comparison.
What I’m trying to say here is that Ron was given his MCT-49 stamp four months after a document telling of a potential assassination plot against Spiro Agnew had been given the same stamp. He was given his ST-102, REC-19 stamps a mere two months before someone who was given the same stamps, a guy named Vladimir Zatko, claimed to have been paid $25K in advance to assassinate Sirhan Sirhan.
Incidentally, I found the Sirhan Sirhan/Vladimir Zatko documents tucked inside some of the James W. McCord records, the former CIA operative and Watergate burglar about whom I’ve written before. We’re interested in McCord because he and Ron both have ST-102, REC-19 stamps, though McCord’s extensive FBI file has other ST/REC stamps as well. But here’s what’s interesting about Zatko and McCord: James McCord’s name isn’t listed anywhere in the Vladimir Zatko letter, yet they were assigned the same ST-102, REC-19 stamps and someone from the FBI felt that McCord and Zatko should be filed together. E. Howard Hunt, a fellow CIA operative and mastermind of the Watergate burglary, is mentioned, but not McCord. (Apparently anything or anyone having to do with Watergate was filed under McCord, which doesn’t exactly seem fair.)
I just thought this development was important enough to warrant putting the TV on pause for a second.
That means that the FBI has had all sorts of intel on him that they’ve been pretending not to know about
For weeks, I’ve been going through Ronald Tammen’s missing person documents with a 2mm-aperture lab-grade sieve (I find it works way better than the toothy comb method) and focusing on the stamps and scribbles that I’d been ignoring for—ay yi yi 🤦🏻♀️—around 14 years. In my last post, I discussed the “Hac” notes that are written on top of 10 out of 22 pages of his records and how I’ve come to believe that it was an abbreviation for the House Assassination Committee, which is admittedly shocking if you say it out loud. I have an update on that theory that I plan to discuss very soon. (Spoiler alert: there’s a lot to say.) Today, however, I’d like to discuss a notation that we don’t even have to try to decode. It’s written in the king’s English on the very first page of Ron’s records.
On page one of Ron’s missing person documents, written vertically in the left margin, is a two-word sentence: “See index.” You have to look hard. It’s almost as if they tried to erase it so that we wouldn’t be able to make it out. But, yes indeed, that’s what it says: See index.
“See index” is written in the left margin of the first page of Ron’s missing person documents.Here it is, blown up and turned on its side. Look closely. The s is obvious. The two ee’s are almost ghostlike, but you can see them if you look closely at their outlines. Then there’s the dotted i, the scribbly n, d, and e, and the prominent slash in the x.
It sounds so vague and benign, but let me tell you, those two words wielded serious firepower.
There’s only one index that they could be referring to: the Security Index, an index so fiercely defamatory that its mere mention could make a G-man of yore’s eyes go wide and his mouth suddenly silent. In a 1971 Washington Post article that was written when the Security Index was first exposed to the public, ex-agents referred to it as “‘a taboo subject’ or ‘super-secret’ or ‘super-skittish.’” (“Super-skittish” was a weird way for someone to describe an inanimate object, but I think the ex-agent meant that he and his coworkers had felt that way if the topic was broached.)
The FBI has dozens of indices, which at that time were maintained on actual index cards, but the Security Index was its most notorious. Originally, it was called the Custodial Detention List, and it was developed—I kid you not—so that the FBI could round up all of their suspected spies and saboteurs and other would-be subversives in the event of some sort of national emergency. We’re not even talking about bona fide criminals. We’re talking about people whom the FBI had labeled as being potentially dangerous in some way based on three priority levels, with level 1 being (potentially) the most prone to violence. Some people were thought to have leaned too far to the left or right politically (usually left), at least in the Bureau’s estimation. Of course, anyone with real or imagined ties to the communist party were on the list. But if you had a friend who’d attended a CPUSA meeting once or if a group that you belonged to was, in the FBI’s view, at risk of being somehow infiltrated by communists, you’d probably wind up on the list too. It’s called pre-emptive policing—surveilling people whom the FBI had deemed potentially dangerous before a potential crime had been committed or even considered—and J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t have been more gung-ho.
This is probably the perfect time to remind readers that this is America we’re talking about, whose forefathers famously wrote on July 4, 1776, that all individuals are endowed with “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (which would be rather tough to accomplish if you happened to be pre-emptively detained). If you plan to be setting off bottle rockets as part of your Independence Day celebrations, please be careful, and don’t forget to wear your earplugs!
OK, so let’s get back to discussing the list of Americans whom the FBI was fully prepared to incarcerate for no reason other than it seemed to be the right thing to do if the situation had presented itself. This wasn’t just the perspective of the FBI—it was the Department of Justice’s too, whose approval was required before anyone’s name could be added to the list. However, in 1943, then Attorney General Francis Biddle decided that he wasn’t on board with the program. He called the Custodial Detention List “inherently unreliable,” adding:
“The evidence used for the purpose of making the classifications was inadequate; the standards applied to the evidence for the purpose of making the classifications were defective; and finally, the notion that it is possible to make a valid determination as to how dangerous a person is in the abstract and without reference to time, environment, and other relevant circumstances, is impractical, unwise, and dangerous.”
Biddle shut it down and ordered that his memo along with stamped verbiage stating that the program was unreliable and “hereby canceled” should be put in each listed person’s file.
Edgar’s response was: “You present a compelling argument, boss. What were we thinking?”
Just kidding! Hoover changed its name to the Security Index, and it was off to the races once again. Still, Hoover knew he was playing fast and loose with Biddle’s orders. He commanded his agents to make sure that the Security Index be “strictly confidential and should at no time be mentioned or alluded to in investigative reports or discussed with agencies or individuals outside the Bureau”—with the exception of Army and Navy intelligence, that is—“and then only on a strictly confidential basis.” That’s undoubtedly when the Security Index developed its menacing mystique.
Actors, musicians, politicians, writers, and various rando people whom FBI field offices had identified for one reason or another with the aid of a large network of informants…these were all added. According to the FBI’s criteria, the Security Index was for nabbing communists and subversives, from the hard-core revolutionary leaders (Priority #1) to your second-tier worker-bee types (Priority #2) to everyone else (Priority #3). But let’s be real. They gave those criteria a LOT of latitude and people who had zero connections with communists or subversives were among the indexed. Of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference—neither communist nor subversive—were in the Security Index. I’ve found evidence that future Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, clearly a democrat and not a communist, had secured a place in the Security Index in 1955, prior to a trip he made to Russia. In another example, a young man who was intellectually disabled and lived with his mother was added to the index, ostensibly because he’d expressed dislike for the U.S. government, and his neighbors had reported him acting suspiciously—leaving by way of the back door and through the neighbor’s yard if someone was standing in front of the apartment and whatnot. Another guy was added because he wouldn’t open his door to FBI special agents after they’d gone to the trouble of making a surprise wellness visit. So apparently, being socially awkward or standing up for one’s constitutional rights counted too. (As I write this, I suspect that, had I been an adult at that time, and if blogging were a thing back then, there would have probably been an index card with my name on it. If they thought someone going out of their way to avoid the neighbors was bad, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have liked…you know…this.)
Fortunately for Hoover, Biddle’s successor, Attorney General Tom Clark, was far more accepting of the FBI’s Security Index, and attorneys general during the Cold War could also see its merit, a view that was bolstered by the Internal Security Act of 1950, which permitted the detention of certain citizens during a national emergency. In May 1951 there were a little over 15,500 names in the Security Index and it was growing at a rate of about 100 people a week.
In 1971, after the FBI office was burglarized in Media, PA, by eight courageous patriots and the Security Index was exposed, the FBI changed its name to the Administrative Index, or ADEX, because of course they did. However, it, too, was discontinued, this time forever, in 1976, after the Privacy Act of 1974 was passed and as the House and Senate intelligence investigations called for changes.
So yeah. Ronald Tammen was ostensibly deemed dangerous or subversive enough to be listed in the FBI’s Security Index. As for his priority level, I don’t know, but I have a theory and a plan to try to find out.
I’m thinking let’s do the rest as a Q&A. Cool? Cool.
Are you sure? If the FBI had dozens of indices, how do you know they were referring to the Security Index?
Let’s take a quick minute to review the FBI’s record-keeping system. The FBI stores and accesses its entire collection (for the most part) of investigative, administrative, personnel, and other records through its Central Records System. Today the Central Records System is digitized, but before computers, it occupied a sea of square footage in the form of actual file folders filled with copious amounts of paper that could be rifled through and scribbled upon.
Also, as we’ve discussed in the past, FBI cases are categorized numerically according to designated classifications, not by the name of a person or organization. Therefore, FBI officials needed a search tool—which, before computers, was based on index cards—to find out where to look for a person’s case file or files. It’s just like at the library, and how we used to consult a piece of wood furniture that held skinny long drawers filled to capacity with little white cards before we could locate a book.
If an FBI agent back then wished to conduct a check on Ronald Tammen, they’d have to first walk over to their ocean of index cards—called the General Index—to learn which case number or numbers applied to him. The index card carrying Ron’s name would have directed them to case numbers 79-31966 (his missing person case) and 25-381754 (his Selective Service violation case) and probably his fingerprint file over in the Identification Building. What I’m getting at is that FBI officials wouldn’t need to write “See index” on page one of his missing person records if they were referring to the General Index because that index had already been “seen.” The General Index was always stop number one. But what if for some crazy reason that was their protocol? Well, we’d be seeing the words “See index” on the first page of pretty much every file in the Central Records System, and that most definitely is not the case.
As for the other indices, there have been quite a few. In a 1978 review of the FBI’s record-keeping system, the General Accounting Office said that the FBI kept 239 special indices in addition to 28 classified indices at that time to aid in their investigations. They had indices for bank robbers and people who’d undergone background checks and car theft rings and people in organized crime and criminal informants, and so on, and so forth…and that’s just up through the C’s.
Was there an index for Selective Service violators? Sure there was. But we know that that’s not the index Ron’s missing person documents were referencing. How do we know this? We know this because his Selective Service case had been canceled in 1955 (we’re still trying to get someone from the DOJ to tell us why), at which point they should have scribbled out the “See index” notation. No one did that. More importantly, to the best of my knowledge, no other index was specified in people’s FBI records. Granted, I have no idea how FBI personnel would have known to check those other indices. Maybe “See car theft ring index” was written on a person’s General Index card, or better yet, maybe if a person had been arrested for stealing a car, an agent would instinctively check the “car theft ring” index to see if his or her name was on it. Obviously, I don’t have all the answers.
But this much I do know: the words “See index” were purposely vague and benign-sounding and they were surreptitiously scrawled in the left margins of the records of a large number of people who were on the FBI’s radar for a variety of alleged infractions having to do with domestic security. Here’s a sampling of the ones that I found, some of whom will be familiar to you and others who will be new. (Apologies in advance for what I’m about to share with you about beloved comedian Bud Abbott.)
Frank Chavez, Puerto Rican head of Teamsters, friend to Jimmy Hoffa
Thomas Peasner, Jr., POW from Korean War who’d been interrogated after his return because of his conversion to communism; Army Intelligence said that he’d been brainwashed by Chinese
Click on image for a closer view
Edward R. Moss (sic; should be Edward K. Moss), p.r. person with close ties to the CIA and organized crime
Click on image for a closer view
What types of information was on the Security Index card?
A Security Index card was a bare-bones, cut-to-the-chase distillation of how a person was viewed in the eyes of the Bureau. It would include the person’s name, aliases, date of birth, most current address (which they kept close tabs on), occupation, and case numbers, plus a string of abbreviations that were typed along the top. The abbreviations might include NB for native born, NA for naturalized, or AL for alien; COM for communist party USA, ISL for Independent Socialist League, or one of several abbreviations for certain non-democratic countries; KF for key figure in whatever communist or subversive organization they tied you with; DC for Detcom, which meant priority detention in the case of emergency; CS for Comsab or communist saboteurs; and so on.
There was also a designation of SP, which meant that your card would be placed in the Special Section. People in the Special Section were in the following demographic groups: espionage (designated as ESP), prominent persons, government employees (federal), foreign government employees, United Nations Secretariet employees, and Atomic Energy Program employees.
An ordinary FBI employee couldn’t just saunter over to wherever the Security Index cards were stored and have himself a look-see. There was a Security Index desk, and a full-time desk man to oversee this highly sensitive area. From 1950 through 1968, that man was Paul L. Cox, the number one man in the FBI’s Subversive Control Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division. It would have been his job to oversee the elaborate process by which cards were added or subtracted from the Security Index, as well as to coordinate with the DOJ in obtaining approvals, among other important duties.
Here’s a dummy sample of what a typical Security Index card looked like. Again, it looks pretty tame. But the fact that someone had one at all means that there was ostensibly sufficient evidence in that person’s investigative records in order for the DOJ to provide their approval.
Click on image for a closer view
How exactly did the approval process work?
If a special agent thought that a person of (in their view) questionable character was a perfect fit for the Security Index, they’d fill out an FD-122 form, a sample of which I’ve included below. That form would make its way to wherever it needed to go around the Bureau, and once signed off, would be sent to the DOJ for its approval.
Things didn’t just end there, however. Once a person’s card had been added, it was the responsibility of the designated field office to keep tabs on that person and to submit updated FD-122s if changes needed to be made. In other words, if a tax-paying citizen had the sneaky suspicion that they were being monitored by the FBI before they were assigned a Security Index card, they could rest assured that they were most definitelybeing watched after getting one.
The FD-122 for Representative Bella Abzug of New York. Her Security Index card was approved. Click on image for a closer view.
It seems so weird that Ron’s case would warrant a Security Index card based on the measly smattering of records the FBI had on him.
That’s just it. Based on the documents that we have, there isn’t any reason for it. It only makes sense that he would have a Security Index card if there were other records, especially records of a derogatory nature, which we haven’t seen. Another possible scenario I suppose would be if Ron’s card was in the Special Section, and he were a federal employee of some sort engaged in, oh, I don’t know, espionage perhaps? I’m just speaking hypothetically, of course. Clearly, I’d need to see Ron’s Security Index card in order to get a better idea of why he had one.
Can you do that?
I can try. But bear in mind that I’d be submitting a FOIA to the FBI, who has made it crystal clear that, after my lawsuit settlement, they will never, ever entertain another FOIA request having to do with Ronald Tammen. So even though my original complaint never mentioned the Security Index and the FBI’s FOIA staff ostensibly never consulted it, they would very likely tell me to take a lengthy stroll off a short pier.
That said, do you know who I didn’t sue for Ron Tammen’s records? The DOJ. And do you know what document the DOJ might still have? Ron Tammen’s FD-122. That would be even better than his Security Index card, since it would contain the FBI’s reasoning behind their need for a Security Index card for Ron. And that, my friends, is the document I’ll be seeking.
Do you really think Ron might have had a Security Index card on file because he was a spy?
Believe it or not, I actually think there may be a stamp that says ESP on one of Ron’s documents that we already have, but it’s been crossed out. The stamp appears at the bottom right of the 1973 memo that had been written by the Cincinnati Field Office requesting a comparison of the Welco employee’s fingerprints with Ron’s fingerprints. The stamp is immediately above the one that says NINE, which represents the FBI’s Special Investigative Division. (We’ll talk about that another day.) I have two versions of the Cincinnati memo: a light version, which had been sent to me by the FBI, and a dark version, which had been sent to me by the Butler County Sheriff’s Office, who’d gotten their version from the Cincinnati Field Office. If you zoom in on both stamps, you can make out the roof and bottom of an E, though the center line appears to be whited out. Beside the E is a curvy letter that looks a lot like an S. The third letter is harder to make out, but there aren’t many other options for it to be. So currently, I’m entertaining the notion that there’s an ESP on one of Ron’s documents. If we could get our hands on Ron’s FD-122 in order that we can verify that theory, I’d be stoked.
And if we can’t verify that he was a spy?
That’s OK. As you can imagine, verifying that someone was a spy is really hard to do. Plus, maybe he wasn’t a spy, in which case we may be able to at least get our answer to that question.
At the very least, we can now say with 100% certainty that the FBI has a lot more information about Ron’s case than they were ever willing to disclose to anyone—to you, to me, to Miami University officials, to news reporters, to the Butler County cold case detective, and to Marjorie and Ron Tammen, Sr., along with the rest of the Tammen family, whom they knowingly deceived for decades.
Better late than never, I guess.
************
On this, the 58th birthday of the Freedom of Information Act, I’d like to extend a very big thank you to the researchers who, through their tireless FOIAing, have made FBI records and other government documents available to all of us and made this current research endeavor possible. These include:
One was assigned in 1953; the other was assigned in 1973
There’s something incredibly embarrassing about blogging investigative research in real time, and that incredibly embarrassing something is this: with each new discovery, my earlier hypotheses will continue to be accessible to all until the internet ceases to be. And that means that all my mistakes, oversights, and rushes to judgment are posted in full-frontal view and there’s not a thing I can do about it.
Today I’d like to talk about Ron Tammen’s missing person number…or, rather, his missing person numbers…as in with an ‘s’…as in very, very plural.
I honestly cannot believe I missed this earlier.
Because I have a couple other deadlines to worry about, I need to write this up fast. Let’s do it as a quick Q&A:
Wow! Are you sure?
Pretty darned sure—sure enough to sit down and write this blog post when, as I said, I have some other stuff I need to get to tonight.
Remind us: which one is Ron’s missing person number…or numbers?
As you may recall, all FBI files begin with a classification number, from 1 to 281, and all missing person cases begin with the number 79. And the 79 number that’s written all over Ron’s FBI documents is 79-31966. That’s the one I’ve been reporting since Day 1.
Recently, I was going over his FBI documents again and I was focusing on the report written by the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Cleveland field office after receiving a phone call from Marjorie Tammen. At the top of page 1, written in small, neat penmanship, under the words “ATT: IDENTIFICATION DIVISION” is this:
MP# 17699
Posted
6-2-53 Jh
Although I’m not 100 percent sure of the last two letters—I think they’re “Jh”—the number is unmistakable. The 79 has been left off—because why not? All missing person numbers begin with 79. The most important part of the number is 17699.
The top of the first page of the report from the Cleveland field office to the Identification Division with Ron’s first missing person number. Click on image for the full two-page report.
Are you sure that wasn’t the missing person number that Cleveland had assigned to him?
You’re correct that field offices would assign their own case numbers, but no, it’s not theirs. I know this because at the top of the memo in parentheses after the words “SAC, Cleveland” is the number 79-0-615 B. In Cleveland, they’d placed Ron’s file in their 0 file, which means that it was placed in the front of the missing person cases because it was a stand-alone report. There was nothing else available on Ron to warrant creating its own folder. Therefore, in Cleveland, Ron’s report was the 615th report in their missing person 0 file. (The “B” probably represents a subcategory of some sort.)
On June 2, 1953, when the FBI’s Identification Division received the report, they listed his case as MP# 17699— obviously, undoubtedly, and most assuredly under classification 79.
Your headline says that one missing person number was assigned in 1953 and the other was assigned in 1973. How did you figure that out?
Remember my July 4, 2022, post where I told you about a box of FBI missing person records that are now housed in the National Archives? I’d submitted a public records request to view those records as soon as they became available. Recently, they wrote to me with the names, dates, and case numbers of the people who are in that file, along with an estimate of the time it would take (they’re still processing orders from February 2014!) and dollars it would cost me ($760!) in order to view them all.
It’s a smattering of missing persons cases, comparatively. In the 1993 book “Unlocking the Files of the FBI,” by Gerald K. Haines and David A. Langbart, the authors stated that the FBI had on its books roughly 20,000 missing person cases in 1980. The number of case files in this box is 87, which is 0.4 percent of the total. None of the people we’ve come to know are in the box: no Ron, no Richard Cox, and not the two people I spoke of in my July 4 post—Charles McCullar, a 19-year-old man who disappeared in January 1975, or Dennis Martin, age 6, who disappeared in June 1969.
However, I started noticing how Ron’s, and Richard’s, and Charles’, and Dennis’ case numbers fit in with the rest of the people listed there. And the numbering system seems kind of chronological.
Oh, that’s good.
Yeah, well, hold on—it’s not perfect. God forbid that a numbering system should ever be perfectly chronological. But you can see patterns regarding when they assigned people’s numbers, including Ron’s two numbers. And I think it gives us a clue as to why they gave him the second number.
What sorts of patterns?
Included below is the table that NARA sent to me with the names of the people I plan to seek records on highlighted in yellow.
Click on image for a better view.Click on image for a better view.
As you can see, the case numbers are listed in numerical order, and they’re also generally listed in chronological order. That means that the lower numbers are generally indicative of the older cases, which began in the 1930s (John Kallapure’s case is likely a typo and should probably read 12/36 instead of 12/16) and the higher numbers are of the more recent cases, which end in 1980. But there are distinct outliers, like Willie McNeal Love and Edward Theodore Myers.
When we insert the case numbers of our four missing persons into the table, here’s what happens:
Ronald Tammen #1: 79-17699
Missing 4/19/53; posted 6/2/53
Ron’s number 79-17699 is a little out of chronological order with his neighbors, and it’s weird that his number precedes those of people who went missing in the late 1940s and early 50s, including Richard Cox. Nevertheless, he’s still relatively in the ballpark of the year in which he disappeared.
Ronald Tammen #2: 79-31966
Date of Cincinnati report seeking comparison of Ron’s fingerprints: 5/9/73
Ron’s missing person number that’s written all over his FBI documents is 79-31966. This number appears where you’d predict him to be in the FBI’s ordering system, between Don L. Ray, who went missing in 12/72, and Ronnie D. York, who disappeared in 1/75. Ron’s number is only 7 digits higher than Mr. Ray’s, so it’s logical to conclude that he received it in 1973. Furthermore, it’s written on documents that are dated May 1973, shortly after the Cincinnati field office had sent a man’s fingerprints to FBI Headquarters to compare them to Tammen’s prints.
Richard Cox: 79-23729
Missing 1/14/50; posted 2/8/50
Richard Cox’s number 70-23729 is in the spot you’d expect him to be, between William H. Doyle, who went missing in 2/49, and George E. Robinson, who went missing in 12/50.
Dennis Martin: 79-31142
Missing 6/14/69
Dennis Martin’s missing person number is slightly out of order, between Melanie Ray, who went missing in 7/69, and Rosemary Calandriello, who went missing in 8/69. But it’s very close, and the discrepancy probably has to do with when his missing person notice was posted in comparison to the two women’s notices. Because there is so much written on Martin, I’m unable to tell when his number was officially assigned.
Charles McCullar: 79-32359
Missing 1/30/75; date in which the FBI was contacted 3/25/76
Although Charles McCullar disappeared in January of 1975, the FBI was first contacted regarding his disappearance on March 25, 1976. For this reason, his missing person number is exactly where you’d expect it to be—between Linda L. Dow, who went missing in 3/76, and Richard W. Miller, who went missing in 5/76.
What do you think this means?
Honestly? I think that sometime between June 2, 1953, and May 9, 1973, Ron’s original missing person number, number 79-17699, was retired. When the Cincinnati field office sent in the fingerprints of the man from Welco Industries, asking the Identification Division to compare them to Tammen’s, I think the folks in Ident were a little stymied.
Here’s my imagined reenactment:
Employee #1: Um, Cincinnati is asking us to compare these fingerprints to a college guy from Ohio who’s supposedly still missing. But I’m not finding his missing person number filed anywhere. It’s like…gone or something.
Employee #2: That’s really weird. What do you think we should do?
Emp #1: Can we give him a new missing person number?
Emp #2: Brilliant!
And so, sometime in the vicinity of May 22, 1973, I believe the FBI assigned Ron Tammen his new number, 79-31966. As we all know, shortly thereafter, on June 5, 1973, there was a lot more activity in Ron’s missing person case, as his documents were “Removed from Ident files.” After that, however, all activity on his missing person case ended.
Is there anything else we can learn from this?
I think this helps explain why the number 79-31966 is written in the same exact handwriting on all of Ron’s documents, even the earlier ones. I think the person who wrote “Removed from Ident files” also wrote his new missing person number on those documents in 1973.
It could also explain why the Cincinnati field office used Ron’s Selective Service violation case number (25-381754) to identify him as opposed to his missing person number, even though his Selective Service case had been canceled in 1955. I don’t think they could find Ron’s missing person number.
Oh, and this: I guess by now you know that I don’t think Ron was still considered missing by the FBI in 1973. What this new information tells me is that I think at least some individuals at the Bureau had indeed figured it out before the Cincinnati field office had sent in the Welco employee’s fingerprints. And I also think there’s a good chance that J. Edgar Hoover, who died in 1972, knew a lot more about Ron’s case when he was at the helm, even as he continued exchanging letters with Ron’s tortured mother and father. Granted, it’s just a theory.
I have a couple pieces of news for you. First, the FBI responded to my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for Lyndal Ashby’s Additional Record Sheets yesterday.
Lyndal Ashby’s Additional Record Sheets
For those who need some refreshing, Lyndal Ashby is the name of a young man who’d gone missing seven years after Ron Tammen. Ashby was 22 when he’d disappeared in 1960 from Hartford, KY, a town of roughly 2700 people on the western side of the state. His story is different from Ron’s. He was a veteran of the United States Marine Corps. According to Ashby’s obituary, after he’d gone missing, it was learned that he’d been living under a new name in California and had died on April 11, 1990. He had a family.
Although Ashby was cremated and his ashes were strewn in the Pacific Ocean, near the Golden Gate Bridge, his family erected a memorial to Lyndal in Walton’s Creek Church Cemetery, in Centertown, KY—the town where he was born and where he’d graduated from high school.
Ashby’s case had nothing to do with the CIA or hypnosis or any of the curious details we’ve discussed regarding Tammen’s case. However, the two cases did have at least two things in common. First, J. Edgar Hoover was very much at the helm of the FBI when both men disappeared. Second, both men had their fingerprints on file with the FBI’s Identification Division when they’d disappeared. Theoretically, the FBI protocol that had initially applied to Ron’s fingerprint records—that they be kept until he was 99 years of age—should have applied to Ashby’s fingerprint records too. Since Ashby was born in 1938, the FBI should have his fingerprint records until at least 2037.
That’s why I submitted a FOIA request for Ashby’s Additional Record Sheets. As we’ve discussed elsewhere on this site, Additional Record Sheets were sheets of paper that were part of a person’s fingerprint jacket, attached to the back of their fingerprint cards with two-pronged fasteners. Identification staff would jot down notes on them whenever they performed an action on the file and then place everything back into the fingerprint jacket. When the fingerprint cards were digitized beginning in 1999, so were the Additional Record Sheets.
Here’s what the FBI sent me.
As happy as I was to receive anything at all from them, it’s not what I was hoping for. I was hoping for the sort of document that’s in this photo, which I’d captured from an FBI video:
I was hoping for scribbles denoting every potential sighting of Ashby as well as the exact moment when the FBI figured out that he’d changed his name and was living in California.
Instead, I received Ashby’s fingerprints from his time in the military.
Do I think the FBI sent me everything in Ashby’s fingerprint jacket? I do not. Am I going to appeal? I will not.
The reason is that I’m a small person of limited means, and I need to prepare myself for bigger battles. Also, I’ve learned enough from what they’ve sent me. By sending me Lyndal Ashby’s fingerprints, the FBI has let me know something valuable: They didn’t expunge them. They didn’t expunge them when they knew he was no longer missing, and they didn’t expunge them after he died almost 32 years ago.
The FBI appears to be abiding by its record retention schedule and holding onto Lyndal Ashby’s fingerprints until at least the year 2037. (The retention period has since been extended to 110 years, so they may be holding them until then.) They ostensibly didn’t even expunge his fingerprints seven years after his confirmed death, which is part of their retention schedule protocol.
Moreover, the fact that they still have Lyndal Ashby’s fingerprints on file, and not Ron Tammen’s, reinforces the notion that the expungement of Tammen’s fingerprints was due to unusual circumstances.
We already know that Ron’s fingerprints were expunged in 2002 due to the Privacy Act or a court order. Some readers have wondered if there might have been a mass expungement of fingerprints when the FBI automated its system beginning in 1999—whether to protect the fingerprint owners or to simply thin out the numbers of prints to be digitized. Although, admittedly, Ashby was deceased by then, I don’t know the precise date when the FBI made that discovery. FBI records that I’ve received indicate that they were still conducting DNA testing for his case in February 2011. Therefore, it’s reasonably safe to conclude that there was no mass expungement of missing persons’ fingerprints sometime around 2002 due to the Privacy Act.
Court-ordered expungements in 2002
My second piece of news has to do with court-ordered expungements. You may recall that, in an effort to figure out the precise reason for Ron’s expungement—was it the Privacy Act or was it a court order?—I’d submitted two FOIA requests to the FBI. In the first, I requested documents associated with the early expungement of fingerprints between 1999 and 2002 on the basis of a court order. In the second, I requested documents pertaining to the early expungement of fingerprints for the same time period due to the Privacy Act. Both FOIA requests resulted in the same response: “Unable to identify records responsive to your request.“
I’ve since refined my request having to do with Privacy Act expungements, and I’m eagerly waiting for the FBI to acknowledge that request, which, I might add, is a thing of beauty. As for the one having to do with a court order, I’ve been letting it lie, since I wasn’t sure where to go next.
And then, last weekend, I put two and two together.
You may recall when I was seeking records from the FBI’s Cincinnati Field Office in relation to another aspect of the Tammen case. They’d responded by sending a raft of electronic documents with only subject headings, and one of those documents was titled “COURT ORDERS RE EXPUNGMENT [sic] SHOULD GO TO BCII.” Now, I would very much love to see what the entire document has to say on that topic, and I’ve asked them to declassify it, please and thank you. But I was wondering if something can be determined now, in the meantime, from the subject head alone?
For example, exactly who or what is BCII? At first, I thought it might have been part of the FBI or Department of Justice, but I’ve found no evidence of that. What I later discovered was that the Ohio Attorney General’s Office has a Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI), which also has an Identification (I) Section. So they have all the necessary letters. Upon further reading, I learned that Ohio’s BCI handles court-ordered expungements for cases throughout the state of Ohio, in care of the Identification Section, and that the people there work closely with the FBI. It makes total sense that the FBI’s field office in Cincinnati would recommend that court-ordered expungements be sent to Ohio’s BCII.
Over the weekend, I’d submitted a public records request to the Ohio Attorney General’s office seeking “all segregable records pertaining to the expungement of fingerprint records that took place in the year 2002 due to a court order.” Again, I was trying to figure out if they had any court-ordered expungements at all that year, and if not, we could be certain that Ron’s expungement was not due to a court order. Of course, there could also have been 10 or 20 or 50 court-ordered expungements in 2002, in which case I’d be back to square one, not knowing if Ron’s case was among them.
Yesterday morning, I’d just gotten back from my run when I checked my phone and saw that someone had left a voicemail. It was from the chief counsel for Ohio’s BCI, and he’d called seeking more information about my request. I returned his call, expecting to be immediately directed to voicemail or at least to have to run through a menu of choices and button-pushes to reach him, but no. Dude picked up on the first ring.
You guys. You know how I think the people from the National Archives and Records Administration are rock stars when it comes to FOIA? Well, move over, NARA, because the people in the Ohio AG’s office have you beat. NARA had responded to one of my requests the next day, which is super impressive. But Ohio’s chief counsel for the BCI responded to my public records request the very same day.
Now, before I tell you what their response was, let me just say that, in our phone conversation, as I was giving him the specifics, he let me know that they don’t maintain court orders by year. But knowing the person in question was helpful, he said, though, again, he wasn’t sure what information he’d be able to provide. I sent him all of Ron’s identifying information. I also pointed out to him that the AG’s web page on missing persons has a page devoted to Ron.
“Who knows…we may be able to solve your missing person case,” I told him.
At around 3 p.m. yesterday, I received the BCI’s response:
BCI has searched its records for “all segregable records pertaining to the expungement of fingerprint records that took place in the year 2002 due to a court order. The records that I’m seeking will document that an expungement of fingerprint records has taken place due to a court order in the year 2002.” Following receipt of your request, I contacted you by telephone to clarify your request and to narrow the focus of BCI’s search of its records.
Upon review of BCI’s records, BCI does not have any records responsive to your specific request. As such, this concludes BCI’s response to your request.
When we consider these two findings together, I think we can say with confidence that Ron Tammen’s fingerprints were expunged in 2002 because of a conflict with the Privacy Act, and not because of a court order. Also, his conflict with the Privacy Act had nothing to do with a mass expungement during the period in which the FBI was switching to an automated system.
I’m more and more certain of it: Ronald Tammen was alive in 2002 and he himself requested that his fingerprints be expunged from the FBI’s system.
Greetings! Today, I’d like to further discuss the memo that was written on May 9, 1973, by the special agent in charge (SAC) of the Cincinnati Field Office to the acting director of the FBI, who was then William Ruckelshaus. As you probably know by now, the memo concerns the anonymous phone call they’d received claiming that Ron Tammen was working at Welco Industries in Blue Ash, Ohio.
“Oh, geez, that thing again?” some of you may be thinking.
Yeah, that. Sorry, but I still have unresolved issues.
In the last write-up, we discussed how shaky that lead was to begin with. The guy who’d called had refused to provide his name and then he told the FBI rep that a coworker of his might be Ron based on his physical description and “other reasons which he cared not to discuss.” He then “terminated the telephone call,” which sounds as if he hung up in the rep’s ear—a noisy click followed by the long, low waaaaaah of a dial tone. (Hanging up on someone was more dramatic back then.) Apparently, that’s all that was needed for an agent to be assigned to check things out that same day.
Here’s the question that keeps rolling around in my brain: If the FBI didn’t investigate missing person cases, as they claim not to do, why would they have assigned someone to fingerprint the guy at Welco just because some unnamed caller thought he fit Ron’s description? According to an unredacted version of the 1973 memo, the Welco man was an electronic technician from Virginia who’d served his country honorably from 1951 until 1960—a period that covers the time right before Ron entered Miami and extends until seven years after he’d disappeared.
I’d think that the FBI agent would have done his background research on the Welco guy before he made his trip to Blue Ash. The FBI has records on all sorts of people. If a person has a criminal record, they can access it, and they can also access a person’s military service records. Did they do any initial research or did they just pull a surprise pop-in and obtain his bio information there? According to the May 1973 memo, many of the biographical details were provided by the company’s vice president after pulling his employee’s personnel file. Pop-in, it is!
Out of respect for his family, I won’t be sharing the name of the Welco guy who was fingerprinted. His name sounds a little like Ron’s name, which is probably why the anonymous caller thought of him when he read the 20th anniversary article on Tammen’s disappearance and decided to alert the FBI. (I mean, who does that?) And despite whatever physical characteristics the Welco guy had that might have resembled Ron’s, one characteristic stands out that isn’t the least bit similar. It’s also an attribute that is far less likely to change after a person reaches adulthood: his height. The Welco guy was 6 feet 2 ½ inches tall. Ron was roughly 5 feet 9 inches tall. Nevertheless, the special agent fingerprinted the strapping electronic technician from Virginia and a couple weeks later, the Cincinnati Field Office was told that the fingerprints didn’t match Ron’s prints. Not the same guy, said they. (The Identification Division also did some curious things after arriving at their conclusion, which I discuss in the post The Ident Files.)
So there’s that. But the 1973 memo has introduced another small mystery in the Ron Tammen story, and that mystery has to do with the first sentence. It says: “Re Bureau airtel to CI, dated 12/19/58.” The CI stands for Cincinnati Field Office, and an “airtel” was one of the ways in which the FBI communicated internally, especially, I imagine, with its field offices. Think of it as a glorified memo. Most importantly, I wonder if the 12/19/58 airtel is the reason that a special agent was sent to Welco versus ignoring the call altogether, which would have been my inclination had I been on phone duty.
In light of that possibility, the airtel strikes me as important. Unfortunately, there are no 12/19/58 airtels anywhere in the documents I’ve received from the FBI. Back in 2011, I quoted that sentence as a reason for my appeal, when I felt the FBI was withholding documents on Ron. (I still feel that way, by the by.) Even though I won the appeal, I never received a 12/19/58 airtel. I only received documents having to do with DNA testing after Butler County, Ohio, and Walker County, Georgia, reopened their respective cold cases in 2008 to see if a dead body found in the summer of 1953 in Georgia might be Ron.
Although I can’t tell you what the nonexistent memo says, I can deduce a few things about it:
It likely had nothing to do with Ron’s Selective Service violation.
Whenever I’ve discussed Ron’s case with retired FBI folks, the issue of Ron’s avoiding the draft has become their go-to hypothesis as to why the FBI would have investigated his case at all. They can’t imagine why the FBI would spend person-hours, car mileage, or long-distance charges on Ron’s missing person case.
But I’m not convinced. First, we’ve learned that the FBI was indeed visiting people in their homes and dorm rooms shortly after Ron went missing, before his draft status had changed, and also that the FBI had been sitting in on faculty conferences at Miami by May 1953. Second, one FBI retiree told me that he or she didn’t think they had the staffing to seriously investigate Selective Service cases. They might have posted a record with the National Crime Information Center, so that, if the person was arrested, the FBI would let law enforcement know that there was a Selective Service violation against him as well. But this person doesn’t remember the FBI actively searching for someone who didn’t report for induction.
So I don’t think that Ron’s Selective Service violation—case #25-381754— was the reason that the FBI investigated Ron’s disappearance, or at least not the sole reason. I also don’t think it’s the topic of the 12/19/58 airtel. Here’s why:
When FBI Headquarters responded on 5/22/73 saying that the Welco guy’s fingerprints didn’t match Ron’s, someone added a note at the bottom, which included this information:
Was a subj of SSA violation in 1953. Canceled in 1955 (USA Cleveland closed case).
Allow me to interpret by writing out all of the words: It says that Ron was the subject of a Selective Service Act violation in 1953, however, his case was canceled, or closed, in 1955 by the U.S. Attorney in Cleveland.
I don’t know how weird it is for a U.S. Attorney, who is part of the Department of Justice (DOJ), to request that an SSA case be closed. That’s probably a question for another day. (Actually, I’ll be submitting a FOIA request seeking all SSA cases that were closed by the U.S. Attorney in Cleveland in 1955 to find out how weird it was.)
For now, let’s concentrate on the timeframe. For whatever reason, in 1955, Ron’s case had been closed by the U.S. Attorney in Cleveland, which is part of the DOJ, which is the parent agency of the FBI. Because the airtel was written in 1958, three years later, the airtel likely had nothing to do with Ron’s Selective Service Act violation.
The 12/19/58 airtel didn’t seem to be in Cincinnati in January 2008.
In May 1973, the Cincinnati Field Office possessed the 12/19/58 airtel. We know this because they referred to it in their memo. And that makes perfect sense. If FBI Headquarters sends you an airtel, you file it somewhere in case you need it, and they needed it in 1973.
But in 2008, the airtel didn’t seem to be in Cincinnati anymore. I think this because I obtained a set of the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents from the Butler County Sheriff’s Office after cold case detective Frank Smith had retired. It’s the set that Smith had obtained from the Cincinnati Field Office in January 2008. Just like my FOIA documents, Butler County’s set doesn’t include the 12/19/58 airtel either.
I know what you’re probably thinking. You’re thinking: Perhaps the airtel reached its record retention date, and Cincinnati destroyed it according to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) records schedule. Thank you for raising this important point. You’ve obviously become experts on the topic of NARA and records retention schedules, thanks to the FBI’s early expungement of Ron’s fingerprints in 2002, 30 years ahead of their normal schedule.
While it’s true that the 1958 airtel may have been destroyed, the FBI hasn’t admitted to destroying very much on Tammen, at least not to me. Through my lawsuit settlement, I was provided with an in-depth declaration of all the places in which the FBI had searched for documents on Tammen. And in that search, they told me the approximate dates when certain documents had been destroyed.
Click on chart for a closer viewClick on chart for a closer view
For example, although FBI Headquarters destroyed Ron’s Selective Service file “on or about 2/1/1997,” they also reported that the Cincinnati Field Office destroyed Ron’s Selective Service file in 1964. Ostensibly, the 1958 airtel was not in that file, otherwise Cincinnati’s SAC would not have referenced it in 1973. So that supports our conclusion that the 12/19/58 airtel didn’t have anything to do with Ron’s Selective Service violation.
Click on bulleted list for a closer view
The only other document that the FBI’s declaration claims was destroyed is Ron’s Classification 190 document, which had to do with either the Privacy Act or the Freedom of Information Act and which had originated in the Cincinnati Field Office. That document was destroyed “on or about 5/17/2008”—several months after Smith had reopened his investigation. But no matter what purpose the destroyed document had served when it was still with us on earth, it couldn’t have been the 12/19/58 airtel, since the latter document originated from FBI Headquarters, not Cincinnati.
In their declaration, the FBI also says that one file on Ronald H. Tammen, file #252-IR-C5652, is missing and unable to be located (see top chart). Perhaps the 12/19/58 airtel is in that lost file? I have some thoughts on this question, but I can’t print them here just yet. Based on the file’s number, it has to do with the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and/or its Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, known as ViCAP. It’s important that we not let our imaginations run wild regarding the missing file. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s anything pertaining to Ron that would be helpful. If there ever comes a time when I’m at liberty to discuss this topic, I will. But I also don’t think it has anything to do with the 12/19/58 airtel, particularly since the center wasn’t started until 1984.
The airtel may not have pertained to Ron specifically.
So where’s the 12/19/58 airtel and what might it have said? You got me. But it occurs to me that the reason neither Frank Smith nor I received the airtel in our FOIA documents could be because it wasn’t stored along with the Tammen documents. Maybe the airtel dealt with a separate topic. For example, perhaps it was an instructional document for how to handle anonymous phone calls.
For this reason, I’ve filed a FOIA request seeking “ALL FBI BUREAU AIRTELS dated 12/19/1958 that were addressed to the Cincinnati Field Office.” I’ll keep you posted.
I’m going to end things here for now. If I should hear back from any of my public records requests over the next week or two, you may hear from me again. Otherwise, I wish you all peaceful and healthy holidays (emphasis on the healthy), including a Belated Healthy Hanukkah, a Healthy Christmas, a Healthy Kwanzaa, and a Healthy New Year, not to mention a Healthy Boxing Day, Winter Solstice, and (of course) Festivus!
Herbie on Christmas morning a couple years ago. (Seriously, he posed under the tree, as if on cue.)
