I know—this title is very lame and likely to attract perhaps the smallest number of visitors yet, but it’s all I could come up with, considering the scribble we’ll be addressing today. But if you do get past the title and read to the bottom…first, thank you! and second, you’re going to be glad you did. You know why?
Because we’re getting very close to a major revelation.
The scribble in question looks like this, and Ron has four of them on his missing person documents, always in the righthand column, about midway down.
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The first letter is a lowercase l. Usually it looks like a straight line, but sometimes they gave it its characteristic loop, which enables me to state with confidence that it’s an l. The second letter could be a lowercase b, or it could also be an f. (I actually lean toward the latter.) It’s always underlined–always. But bear this in mind: this is not a common mark on FBI documents. In fact, I was just about to give up on finding a match until I delved further into James W. McCord, Jr.’s Watergate records. Then: pay dirt.
Here’s just a sampling I found on McCord et al.
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Our friend Hank Greenspun has one as well.
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Also Daniel Ellsberg, patriot and hero who risked going to prison to publish the Pentagon Papers, finally exposing the truth about the Vietnam War, has one.
Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view. This is the same document as the one above it, however the lb/lf appears to have been erased.
All of these individuals are bound together by none other than James W. McCord, Jr., and they all involve burglaries: one of the DNC Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, one “alleged planned” burglary of Hank Greenspun’s office safe at the Las Vegas Sun, and one at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding. All of these burglaries or planned burglaries were coordinated with “the White House plumbers,” and James W. McCord, Jr., played a lead role.
A few things I’ve noticed about the maker of the lb’s/lf’s:
They are privy to sensitive intelligence information.
The mark doesn’t match the initials of the usual FBI assistant directors. It could be that he or she is attempting to conceal their identity.
Judging by the date stamps on Ron’s documents, it appears that the person wrote his/her mark on them in June 1973. Interestingly, that same person was making that same mark on the Watergate docs during that same time period.
And this brings me to our next announcement:
You guys, I think Ronald Tammen was palling around with James W. McCord, Jr., and may actually have been working for him.
Just a quick word that we have one last announcement to make on our tour, which I’ll be making later this week. Then, shortly thereafter, I’ll be throwing a Walking Tour After-party, where we’ll be discussing some of the less prominent, but still important scribbles on Ron’s docs. At that point, the tour will be officially over, and we’ll be going back to more in-depth reporting. Because…I mean…I don’t know about you, but I think we have a lot to discuss.
Coming next: A Korean War POW who worked at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club in 1963 and who bought a Sears & Roebuck rifle shortly before Kennedy’s assassination but who then disappeared has something on his FBI docs that looks very much like one of Ron’s docs
As we’ve been going through the scribbles on Ron’s docs, it’s becoming clear that having one or two of them strategically placed on a document is one thing. But to have a whole menagerie of them, including the ST-102 and MCT stamps, PLUS a “see index” in the left margin of the first page? Hoo boy. Pretty soon, I imagine that the FBI is going to start taking Ron Tammen seriously.
Well, just wait, because I’ve found another scribble that, to the best that I can determine, would be akin to sticking the biggest reddest sticky note on top of his file folder as a warning to passersby.
Before I proceed, I want to remind my readers—be you a government official, a representative of law enforcement, a member of the military, or a fellow member of the general public—that what I am doing is 100% permissible by law. I am reviewing declassified documents, some having been declassified only recently, and comparing them with each other to discover similarities and patterns. Once these records were declassified and released to the public, I was immediately given carte blanche to report on them. It is my inalienable right.
OK! So here we go:
On page 1 of Ron’s missing person documents, in the bottom lefthand corner, is a notation that, again, isn’t very common among FBI records. The format is consistent: there’s a number, which, in my experience, is either 1 or 2, there’s usually a dash, and there’s the letter D, which is either written in lowercase or uppercase.
For a while, I thought that the D stood for detention and the numbers were assigned according to their priority level on the FBI’s Security Index. So in my initial hypothesis, 1-D would be the individuals of highest priority, who would be detained first in the event of a national emergency. 2-D would be second highest priority, so they’d be detained next, and 3-D, which, to date, I’ve never seen, would be everyone else whose name resides in the Security Index.
But then… I found the below document, which happens to concern James W. McCord, our friend from Watergate fame. To remind readers, James McCord did things long before Watergate, which took place on June 17, 1972. He was in the CIA from 1951 to 1970, which is more than enough time to become entangled in something pernicious, especially during those wild years. Throughout his time with the CIA, McCord was employed by the Office of Security, and, from what I can tell, had been part of the Security Research Staff until 1962, which was headed up for many years by Paul Gaynor. Morse Allen, whom I’ve written about in other posts, was a colleague as well. Security Research was the epicenter of Project Artichoke, the CIA’s interrogation research program. As you know, I strongly believe that Ron Tammen’s psychology professor, St. Clair Switzer, was recruited as a consultant for Project Artichoke for his expertise in hypnosis and drugs as well as his strong ties to the United States Air Force. Louis Jolyon West ostensibly started out with Project Artichoke too, but then he moved over to MKULTRA. (As has been pointed out by H.P. Albarelli, Jr., and Jeffrey Kaye in 2010, Project Artichoke didn’t just evolve into MKULTRA, as many people have mistakenly claimed—including yours truly when I was just getting started in my research. The two programs were operated in tandem for nearly 17 years after MKULTRA’s start in 1953!) I guess what I’m trying to say is that whenever I write the name James W. McCord, don’t just think Watergate. Think Project Artichoke too. Maybe even think Project Artichoke before you think Watergate, since Artichoke came first.
OK, so let’s look at the document from July 7, 1972. When you examine the bottom lefthand corner, in the distribution list, you see that they made 2 copies for the Bureau—which means FBI Headquarters—and that number is circled. However, in the white space northeast of the circled 2, someone has written: “1 – Dept.; 2 of T file copy.”
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I take that to mean that of the 2 Bureau copies, one will go to the Department, and the second of two (T stands for two) will be the file copy at FBI Headquarters.
And that’s when it hit me: d or D stands for Department, as in the Department of Justice, the umbrella organization under which the FBI falls. So whenever we see a 1-d or 1-D, one copy went to the DOJ. When we see 2-d or 2-D, two copies were sent to the DOJ, which, it seems to follow, is more…um…elevated in importance. Doubly so, in fact.
You guys…Ron has 2-D written on the first page of his missing person documents.
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I will now post some of the people who had 1-d’s or 1-D’s on their docs, many of whom you know well. (I’ve provided links to a couple who may be new.)
LEE HARVEY OSWALD
Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.
Trust me, we will be discussing these folks more in the future, particularly James McCord and Thomas Peasner. But for now, here’s today’s announcement:
Of the four individuals I’ve found who have 2-Ds, two of them (Jack Ruby and Thomas Peasner) have been investigated for having possible ties to the assassination of JFK. One (James McCord) was reported by two separate sources to have been in Dallas on November 22, 1963. That just leaves us with Ron.
We’re going to take a break from the “see index”es for a little while—but, trust me, we’ll be circling back. There’s something I’m saving for the end of the tour that (in my view) is a rather big deal.
In the meantime, let’s talk about a scribble that’s noticeably prominent in the left margin of a bunch of Ron’s missing person documents. It looks like a lowercase p and h written in cursive—or is it a lowercase p and capital L?
Whatever it is, it’s another one of those identifying marks that seems to be rarely seen on other FBI documents in general, but when you do, it’s an instant thrill. It’s like when a 10-point buck warily steps out of the woods to peer at you from the opposite end of a one-lane underpass just as it’s your turn to drive through (which happened to me a week or so ago!). Or a hummingbird that swoops in out of nowhere and hovers over your friend’s hostas as you’re standing a foot away knocking on her front door (which happened to me in July!). The magnificently elusive ph (or pL…it’s very hard to tell sometimes) was typically reserved for people who weren’t regarded as choir boys. To be sure, many, though certainly not all, of the recipients lived some seriously sordid lives. Other recipients were wonderful people whom the FBI didn’t trust—people like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Harry Belafonte.
Today I’ll be showcasing all of Ron’s ph’s and/or pL’s along with a gallery of others I’ve found that were unmistakably written by the same person.
I’ll also be presenting similar handwriting that occurs on an FBI document that discusses…well…I’ll tell you at the end when I make today’s announcement.
Here are Ron’s documents that have the ph/pL on them:
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And here are other people’s documents. If you’d like additional background, click on the link for each subject.
Angleo Bruno was boss of the Philadelphia crime family from 1959 until his assassination in 1980. He was referred to as “The Gentle Don” because he preferred to resolve issues without resorting to violence.
The FBI’s Extremist Photograph Album (actually, there were more than one) was just that… photo albums of extremists to supply background information and to assist in identification. In this memo, the FBI’s Intelligence Division is discussing the Secret Service’s request for a copy.
Hank Greenspun was the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun whose office safe was the target of an “alleged planned burglary” in 1972 by E. Howard Hunt, James W. McCord, and G. Gordon Liddy, among others. In my last post, I wrote about how Greenspun’s FBI documents share notations with Ron Tammen, namely “see index” and Hac. Now we have another notation that they share. By the way, I’m excited to announce that there’s a movie about Hank Greenspun that’s narrated by Anthony Hopkins!
Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view. Note that the “ph” (or pL) is circled.
Richard Cox, from Mansfield, Ohio, was a cadet at West Point Academy who disappeared January 14, 1950. His story has some interesting parallels to Ron’s, which we’ve detailed on this blog.
COINTELPRO was a program in which the FBI surveilled and engaged in other illegal activities to disrupt organizations that they felt were dangerous, including the Communist Party, the KKK, the New Left, the Black Panthers, and others. COINTELPRO stands for Counterintelligence Program. NEW LEFT refers to a broad umbrella of people advocating for liberal-leaning social causes. (Note that the ph is on the right side, while all of the others were like Ron’s, on the left.)
The SCLC continues to thrive as a human rights organization that had its start with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the organization’s first president.
Klaus Barbie was a notorious Nazi who was nicknamed “the Butcher of Lyon” for the atrocities he committed as Gestapo chief in Lyon, France. After WWII, the U.S. Army helped him escape to Bolivia in exchange for his assistance in reporting communist activities. In 1983, he was spotted in Peru and was extradited to France to face trial for war crimes. He was convicted and died of cancer in 1991 while serving a life sentence.
Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.
Now, as promised, I’d like to share with you two pages from a lengthy FBI document that has handwriting that, in my view, looks quite a bit like our ph or pL, though not exactly. The document was sent to members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence in August 1975 in response to a request they’d made. (The House Select Committee on Intelligence preceded the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which was created the following year, in 1976.)
Written at the top of the first document, among other notes, are the words “Place in file in folder.” I’m thinking that the “Pl” in “Place” looks a lot like our ph’s or pL’s. On the second page is a ph or PL or pl in front of the word Dean. Again, it looks a lot like the same handwriting to me.
Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.
Once you get past the telephone directories, the lion’s share of this FBI document discusses “Informants” and it appears to be part of the FBI’s Manual of Instructions on how agents are instructed to work with and reimburse criminal or security informants. I have no idea if that topic applies to our documents—in fact, I highly doubt that they do. What I do find intriguing and helpful is the source of these documents. On the title page of a section called “Policy – Informant and Informant Payments,” a page that’s near the end of a lengthy “Item H,” someone has written “Cregar Copy.” In fact, “Cregar Copy” has been written on several pages in this document, which leads me to believe that all of the informant pages came from someone named Cregar.
As it turns out, the Cregar in question is William O. Cregar, who headed up the Counterintelligence Section of what was, by then, called the Intelligence Division (as opposed to Domestic Intelligence). Earlier in his career, he’d been the FBI’s liaison with the CIA, though the person in that role in 1975 was Leon F. Schwartz.
I have a guess as to who the person was who made the ph or pL marks on the aforementioned documents, but I don’t think today’s the day for me to go public with that. But here’s what I think we can deduce, which is my next announcement:
I think that whoever made Ron’s ph’s or pL’s was either part of the FBI’s Intelligence Division (likely a staffer in Bill Cregar’s Counterintelligence Section) or someone on the House Select Committee on Intelligence. And if I have to choose between the two of them, I choose the former.
Let’s see…so far, we’ve been discussing the FBI’s Security Index, the notorious list of so-called dangerous people whose rolls included Ronald Tammen and Richard Cox, but curiously enough, excluded Lee Harvey Oswald, at least at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination, even though they knew all about his activities with Cuba and the Soviet Union. We also were able to guesstimate that someone from the FBI had written “see index” on the front page of Ron’s missing person documents in or around 1973, since it was written in the same handwriting, and therefore by the same person, as the same phrase that appears on a document from July 30, 1973. We didn’t discuss the content of the July 30 document…just the “see index” part and its date.
So let’s briefly discuss the content of the July 30, 1973, document.
In the “from” line is “Director, FBI,” who by then was Clarence Kelley. The person in the “to” line was the SAC (i.e., special agent in charge) of the FBI’s Las Vegas Field Office, who was Vern Loetterle. The subject is lengthy and in all caps: ALLEGED PLANNED BURGLARY OF THE OFFICE OF HENRY GREENSPUN, A LAS VEGAS PUBLISHER, IN EARLY 1972 (INTELLIGENCE DIVISION).
There’s quite a bit to unpack here at some point, but let’s not do that now. Let’s simply start by saying that Clarence had gotten Greenspun’s first name wrong. It was actually Herman, but everyone called him Hank. Hank Greenspun owned the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, and he used its editorial page like a weapon to wield his power and advance his political views, which evidently is a practice that hasn’t changed at all, especially since social media has entered our lives. (Hi, Elon! Hey, Zuck!)
Here’s the story in a nutshell, which I’ve gleaned from several FBI reports on this topic: In early 1972, E. Howard Hunt—yes, THAT Howard Hunt—approached a security guy employed by Howard Hughes’ Tool Company—yes, THAT Howard Hughes—and told him about a robbery that he and his friends were planning to pull off. What friends, you ask? Oh, just G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord, both of Watergate fame, to name two. There were likely others involved as well. The reason for the robbery was to steal some documents that were in Greenspun’s safe that Hunt said could be used against Edmund Muskie, should he become the Democrat’s nominee for president. Hunt told the security guy, named Ralph Winte, that it was his understanding that Hughes could benefit nicely from the burglary as well. As they were rifling for the Muskie documents, the burglars would take the documents benefiting Hughes and hand them over to Winte, who could get them to Hughes. The only thing they were asking for in return was to have one of Hughes’ planes sitting at the ready to fly the burglars to a Central American country of their choosing.
Here’s my favorite part of the story: when Winte asked Hunt what would happen if they got caught, Hunt’s response was “We’ll shoot them.”
I know. Wild, right?? Winte asked his immediate boss, William Gay, what he thought about the plan, and his boss ethically replied, “Not just no, hell no!” or something along those lines. So ostensibly the crime was never committed.
But here’s what I want to show you today: the July 30, 1973, document in its entirety. Look at the righthand side, in the white space near the first sentence: it says “Hac,” just like the ones on Ron’s missing person documents. (The letters “ac” are concealed by the letters JFK, which are written over them.)
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Ron’s Hacs vary somewhat from page to page and may be written by two different people—I’m not entirely sure. However, here’s one version that in my view closely matches the July 30 document.
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Let’s do a couple more! Here’s a Hac from Hank Greenspun:
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And here’s a similar Hac from Ron’s missing person docs:
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Therefore, the announcement for today is:
I think the same person(s) who wrote Hac on Ron’s missing person records wrote Hac on the Herman Greenspun burglary documents. What’s more, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think the two cases may be related in some way.
Coming next: What the phuh do all these ph’s mean?
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.
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Now, look at this “See index,” which is written on a document that was created on July 30, 1973.
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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.
We’re still talking about the FBI Security Index, as denoted by the “See index” notation in the left margin of page one of both Ronald Tammen’s and Richard Cox’s case files.
The first page of Ron Tammen’s missing person documents. “See index” is written in the left margin. Click on image for a closer view.The first page of Richard Cox’s file. “See index” is clearly visible in the left margin. Click on image for a closer view.
Being on the Security Index meant that the FBI and Department of Justice considered you to be a dangerous person—someone who needed to be rounded up and incarcerated in the event of a national emergency, which was a term that was left up to everyone’s imaginations. (I’m thinking bursting powerlines, people running amok in the streets, every other building on fire…that sort of thing. But that’s just my idea of a national emergency. The FBI and DOJ may have a different view.)
As far as we know, the FBI had no idea where Ron Tammen and Richard Cox were. Why would our nation’s lead law enforcement agency jump to the conclusion that either of them was dangerous? And incidentally, if a person is missing, how would the FBI even go about rounding them up?
As it turns out, it’s probably not so surprising that Cox made it to the Security Index, since he was considered a deserter and fugitive from the Army, even as a cadet at West Point, and, for this reason, he was breaking the law. But Tammen? Good heavens. Not in a million years would one of his friends or family members have ever called him dangerous.
Today I’m going to announce someone who wasn’t on the Security Index who probably should have been, at least based on the FBI’s and DOJ’s criteria. One of the main reasons for the Security Index was for the FBI to keep track of communists and other subversives to prevent their wreaking havoc during our aforementioned national emergency. So keeping that in mind, would you be surprised to learn that:
Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t on the FBI’s Security Index at the time of JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963.
For real. Lee Harvey Oswald, who’d defected to the Soviet Union in November 1959, who’d changed his mind and returned to the States with his Russian wife Marina and baby daughter in June 1962, who’d made headlines in New Orleans in August 1963 while advocating for the pro-Castro organization Fair Play for Cuba Committee—Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t considered communist enough to get his name onto the FBI’s Security Index. What’s more, according to government records, he’d taken a bus to Mexico City in late September 1963 and had stopped in to visit both the Soviet Embassy and the Cuban Consulate. Again, no red flags.
I’m pretty sure that the FBI caught some heat for that.
Immediately after the assassination, James H. Gale, who’d headed up the FBI’s Inspection Division at that time, conducted an evaluation of the investigative deficiencies leading up to JFK’s assassination. Oswald’s not making it to the Security Index was at the top of his list of oversights. He also said that they should have interviewed Marina in the months before the assassination, which they had not done. He told the House Select Committee on Assassinations as much in 1978 as well. You can read his December 10, 1963, report and 1978 HSCA testimony on this website. (See Vol. III of the HSCA hearings.)
But here’s the rub—and I’m not sure this has ever been said out loud ever before: Lee Harvey Oswald had indeed been on the Security Index at an earlier point in his past. I’m truly, truly serious. It was in November 1959 at the time of his defection to the Soviet Union. Here’s the document, dated November 9, 1959, where you can see the words “See index” in the left margin.
Lee Harvey Oswald was included on the FBI Security Index in November 1959 as he was defecting to the Soviet Union. Click on image for a closer view.
What this means is that officials at the FBI and DOJ must have changed their minds about Oswald’s Security Index designation somewhere along the way.
As further proof of the FBI’s mindset, on September 10, 1963—shortly before Oswald’s trip to Mexico City—an FBI report was written on both Lee and Marina by the Dallas Field Office. Lee’s report is clean—all of the available options regarding the Security Index are free of checkmarks. He isn’t on it.
Lee Harvey Oswald was not included on the Security Index in September 1963. Click on image for a closer view.
But Marina? Oh, there’s definitely a checkmark—more like the number 1—next to the line “The Bureau is requested to make the appropriate changes in the Security Index at the Seat of Government.” (The Seat of Government is FBI lingo for its headquarters in DC.)
Marina Oswald is included on the Security index in September 1963. Click on image for a closer view.
There’s also a date beneath the number 1, which was July 24. The year isn’t visible, but I know what it was—it was 1962. I know this because of the below document, dated the very next day, in which Marina is the subject.
Marina Oswald is on the Security Index on July 25, 1962. Click on image for a closer view.
To summarize, Marina Oswald was added to the Security Index—or her designation was somehow changed—on July 24, 1962. And in a document written about her on July 25, 1962, the words “See index” appear in the lefthand margin. The words are smeary, possibly as if there was an attempt to erase them, but the “d” and slash of the “x” in the word index are unmistakable.
So you see, the issue was more nuanced than what James Gale had described to his bosses at the FBI in 1963 as well as to the HSCA in 1978. Lee Harvey Oswald had been on the Security Index, but he’d been taken off sometime between November 1959 and September 1963. In addition, his wife Marina had also been on the Security Index, ostensibly at the time of JFK’s assassination, though it’s possible that she’d been removed by then.
But for James Gale to say all of that? Yikes. That would have sounded way worse than just telling them that the FBI agents didn’t feel Oswald had met the criteria and, in hindsight, they should have interviewed Marina.
I mean, think of the follow-up questions.
Coming: When was Ron Tammen added to the Security Index?
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:
I can’t believe I just wrote that headline. One of the cardinal rules of writing a true crime blog is to not paint oneself into a corner. Present some new theory, sure, but remember to use words like “may” or “could” so you have a way out if new info turns up that doesn’t support that theory. (Please note that I did say “I think,” but still…it’s risky.)
Nevertheless, I’m sticking with it because I have evidence that Ron—our Ron—nice, quiet, studious Ron Tammen, who, then as now, HAPPENED TO BE MISSING, was being looked at by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1976 as they investigated President Kennedy’s assassination. What’s more, I think the HSCA, not to mention the FBI, had lumped him into the same category of people as mobsters Sam Trafficante and Sam Giancana, the Cuban Revolutionary Board, CIA operatives James McCord and E. Howard Hunt, and Lee Harvey Oswald himself. (The committee was also looking into Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, though I don’t have evidence that Ron’s name had turned up in that case, at least so far.)
First, a little background about how we got here. It has to do with the ST-102 stamps on Ron’s missing person documents. Those stamps had become so easy for me to ignore. I suppose it’s because we as humans tend to prefer words when we’re reading documents as opposed to indecipherable numbers and initials. But one day, roughly 14 years after having seen Ron’s FBI documents for the very first time, I started paying attention to those stamps and the people who shared the same numbers and initials with Ron. I was soon startled to discover that these were some seriously high-profile people, many of whom were what you might refer to as bad guys. Other stamp sharers weren’t at all bad—they were just very idealistic. They were fighting for civil rights, speaking out against the war in Vietnam, and sending telegrams to the FBI out of concern for the safety of farm workers in the Coachella Valley. But bad or good, noble or ignoble, the FBI considered the above diverse crowd to be somehow similar. The Coachella telegrams were stamped with an ST-102, just like the ST-102 that the FBI stamped on memos concerning renowned mobsters, just like the ST-102 they stamped on a memo from Mexico City having to do with Lee Harvey Oswald, just like the ST-102 that they stamped on Ronald Tammen’s missing person documents.
One of Ron’s FBI documents. Click on image for a closer view.One of James W. McCord’s FBI documents.. Click on image for a closer view.
In my last post, we discussed another weird discovery: that Ron shared both the ST-102 stamp and an accompanying stamp, REC-19, with James W. McCord, Jr.—and only James W. McCord, Jr.—who is best known for being one of the Watergate burglars. But James McCord did a lot more in his life than just bungle a political burglary. He’d been with the CIA from 1951 to 1970. From 1955 to 1962, he was part of the CIA’s Security Research Staff, which was ground zero for Projects ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA. In 1953, he was on assignment in NYC to investigate bioweapons expert Frank Olson’s fall from a 10th-story window and to help steer the investigation away from the CIA, according to H.P. Albarelli, Jr.’s book A Terrible Mistake. McCord had also been tied to the Kennedy assassination.
There are other stamps on Ron’s documents as well, which we can discuss a little later if you’d like, maybe in the comments. But the real reason I feel compelled to interrupt your Father’s Day concerns a couple other marks on his documents that weren’t stamped. These marks were handwritten by someone in pen or pencil. They are:
“Hac,” which is written at the top righthand corner of ten of Ron’s pages, and,
The number “F-189” on the bottom left of seven of Ron’s pages, near the date stamp. A similar-looking number appears on two of Ron’s pages—number 149, minus the F—but it’s the F-189 that we’ll be focusing on today.
Click on image for a closer view.
Let’s start with “Hac.” At first, I wondered if it stood for the first three letters of someone’s last name. Then I thought it might represent the first letter of someone’s first, middle, and last names, which is how FBI officials usually initialed their documents, although these appear as a word as opposed to three capital letters.
But now? Now I think it stands for the House Assassination Committee.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “That’s not its true name. The true name was the House Select Committee on Assassinations, or HSCA.”
Correct! But you know what? Humans prefer their acronyms to be short, and, if at all possible, they like them to be pronounceable as made-up words. Also, most of us don’t like the word “Select” to be used in any official names, like ever. It’s too pompous-sounding for government work. Because you know what happened? People didn’t refer to the HSCA as such unless it was for official communication with the biggest of big wigs, such as the actual people on the HSCA. When it was just one run-of-the-mill fed writing to another fed, or if it was a news reporter writing about the activities of the committee, it was most commonly referred to as the House Assassination Committee. That was the committee’s working title. And the working abbreviation of the House Assassination Committee was HAC. I believe that’s what was being referenced on Ron’s documents.
Click on image for a closer view. Note the reference to the House Assassination Committee (HAC) in the first paragraph.
As for Ron’s F number, I think it’s important too. I’ve noticed F numbers on many an FBI document, from the highly marked-up to the relatively clean, but not all FBI documents carry them. Here are some general observations I’ve made about the FBI’s F numbers:
The numbers aren’t terribly large—never more than three digits and I don’t believe I’ve seen any F numbers that exceed 500.
A person might be assigned one F number on one document and a different F number on another document.
Rarely have I found two or more people sharing the same F number, but it does happen at times, as you’ll soon see.
Although I don’t know the exact purpose for the F numbers, I think they probably have something to do with an oversight group trying to keep track of the morass of information generated by the FBI. The FBI had its Central Records System which was cross-referenced to its many indices, but the F numbers appear to fall outside of those usual FBI record-keeping systems.
An oversight group might be internal, such as the FBI’s Inspection Division, whose responsibility was to audit other FBI divisions. Or the oversight group could have been external, such as the House Assassination Committee.
OK, I think that’s pretty good for starters. Let’s stop here, and do the rest as a Q&A.
Do you have hard evidence that led you to conclude that Hac stands for House Assassination Committee?
The first time I entertained the thought that Ron’s Hac notation might stand for the House Assassination Committee, I went looking for other Hac notations. I needed someone else to have Hac written on their document. Extra points if that person was indeed investigated by the House Assassination Committee.
Well, I’ve found a document that indeed has the letters “Hac” written on it, though it’s in the bottom lefthand corner, on the signature line reserved for the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of an FBI form. This particular document is written from the SAC of the Las Vegas field office to the FBI director. The document has to do with a Rose Bowl gambling ring and a guy named Edward Kiper Moss.
So…that’s exciting, right? I mean…was Ron a known commodity to the Las Vegas FBI? Well, hold on. The Las Vegas field office did have an SAC with two out of three of those initials. His name was Harold E. Campbell. He retired in April of 1972. The three letters “ret” probably stand for “retired.”
But that’s weird too, since the memo from the SAC is dated March 18, 1971. Harold was still in charge of the Las Vegas FBI then. Why didn’t he sign it in 1971? What’s more, did someone bring him out of retirement to sign his form and he accidentally got his middle initial wrong? Yeah, no. Methinks that someone else signed Harold’s form years later and added the “ret” to make it more honest and less like a forgery. That same person signed another of Harold’s forms, this one from August 1968 dealing with the Las Vegas division of La Cosa Nostra. (Harold wasn’t much for signing the bottoms of his forms, apparently.) The 1968 form has JFK verbiage at the top. Also, this one looks like they got the middle initial right.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that even if Ron’s missing person forms and Harold Campbell’s Las Vegas forms appear to have been signed by the same person, they don’t necessarily point to the House Assassination Committee.
Maybe not. But I’ve noticed other FBI documents in which a handwritten H has a strikingly similar wayward loop, though, admittedly, they slant a little differently sometimes. Instead of preceding the acronym Hac, these H’s precede the word Hess, the last name of Jacqueline Hess, who was the deputy chief researcher on the House Assassination Committee. You guys, I’ve been staring at Ron’s and Jacqueline’s H’s for a very long time, and as of this writing, I believe that whoever wrote the “Hac” on Ron’s FBI documents was the same person who wrote Jacqueline’s last name at the top of other FBI documents.
After all, it’s not Jacqueline’s handwriting. Her handwriting looked like this:
So it appears to me that the person who wrote Hac on Ron’s forms was somehow knowledgeable about matters pertaining to the House Assassination Committee. That person also appears to have been the one who supplied the after-the-fact signatures for Harold E. Campbell and the Las Vegas field office. And why would those signatures be necessary to supply years later? Probably because they were being reviewed by an oversight group of some sort.
But the Hac notations aren’t the only interesting detail about Harold’s memo about Edward Kimper Moss.
I’m listening.
Do you see Edward Moss’s F number? It says F-189. Ron’s says F189 too. For Edward K. Moss and Ronald H. Tammen, Jr., to share the same F number tells me that someone felt those two individuals had enough in common that they should be grouped together. In my view, that someone had something to do with an oversight group, such as (again, in my view) the House Assassination Committee.
Click on image for a closer view.
Who was Edward Kiper Moss?
The name Edward Kiper Moss may sound like some boring accountant from the East Coast, but he was anything but. Officially, he’d been a PR analyst for the federal government at one time, but he was known to do business with gangsters and Cuban exiles who wanted to overthrow Fidel Castro. He also was a PR adviser to foreign governments and a CIA operative. According to the book One Nation Under Blackmail, by Whitney Webb, as well as Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by Peter Dale Scott, Edward K. Moss was a powerful person with deep ties to the Mafia, foreign governments, and the CIA. He was most definitely investigated by the House Assassination Committee with regards to JFK’s assassination. So far, I’ve only read what’s available online. Now that I know that Edward K. Moss and Ron Tammen were assigned the same F number, I’ll be reading those books pronto.
Plus, don’t forget Ron Tammen’s link to James W. McCord, Jr.
Yeah, what about that? What did James McCord have to do with JFK’s assassination?
He didn’t admit it, and he threatened to sue two individuals and the magazine The Realist for libel when an article published there mentioned the alleged tie-in.
Here’s what I can tell you. In a follow-up article written by Paul Krassner titled “Dear James McCord,” Krassner discusses McCord’s threatened lawsuit and he doesn’t back down. The original article, which was written by Mae Brussell, had referenced a passage in a book titled The Glass House Tapes, by Louis E. Tackwood. Brussell paraphrased that “James McCord, according to Louis Tackwood, was in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot, and flown afterwards to the Caribbean.” Tackwood had also divulged that McCord went by the alias of Martin, a fact that Brussell had repeated.
I don’t know if James McCord was in Dallas that day, but I can at least provide corroboration that McCord’s alias was Elwood Martin. You can see it for yourself on the below FBI document. Also, for a person who claimed not to have anything to do with JFK’s assassination, I find it interesting that his name has turned up on so many JFK documents that were released to the public over the years.
Click on image for a closer view. James Walter McCord, aka Elwood Martin, is listed at position number 1.
What could Ron have been up to?
Great question. Based on the resumes of some of the people he’s been tied to, it doesn’t look good.
