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:
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.
It’s the fourth of July, and hoo boy, looks like I’m another year older. How old is that, you ask? Let’s just say that I can now relate to that song by the Beatles where Paul McCartney sings about reaching this impossibly far-off age and he wonders if his significant other will still need him and feed him while she’s knitting his sweaters and he’s weeding the garden. [Note to readers: I never do the former and rarely the latter. Besides, this Beatles tune is more up my alley.]
Do you know who else’s birthday it is? The Freedom of Information Act. FOIA was signed into law on July 4, 1966, so it’s a sprightly 56. Comparatively speaking, FOIA is the Shania Twain to my Gloria Estefan, the Ben Stiller to my Alec Baldwin, the Benzino to my Ice-T.
In celebration, I’d like to discuss a few of the discoveries I’ve made recently about Ron’s missing person documents thanks to other people’s FOIA requests. Because that’s one of the coolest things about FOIA—the information one person obtains can benefit lots of people in numerous unforeseeable ways.
Of course, because it’s my birthday, I’ll be writing in my favorite format—Q&A. Let’s go!
Have you learned anything more about the Missing Person File Room?
You’re referring to the stamp on a few of Ron’s documents that said “Return to Ident Missing Person File Room”? Yes—yes, I have.
Care to tell us?
As you know, the room number they’d specified was 1126. Although they didn’t say which building, I recently reported that room 1126 was on the first floor of the Identification Building, which was located at Second and D Streets SW, in DC. In that same post, I also attempted to make the case that the Ident Missing Person File Room was probably overseen by the Files and Communications Division, which was responsible for managing most of the FBI’s files and had occupied much of the first floor of the Ident Building.
Thanks to a FOIA request on another missing person case submitted by The Black Vault’s John Greenewald, Jr., I now know more about the Ident Missing Person File Room. The case concerned Charles McCullar, a 19-year-old Virginia man who was reported missing in February 1975 after he was expected home from a hiking trip to Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park. When you look through Mr. McCullar’s missing person documents, you’ll see that several of those documents were also maintained in the Ident Missing Person File Room. But his documents weren’t in the Identification Building. Rather, they were held in a room in the J. Edgar Hoover Building after that building was completed in 1975. (Sadly, McCullar’s remains were later discovered near Bybee Creek, inside the park, and it was determined that the probable cause of death was exposure to the elements.)
Do you know where in the J. Edgar Hoover Building the Missing Person File Room was located?
The writing on the stamps is extremely difficult to read, but yes, I do believe I’ve figured it out. Here are four stamps that are on Mr. McCullar’s documents.
Click on image for a closer view
Images 1 and 4 are clearest and the numbers look the most similar. Image 2 is practically useless. Nevertheless I compared them all in making the following assessment:
Let’s start with the easiest part. The letters JEH, the FBI’s abbreviation for the J. Edgar Hoover building, are clearly present at the end, as you can see in images 1, 3, and 4.
Also, there appear to be four numbers preceding the letters, which eliminates floors 10 and 11, because the room numbers on those floors had five digits.
As for the actual numbers, let’s begin with the second number, which appears to be 9 (images 1 and 4).
The third number looks like a 6 (image 4, possibly 1).
The fourth number seems to be 1 (hard slash in images 1, 3, and 4).
And if you look closely at image 4, the first and second numbers appear to be the same and in parallel, written at a severe slant. Therefore, I think the first number is also a 9.
My conclusion: after 1975, I believe the room number for the Ident Missing Person File Room was Room 9961 JEH Building.
Now that you know where the Ident Missing Person File Room was after 1975, is it possible to learn why some missing person files were kept there but not others?
I’ve been doing a couple things to get to that answer. First, through FOIA, I’ve been attempting to obtain a list of all the files that were maintained in that room. I’d started by asking the FBI for an inventory that would have been created prior to the move into the JEH Building, but they told me that my request wasn’t searchable in their indices. I then submitted a request for an inventory of that room that was developed by someone in the Inspection Division during one of its annual inspections. If I’m told that that request is also unsearchable, I’ll be requesting all inspection reports for the Identification Division as well as the Files and Communications Division for the years 1970 through 1980. They won’t be able to wriggle out of that one, since the whole purpose of the Inspection Division was to conduct annual inspections of all FBI divisions and field offices to make sure things were up to snuff. Also, according to the Department of Justice, inspection reports are considered public information. I highly doubt that there will be complete listings of every file in those reports, but there could be more information to help me figure out my next FOIA request.
I’m also attempting to determine the room’s purpose by learning more about the people who were stationed there. In the 1975 telephone directory, I found three staff members—all women, all affiliated with the Identification Division—who occupied Room 9961 that year. Two had generic names, which makes them tough to trace. The third person had a distinctive name, so I was able to learn more about her life and career, and also that, sadly, she’d passed away at a young age in 2002. I’ve submitted a FOIA request for her personnel records to see if I can determine which section of the Identification Division she was part of.
If the Ident Missing Person File Room is part of the Identification Division, is it possible that all missing person files were kept in that room?
To the best of my knowledge, the answer is no. As I’ve mentioned in past blog posts, a credible source who used to work in the Records Management Division told me that missing person documents were generally housed in the Central Records System, aka the main files, under classification number 79. Also, the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin stated that, if the Identification Division happened to have the missing person’s fingerprints on file, as they did in Ron’s case, that person’s documents would be maintained in their fingerprint jacket. This is supported by the following stamp on Ron’s documents:
In addition, in my experience, the Ident Missing Person File Room stamp on someone’s missing person documents is a rare find. So far, I’ve only found it on missing person documents for two people: Ron Tammen and Charles McCullar. I haven’t even found it on Richard Cox’s missing person documents.
Lastly, documents from another missing person case—again, released because of someone else’s FOIA request—helps prove this point. The child’s name was Dennis Martin, a 6-year-old who’d disappeared in 1969 while on a camping trip in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with his family. None of his documents had the Ident Missing Person File Room stamp on them. (The case is so tragic, it’s hard to read through them. What a nightmare.)
Furthermore, I’ve noticed that the documents that tended to have the stamp on them in Tammen’s and McCullar’s cases involved letters from the FBI director (for both men) or a concerned member of Congress (for McCullar). But the stamp is not on those types of letters in Dennis Martin’s case file.
Interesting. As I was looking at Dennis Martin’s and Charles McCullar’s documents, I noticed the “Referred to Records Branch” stamp on some of them, just like the one on Ron’s documents. Were you able to learn anything about that stamp?
That stamp is confusing on so many levels. A large area of confusion for me is how it seems to provide a choice of destinations within the Records Branch—as if the staffer is supposed to check either the “Main File” or “79-1.” But if a missing person file is placed in the main files, it is filed under classification 79. There is no either/or—they’re one and the same. (By the way, if you’re wondering what the “-1” signifies after the 79, that’s the first file after the “zero” files, which are always at the front of each classification. You may recall from earlier posts that a “0” file includes random reports on people or subjects that don’t yet have enough information for their own file, while a “00” file includes bureau communications about protocol.)
I’ve compared how that stamp was marked for Tammen’s vs. McCullar’s vs. Martin’s files. For Tammen, they consistently checked the blank next to “Main File.” For McCullar, they consistently wrote the number 79 in the blank next to “Main File.” And for Martin, they mixed it up—sometimes checking 79-1, but usually checking “Main File.”
Stamp on Ron Tammen’s documentStamp on Charles McCullar’s documentStamp on one of Dennis Martin’s documentsStamp on another of Dennis Martin’s documents
I honestly don’t know what it means. I’ve tried asking two people who would know the answer for a confidential conversation about the meaning of this stamp as well as the Ident Missing Person File Room stamp. Neither have responded.
In my blog post on The Ident Files, I speculated that the “Referred to Records Branch” stamp was primarily linked to the documents in Ron’s fingerprint jacket. In other words, I thought that the documents that were “Removed from Ident files” were the same ones that had been removed from his fingerprint jacket and then handed over to the Records Branch. The monkey wrench in this theory is that I don’t believe Charles McCullar or Dennis Martin had fingerprints on file. Why were their missing person documents being referred to the Records Branch, when I’d think that they would have been there all along? I welcome any and all hypotheses to this conundrum.
I’ll ponder on that and get back to you.
OK. 👍
In the meantime, it seems as though the documents that were held in the Ident Missing Person File Room were super tame. Why would they need their own special file room?
This is the part where I get to hypothesize my head off with very little back-up data. We know that there was at least one Tammen document that had been in room 1126 Ident that I never received through my FOIA request: a photo had been added to his file on 6-5-73, the same day that documents were “Removed from Ident files.” I don’t believe that we’re seeing everything that had been filed in the Ident Missing Person File Room.
In a recent post, I suggested that the Missing Person File Room may have been a storage place for any unsolicited tips that might have come in on various missing person cases and I also said that some of those unsolicited tips might have been of the steamy or illicit variety. So isn’t it interesting that the two people who did have a file in the Ident Missing Person File Room were adult men, whom I’d think could have generated a phone call or two, whether credible or not, while the one who didn’t have a file in that room was a 6-year-old child? As I said, I think the more interesting reading is likely long gone.
Are there other missing person files you can compare these with to get more answers?
Yes! Thanks to information obtained from a FOIA request submitted by GovernmentAttic.org, I will soon have access to a box of missing person files from the years 1947 through 1980, the year when the FBI turned over its missing person activities to the National Crime Information Center. The files are now housed in the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, MD. They’ve added me to their queue, and will let me know when I can drive out to visit them. The size of the box is too small to be complete, but I wonder if Ron Tammen’s and Richard Cox’s files are in there. Anyway, I can’t wait.
Click on image for a closer view
Any additional updates?
Just that I have a second mediation meeting coming up on July 5 concerning several remaining unposted recordings that I’ve requested from Miami University’s Oral History Project. As opposed to the last time, in which I tried to cram in about ten pages’ worth of talking points into an hour-long phone call, I have one talking point that I plan to repeat over and over. We’ll see how it goes.
Happy fourth, y’all. Be safe out there, and that includes wearing earplugs if you’re close to the noise.
P.S. Just saw this on Twitter and had to post. Looks like I’m in good company.
…and the answer has been on page 1 of Ron’s FOIA docs this whole entire time
One of the ongoing questions of my search for what happened to Ron Tammen has been the location of the “Ident Missing Person File Room”—the string of words that had been stamped on some, though not all, of Ron’s missing person documents. We’ve known that the Ident Missing Person File Room was in room 1126 of some building, ostensibly in the Washington, D.C. region, though we didn’t know which building.
For months, I’ve been expending some serious brainpower—and not just my brainpower, but yours too—trying to come up with ways that I might discover the location of room 1126. Thanks to your creative suggestions, I’ve submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests seeking phone directories, floor plans, key receipts, custodial routes, maintenance requests, installation orders, you name it, for some of the more likely contenders. You may recall reading blog posts in which I advanced hypotheses for the location of room 1126—first, inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building, and, on second thought, the Department of Justice Building.
Why would I do all of that? Because I believe room 1126 is significant to Ron’s story.
But lately, I’ve grown weary of FOIA. So much back-and-forthing with the FBI has thrown buckets of water on my inner fire. They always have the final word, and that word (or words) has been: “unable to identify records that are responsive to your request.” So I thought I’d switch up my game a little. I decided to Google what’s already out there—but not your typical, run-of-the-mill Googling. I mean level-10 Googling. I mean cracking open “Google Books” and diving into the decades-old, government-produced publications that various librarians of sundry institutions have taken the time to copy, cover to cover. And let me tell you…what’s already out there has been illuminating. If you want to get an authentic picture of how things worked back in the day of J. Edgar Hoover, it’s best to consult what the key players had written or said, preferably under oath.
Before we address what makes room 1126 so special, let’s talk about the FBI’s filing system. Honestly, from everything I’ve read, it hasn’t changed that much since Hoover ran the place. OK, yeah, sure, computers. But the overall organization of the files and the related vocabulary are the same today as when Edgar discussed them with his associates and underlings. (Did you know that that’s what he called himself informally? I feel like such an idiot, but I’ve thought of him as J. Edgar for so long that I never knew that his friends called him Edgar.)
For the most part, Edgar Hoover believed in filing everything together. In most cases, every single file representing every single investigation has been lumped together into one ginormous records system, which is referred to as the Central Records System. In Edgar’s idealistic world, everyone’s records should be treated the exact same way—whether you’re a habitual law breaker or a squeaky clean job applicant in need of a routine background check. Then as now, they commonly refer to these files as the “main files,” or the “main bureau files.”
What divides them are the classification numbers that precede every FBI case number. Missing person cases start with the number 79. Crime on the high seas begins with 45; fraud against the government is 46; and impersonation, 47. If you had the number 53 in front of your case file, you were being investigated for “excess profits on wool,” which I guess was a problem around World War I, but they don’t use that one anymore. But, as mentioned earlier, it’s not all kidnappings (7), extortion (9), and counterfeiting (55). There are respectable classifications too—like 66 (administrative matters), 67 (personnel matters), and 240 (FBI training). As of this writing, there are 281 classifications in all, which you can peruse here.
To help FBI staff locate files, they created indexes, 3” X 5” cards arranged alphabetically by subject on which pertinent case numbers were written. Let’s say you worked in the Files and Communications Division and you were asked to name check someone. You’d look up that person’s name on a card in the general index, and there, on that card, would be numbers of relevant case files to check. It gets way more complicated, with multiple indexes and cross-references, but for our purposes, the indexes helped FBI staff find pertinent case files on a given subject.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “What about fingerprints?”
Fingerprint files are maintained separately from the Central Records System, as are records that are entered into the National Crime Information Center. These resources were formerly housed within the Identification Division, now the Criminal Justice Information Services Division, and are accessible to law enforcement agencies around the country. The Central Records System, on the other hand, is only accessible to FBI staff and, at least before computers, primarily staff in the Files and Communications Division, who would provide the files to other FBI staffers on a short-term loan basis.
What I’m getting at is that, under the normal system, missing person cases were filed along with everything else in the main files. If the FBI was fortunate enough to have a missing person’s fingerprints, as they did in Ron’s case, that person’s records would be filed in their fingerprint jacket in the Identification Division. And even though fingerprint jackets were maintained separately from the Central Records System, I’m guessing that the folks in Files and Communications would at least have an index card with the missing person’s name on it to help them find those records too if need be. But that’s just a guess.
What wasn’t a normal part of the FBI’s recordkeeping system was putting some of the missing person files in a special room: #1126. That was unusual.
At this point, let’s switch over to my favorite format, Q&A. Who wants to start us off?
The Identification Building—which was nicknamed the Ident Building—is so named because the enormous Identification Division was located there for many years. But other divisions were located there too, namely the Files and Communications Division, and later, once the FBI was computerized, the Computer Systems Division.
Why do you think the FBI would have needed a Missing Person File Room apart from the main files?
My guess? Secrecy. When Hoover was the FBI director, he and his leadership team felt the need to keep sensitive documents locked away in cabinets and special rooms, so that only a select few people would know about them or see them. I have a theory on why they might have done that for missing persons in particular, which I’ll explain a little later.
I’d heard that Hoover had kept secret files in his office. Did his associate directors and assistant directors have secret files too?
The short answer is yes.
Not long after Hoover died on May 2, 1972, the public learned about files that he kept in his office area, which was a suite consisting of nine rooms on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice building. According to Helen Gandy, Hoover’s loyal secretary for over 50 years, there were several types of files housed there:
Hoover’s personal files, which were described as personal correspondence between Hoover and people in his sphere, many famous and politically powerful. (At Hoover’s instruction, Gandy destroyed all of the personal files shortly after Hoover died.)
Estate files, which had to do with Hoover’s house, taxes, etc.
Hoover’s “Official and Confidential” files, which had been widely publicized in the media and were considered extremely sensitive on a range of topics.
A category that Gandy only referred to as “special,” which were also highly confidential, and kept under “lock and key.”
Mark Felt, who is famously known as the anonymous source Deep Throat during Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting of Watergate, was responsible for taking over the Official and Confidential (OC) files after Hoover’s death. Felt oversaw the inventorying of those files, but they remained in his office until he retired in 1973. They were later placed in the Special File Room, a room set aside by the bureau for confidential files. (If you want to read Hoover’s OC files, you can do so here.)
In 1975, Felt told a subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations that it wasn’t just Hoover who was withholding sensitive documents. The division directors were too. Shortly before Hoover’s death, Felt had been tasked with consolidating the sensitive division files in his office. He obtained about two file cabinets’ worth, which he promptly locked up.
John P. Mohr, who oversaw the FBI’s Administrative Division and several others, said this to the subcommittee about his own secret files: “They were files that I maintained that were not in the record of the Bureau’s files, which were contacts that I had. If you are a smart investigator, and you should be one if you are going to be in this business, you should have your own sources and keep them to yourself.”
What kinds of documents did FBI officials treat as confidential?
Oh, gosh, you name it. The Special File Room held a hodge podge of records on hot-button subjects of the day. They were all indexed, so still officially part of the Central Records System. The point was to restrict access to a limited few, and out of eye shot from most everyone else, especially the majority of Files and Communications staffers.
Included were files containing graphically violent photos, national defense secrets, informants’ names, stuff on Castro, stuff on Cosa Nostra, cases affecting an FBI employee’s family, and more. Of course, if someone important was rumored to be gay, that would have made the cut. The Special File Room wasn’t especially spacious so it was considered only temporary housing for a file, though admittedly “temporary” could mean years. Division heads were periodically asked to review the files they were maintaining there and to let Files and Communications staff know when a file had lost some of its radioactivity (so to speak) so they could be returned to the main files. Speaking of radioactivity, files related to the Atomic Energy Commission were included there as well.
Back to the Missing Person File Room, why would a bunch of missing person files be kept secret?
I think I know. In the mid-1970s, Americans were learning that the FBI as a general practice held onto just about everything that anyone mailed or called in on someone—usually derogatory, rarely complimentary—even if the tipster was anonymous. (This helps explain why the Cincinnati Field Office responded to that anonymous call in 1973 to check out the employee at Welco Industries.) During another 1975 hearing (the 94th Congress was busy), members of the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights voiced their displeasure over this practice. They were particularly concerned about information being held on members of Congress, however, it was emphasized that legislators are treated no differently than any other citizen.
Here’s an exchange between M. Caldwell Butler, of Virginia, and then-FBI Director Clarence Kelley concerning a made-up person named John Jones:
Mr. Butler: “Let us just take John Jones and somebody says to the Bureau there is a guy named John Jones in Boston who is nuts. What do you do with that? Can you not just throw it away, or do you have to really put it in the miscellaneous file, index it and keep it there, and then go through the purging procedure later, or does the guy lose his job if he does not file it?”
Mr. Kelley: “I am confident again that some of it is not put in the file. But the general instruction is that it does go into the file, it having been reported to us by a citizen, and in the orderly conduct of our business we are to take information which is unsolicited and comes to us.”
So let’s ponder on that for a second. Whenever someone—anyone—went missing, even if the FBI wasn’t conducting an investigation, which is the norm for most missing persons cases, they were probably receiving a lot of unsolicited letters and phone calls from acquaintances of that person, be they friend or foe. These wouldn’t be the “he was such a nice guy” sort of call. They’d be juicier, perhaps scandalous—something that might help explain why such a nice, quiet person up and vanished. Kelley admitted that that’s the sort of information the FBI would gladly accept and file. And with as much publicity as missing person cases receive, I’d imagine that if any of the classifications had a need for their very own special file room, classification 79 would.
Why do you think room 1126 is in the Ident Building?
I was still leaning heavily toward the DOJ Building, when things began to fit much better for the Ident Building. Here’s what led me to my conclusion.
The Department of Justice Building Map doesn’t fit.
I managed to find several telephone directories for the Department of Justice during that general time period, which included a map of the DOJ building’s layout. (Thanks again, Google Books!) I then developed a chart of room numbers on the first floor where Special Investigative Division staff were located in 1975, before they moved into the FBI Building. Although they were located in almost every corridor, no one had an office in the 1100 corridor, which was still occupied by DOJ administrative staff. Therefore, even if there was a room 1126 in that corridor (which I still haven’t confirmed), a DOJ administrator would’ve had to be responsible for the missing person files, which is highly unlikely. That isn’t how the FBI operated.
Files and Communications were responsible for all files, even the special ones.
The Files and Communications Division had a lot of say regarding management of the bureau’s files. If a division wanted to house a sensitive file in the Justice Building for accessibility, they needed to alert Files and Communications first, and it was signed out on a short-term basis, usually with the file kept in a supervisor’s office. Although we learned from Mark Felt that divisions had their own stash of special files, they would’ve been in a locked file drawer, not occupying an entire room. Also, they wouldn’t have had their own stamp declaring it the “Ident Missing Person File Room.”
The Files and Communications Division occupied much of the first floor of the Identification Building.
To reiterate, all bureau files—including those in the Special File Room—were the responsibility of the Files and Communications Division, which occupied several floors of the Identification Building, including the first floor. From 1961 to 1972, the Special File Room was located in room 1315 Ident, and the supervisor in charge of the Special File Room was located in room 1113 Ident. The Special File Room was later moved to the third floor of the Ident Building before everyone moved to the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
The numbering fits.
Room numbers in the Identification Building were in four digits, with the first digit indicating the floor number. Therefore, room number 1126 fits the scheme for a first-floor room. Also, I compared office numbers listed in the 1975 telephone directory, and a number of them correspond to one another by floor. For example, there were offices in rooms 3129, 5129, and 6129. Even though no one had an office number 1126—why would they if it was full of missing person files?—someone did have an office in room 3126, two floors up. We also know that the health center was in room 1121, which would have been a few doors down from 1126.
‘Ident’ is used two ways.
This was perhaps a big source of my confusion. Sometimes “Ident” refers to the Identification Building. And sometimes it refers to the Identification Division. When they wrote “Removed from Ident files” on Ron’s missing person documents, they were talking about the division.
Likewise, the “Ident” in front of “Missing Person File Room” on the stamp was likely referring to the division, although it could have been referring to the building. Either interpretation works.
But are you ready for the clincher? On the first page of the May 26, 1953, report summarizing Mrs. Tammen’s phone call, off to the right of Ron’s identifying features, are the words “Copy of photo filed in 1126 Ident.” Below that is the date 6-5-73. And below that are the initials MSL. They did the customary thing and put the room number in front of the name of the building—1126 Ident. They told us which building. They’d been telling us all along.
And you guys? Now that we know the exact location of the Ident Missing Person File Room, suddenly I’m in the mood to submit a few more FOIAs. Funny how that happens.
You know how it feels when you’re working on a jigsaw puzzle and a puzzle piece doesn’t fit quite right? It looks like it should fit. It seems as if it has all the right edges. But when you try to insert one piece’s knobby end into the corresponding cut-out area of another piece, you discover that you have to use too much force jamming it in. That’s how I felt about my hypothesis from January 21 on the location of the Ident Missing Person File Room—room #1126 in an unnamed building. Lots of details seemed to fit the J. Edgar Hoover Building, but I’ll admit that other details required a little too much, um, creative-thinking, shall we say? Case in point: when I proposed that the Identification Division had assigned a number to the Missing Person File Room that was based on the future numbering system of a building that was still in the blueprint stage, well, that’s getting pretty creative. Also, if the room was going to be housed on the 11th floor with all of the muckety mucks in Identification, as I’d proposed in my hypothesis, it should have had five digits, not four. It should have been room #1126-something, like 11261 or 11265. You get the gist.
So, I admit it. I was wrong. I apologize for the confusion and I humbly beg your forgiveness. As I believe I’ve mentioned in past posts, I am a human being with all of the accompanying accoutrement and baggage.
I’m not going to bore you with the precise details of how I came upon the new hypothesis because, truth be told, I don’t think I could replicate the sequence of events. Let’s just say that I read through a bunch of documents, plus I spent more time looking through the 1975 FBI phone directories, then I Googled a bunch of stuff based on what I’d learned through said documents and phone directories. Coffee was involved as well.
Now, several days later, I think we’re getting really, REALLY close to knowing the truth behind the Ident Missing Person File Room, and why some of Ron’s missing person documents were housed there.
Here’s how we’re going to do this. Far be it from me to bury the lede, so I’m going to tell you very soon—in the very next paragraph, in fact—what I discovered. Then, I’ll try to address all of the questions that I can imagine swirling around in your collective brains.
Here’s what I discovered: Room 1126 was very likely a room on the first floor of the Department of Justice Building, a building that had housed more than two-fifths of the FBI before the J. Edgar Hoover Building was completed in 1975. The division that maintained room 1126, the Ident Missing Person File Room, was very likely…wait for it…the FBI’s Special Investigative Division.
And now, some Qs and As:
Really? Are you sure?
I’m pretty darn sure. But you may have noticed that I used the words “very likely” twice in the above paragraph. That’s because, although I haven’t yet found a document that directly links room 1126 to the Special Investigative Division, I’ve discovered lots and lots of connecting dots that link the two together.
Why do you think the Missing Person File Room was in the DOJ Building?
First, the numbering format of the building fits. The DOJ Building is seven stories high, and its numbering system is always in four digits. Rooms on the first floor all begin with the number one followed by three other numbers.
Second, although I wasn’t able to find documentation of room 1126 (yet), I was able to find documentation of room 1127, which, in February 1976, was the office number of someone by the last name of Newman. Unfortunately, this particular Newman doesn’t appear to be listed in the 1975 FBI phone directories, but that’s OK. I have more to say on Newman in a second.
Third, if you examine those phone directories, you’ll see the names and abbreviations of five buildings listed at the top of the first page. These are the buildings in which the thousands of FBI staff were stationed, and they were scattered around DC and in nearby Silver Spring, MD. You’ll see the initials JEH for the J. Edgar Hoover Building and IB for Identification Building. But there’s one building that isn’t listed at all, even though people were still working inside it. In those instances, a person’s name would be listed, along with a phone extension, and a room number, but no building would be specified. I later found this was the Department of Justice Building. Furthermore, with one exception, all of the offices that were on the first floor were located in the DOJ building.
Page 1 of the July 1975 phone directory. Note the five buildings that are mentioned with their abbreviations at the top left. At the top right are the numbers representing the divisions, with the number “9” representing the Special Investigative Division. The heads of each of the divisions are listed above the letter “A.” To look at the entire July 1975 directory, click here.
Why didn’t they write the name of the DOJ Building in the staff directory?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I’m thinking maybe it was for security reasons. Or maybe, because it was the main administrative building for so many years, the office culture had been to just write the room number. The only time they’d need to name a building was if they were describing a different building. Just guessing though.
Two parter: How did you figure out that the missing building in the directories was the DOJ building, and how did you tie everything to the FBI’s Special Investigative Division?
Oh, this is when things got fun. Remember Newman in office 1127? Well, the documents I found on him or her looked mighty investigative in nature. In February 1976, he or she had requested a slew of files from the Records Management Division. The files that were requested could be subversive or nonsubversive; some were restricted to the DC metro region, and others not.
One of many records requests filed by Newman in Feb. 1976
Then I looked at the 1975 phone directories again. Many of the individuals who were listed without a building were in the FBI’s Special Investigative Division. And most of those individuals also happened to be on the first floor.
That’s when I started Googling the Special Investigative Division like mad. One person, a guy by the name of Courtney Allen Evans, had been named to head the division when it was created in 1961. According to his personnel documents that I found on the FBI Vault site, in 1962, as Evans was starting his new position, he received some room keys. Evans retired in 1964, however, those room numbers correspond to several of the rooms that are listed in the 1975 phone directory for people who worked in the Special Investigative Division, including the man in charge, William V. Cleveland.
Lastly, the annual inspections of the Special Investigative Division for 1962 and 1964 said outright that all division space is located on the first floor of the Justice Building with the exception of some employees who were on the seventh floor.
Hence: the unnamed building in the phone directories was the DOJ Building, and, in 1975, the FBI’s Special Investigative Division occupied the first floor.
Did any of Courtney Evans’ room keys happen to be for room #1126?
Sadly, no. But documents show that Courtney also had a master key to the entire first floor, which he returned when he retired.
You said there was one exception to your discovery that all of the offices that possessed first-floor room numbers in the phone directories were located in the DOJ Building. What was the exception?
The exception was in the Identification Building, which had one room listed on the first floor, #1121. That room was the health service for the Identification Division. Although I’m a big believer in health, I wish this office hadn’t existed because its room number is very close to the number 1126, which plants a small seed of doubt regarding my theory. Nevertheless, I think the preponderance of evidence supports the notion that 1126 was in the DOJ Building.
That’s very interesting, but I’m still thinking about the health clinic in the Identification Building. Why don’t you think room 1126 was somewhere nearby?
Two reasons: First, not one person with whom I’ve spoken who had worked in the Identification Building has ever heard of the Ident Missing Person File Room. Not a soul. And I spoke with people who, if there was such a thing on the first floor of the building in which they worked, they should have known about it.
Second, it wasn’t the protocol. Missing person documents were normally filed with the Records Management Division. The missing person file room was not part of the Identification Division’s day-to-day business of handling missing person cases.
Wow. If you’re right, this would help answer a lot of questions about the Missing Person File Room stamp on Ron’s documents, wouldn’t it?
Go on…I’m listening…
Well, there’s the question of why don’t they identify the building after the room number on the stamp? But if it’s the DOJ Building, they probably didn’t feel the need to add the name of the building, just like with the phone directories.
Awesome point.
Also, there’s the question of why does the word “Ident” precede the words “Missing Person File Room”? If the room was housed somewhere in the Identification Division, they shouldn’t have to specify Ident, should they?
You know, that’s another really good point. If we put ourselves in the shoes of someone who worked in the Special Investigative Division, they might have labeled their Missing Person File Room with the prefix “Ident” to reinforce the fact that the files originated with the Identification Division. The name may have been a shout-out to the fine folks in Identification, though the file room resided within the Special Investigative Division.
What’s so special about the Special Investigative Division?
Let’s start with some historical perspective: the Special Investigative Division didn’t exist until 1961, when Courtney Evans was named to the head post by J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had decided to split his investigations team into two divisions—the General Investigative Division and the Special Investigative Division—as a tactical maneuver to help reduce friction between the FBI and Hoover’s two nemeses, President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Both Kennedys liked and trusted Evans, and Evans served as a liaison to both men.
The General Investigative Division covered all of the typical FBI cases: murders, kidnappings, bank robberies, and the like, as well as fraud, embezzlement, and civil rights cases.
The Special Investigative Division, on the other hand, covered three main categories. The first was organized crime, which, according to a 1975 FBI brochure, was defined as “a lawless empire involved in gambling, loan sharking, narcotics, prostitution, labor-racketeering, extortion, and any other venture where easy money can be made.” Organized crime includes the mafia, but it can also include gangs and other organized groups. The Special Investigative Division also investigated fugitives—people who escaped arrest or incarceration. They were also the group who investigated Selective Service Act violations, aka draft dodgers.
Lastly, agents in the Special Investigative Division were the ones who were called upon to investigate individuals who were being considered for employment in high or sensitive government posts under the “Security of Government Employees program.” As the 1975 brochure states, “These investigations ensure that appropriate Government officials have the necessary information on which to judge whether a person chosen to serve the American public is deserving of the trust placed in him as a public servant.”
So why do you think the Special Investigative Division would have had Ron’s missing person file?
Exactly. Why would the Special Investigative Division want to investigate Ron Tammen?
I don’t believe Ron was linked in any way to organized crime, so let’s just toss that one out right now. We know all about the source of the fish in the bed, and so did the FBI. It wasn’t the mob. And there’s no indication that Ron was involved in any of the nefarious activities previously mentioned.
What about fugitive or Selective Service Act violation cases? We already know that Ron was investigated for draft dodging beginning in 1953. But that case was closed in 1955 by the U.S. Attorney in Cleveland, Ohio. (I’ve submitted a FOIA request to the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, by the way, to find out how typical that action was.) So with the Special Investigative Division starting in 1961, I highly doubt that they would have reopened Ron’s Selective Service case. No way.
Let’s see, let’s see…so what’s left?
What about the very happy-sounding and not-at-all-worrisome program known as the “Security of Government Employees program”? When I looked up that program, a page popped up on the National Archives and Records Administration website that states that this investigative program (labeled Classification 140 in FBI parlance) was established by the FBI in 1953 as a way of enforcing Executive Order 10450, which was the executive order signed by President Eisenhower to root out and fire gay government employees. We’ve discussed the Lavender Scare on this site before, and how the FBI was descending on civil servants and subjecting them to intense interrogation about their personal lives. Well, now we know the people who were doing it: our friends in the Special Investigative Division.
Now, recall that, in 1953, the Special Investigative Division didn’t exist yet—they inherited the program later. But Ron’s documents were very likely passed along to them—for whatever reason—after they were established in 1961.
Do you think that’s why Ron’s documents were housed there—through the Security of Government Employees program?
It’s tough to say, since we don’t have the documents. But we do know that the FBI was investigating Ron’s case far more than they would a typical missing person case. I’ve often wondered where those interview reports landed, and my current belief is that many of them may have been stored in the Missing Person File Room.
Do you think the Missing Person File Room is still in the DOJ Building?
If I’m not mistaken, the Special Investigative Division moved out of DOJ later in 1976, and into their new digs at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. In September of that year, a group representing the General Counsel to the Public Documents Commission of the DOJ was occupying Newman’s old office.
So what’s next? What can you do to find out more?
I think this information opens up new territory for Freedom of Information Act requests. First off, I need a floorplan of the DOJ building, like, pronto. I’ve attempted this before and failed. But now I have more reason to push on that.
What do you all think? Can you think of some FOIA requests that are just begging to be submitted?
Any final thoughts?
Just one: We’ve been saying all along that Ron’s missing person case was special. Apparently the FBI’s Special Investigative Division thought so too.
*****************
3/12/2022
Update regarding my 2/23/22 blog post:
As you may recall, I’ve been trying to figure out if there was a room 1126 in the Department of Justice (DOJ) Building in the early 1970s. If I can prove that, then I think we can reasonably conclude that the Ident Missing Person File Room was under the supervision of the FBI’s Special Investigative Division.
To answer that question, I’ve been attempting to get my hands on the DOJ Building’s floor plan. But I’ve come to learn that the DOJ Building is considered one of the most secure buildings in the federal government. Translation: I won’t be getting a copy. I did manage to locate someone from the General Services Administration who has a copy of the original floor plan from the 1930s, and who was willing to tell me if there was a room 1126. Here’s what she said:
“Looking at the original (1930s) first floor plan for the U.S. Department of Justice headquarters building at 950 Pennsylvania Ave NW, there does not appear to be a room 1126. It’s possible that the building was re-numbered between 1930 and 1970, however, the original plans do not contain that number.”
So that’s disappointing.
I then asked: “Did the original floor plan show a room 1127? That could help me determine if there could have been a renumbering afterward.”
Her response was: “No, I do not see a room 1127 either.”
So here’s my thinking: unless the staff member known as Newman was working out of a different building in 1976—and I don’t think he was—they must have renumbered the rooms sometime between 1935, when the DOJ Building was completed, and 1976, when Newman was making his records requests.
Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “Jenny, Newman’s records requests didn’t include the building name—only the number 1127. Is it possible that Newman was working out of the Identification Building? Maybe the Special Investigative Division placed him there so he’d be closer to Records Management, which I seem to recall was also located in the Identification Building.”
Wow…you have an insanely good memory. But while anything is possible, I believe I have proof that that wasn’t the case.
First, although it might have been helpful to place Newman close to Records Management, here’s the snag in that theory: Records Management was part of the Files and Communications Division, and, in February 1976, they had already been occupying the fifth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building for over a year. There would have been no reason for Newman to be in the Identification Building in 1976 as everyone else was moving out.
Also, there really, truly was (and perhaps still is) a room 1127 in the DOJ Building. I know this because I have two documents from September 1976 that tell us so.
The first is a letter dated September 15, 1976, from the deputy archivist of the United States to the General Counsel’s office of the Public Documents Commission, a commission created in 1974 to study “the control, disposition, and preservation of documents produced by federal officials, particularly the President.” It appears as though the commission took over Newman’s office shortly after he and his colleagues moved into the J. Edgar Hoover Building that same year.
The letter’s recipient, an attorney named Dori Dressander, passed away in 1999, I’m sorry to report. Otherwise, I would have definitely reached out to her to ask about the room next door and whether she had any good stories she could tell us about Newman. Some additional research on Ms. Dressander reveals that she was a respected legal scholar who had been working on a book on civil rights under the Eisenhower Administration at the time of her death. After she died, the landlord of her Washington, D.C. apartment sent all of her research papers–which were on loan to her and should have been part of Eisenhower’s Presidential Library — to the landfill, which is sadly ironic, considering her obvious belief in public access to historical records. (Note to self: revise will to donate Ron Tammen files to a millennial whom I like and trust.)
The second document is a write-up from the September 16, 1976, issue of the Federal Register that also lists room 1127, Department of Justice.
So, at least for now, our theory is holding up.
Mind you, there’s still a chance that room 1126 is or was on the first floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, but I doubt it. The stamp on Ron’s missing person documents likely preceded 1975, the year in which the Hoover building was constructed. Also, the first floor was predominantly devoted to administrative-type purposes, such as classrooms, an auditorium, and the personnel office. A computer room for the National Crime Information Center was also on the first floor, in room 1328. Although, at this point, we can’t rule out the J. Edgar Hoover Building entirely, hopefully the additional FOIA documents I’ve requested will help us do so. And who knows, maybe with those documents in hand, we’ll be knocking on the door to the Ident Missing Person File Room–a door that’s maddeningly unremarkable; a door that’s in full view but is way too easy to miss–sooner than we know.
Considering how similar the Ron Tammen and Richard Cox disappearances seemed to be, one question that may have crossed your minds at some point is: were Richard Cox’s missing person documents handled the same way as Ron Tammen’s? In other words, were some of Cox’s documents stamped “Return to Ident Missing Person File Room” too?
Also, you may recall that other Tammen documents had been stamped “Retain permanently in Ident jacket #358-406-B”—Ron’s fingerprint jacket—before they were “removed from Ident files” in June 1973. Was there a phrase on Cox’s documents to “Retain permanently in Ident jacket” too? We know the FBI had Cox’s fingerprints on file because of his Army ties, so he should have had a fingerprint jacket too.
To the best of my knowledge, the answer is “no” to both questions.
I know that some of you aren’t convinced that there was a missing person file room per se. But even so…the FBI seemed to be treating the two cases differently, even though there were distinct similarities between them and they’d occurred only three years apart.
Admittedly, I’ve been eyeballing hundreds of pages today and there’s a chance I may have missed something.
And so…I’ve decided to post all of Richard Cox’s FBI documents on this website. I could be wrong, but I don’t think the FBI’s files on Cox have ever been posted in their (supposed) entirety online before. Feel free to explore them at your leisure. There’s quite a bit there and some of it makes for fascinating reading. Also, if you do spot either of the above phrases, or anything else of interest, please let me know. You can find the three CDs’ worth of documents at the bottom of the home page, in the same area as the other documents I’ve posted.
Lastly, if their estimate is still on target, I should be hearing from the Department of Justice by early February regarding my appeal concerning Richard Cox’s Additional Record Sheets. It would be a huge deal if they rule in my favor. I don’t think anyone has ever requested—and received—Additional Record Sheets from the FBI before. Fingers crossed.
A couple days ago, as I was pondering my next move on a recent FOIA request that had left me empty-handed, I turned my sights once again to the July 1975 FBI telephone directory.
You may recall the directory in question. We’d discussed it when I was trying to track down someone who’d removed Ron’s missing person documents from “Ident” in June 1973—someone who appeared to have the initials MSL. The directory header says “Officials and Supervisors” in large print and “Secretaries, Stenos, and Clerical Supervisors” in smaller print. Beneath that header is an unredacted list of former employees and their phone extensions, and following those names are the names and locations of every division, section, unit, and desk in the Bureau. It’s a tiny window into the FBI in the mid-seventies and a window that I needed to peer through a little more intently. I guess you could call me the FBI’s own little Gladys Kravitz.
Not all officials are listed in the 1975 staff directory, mind you. Clarence M. Kelley had been the director since 1973, and his name is nowhere to be found. The logic may have been that if you’re an employee of the Bureau, you should already know who the director is. Shame on you if you needed to ask if Kelley was spelled with an “ey” or just a “y.” But Kelley’s underlings are all present and accounted for, including his associate director Nicholas P. Callahan and the associate directors of each of the 12 divisions and the Office of Planning and Evaluation.
According to the directory, the director’s and associate director’s offices were located on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, which had been newly completed that very year. Many of the FBI’s employees were also stationed there by then, though not all. People were still occupying space in the Identification Building at 2nd and D Streets SW, as well as an Annex at 215 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, the Old Post Office Building, and the Willste Building, which was a high-rise in nearby Silver Spring, MD (and is now a pricey condo building).
FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover Building, aka FBI Headquarters, in 1975; photo credit: FBI
Richard H. Ash, who headed up the Identification Division at that time, had an office on the top floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building—the 11th—in room 11255.
Two days ago, I found myself staring vacuously at the second-to-last page of the directory at a general entry for the Identification Division. The entry looked modest for the largest division in the agency. The mammoth sections it oversaw appeared alphabetically as stand-alone entries, typed in all caps with their units beneath, but the division itself appeared on its own in mostly lower-case letters. Only its phone extension managed to convey an elevated degree of importance: 2222. The Identification Division’s room number was 11262 in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
11262.
11262.
It sounded familiar, but why?
1126…
too.
And then it occurred to me that 1126 is the number for the “Ident. Missing Person File Room,” which had been stamped on several of Ronald Tammen’s missing person records. So far, a total of zero people I’ve spoken with from the FBI’s Identification Division or its successor, Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS), as well as the Records Management Division, have ever heard of the Missing Person File Room.
For those who may be new to the blog site, the Identification Division’s Missing Person File Room appears to have been a diversion from typical FBI protocol for missing persons. Several of Ron’s papers had been housed there, as indicated by the above stamp, and then the stamp was crossed out at some point, though we don’t know when or why, and we also don’t know where Ron’s papers were stored after that. My thinking is that Ron’s case wasn’t the typical missing person case. I also think they knew he was no longer missing. (You can read every blog post that discusses Ron’s missing person file at this link.)
Could it be, thought I, that the Missing Person File Room was in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, up on the 11th floor, under the watchful eye of the higher-ups in the Identification Division? It only had four numbers, not the five that was characteristic of the 11th floor’s numbering system. But is it…conceivable?
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that it makes no sense. Ron’s missing person documents had (ostensibly) been stamped sometime before June 1973, which precedes the Hoover building by at least two years. How could they specify a room number for a new building before said building had even been built?
Hear me out.
As it so happens, although the J. Edgar Hoover building was nowhere near finished in 1973, it had already been years in development by then, and had been since the early 1960s. In fact, if you’re ever in the mood for some light reading, or, better yet, a natural remedy for covid-fueled insomnia, documents pertaining to the entire process, which began with the formulation of an idea in 1940, can be found on the Government Attic website.
So keeping all of the above in mind, it would seem feasible that, by the summer of 1973, the Identification Division’s management probably was already preparing for its big move. To assist in the transition, perhaps they’d even decided to label some documents according to the new floor plan, even though the numbering system may not have been 100 percent final. Perhaps when they were writing the number 1126 on the line provided by the rubber stamp, they meant 1126-ish.
That might help explain another minor mystery, by the way—the Missing Person File Room stamp itself. I’d often wondered why someone had to write in the room number as opposed to having the room number engraved on the stamp. Was the information held there so confidential that they had to change its location every so often?
My thinking now is that the stamp was made during the transition period when they weren’t exactly sure where the Missing Person File Room would be located. “Just put a blank line there and we can fill in the room number later,” a 1970s office supervisor might have said before pivoting on her platform heels and walking away.
But what about the other buildings that the FBI used back in 1973? Could room #1126 have been in one of those?
I honestly don’t think so. I’ve attempted to obtain floor plans for the Robert F. Kennedy Building at 950 Pennsylvania NW, where the Department of Justice is housed and where some FBI officials were located before they moved next door to FBI Headquarters. Likewise, I tried to obtain floor plans of the Identification Building at 2nd and D Streets, SW, the hub of the fingerprint identification activities. I was unsuccessful. I also was unsuccessful in having someone answer my direct question regarding whether there is a room 1126 in the DOJ building now or in the Ident Building when the FBI was still a tenant.
One kind soul did tell me that there is no such number in the Ford House Office Building, which is a renovated version of the Ident Building.
I was also able to locate some room numbers online for the RFK building, though 1126 isn’t among them. Although the numbering is in four digits and there could feasibly be a room number 1126 on the first floor, it seems unlikely that the Missing Person File Room would have been there. It’s more plausible that it would be accessible to wherever administrative staff would have been located, which was usually on a higher floor.
As for the Identification Building, the 1975 FBI telephone directory shows that most sections were on the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th floors. The directory didn’t specify a room number for the Technical Section, which housed the criminal fingerprint cards. (The civil and Old Armed Forces cards were stored in the Willste Building, in Silver Spring.) Technical staff were most likely stationed in a large open space on the first and possibly second floors. But again, it doesn’t seem likely that the Missing Person File Room would have been located there, particularly since people who’d worked there didn’t seem to know that the room existed.
I also don’t think the Missing Person File Room was housed in the Willste Building due to the same accessibility issues as for the DOJ building. It’s difficult to say, since no room numbers are provided in the directory.
Yesterday, I wrote to the National Capital Planning Commission’s (NCPC’s) Office of Public Engagement seeking the 1967 approved floor plan for the 11th floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, if available. I also requested copies of the approved floor plans for the first, second, and seventh floors, since the drawings are blurry in the 2014 GSA document. (The NCPC has suggested going through the Public Engagement Office first before filing a FOIA request.)
In addition, I plan to reach out to two former employees from that era who may be able to answer my questions about the Missing Person File Room as well.
