Hey everyone. I feel like I’ve been needing to post something lately, but I haven’t exactly been in the mood. First, I’ve never done very well in extreme heat. And second…well, for as long as I’ve known me, I’ve been a big believer in things like democracy and science and the Golden Rule. For some reason, those seemingly unifying bedrock principles are now being thought of as quaint vestiges of a past civilization by some people, a fraction of whom I used to know and even hang with on occasion.
So, I’m sad. No, like…really sad. Like, waking up in the morning and realizing that I’ve been crying in my sleep sad, which has happened to me twice in the past week. As you can imagine, it’s challenging for a blogger to write a post that’s all zippy and upbeat when they’ve been living under a dome of 90-degree gloom for day upon day, and, deep down, they don’t envision the dome lifting anytime soon—at least not for the next 3 ½ years.
Still, I’ve made a few interesting discoveries lately that apply to Ron Tammen’s FBI documents, and, although you’ve proven to be patient, dear reader, I realize that 3 ½ years would be too long for anyone to have to wait for an update. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m a practitioner of the Golden Rule, and I wouldn’t want to be treated that way.
Here’s what I’m planning to do: starting now, and for the next six days, I’ll be posting some of my most recent discoveries for you. Sometimes I may just post a document and provide two or three sentences for background, while other times, I may wax a little poetic about it. (It’ll be more of the former and less of the latter.) The final post of this series will be on the fourth of July, the birthday of America’s independence from a monarchy (249 years of age!), the birthday of the Freedom of Information Act (59 years of age!), and, OK, the birthday of yours truly (internally, I’m a 5-year-old “fearless” and “adventurous” “kid at heart,” according to a quiz on BuzzFeed!).
So grab an American flag and your trusty ol’ cowbell and let’s do this, people. Let’s shake off some of these doldrums we’ve been feeling and take a gander at some FBI docs. Because, the last time I checked, this is what democracy still looks like.
June 28, 2025
Here’s another 10 that I found
To pick up from the last time we discussed 10s in the upper righthand corner of FBI records, I currently believe they were written in that location to indicate that the FBI’s liaison to the Secret Service should receive a copy. Some 10s have hyphens followed by the numbers 1 or 2, while others don’t. I think a 10-1 and a 10 mean essentially the same thing: that the liaison should receive one copy of the memo. A 10-2 would indicate that the liaison should receive two copies.
For today’s release, here’s a document that has a 10-1 in the upper righthand corner, similar to the 10s that are in the upper righthand corner of Ron’s documents.
Included on the memo are the names of three people you probably recognize by now: Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis, three of the five Watergate burglars. On April 15, 1977, this memo was written to inform the recipient that the pardon attorney had requested an Application for Pardon for the three men. As it turns out, only Eugenio Martinez would be pardoned. All three men were denied pardons by President Carter, but Martinez was later pardoned by President Reagan.
As you may recall, so far, I’ve found three other documents for Frank Sturgis (aka Frank Fiorini) with 10s on them. Here’s number four. In some circles, Sturgis is also suspected of playing a possible role in the assassination of JFK.
Click on image for a closer viewl-r: Frank Sturgis, Eugenio Martinez, and Bernard Barker
OK! See how this is going to work? Short and sweet, but hopefully intriguing and/or enlightening.
See you tomorrow. Note that there’s no definite time when I’ll be posting. It’ll be a surprise. Also, if you should notice anything on the documents that I’ve missed or neglected to mention, please don’t hesitate to speak up.
Hello! It’s April 19, a rather momentous date on the calendar, wouldn’t you say? After all, April 19 marks the first day of the Revolutionary War (250 years ago today!). Also the first fatalities of the Civil War were incurred on April 19 (164 years ago today!), as were the deaths and imprisonment of Cuban exiles on day 3 of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion (64 years ago today!). Plus, let’s not forget about the inauguration of the White House bowling alley (78 years ago today!). (I threw in the last one to help lighten the mood.) But you’re not here to discuss any of those events, and neither am I. We’re here to discuss updates on Ron Tammen, who, 72 years ago today, went missing from Miami University on the night of April 19, 1953.
Some of you may be wondering what JFK, the number 10, and an intelligence official with a chic-sounding surname might have to do with Ron Tammen, and to you I say: You must be new here! Thank you for visiting my website, fair and noble recruits! It’s wonderful to have you along, although I’m afraid you have some serious catching up to do. As for you regulars, it’s good to see you too! I think you can guess by the headline where we’re going today. I’m referring, of course, to the missing person documents that the FBI had been keeping on Ron, and all of the stamps and scribbles they’d made on them—stamps and scribbles that I believe hold bona fide clues into what happened to him.
Because the topics we’ll be covering today are, oh, I don’t know…all over the map and occasionally venturing into the weeds, you might say?…I think it’d be best if we did this as a Q&A, which, for you newcomers, happens to be my favorite format. I’ll try my best to keep you in mind as we go. However, if I happen to ramble on about something and you have no idea what I’m talking about, feel free to ask in the comments box at the end.
Lastly, you can click on any of the documents included below for a closer view.
OK! Here we go!
Q: Did you find anything that might pertain to Ron in the latest release of JFK documents?
A: I believe you’re referring to our fairly recent discovery that some of Ron’s stamps and scribbles are the same as those found on a number of people who were investigated for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? Indeed, I’ve been searching the documents that were made public last month for any of the aforementioned scribbles and stamps and the results have been intriguing.
As of today, I’ve found three FBI documents that fit the bill: one of the documents has an ST-102 stamp, just like Ron’s; one of them has a big number 10 in the righthand corner, just like Ron’s; and one has a series of numbers in the righthand corner, including the number 10 (just like Ron’s), plus, as an added bonus, the names of several FBI agents, two of whom appear to be associated with the number 10.
(For you newcomers, here’s a link to Ron’s FBI documents, so you can see the ST-102 stamps and number 10s. Note that all of the important stuff is on the early documents, ending 5-22-73.)
Here are the new documents I found:
ST-102 stamp
May 1963 CIA document containing a list of members of a “Provisional Government of the Republic of Cuba in Arms”; source is a Cuban exile; ST-102 stamp is on page 2
Number 10
January 1967 FBI memorandum on Santo Trafficante, Jr., a powerful mob boss who oversaw businesses in Florida and Cuba
Series of numbers that includes a 10 (1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9,10,11)
July 1969 National Security Agency (NSA) document on communist nationals traveling to Latin American countries; COMINT stands for communications intelligence
Q: Whoa.
A: Right? I don’t want to get all presumptuous just yet, but there seems to be a theme taking shape here, doesn’t there? And if I had to put that theme into words, I’d say that the same people at the FBI who happened to be keeping an eye on Ron (for whatever reason) were also tracking people affiliated with Cuba—be they pro-Castro, anti-Castro, or mobsters who did a lot of business in Cuba.
Bear in mind that Ron’s documents don’t just have commonalities with Cubans and their associates in the mob. His records have signs and symbols that are shared by famous and infamous people with no Cuban ties as well. You’ll see examples of some of these other people later in this post.
Q: That NSA document seems important. What can you tell us about the names of the FBI agents written on it?
A: When I initially saw the numbers next to several people’s names, I thought that they might be referring to divisions of the FBI, which would have been very mundane and super boring. In other words, I thought that the numbers 9, 10, and 11 were in reference to FBI Divisions 9 (Special Investigative Division), 10 (Inspection Division), and 11 (Legal Counsel), and those people were cc’d. But I don’t think that anymore. Let me correct that: I still think the people listed were cc’d, however I now know that every single person on that list whose name I’m able to decipher was employed with Division 5, or Domestic Intelligence, at that time. That is very exciting news.
Here’s why I’m excited: it now appears that the Domestic Intelligence Division was assigning the numbers to its own people. Maybe the numbers—from 1 to 11—represent traditional units or sections, maybe they represent special teams or squads of some sort, or maybe they represent certain individuals. I believe that these are the groups or individuals who were cc’d in the top right corner of some people’s FBI documents, including Ron Tammen’s.
Here are the last names of the people I’m confident about, along with their full name and one or more of their areas of expertise within Division 5:
Nasca Vincent (Vince) Nasca Expert on Cuba, Cuban exiles
*Note that there’s a 5 in front of Nasca’s name, which I think may pertain to the division number. I don’t know why they felt the need to do that, but I think it’s interesting that it appears before his name while the other numbers appear at the end, following a dash. You can see Nasca’s name on the May 1963 CIA document as well.
Harrell Eugene R. Harrell Expert on non-Soviet communist countries; also worked on the Daniel Ellsberg case in 1971
F.X. O’Brien Francis X. O’Brien Expert on South America
A.W. Gray Arbor W. Gray Expert on internal security, i.e., communists and revolutionaries labeled as “new left”
Branigan William A. Branigan Expert on counterespionage, Russian intelligence
Wallace – 9 Howard H. Wallace Expert on counterintelligence
McGuire – 9 James F. McGuire Worked the night desk, and also worked on Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination investigation (MURKIN)
Of course, wouldn’t you just know that two names of which I’m not 100 percent certain are next to the number 10? I do have my guesses though, which are:
Tansey – 10 Fred Anthony Tansey Midnight supervisor who took part in a wide range of international cases, including the JFK assassination investigation.
Schwartz – 10 Leon Francis (Frank) Schwartz In 1969, when the NSA document was produced, he was working as a liaison with the U.S. Air Force and representing the FBI on the U.S. Intelligence Board (USIB). He would become the liaison to the CIA in 1972.
For readers who aren’t sure that this is Frank’s name—if it looks a little too short to you—trust me, I thought it looked a little too short too. However, I think someone else had written the names since they appear to be in the same handwriting, and if so, I wonder if the writer had misspelled Schwartz. It looks as though they’d forgotten to include the c and possibly the t. But what makes me think it’s still Frank is the distinctive, sloppily printed initials over the name, especially the F in the center which connects to a lazy S. Those have Frank’s name all over them.
Here are several examples of Frank’s initials for comparison:
In addition, I’ve checked the FBI’s “Dead List” for every FBI agent with names like Shultz, Schultz, Shay, Sheehy, Skelly, plus any other permutations, and zero possibilities have turned up. The most promising contender was an agent named Henry A. Schutz who’d played a large role in the JFK assassination investigation. However, he was in the General Investigative Division, which is Division 6, not 5 or 10, so I’m thinking it isn’t likely to be his. If Frank Schwartz turns out to be the formidable number 10, that would be consistent with another mark on Ron’s documents: the “lf” mark in the right margin of four of them. In past posts, I’ve proposed that the lf’s were made by Schwartz as well.
R.K.? Doerz? – 11
This last one has me stymied. The FBI’s Dead List and old routing slips weren’t much help either. Of course, I’ll keep at it, but if you’d like to try your hand at figuring out who it might be, feel free!
Q: What do you think the purpose of the numbers was?
I think the numbers in the righthand corner were for internal communication purposes—strictly for FBI staff, and perhaps only for certain key FBI staff. Maybe group 10 dealt with some of the more hot-button cases. Maybe they gave him a 10 for another reason. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to get into the heads of the FBI guys who assigned the numbers, at least not today.
That said, there are a few things we can definitively say about Ron’s 10s:
They came from Domestic Intelligence. We already concluded that Ron’s docs had been floating around the Domestic Intelligence Division when we found his “See index” notation. This just confirms it. Don’t you just love it when we’re right?
Whatever their meaning, those numbers carried a lot of weight to officials within the FBI. Remember all of the 8s that had been given to Lee Harvey Oswald’s docs? Most were written at the top of FBI documents but others were written at the top of other agency documents that had been sent to the FBI, such as those of the State Department or Naval Intelligence. I think we can now conclude that it was the FBI, and only the FBI, that was using the 1-11 numbering system on the documents they produced or acquired.
Sometimes the cases were international while others were domestic. For example, in cases where the State Department had asked the FBI to conduct a security check for someone’s visa application, the FBI would write the number at the top of their copy or, in the case of Marina Oswald’s visa application, in a relevant box. Fittingly, Marina’s 8-1 follows the letters Ci, which likely signifies the Counterintelligence Section within Domestic Intelligence.
One other thing I’ve discovered is that I now believe the numbers were included as part of the FBI’s distribution list for that document. So again, you know Marina Oswald’s visa application that was marked 8-1? I now think that it means that whomever in Domestic Intelligence had been assigned the number 8, that Intelligence staffer or staffers received one copy of Marina’s visa application. A standalone 8 with no dash would indicate that they received one copy as well. If it had said 8-2, they would have received two copies. I think I’ve seen one 3 after a dash, but I’ve never seen a number bigger than that—usually it’s just 1’s and 2’s.
Q: How did you arrive at that conclusion?
A: I remember the exact moment. I was looking through some old FBI documents, which should surprise exactly no one by now. Some of my very best days are spent looking through old FBI documents. (Paradoxically, some of my most mediocre days are spent looking through old FBI documents too. To be honest, I don’t think that I’ve ever experienced a really bad day when reading old FBI documents.)
The documents in question were Message Relay sheets. I was looking at the black-and-white digital versions, but the originals had been made of either a green bond or yellow paper. From what I can tell, these brightly colored cover sheets were used to accompany important memos and teletyped messages that were to be relayed from one of the FBI’s field offices, be it domestic or foreign, to one or more other parties by way of FBI Headquarters. Printed on the Message Relay sheets was a list of federal agencies and officials (e.g., Vice President, President, CIA Director, Attorney General, Secret Service, Secretary of State, etc.) with a square box next to each agency. The boxes would be checked for each intended recipient. At the top of the sheet were two blank areas reserved for Special Agents in Charge (SACS) of the domestic field offices, and Legal Attachés (Legats), stationed in the FBI’s foreign offices. The agent who was filling out the sheet—the message relayer—would write in the names of the recipient offices by hand.
As I was going through the documents, I noticed that the message relayers were also writing the same dashed numbers on the Message Relay sheets that I’d been tracking on the other FBI documents. What’s more, the dashed numbers were written in the same general vicinity where the SACS and Legats were to be written, after the word “TO.” And that’s when it hit me.
“They’re people!” I said to myself.
“They’re people who aren’t already represented on the checklist!” I added.
As for who these people might be, I do have a thought. It has to do with the special agents whose official job responsibilities are to serve as the point of contact for federal agencies, not to mention the FBI’s legal attachés. These employees of the Domestic Intelligence Division are called liaisons. Although I haven’t located a document that tallied the number of liaisons in 1969, the year of the NSA document, it appears to have been 11. (A document from July 1970 stated the number indirectly, and I had to do some math, which is why I’m hedging a little.)
The liaisons would have needed to be kept in the loop regarding anything that the federal agencies whom they covered had received from FBI Headquarters, and yet they weren’t represented on the checklist. That supports our fledgling theory. However, there are aspects to this theory that don’t mesh well with the list of agents on the NSA document. For example, Frank Schwartz was a longtime liaison, but I can’t tell if Wallace, McGuire, or Tansey were. Also, on the NSA document, they’d written down two names each for numbers 9 and 10, and liaisons tended to operate solo. Nevertheless, I think it’s a possibility worth keeping in the backs of our minds.
Here’s one of the Message Relay sheets with the numbers 2-2 and 8-2 near the Legats column.
Here’s a Message Relay sheet in a slightly different format that includes an elusive 10. I’ll tell you who the subject is later. It’s pretty wild.
Q: I remember that you’d also noticed that the term “FD-217” was sometimes written near the numbers in the righthand corner, although it isn’t written on Ron’s documents. Any idea what that’s about?
A: I’m really glad you brought this up. Did you happen to notice the FD-217 on Santo Trafficante’s FBI doc above, next to his 10? I continue to think the reference to FD-217 pertains to the numbers in the upper righthand corner.
As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, the term “FD-217” is in reference to a special FBI form that I’ve been trying to get my hands on. My hope is that it carries instructions regarding what number to assign to a particular document.
This should be an easy request, but the FBI has already demonstrated that they have no intention of giving me what I’m requesting. Even though the FD-217 form is listed in the Table of Contents of the FBI’s Book of Forms, and I have pointed that out to them, they claim that they can’t find it. That takes a whole lot of chutzpah, wouldn’t you say? In my appeal to the Department of Justice, I wrote:
“I am appealing this request because their response that the FBI is unable to locate a blank copy of form FD-217 is not credible, particularly after I pointed them to the FBI Form Book and the relevant page in the Table of Contents. If it were classified information, that would be a different situation. However they’re claiming not to know where it is, which is clearly a false statement. Under FOIA law, there is no exemption for information that the FBI simply would prefer I not have access to. Therefore, I ask that you remand my request and order them to provide to me what I’m entitled to receive.”
I’m hoping the DOJ does the right thing and remands my FOIA request and the FBI sends me the form ASAP. Irrespective of how they respond, I will be posting all responses in full on this website. I look forward to hearing from them soon.
Q: What if it turns out you’re wrong about what the numbers mean?
As long as we get to the answer, I’m OK with being wrong sometimes. Also, regardless of its meaning, I feel confident that Ron’s 10 was assigned to him by someone in the Domestic Intelligence Division.
Domestic Intelligence.
That is soooo not nothing.
Q: Speaking of Ron’s 10s, you mentioned that you’ve found others?
A: Yes! Here’s my list to date, some of which you’ve already seen. I’ve decided to group them alphabetically by topic. Some 10s are large and jump out at you right away. Others are smaller or very light. Some occur on their own, while others are present in a series. Most are in the top righthand corner, though some are in the right margin. Some are representative samples for a given case. Admittedly, a few are judgment calls. Not all “10” documents are negative…but all seemed to have the FBI as well as one or more federal agencies on high alert. Here you go!
Assassination Attempts (Other than U.S. President/VP)
Pierre Trudeau
Author Seeking Interview on Sensitive Topic
Ron Kessler seeking interview regarding FBI involvement in 1964 DNC Convention
Bomb Threats
Federal Building, Madison, WI
Bomb threat against Princess Diana and Prince Charles
(Note: I’m including two Message Relay sheets plus the first page of the document that followed each. The second Message Relay sheet is the one that I spoke of earlier.)
Brainwashing/Cults
Margaret Singer, professor and cult/brainwashing expert
(Note: A large number of Margaret Singer documents marked with the number 10, plus some 9’s, can be found on The Black Vault website.)
Communist Nationals
NSA COMINT Report on travel of communist nationals to Latin American countries
Cuba/Cubans/Cuban exiles
Frank Sturgis, U.S. citizen and self-proclaimed soldier of fortune who first assisted Castro, then Cuban exiles
George Spellmeyer, U.S. citizen and owner of fishing boat found traveling between Havana and Cuban prison
Felix Padron Sanchez, et al
Extortion Victims
List of congressmen, senators, agency heads, etc., who received a threatening letter
Frank Sinatra, who received a threatening letter from the same person
Kennedy Assassination
Lee Harvey Oswald activities in New Orleans
Mass Murderers
Richard Speck
Sharon Tate et al (aka Charles Manson murders)
(Note: These two are judgment calls, but I thought they were worth including. The 10 in the top document, near several people’s initials, is small and underlined. The bottom 10 is in the right margin. The 1 is light, but if you zoom in close, you can see that it extends past the 0, showing that it is separate.)
Mobsters with Cuban Ties
Santo Trafficante
Salvatore Amarena, et al
Racial Matters
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Sabotage/Sedition, etc.
Kent State students investigated for burning down the ROTC building on May 2, 1970
(Note: I think that the agent who signed the top document looks like our friend Russell H. Horner. In a former post, I suggested Horner may have been responsible for the “Hac” notations written at the top of several of Ron’s documents. I’m still waiting on the FBI to send me his personnel file.)
Vice President – Travel Itinerary
(Note: I think it’s interesting that a memo concerning the VP’s international travels is assigned the same number 10 as two memos that concern potential assaults on the VP. I think this could be consistent with our “liaison” theory.)
White House
Sensitive records obtained illegally between 1969 and 1971 through electronic surveillance at request of President Nixon
Q:
A:
Q: I’m kind of speechless. I need to think on this a little more before I ask what I want to ask.
A: Totally fine. It’s a lot. We can move on to the next topic and circle back later.
Q: So who was this L’Allier person, and why do you think he was involved in Ron’s case?
A: Rolland Octave L’Allier was born in Somerset, Wisconsin, on March 2, 1910. His father, Eugene L’Allier, whose parents were both French-Canadian, had been a farmer in Somerset, which appeared to be a magnet for French-Canadians with a yen for farming. Many of their neighbors were also French-Canadian farmers. Tragically, Eugene died much, much too soon—when Rolland was just 2 years of age. As it turned out, his mother remarried another French-Canadian farmer in Somerset (as I said, there were a lot of them), so life didn’t appear to have changed too drastically for him. I think being around so many French-Canadians led Rolland to gravitate to Canada and Canadians, particularly the French-speaking ones. (I know the feeling. I love them too.) According to Rolland’s obituary, he’d attended St. Lawrence College, in Ontario, as well as the University of Montreal.
In 1941, when Rolland was 30, he and his wife, who was French-Canadian by birth, and their young son were living in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was working at the St. Paul Milk Company, though that would soon change. In October of that same year, he would be hired by the FBI and he and his young family would move to the Washington, D.C. area. I’m sure he had a great story to tell his friends about how he’d been living the dream in the milk business in St. Paul, and then, seemingly out of the blue, he was recruited by the FBI, but unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to hear it.
Rolland L’Allier at a conference at the Harry Truman Presidential Library; photo in public domain
Despite the little I know about Rolland’s early years, I’m positive that he spoke exquisite French. From 1951 through 1959, Rolland was the FBI’s legal attaché in Paris, which sounds like the FBI’s plummest of job opportunities. He would have been the perfect choice. He had a slender build and a likable face. He looked super French, he probably sounded super French, and he had this amazing name that probably rolled off his tongue like a true Quebecois. I’m sure the Parisians ate him up like a profiterole.
In 1960, Rolland L’Allier was 50 years old. He’d been employed with the Bureau for nearly 20 years, which was generally retirement time at the FBI. It appears he wasn’t ready to retire just yet though—he had a little more petrol left in his Renault (so to speak). He moved back to the States, and was named chief of the FBI’s Liaison Section, the section in Domestic Intelligence that we’ve already heard quite a bit about today. He was in charge of all of the liaisons, including Sam Papich, who was a longtime liaison to the CIA before Frank Schwartz. In his position, L’Allier needed to be apprised of everything that the liaisons were learning from and sharing with the federal agencies and legats because he needed to alert the people at the top of the FBI. It was a heavy duty post. Put simply: he knew a lot about what other agencies in the federal government were doing and it was his responsibility to bring his bosses up to speed.
In 1962, L’Allier was tapped to become the first director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa. This might sound weird at first, but it actually makes sense. In his role as chief of the Liaison Section, he’d raised concerns with the FBI leadership regarding what restrictions were being placed on documents that were being made available at the National Archives. He was particularly concerned that not enough restrictions were being implemented for some classified documents. When he was named to his new post, the people at the National Archives likely felt that they were putting the nation’s classified documents in good hands.
I forget the second part of your question. What was it again?
Q: How does a guy with those credentials come into contact with Ron Tammen’s missing person documents?
Oh, right. First let’s do a quick recap of his timeline. From 1951 through 1959, he was in Paris as the FBI’s legal attaché; from 1960 to 1962, he was stationed at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., overseeing the liaisons; and from 1962 through whenever he ended his term as director of the Hoover library, he was in Iowa. By my calculations, there’s a tiny window when I think Rolland L’Allier came into contact with Ron’s missing person documents, and that window is between 1960 and 1962.
Here’s why I think he intersected with Ron’s documents: Rolland L’Allier had a distinctive way of signing his name to FBI documents. Actually, he had two ways. One way he signed them was with a printed L and an accent mark. Like this:
His jazzier signature—his signature signature, in my view—was a large loopy L, an oversized accent mark, and a small, printed capital A to the right of the L, sometimes at a jaunty angle. Here are a couple good examples:
Now, take a look at the signature in the upper righthand corner (near the 10) of page one of Ron’s missing person documents.
There’s the big loopy L, the oversized accent mark, and, the most telling part, what appears to be a small capital A at a jaunty angle. There’s also a squiggly line, which I’ll be addressing below. For now, concentrate on the L, the accent mark, and the A.
Let’s zoom in a little further on that A:
There are three prominent lines: two slanted lines that come together to form the point of the A (at a jaunty angle) and a third horizontal line that crosses them. I believe that Rolland L’Allier signed page one of Ron’s missing person documents alongside the phrase “all files” and the partial date of “5/28.” (Incidentally, don’t you just love the “all files” note? It sounds as though they had enough info on Ron Tammen to fill several file folders, if not an entire filing cabinet! I’m kidding, but it does seem weird.) As mentioned above, there’s also that squiggly line after the A.
Some readers may think that it can’t be L’Allier due to the 5/28 date, which, because it’s lacking a year, implies that it was signed on May 28, 1953, two days after Cleveland had sent in their report about Marjorie’s phone call, and well outside of L’Allier’s 1960-62 window. But perhaps the 5/28 represents a different year or signifies something else? I mean, how many files could there have been on Ron Tammen on May 28, 1953? It was still at least three months before Ron’s Selective Service file would be opened. By my count, there should have been precisely one. So something seems fishy there.
Also, that squiggly line was not generally part of L’Allier’s M.O., which might lead some people to rule him out as being the signer on Ron’s document. Not me though. The way I see it, Rolland might have added that squiggly line for pizzazz. Or, as shown above, occasionally he would sign his initials over his full name, which sometimes looked a little like a squiggle at the end. Like this time, for example:
Maybe a portion of his full signature had been erased. I’m not sure. All I can say is that the big loopy L plus the accent mark plus the small capital A have all the hallmarks of L’Allier’s signature on Ron Tammen’s documents. I think it’s him.
Q: What do you make of all this?
Oh, gosh, so many thoughts. First, I think we can all agree that Ron Tammen was alive and well after he went missing and the folks in the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division were keeping their eye on him, for whatever reason. I think we can also safely say that Ron wasn’t leading the tranquil life of a bond salesman, which had been his supposed dream job.
Second, something that I haven’t mentioned to you yet is that Rolland L’Allier was extremely familiar with the CIA, not only when he was overseeing the liaisons, but also when he was the legal attaché in Paris. I’ve learned through newly declassified portions of a famous 1961 memo from Arthur Schlelsinger, Jr. to President Kennedy that the U.S. Embassy in Paris, where L’Allier had been stationed for 9 years, was also home to 123 CIA agents—one hundred twenty-three!—all of whom occupied the top floor of the Paris Embassy. So…there’s that.
Third, if it is L’Allier’s signature on Ron’s missing person documents, and if he signed it between 1960 and 1962, then that would coincide with a significant time period in our nation’s history when the United States and Cuba were butting heads, including, most famously, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. If Ron was somehow, I don’t know, involved with any of that, it might help explain why Ron’s documents share so many similarities with Cubans, Cuban exiles, and mobsters who were operating out of Florida and Havana, such as Santo Trafficante. Also, don’t forget that James W. McCord, Jr., the former CIA agent and Watergate burglar who shares a few stamps and scribbles with Ron, had close ties to Cuban exiles as well.
How about you guys? What do you make of all this?
Q: Before we go there, I have a question about all of those 10’s you found that match Ron’s.
A: Sure, go ahead.
Q: If the FBI considered Ron to be somehow dangerous, adding him to the Security Index, and lumping him into the same category as mobsters and cases involving extortion, bomb threats, assassination attempts, and mass murderers, why have they been running interference for him by not disclosing his whereabouts for over seven decades? In a sense, haven’t they been putting us all in harm’s way?
A: GREAT question. If anyone from the FBI, DOJ, or CIA would like to weigh in, the floor is now open. Or, feel free to reach out to me through the contact form on this blog site and I’ll protect your identity forever.
******
COMING NEXT WEEK: For anyone in the Oxford/Hamilton/Cincinnati/etc. area, I’ll be discussing Ron’s story at the Butler County Historical Society next Saturday, April 26. If you’ve been a little too busy to keep up with the blog or you’ve been wanting to hear a condensed version of the most important details of the case, this is your opportunity. There will also be some breaking news. The 1 p.m. session is sold out, but there are still some open seats for 3:30 p.m. They do require reservations. It’s free for BCHS members and $5 for nonmembers, payable at the door. Hope to see you there!
As promised, I’m back with the seventh and final “goodie” from my last post.
Let’s look back to the halcyon days of 2020 when, during lockdown, I discovered a photo I’d taken of a summary of an interview that had been conducted with a woman who’d been Carl Knox’s secretary at the time of Ron Tammen’s disappearance. The summary is undated and unsigned and lives in a box stored at Miami’s University Archives.
A typed summary of an interview that had been conducted with a woman who’d been Carl Knox’s secretary in 1953. I’ve redacted the woman’s name.
As you probably know by now, I think the interview with Carl Knox’s former secretary had been conducted relatively recently, within the last 20 years, and I also think that she may have disclosed some pertinent information about Carl Knox’s investigation, particularly the forbidden words described in bullet 3. Needless to say, I really, really want to find the person who conducted the interview.
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with the one person who I was totally convinced could have shone a big bright light on the whole mystery. I thought that if anyone knows anything about that interview, this person would. But guess what? The person with whom I spoke didn’t know anything about the interview with Carl Knox’s former secretary. In fact, they had no idea that the person who was interviewed had been Carl Knox’s secretary in 1953. In addition, this person didn’t really know the woman who’d been Carl Knox’s secretary very well—definitely not well enough to know that she’d been Carl Knox’s secretary in 1953.
I believe this person. This person is very credible.
While this was surprising news to me, it should in no way be mistaken for bad news. This new info has caused my search to take an abrupt turn which could lead us closer to finding the person who conducted the interview.
I’m going to turn off comments for this one, since I don’t want to speculate further. I’ll keep you posted if I have updates.
P.S. If the author of the interview summary happens to be reading this post, I’d be so grateful if you’d reach out to me through the contact link on this blog. If you’d like me to protect your anonymity, I promise to do so into perpetuity.
Happy Valentine’s Day, a day of celebration for the oligarchs of candy making, flower arranging, teddy bear stuffing, and the manufacture of paper doilies. A day when Americans of all stripes—young and old, short and tall, single and buddied-up—are pressured into dipping into whatever leftover savings they have from the holidays to shower the objects of their affection with, um, more objects…preferably of the pink and frilly variety. Call me cynical, but what if, instead of shelling out more cash in a mandatory declaration of love for someone, we just did some really kind deeds for them…plus anyone else who happens to be in their vicinity? What if, instead of giving that one special person a box of assorted chocolate goodies that will last a moment on their lips and a lifetime on their hips, we treated them to goodies of a different type—something for their brains to chew on for a while? What if we treated them to new knowledge?
And so, dear reader, in honor of St. Valentine, Patron Saint of “affianced couples, bee keepers, engaged couples, epilepsy, fainting, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, plague, travellers, and young people,” I’ll be treating you to an assortment of brand new bits of information concerning Ronald Tammen’s case that I haven’t disclosed to anyone yet. Some are big, some are small, some are deliciously decadent, while others could be likened to those weird maple cream-filled ones, which I suppose is better than nothing. But I think all are important in some way. So go ahead—indulge!
Goodie #1: I was wrong about Ron’s two missing person numbers…but only partly.
Back in November 2022, I wrote a blog post about Ron Tammen having two missing person numbers—one that I believed was assigned in 1953 and the other in 1973. I came to this conclusion when I discovered on page one of Ron’s FBI documents the words “MP #17699 Posted 6-2-53,” followed by the letters “Jh.” I knew that Ron’s missing person case number was 79-31966 (79 is the classification number for missing persons), so I figured that this other missing person number—#17699, minus the 79—had been assigned to him on day one, in 1953, and that, for whatever reason, the FBI had found reason to retire it at some point. I also claimed rather boldly that the new number had been assigned in 1973, after the Cincinnati Field Office had sent in the man from Welco Industries’ fingerprints and asked them to compare them to Ron’s prints.
Well, it turns out that my inference was incorrect about MP #17699. I learned this when I found that Richard Cox, who’d disappeared from West Point Academy on January 14, 1950, had been given an MP# too—#13550—even though his actual missing person case number was 79-23729. Interestingly, Cox’s MP# and Ron’s MP# had had been written by the same person—a person with impeccable penmanship whose initials appeared to be Jh.
Ron Tammen’s MP#Richard Cox’s MP#
I then consulted some old issues of the Law Enforcement Bulletin, the FBI’s publication for law enforcement officers around the country, and found that all those sad missing faces had MP numbers too. Apparently, that was a thing that the FBI did for missing persons. They’d assign a missing person number when the Identification Division’s Posting Section posted the notice for law enforcement. But the case number—the one that starts with the 79—was reserved for when the missing person documents were filed in the FBI’s Central Records System.
Here are a couple examples:
So I got that part wrong, and I hate when that happens. I’m very sorry for the error.
Here’s what I don’t think I got wrong: Ron’s missing person case number—79-31966—falls chronologically within the same timeframe as people who went missing in the early 1970s. Specifically, his number falls between Don L. Ray, who disappeared in December 1972, and Ronnie Durall York, who disappeared in January 1975. (You can find the list on my blog post.) Granted, there are some inconsistencies in the case numbers, especially three cases that fall immediately after York’s. I think those discrepancies may have something to do with when a person had been reported to the FBI as missing. I don’t know. But, by all appearances, the Cincinnati Field Office didn’t have access to Ron’s missing person case number when they wrote up their report on May 9, 1973, which they absolutely should have. Instead, they referenced his Selective Service violation number, a case that had been dismissed in 1955. Therefore, even if the number that I thought was Ron’s first missing person case number is incorrect, I still think Ron’s missing person case had been assigned a number that had been retired before the Cincinnati Field Office had contacted FBI Headquarters in May 1973…or perhaps he’d never even had a missing person case number until 1973, which would be even weirder.
Goodie #2: Do you remember the misleading photo that a Cincinnati paper had published in April 1953 identifying some jock in a West Point sweatshirt as Richard Cox? I recently learned something else that’s intriguing about that photo.
This past Halloween, I posted a write-up on a photo that had been published in the Cincinnati Times-Star FAMILY Magazine that was supposed to be Richard Cox. It’s definitely not him. In my write-up, I concluded that, by April 1953, when the Cincinnati paper published Gilson Wright’s story, the search for Cox had been called off by the U.S. Army and the FBI for over three months, and, for whatever reason, someone in the press office of the Army and/or West Point had decided to send a doctored photo of the wrong guy.
Richard CoxNot Richard Cox; used with permission
Recently, I found that the Associated Press had published the same doctored photo as early as March 1950. That seems really early.
What could it mean?
I suppose it could mean that 1) It really is Richard Cox and he was just having a bad hair day, not to mention a bizarro face day (it’s not him, so I’m ruling this one out from the get go); 2) the Cincinnati newspaper had acquired its photo from the Associated Press and just neglected to credit them (also a no, since the AP would have demanded credit, and besides, it’s just good journalistic protocol); or 3) the aforementioned press officer had sent the misleading photo to the AP sometime before March 18, 1950 (the dateline of the accompanying article), at a time when every person who was working the case in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, West Point Academy, and the FBI would have looked at that photo and known instantly that it was definitely NOT Richard Cox.
Here’s what’s strange about the photo: the AP wire service already had a perfectly great photo of Cox in his military uniform which they’d published shortly after he’d disappeared. The Cleveland Plain Dealer had published the AP’s accurately identified Cox photo on February 6, 1950. A month later, the AP opted to go with a more casual photo of a guy in a West Point sweatshirt who looked nothing like Richard Cox.
Goodie #3: Even though FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had instructed his agents to call off their search for Richard Cox in January 1953, the FBI was keeping track of him well into the 1970s.
As I announced on August 30, 2024, Richard Cox, who, like Ron, was missing, had been added to the FBI’s Security Index at some point. We know this because we can see the phrase “see index” written on his FBI document from January 31, 1950. To be added to the Security Index meant that the FBI considered you somehow dangerous or a threat to national security and they were tracking your whereabouts every six months or so. That would be especially hard to do if the person had, in fact, vanished.
Recently, when I reexamined the handwriting of Richard Cox’s “see index” and I compared it to other people’s “see index” notations, I found one that looks remarkably similar to Cox’s. As it so happens, I’m quite sure that it was written by the same person who wrote the phrase on one of Charles McCullar’s documents in 1976.
Here’s Richard Cox’s:
And here’s Charles McCullar’s:
I’m aware that people often worked for 20 or 25 years with the FBI, but there’s no way that I can see the same person making nearly identical marks on documents for that length of time. People change. They move to other jobs. If he (I’m guessing it was a he) is anything like me, his handwriting would have deteriorated over time—certainly after 10 or 15 years. But the “see index” notation on Richard’s and Charles’ docs practically look as if they were written on the same day. That tells me that Richard Cox continued to hold an interest for the FBI well into the 1970s despite the fact that the FBI’s search for him had been terminated by J. Edgar Hoover in 1953.
J. Edgar Hoover discontinued their search for Richard Cox on January 14, 1953.
It’s important to remember that, after 1971, the Security Index had been renamed the Administrative Index, though its purpose was pretty much the same as before: keeping tabs on the people they perceived to be subversives. I also happen to think that, except for using a lowercase i instead of the capital I above, the handwriting on Richard Cox’s and Charles McCullar’s documents look a lot like the handwriting on Ron’s and Hank Greenspun’s docs, not to mention Tom Peasner’s.
Goodie #4: I’m pretty sure I now know what the first phrase says at the bottom lefthand corner of Ron’s 5-9-73 missing person document.
During the Walking Tour Afterparty in October 2024, we played a game that involved figuring out what certain words said on Ron’s FBI document from 5-9-73. Only one person ventured some guesses (shoutout to whereaboutsstillunknown!) and during various quiet moments since that party, I’ve sat staring at those inscrutable letters, which have defiantly stared right back at me.
The phrase that I’ve finally figured out is “Not ____ matter” with four letters occupying the space between Not and matter. Whereabouts and I agreed that the last three letters are FPS, and I thought the first letter was an O, indicating an office within an agency perhaps. Now I see that it’s not an O, but an L, as in “Not LFPS matter.” At the FBI, LFPS stands for the Latent Finger Print Section, which makes sense, since the stamp that’s scribbled over on that same document is LFP. I’d mentioned on that same post that I thought it was odd that they’d send Ron’s docs to the Latent Fingerprint folks, since they had a perfectly fine set of ten prints from when Ron was fingerprinted in the second grade. So it appears that the Latent Fingerprint folks thought it was odd too.
I think the first phrase is “Not LFPS matter.” Not sure what the rest says but I’ll keep staring.
Goodie #5: Major Hughes, the guy who fast-tracked Louis Jolyon West’s move from Lackland Air Force Base to the University of Oklahoma, was an actual guy, and not a pseudonym for Sidney Gottlieb, as I’d theorized.
In my blog post from August 2023, I discussed how Louis Jolyon West had been lamenting his situation at Lackland Air Force Base because he’d felt that his immediate boss at the base would seriously impede his work on Project Artichoke. But, according to a letter from Brigadier General H.H. Twitchell to West in September 1954, it was the problem-solving skills of a man referred to as Major Hughes who greased the wheels so that West could transition out of Lackland that December, 1 ½ years earlier than what he’d originally been obligated to.
I’d theorized that Major Hughes might have been a pseudonym for Sidney Gottlieb, since we know that Gottlieb had a fondness for pseudonyms (see Joseph Scheider, Joseph Schneider, and Sherman Grifford), but it appears I was wrong about that too.
In his book “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments,” H.P. Albarelli, Jr., has included a whole chapter on a mysterious guy named Allan F. Hughes. As Albarelli describes, Allan Hughes was formerly with the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) and was an expert in electronic surveillance and interrogation. He worked for Sidney Gottlieb’s Technical Services Staff from 1953 to 1955, and, in fact, he was one of the persons in attendance at the 1953 cabin retreat in which Frank Olson was given LSD. (The itinerary posted on the Frank Olson Project website lists A. Hughes as one of the participants.) From what I can tell, no one has said outright that “Major Hughes” is in fact “Allan F. Hughes,” or vice versa, but it does seem probable. (If you know of a website, article, podcast, or anything else that makes that claim, please let me know.) Needless to say, I’ll be looking more into Allan Hughes, as he seemed to run in the same circles as James W. McCord, who, as we’ve discussed many times on this blog, has FBI documents with the same scribbles and stamps as Ron Tammen.
If Allan F. Hughes turns out to be Major Hughes, we can state definitively that Major Hughes is not Sidney Gottlieb’s pseudonym since both men attended the cabin retreat where LSD was given to Frank Olson.
Goodie #6:I’ve learned a little more about the numbers written in the upper righthand corner of State Department and FBI documents, including someone else who received a 10.
On November 22, 2024, I blogged about the number 10 that sits in the upper righthand corner of ten pages of Ron’s FBI docs, and we discussed how another person sporting the 10 was Frank Sturgis, of CIA fame among others. Today, I’d like to share a few additional updates about the numbering system and another person who shares the number 10:
FD-217 Recently, I’ve found several documents in which the term “FD-217” is written adjacent to the number in the upper righthand corner, usually in the same handwriting. FD-217 is an FBI form and, although it has a benign-sounding title: Notification of Bureau File Number, I’m wondering if perhaps it’s the source of the number in the righthand corner. Unfortunately, I can’t find this form anywhere online, whether completed or blank. Also, I’ve found no other forms that are cited near the upper-corner numbers, so it seems important. I’ve submitted a FOIA request for this form to see if I can learn anything more about the numbering system. In the meantime, here are a few of the documents in which someone has written FD-217 near the various numbers.
Louis Henry Jones, FD 217, 5Samuel M. Giancana, FD-217, 4Michael McLaney, FD-217, 7-1Redacted, FD-217, 4
A mark that Ron has in common with the redacted case
In the above report dated 8-29-74, which has a redacted title, someone’s initials (I presume) appear next to the 4 and the FD-217. Those initials look like Lei or maybe it’s a Lu with a dot over the u. It’s hard to tell. Guess who else has one of those Lei/Lu-dot things near his 10? Ron. This is the first time I’ve ever seen another one of those marks other than Ron’s.
Page one of Ron’s FBI docs — note the Lei/Lu with a dot that seems to match the redacted doc above
I have a seventh goodie that I was planning on sharing with you, but I’m seeking someone’s OK first. So, stay tuned. I’ll post it separately as soon as I’m able.
I guess that’ll do it for now. Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!
**************************
2-15-2025
ADDENDUM:
You guys? I believe I’ve found another FBI document that has FD-217 written near the upper-corner number, which is an 8. This is an important one. The document’s subject is Marina Oswald and it’s dated July 25, 1962. That’s one month after she’d arrived in the United States with Lee and their daughter. It’s not perfectly written. The F appears to be backwards, or maybe it’s written in cursive. The left arm of the D is invisible except for a dot, and the 2 has been cut off as well. But I’m seeing FD217…are you?
Credit: Thanks to the Mary Ferrell Foundation for making this document available. The letters and numbers are difficult to make out, but I believe there’s an F (backwards or cursive), a capital D, and a 17 at the end. I believe the smudgy mark that looks like an equal sign is a 2 that’s been cut off.
Here it is blown up. See the dot in the left arm of where a capital D would be? Also, I think the two parallel horizontal lines are part of a 2 that’s been cut off.
It’s been a while since we last communicated, and for that, I apologize. It’s just that reading hundreds of pages of FBI documents morning, noon, and night can wear a girl out. Also, I don’t like to post updates unless I have something noteworthy to tell you. I respect you and your downtime that much.
Today, we’ll be discussing the very small window of time when everything came to a head with regards to the mystery of Ron Tammen. I’ll also be providing the names of a couple people whom I (currently) believe were responsible for two of the more prominent marks that appear on Ron’s FBI documents, along with a surprise discovery concerning someone else we know. Aaaaaand I think we’ll also be throwing in a little pop culture here and there, because the early 1970s played a very big role in helping this girl blossom into the Good-Hearted, Hard-Headed, Do-Right, and, at times, Witchy Woman who has been chasing this story down for the past 15 years.
(Speaking of the latter, I’m afraid my witchiness was on full display this week when I was on a run and some guy almost hit me with his car even though I clearly had the right of way. Let’s just say that I doubt that he’ll be making any right or left turns without first checking in every possible direction to make sure I’m nowhere in sight. Neither will any of the eyewitnesses.)
First let’s talk pop culture. I can barely recall the sorts of things I was doing in the summer of 1973, which is probably a good thing. I was woefully immature back then. I will say this: the music was pretty good, though, admittedly, there was some seriously awful stuff being churned out too. No matter what the Billboard chart says, the best song that year was, in my opinion, Midnight Train to Georgia, which was released on August 4, 1973. It’s weird to think back to a time when no one had heard Gladys Knight and the Pips sing their iconic song, but these are the days we’ll be primarily focused upon here. Put another way, in May, June, and July of 1973, Ronald Tammen, Daniel Ellsberg, James McCord, and Herman Greenspun didn’t have the opportunity to crank up that soulful tune and belt out some of the best back-up lyrics EVER as they were stress driving their sedans down D.C.’s Constitution Avenue, or the Vegas Strip, or wherever else they happened to be—at a time when they were being investigated by the FBI for acts of subterfuge that were (ostensibly) committed by or against them.
But make no mistake: Ronald Tammen, Daniel Ellsberg, James McCord, and Herman Greenspun were being closely watched by key people at the FBI and they were being linked together in some way. (We haven’t discussed Daniel Ellsberg much, so for those who need a quick tutorial, he was actually a hero, despite the federal government’s treating him like a traitor. Ellsberg was responsible for leaking a report on the Vietnam War that showed that the government had been lying to the country all along about how things were going. The report came to be referred to as the Pentagon Papers, and its release helped bring the Vietnam War to an end. Needless to say, Nixon was not pleased with Ellsberg, and in September 1971, Ellsberg became the first victim of a now-familiar scheme by which the former president dealt with his perceived adversaries. More on that in a few.)
Instead of writing this up as a Q&A, which is usually my favorite way of reporting something important quickly, we’re going to go with a timeline. We’ll also be focusing on three familiar identifying marks that were stamped or scribbled on the FBI records of two or more of the four men during the summer of 1973. All of the men have one of the marks in common, two of the men share two of the marks, and one of the men, Ron Tammen, was given all three of the marks. The marks in question are:
lf,
ST-102/REC-19,
and Hac.
Ready, set, go!
—1970—
July 1970
To set the stage, we need to start three years earlier, in July 1970, when famed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was still very much alive and in charge and carrying a festering grudge against the CIA. At the time the CIA was established in 1947, Hoover had believed his FBI was perfectly capable of protecting the safety and security of American citizens, both domestically and abroad, and he didn’t want anyone invading his turf. Nevertheless, Congress went ahead and created the CIA anyway and, up through the 1960s, the two agencies attempted to stay in their own lanes—with the FBI gathering its intelligence at home and the CIA being responsible for international operations. They kept abreast of each other’s activities through the FBI’s liaison program, which was part of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division.
For many years, Sam Papich was the FBI’s liaison to the CIA, and he kept the communication channels open as best he could with people at high levels of both agencies. However, there were times when one agency would cross a boundary, be it inadvertently or advertently, causing the infringed-upon agency to add a new transgression to its list of grievances. By the middle of July 1970, Hoover had had enough. He discontinued the FBI’s Liaison Section, which not only had coordinated activities with the CIA, but also with some 80 other federal agencies as well as legal attaches in the FBI’s foreign offices. The Liaison Section was drastically reduced and renamed the Special Coordination Unit, which limited its coordinating activities to the FBI’s foreign offices and the White House, Office of the Vice President, and National Security Council. The CIA and FBI were officially incommunicado.
—1971—
June 13, 1971 (Sunday)
The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, which, as we just discussed, were leaked by RAND Corporation’s former analyst Daniel Ellsberg. Richard Nixon is furious. They publish two more installments on June 14 and 15, but are ordered to stop.
June 15, 1971 (Tuesday)
In response to the New York Times series, the FBI begins investigating Daniel Ellsberg at the request of Attorney General John Mitchell.
September 3, 1971 (Friday)
Individuals affiliated with the White House, CIA, and FBI, aka the “White House plumbers,” break into the office of Lewis Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, looking for documents they could use to discredit Ellsberg. The burglars include former FBI special agent G. Gordon Liddy and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt. We’ll be bumping into those names again very soon.
—1972—
May 2, 1972 (Tuesday)
On this day, the world was informed that J. Edgar Hoover had died in his sleep. I won’t be getting into all the details, but suffice it to say that this was a big deal for the FBI. Soon, his “official and confidential” files would become public knowledge, as would his scurrilous special file rooms, and the illegal means by which the FBI was getting some of its intel. That’s the trouble with guarding so many secrets when you’re alive—when you die, eventually those secrets are going to come out. As the public learned of the FBI’s unscrupulous surveillance methods, Hoover’s image, as well as the image of his beloved FBI, would be severely tarnished.
May 28, 1972 (Sunday)
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but, up until yesterday, I hadn’t realized that there were in fact two Watergate burglaries. The first break-in into the Democratic National Headquarters in D.C.’s Watergate Hotel occurred on this day—Sunday, May 28—and it involved a familiar cast of characters. G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt were there as the planners and overseers, while seven burglars, including former CIA operative James Walter McCord, Jr., and six Cuban expatriates, did the work. The point of the break-in was to plant bugging devices and to photograph documents, and apparently, everything went swimmingly.
June 17, 1972 (Saturday), part 1
THIS is the date that’s best known as Watergate. In the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, a little over six weeks after Hoover’s death, five men wearing blue surgical gloves are caught in DNC Headquarters on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel. According to one FBI record, the five were discovered in an executive conference room area. In another document, they were discovered in the office of Phillip Seib, an assistant to DNC chair Larry O’Brien. No matter where they were standing when they were caught, this is the beginning of what will forever be known as the Watergate scandal. Eventually, it would come out that G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt were the masterminds, though they weren’t arrested that night. The five so-called burglars who were arrested were James McCord, Frank Sturgis, and three Cuban expats. As we’ve discussed in another blog post, Sturgis has been described as a soldier of fortune who’d become heavily involved in Cuban affairs, including (allegedly) helping the CIA with the Bay of Pigs.
The FBI reports during this early period of the Watergate investigation are messier than usual, probably because new info was coming in as fast as they could type it up. There are lots of handwritten edits. The lists of the burglars’ names and aliases are marked up in a chaotic fashion. McCord’s name isn’t even included on an early report, though his alias, Edward Martin, is. In the ensuing reports, we begin to see an underlined loopy lowercase “L” in the right margin. It appears to mean something significant, like “liaison” maybe, even though, as we all know, the FBI doesn’t have a liaison dedicated to the CIA anymore. But I’m 100 percent positive that someone from the FBI would have contacted someone at the CIA about the burglary early on. They would have been nuts not to, given Hunt’s, McCord’s, and (allegedly) Sturgis’ ties to the CIA.
Here’s the underlined loopy l. Remember its location in the right margin because it’s going to be replaced soon.
June 17, 1972, part 2
The memo stating that the burglars were discovered in Phillip Seib’s office was written by the Miami Field Office at 3:10 p.m. Eastern time the day of the break-in. What’s interesting about it is that it looks as if the word Hac is written at the top, similar to the Hacs at the top of Ron’s documents. Someone has also assigned a number 1 with a dash nearby, similar to the number 10 that Ron was given. But there are obvious differences between Ron’s Hacs and the word written here. Even though the letters are nearly impossible to make out, we can see that there are at least five or six of them instead of the three in Hac. I think it’s someone’s name.
Here’s a close-up of the word at the top of the Phillip Seib memo. You can see at least 5 or 6 letters, and I think it’s someone’s name.
I have about 10 people in mind who might have written Hac at the top of Ron’s documents, and that doesn’t include the office assistants who might have been the authors as well. Plus, it could be that more than one person was involved in writing Ron’s Hacs. But this H looks so much like Ron’s, especially the one from November 29, 1963, that I can’t discount it. It’s in the right location and it has an accompanying number.
Here’s the Hac at the top of Ron Tammen’s doc from November 29, 1963. I think the H looks very similar to the one on the Phillip Seib memo, plus there’s a number nearby.
As for the name of the person who wrote the H-word at the top of the Seib memo? I think it was…
Russell H. Horner.
Russell Horner has been one of my top ten contenders for Ron’s Hac writer, and I think this Seib memo bolsters that theory. My reasons are: 1) The H resembles the H in Hac on Ron’s documents, especially the one from November 1963; 2) It looks as if the word written at the top of the Seib document could be Horner; and, most telling of all, 3) “Mr. Horner” is cc’d at the bottom of page two.
Mr. Horner is cc’d on the Phillip Seib memo. The person above his name is Mr. Bates, who was part of the General Investigative Division.
Here’s why Russell Horner’s name is significant: The Watergate scandal was principally overseen by the FBI’s General Investigative Division (Division 6), which was headed by Charles A. Nuzum. However, Russell Horner was part of the Domestic Intelligence Division (Division 5), in the Internal Security Section. Although I can’t confirm his job title in 1972, I can say with confidence that he was the chief of the Special Records and Related Research Unit immediately before he retired, which I believe was sometime in 1974.
What’s the Special Records and Related Research Unit, you ask? According to a Domestic Intelligence inspection report filed in August 1972, the SRRR Unit was responsible for the administration of some of the most sensitive records created by the FBI, including the FBI’s defense plans; records pertaining to “electronic surveillances and other sophisticated investigative techniques” (the inspector’s words); and records pertaining to the Administrative Index (ADEX), which was the successor to the FBI’s extremely hush-hush, never-to-be-spoken-of-aloud Security Index.
Because Horner is cc’d on the Seib document, we can state unequivocally that Domestic Intelligence was brought into the Watergate investigation on day 1. Domestic Intelligence was also the division that I believe added a number of stamps and scribbles to Ron’s pages as well—including Ron’s “see index” notation—which tells me that we’re in the right place.
I filed a FOIA request for Russell Horner’s personnel file on December 16, 2024, to see if it might provide some additional details. I’m still waiting for the FBI to acknowledge that request. (Usually, it takes no more than a few days for them to send an acknowledgment, but I’m going to presume that their tardiness is due to the holidays and not because they don’t like my request.) Admittedly, if Russell Horner is the Hac author, then the letters H-a-c can’t possibly be an acronym for the House Assassination Committee, as I’d suggested in my June 16, 2024, post. The House Select Committee on Assassinations wasn’t established until 1976 and, as I said, I believe Russell Horner had retired from the FBI in 1974. We’ll see what I can learn from his file when I eventually get it.
June 29, 1972 (Thursday)
Twelve days after the second Watergate break-in, and 57 days after Hoover’s death, David D. Kinley, assistant to Acting Director L. Patrick Gray, sent a memo to W. Mark Felt, now the number two man in the FBI, seeking his thoughts on how they might go about reestablishing the Liaison Section. Obviously, there was an enormous need to bring back the liaisons, particularly with regards to the CIA, and now that Hoover was gone, they didn’t have his massive ego to worry about. The next day, Felt sent a memo to Kinley offering up his thoughts, and suggesting Leon F. Schwartz, who was then chief of the Special Coordination Unit, as the potential head. Schwartz had the proper skill set and had fostered valuable contacts as a liaison with the U.S. Air Force and other agencies including those in intelligence. Edward S. Miller, head of Domestic Intelligence, let Mark Felt know that he had other people in mind as candidates to head up the Liaison Section. It would take the FBI a few months to set up the new chain of command, and by October 1972, Leon F. Schwartz was the new liaison to the CIA.
July 17, 1972 (Monday)
To the best of my knowledge, the lf mark first appears on the McCord Watergate documents on this date, replacing the loopy lowercase L in the right margin. Although he isn’t officially named as the liaison to the CIA until October, I think Leon F. Schwartz would have been the most obvious person who could immediately step in to assist in communicating with the CIA during the early months of Watergate. He was still the chief of the Special Coordination Unit at this point. Also, the lf marks appear on the McCord documents through at least June 25, 1973, when Schwartz had been the official liaison to the CIA for 8 months. The initials often appear near sentences in which a topic relevant to the CIA is mentioned. Quite simply, he had to have seen these documents. For this reason, I think lf stands for Leon Francis, the FBI’s main conduit to the CIA. I think he kept his last initial off to keep his identity secret.
—1973—
We’re now into 1973, when everything eventually comes together for our foursome. Unfortunately, this is also where the timeline can get a little confusing. One day we’re talking about one guy and the next day, we’re totally focused on someone else. I suppose that’s what happens when four people’s lives seemingly converge in the eyes of the FBI. But note that we’re still primarily concentrating on the three marks—the lf, the ST-102/REC-19, and the letters H-a-c. And don’t worry about trying to keep everything straight. I’m going to summarize it all at the end and (spoiler alert!) I’m including a colorful chart.
The Watergate trials begin. By the end of the month, five of the seven have pleaded guilty, while two (McCord and Liddy) were convicted. Because James McCord cooperated with the prosecution (he wrote a letter to Judge Sirica explaining that Watergate was much bigger than people realized), he served only 4 months in prison. Frank Sturgis served 13 months in prison, E. Howard Hunt served 33 months, and G. Gordon Liddy served the longest time—52 months.
January 17, 1973 (Wednesday)
The trial of Daniel Ellsberg and his friend and former colleague Anthony Russo begins. This was actually their second trial. The first had been declared a mistrial after it was revealed that the FBI had illegally wiretapped a conversation between Ellsberg and his attorney. According to an extremely helpful and detailed write-up from the University of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law, the men faced “fifteen counts related to the theft of government documents and espionage. If convicted on all counts, Ellsberg faced the prospect of a 105-year prison sentence.”
May 8, 1973 (Tuesday)
In response to a request from Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, Edward S. Miller, of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, wrote a memo to Mark Felt describing everything the FBI knew pertaining to the CIA’s involvement in the Daniel Ellsberg case. The memo, which has sizable redactions, includes details concerning the break-in into Lewis Fielding’s office by Hunt, Liddy, and several others, including several Cubans. Someone signs lf on this document.
May 9, 1973 (Wednesday)
After receiving an anonymous tip, the Cincinnati Field Office writes to FBI Headquarters asking for a comparison of fingerprints between Ron Tammen and an employee of Welco Industries. The reason for the tip is that Hamilton Journal-News reporter Joe Cella had written a 20-year anniversary article about Ron Tammen’s disappearance, and the tipster thought Ron’s photo looked like someone they knew. I’m forever grateful to Cella for writing his article and to the anonymous tipster too. If this sequence of events hadn’t happened, I don’t think we’d have the stamps and scribbles on Tammen’s documents that we’re able to use for comparison today.
May 11, 1973 (Friday)
Judge William Byrne dismisses all charges against Daniel Ellsberg, citing government misconduct. He lists the Hunt-Liddy break-in into Lewis Fielding’s office and the FBI’s illegal wiretaps among his reasons.
May 14, 1973 (Monday)
This is the first date-stamp appearing on Ron’s records after the Cincinnati Field Office sent in their fingerprint request. Other date-stamps, which I believe represent various divisions or sections within the FBI, include June 5, June 8, June 14, and June 27. This is intriguing, since FBI Headquarters had written to the Cincinnati Field Office on May 22 letting them know that Ron’s fingerprints weren’t a match to the man from Welco Industries. But they continued to be interested in Ron’s case, and passed around his documents for at least another month.
June 14, 1973 (Thursday)
Most of Ron’s documents carry a stamp dated June 14, 1973, in the lower lefthand corner, which is preceded by the number 70. (The 70 means something to the FBI, no doubt, but I have no idea what.) Nine of Ron’s documents received the June 14 date-stamp, four of which carry the initials lf.
June 15, 1973 (Friday)
The VERY NEXT DAY, Richard G. Hunsinger signed his initials as the “approving official” at the bottom of a report from the FBI’s Chicago Field Office with the subject “JAMES WALTER MC CORD, et al.” As you may recall, Richard G. Hunsinger is the FBI official who’d grown up in Oxford, Ohio, graduated from Miami University, and served in the Administrative Division at FBI Headquarters for most of his career. His mother, Leah Hunsinger, was a cashier at Oxford National Bank for many years, the same bank that was headed up by people with extremely close ties to Miami, and where Ron Tammen and Dorothy Craig both had checking accounts.
RGH’s initials can be seen midway down the page on the left side. Also, note the lf in the right margin.
For comparison, here are two samples of his initials that I’d retrieved from other documents:
What’s odd about this discovery is that, normally, Richard Hunsinger had nothing to do with the Watergate investigation. Why would a guy who mostly dealt with personnel matters throw himself into the middle of the FBI’s high-profile investigation of James McCord? Also, how coincidental was it that the Watergate document that he’d signed and that someone marked lf was dated one day after Ron Tammen’s missing person documents had reached someone’s desk, and that they, too, would receive 4 lf’s? It almost appears as if someone had alerted Richard Hunsinger about Ron’s documents and he stepped in to help out in some way.
If that’s what happened (and I have no idea if it did), the next question is why would someone think to alert him? I have a theory. In a Cincinnati Enquirer article datelined April 29, 1953, an FBI representative had visited Oxford “on his own time this week to discuss the case and to give advice” despite the fact that the FBI had told them that they had no jurisdiction over the case. Could the FBI rep have been Richard Hunsinger, who may have been home visiting his parents and, like a good fed, he was letting it be known that this trip was not being funded by taxpayers? If so, perhaps he’d written up a report on the Tammen case back in 1953—a little summary perhaps, not unlike a tip they might receive from anyone off the street. Twenty years later, one of his colleagues might have found his summary while investigating the newly invigorated Tammen case, and gave him a heads up. Maybe it’s just serendipitous, but it does seem weird and I thought you should know.
July 9, 1973 (Monday)
By this point, the Senate Watergate hearings were in full swing, and some fascinating new details were coming to light. For example, James McCord had revealed that E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy had been planning to burglarize someone else—a guy named Herman (Hank) Greenspun, the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, in early 1972. On July 9, Acting Director L. Patrick Gray sent a memo asking the special agents in charge (SACs) of the Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., offices to investigate the Greenspun case at the request of the Special Prosecutor’s Office. Someone has written lf immediately next to E. Howard Hunt’s name in this memo.
July 13, 1973 (Friday)
The SAC from Las Vegas submits a report on the Hank Greenspun planned burglary. Hac is written in the righthand corner, just like Ron’s, and nearby is the number 4 with a dash. Four Domestic Intelligence agents have signed their names or initials immediately adjacent to the number 4, which makes it appear as if that’s the division where the number came from. Admittedly, Russell Horner isn’t one of them, although, if he’s the man responsible for the Hac notation, I suppose he’d already left his mark.
July 26, 1973 (Thursday)
On this date, documents for James McCord et al are given the ST-102/REC-19 stamp combination for the first time. For the next 13 days, up through August 8, his records will receive these two stamps.
July 30, 1973 (Monday)
The FBI Director’s Office writes a memo to the SAC in Las Vegas, instructing him to interview Hank Greenspun. Hac is written in the top right of the document, again, just like Ron’s, along with the 4 dash. And even though we’re really not discussing this notation in detail today, the words “see index” in the left margin look to me as if they were written by the same person who wrote “see index” on Ron’s record.
This is where we’ll end our timeline, with the caveat that James McCord’s ST-102/REC-19 stamps extended through August 8, immediately after the release of, you guessed it, Midnight Train to Georgia. I wish we could end on a more exciting note—it would have been cool if Richard Hunsinger had initialed the July 30 memo—but that’s another downfall with conducting a timeline of FBI documents. The documents say what they say and the timeline ends when it ends.
Summary and a chart
As promised, below is a chart that shows when the various marks were made on the documents pertaining to the four men. To simplify things, we’re looking at ranges of time to help you visualize how the notations on Ron’s documents either overlapped with some people’s notations, or, at other times, preceded or succeeded them. Either way, these four men’s documents (and, to the best of my knowledge, only these men’s documents to date) received the same marks within a short period of time, which tells me that they were being handled by the same people and were considered somehow related.
CAPTION (click on image for a closer look):
Ron Tammen — The approximate timeframe in which Ron likely received his lf, ST-102/REC-19, and Hac notations was May 14-June 27, 1973. My logic is that this is the range of dates in which he received date-stamps after the Cincinnati Field Office reached out to FBI Headquarters. There’s a chance that he received one or more of the marks after June 27, however, I want to be safe in my estimate and I need to specify an end date.
James McCord — McCord’s documents have two separate timeframes. His lf timeframe is approximately July 17, 1972 – Jun 25, 1973, the range of dates in which I’ve seen that notation on his documents. His ST-102/REC-19 timeframe is roughly July 26 – August 8, 1973, the range of dates when his docs have both of those stamps. Although our chart cuts off at July 30, I extended his ST-102/REC-19 line to symbolize that we’re incorporating a little of August.
Daniel Ellsberg (and CIA involvement) — To date, I’ve found one document with an lf mark that pertains to Daniel Ellsberg’s case, and it’s dated May 8, 1973. I believe he likely received the lf on that day or shortly afterward.
Hank Greenspun — Evidently, the FBI didn’t know about the potential burglary of Hank Greenspun until James McCord disclosed that info during the Senate Watergate hearings. Based on the documents that carry the notations, the range of dates in which his documents likely received the lf and Hac is roughly July 9-July 30.
Oh, we’re in luck. It looks as though we have time for two Q&As before we open this up to comments.
Q: What does this tell us about Ron?
A: As I’ve said before on this blog site, it appears as if Ron might have been working with James McCord in some capacity. But it makes you wonder…what about Watergate? Was Ron Tammen on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972, and did he somehow manage to evade the police?
Remember when I told you about the letter James McCord had written to Judge Sirica that helped him get a reduced sentence? In that letter, he told the judge that “Others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial, when they could have been by those testifying.”
If McCord is to be believed, there were more people involved in the Watergate break-in than the seven people who were tried. Do I think that one of the “others involved” might have been Ron? I’m not ready to say that yet. But I think it’s something worth pondering.
Q: You said that if Russell Horner is responsible for the Hacs on Ron’s and Hank Greenspun’s documents, then there’s no way it stands for House Assassination Committee. Does that mean that you don’t think Ron was among the people who were included in the JFK assassination investigation?
A: Glad you asked. I honestly don’t think we can rule it out yet. Here’s why: I think everything we’ve discussed above establishes some close connections between Ron Tammen, James McCord, and Hank Greenspun. (Daniel Ellsberg’s situation was different. He was an anomaly in my view—a heroic anomaly, but an anomaly nonetheless.) Both McCord and Greenspun were included in the HSCA’s investigation. You can see for yourself by visiting maryferrell.org and running searches for “McCord AND HSCA” and “Greenspun and HSCA.” So I think it’s still a possibility.
Sending heartfelt care and concern for everyone who is currently dealing with the LA wildfires. If you, like me, are feeling a little powerless during this crisis, here’s a fairly comprehensive list of resources we can contribute to:
Hi there, and welcome to the Ronald Tammen walking tour after-party. You’ve waded through so many scribbly, scrawly FBI docs with me over the past several weeks that I thought we all deserved a little celebration.
Let’s see…beverages are in the cooler, food is over there, and I have some royalty- and copyright-free music all cued up. If you could press play any time you encounter one of these mp3-player thingys ⬇️, that’d be great. As you know, music is essential to any party, even if it happens to be unrecognizable and damn near impossible to dance to.
Catching up with old friends: To help get things rolling, we’ll do a quick run-down of the marks we’ve already discussed, whether it was on the tour or at another time. That way, we’ll have all the marks with their proposed meanings together in one place. I also have some updates for you with details that I’ve uncovered since the first time I wrote about a topic.
Meeting new ones: Once we’ve covered the marks we know, I’ll be introducing you to a few of the less prominent ones that we haven’t discussed or that I’ve only mentioned in passing.
Let’s play a game: Finally, I’ll be posting a couple significant marks I’ve been trying to figure out but haven’t been able to. We’re not just talking about someone’s initials. We’re talking about 1 address or phrase and 1 full-on sentence that has been scrawled in and scribbled over on Ron’s docs that I can’t seem to make heads or tails of, no matter how long I stare at them. This is your chance to offer up your ideas, Wheel of Fortune-style. Only in our version, there are no wrong answers!
These two stamps which appear together on nine of Ron’s docs got the ball rolling for our analysis of FBI markings. Not only did I find a long list of high-visibility cases and people who carry the ST-102 stamp, but I found one person—and, to date, only one other person—who has both the ST-102 and REC-19 stamps together on some of his records. That person is James W. McCord, Jr., who is known for his role in Watergate, but who had a long career before then working for the CIA’s Security Research Staff, which oversaw Project Artichoke. Before he joined the CIA, McCord had been employed by the FBI, so he was well known to them too. That the FBI would assign Ron Tammen, who was ostensibly still missing, the same stamps as James McCord—at roughly the same time, no less—is significant. And by significant, I mean it’s level 10 in hugeness. You can’t get much more significant, except for the “see index” notation, which we’ll be talking about right after this one.
From what I can surmise:
I’ve never seen an ST stamp without an accompanying REC stamp. However, I have, at times, seen an REC stamp either alone or with another type of stamp.
REC means “recorded.” I still don’t know what the letters ST stand for.
ST numbers were assigned to cases of high sensitivity, beginning with 100 and reaching at least into the upper 120s.
The lower the ST number, the more sensitive and/or explosive the case appears to be.
ST numbers appear to have been assigned by the Domestic Intelligence Division, which oversaw cases involving espionage, foreign agents, internal security, communists, racial matters, sedition, sabotage, etc.—all of the top-tier topics of the day. The FBI’s liaison to the CIA worked in the Domestic Intelligence Division as did the person who oversaw the Security Index.
Before ST numbers, there were SE numbers, which appear on records for older cases, beginning when the Domestic Intelligence Division was called the Security Division. (Thomas Peasner and Richard Cox both have documents with SE numbers.) In 1975, Domestic Intelligence was renamed the Intelligence Division.
When I organized the ST-102 stamps in order by their accompanying REC stamps, the list of people is…impressive. Not only is it wild that Ron Tammen was given the same ST-102, REC-19 stamps as James McCord, but he was also tucked in between Santo Trafficante (ST-102, REC-18) and Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo (ST-102, REC-20), both of whom were investigated for possible ties to the Kennedy assassination. That’s just plain weird, don’t you think? Here’s what that list looks like to date:
A screen shot of the ST-102 folders on my laptop, arranged by REC-numbers. Click on image for a closer view.
Update! In an earlier post, I’d noted how strange it was for Ron to have those stamps on his FBI documents because he was still listed as missing. And make no mistake, I still believe that it’s very strange. However, I’ve found one other formerly missing person with an ST number on his FBI records, though it wasn’t an ST-102 like Ron’s. Charles McCullar, who went missing after hitchhiking to Crater Lake National Park in January 1975, and whose skeletal remains were found in an area of the park in October 1976, has an ST-126 stamp on one of his documents. The ST-stamped report was written in 1978 after someone had contacted the Portland, Oregon, Field Office to dispute the crime lab examiner’s conclusion that he was killed by exposure to the elements and not foul play. I have more to say about the McCullar case in the next two categories.
See index
This is the holy grail of FBI notations. If you should ever encounter someone who questions us as to where this story appears to be heading, kindly direct them here. The words “see index” written in the left margin of a person’s FBI documents indicates that they’d been added to the FBI’s Security Index. And if a person was on the Security Index, the FBI and DOJ had determined that they were a danger to society (for whatever reason) and would need to be incarcerated in the event of a national emergency.
Say it with me three times: Ron Tammen was on the Security Index. Ron Tammen was on the Security Index. Ronald Henry Tammen, Jr., was on the freakin’ Security Index!
Several other people who were on the Security Index are listed below. Note that people who were investigated for possible ties to the assassination of President Kennedy are indicated with the letters JFK. They are:
Ruth Alscher (associate of Julius Rosenberg), Frank Chavez (racketeering/JFK), Judith Coplon (Soviet spy and DOJ employee), Richard Colvin Cox (U.S. Army fugitive), Salvatore Granello (racketeering/JFK), Hank Greenspun (convicted of arms shipments to Israel/JFK), Loren Eugene Hall (Nicaraguan revolutionary activities/JFK), John Timothy Keehan II (potential bombing suspect), Egil Krogh (Watergate), Stanley David Levison (MLK’s speechwriter), Jeb Magruder (Watergate), Edward K. Moss (PR exec who had close ties to the CIA and organized crime/JFK), Thomas Peasner (POW accused of being brainwashed/JFK), Gilberto Rodriguez (Cuban/JFK), Morton Sobell (Russian spy), Charles Tourine (gambling and racketeering/JFK)—the list goes on and on!
Weirdly enough, Lee Harvey Oswald, who has been blamed for singlehandedly carrying out what could be considered the most horrifying, historically impactful crime of the 20th century, had been on the Security Index in 1959, when he’d defected to the Soviet Union. However, by 1963, despite his pro-Castro and Soviet activities, someone high up in the FBI and the DOJ had determined that he wasn’t a danger after all, and his name should be removed.
As for when Ron’s name was added to the Security Index, it appears that he was added in 1973, at roughly the same time that someone had anonymously phoned in a tip to the FBI’s Cincinnati Field Office that a guy working at Welco Industries was probably Ron. (He wasn’t.) In my opinion, the “see index” handwriting on Ron’s document closely resembles the “see index” written on a July 1973 report regarding an alleged plot to burglarize records stored in the office of Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun of which James W. McCoy, Jr., was an alleged accessory. (Note that Hank had been on the Security Index in his own right for illegally shipping machine guns and ammunition to Israel, an offense for which he was convicted in 1950, but that President Kennedy pardoned in 1961.) Because it appears as if the same person wrote both notes, I think Ron was probably added to the Security Index sometime that same year. I also think that Ron was somehow tied to that alleged burglary plot, or at least the people who were associated with it. It’s still a theory, and I’ll continue investigating.
Update! As it so happens, Charles McCullar was also listed on the FBI’s Security Index. You may recall that we’d spoken of Charles McCullar a while ago and, like Ron, his missing person documents had been stored in the FBI’s “Ident Missing Person File Room,” which was a separate location from where typical missing person records were stored. My theory is that tips called in that might have been considered a little unsavory and NSFW would have been put in the Missing Person File Room. Depending on how jaw-dropping the accusation, it could have also gotten someone onto the Security Index. At any rate, it appears that the FBI may have had some dirt on Charles McCullar.
Here’s what’s different between McCullar’s and Tammen’s cases: I believe that whatever McCullar did to get onto the Security Index, he probably did it before he went missing in January 1975. My reasoning is that I’ve seen no reports of index-worthy activities while he was ostensibly missing, and in 1976, the examiner had deduced that he’d been dead most likely soon after he’d disappeared. The FBI didn’t add dead people to the Security Index—they’re neither dangerous nor incarcerable. Ron’s case was different. My feeling is that whatever got him onto the Security Index happened sometime during the two decades after he went missing.
MCT-49
MCT numbers appear to be another way that FBI agents can inform one another that a case is unbelievably huge while keeping this info hidden in plain view from an unsuspecting, FOIA-wielding member of the public. I’ve tried to find out what the letters stand for, but the FBI isn’t saying. Ron’s MCT number, MCT-49, was assigned to him several months after it was given to a case having to do with an alleged assassination plot against Spiro Agnew. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. But from what I can tell, MCT numbers were closely tied to the Security Index. If a person had been on the Security Index, then they were extremely likely to have an MCT number. Lee Harvey Oswald, who was on the Security Index in 1959, had been assigned MCT-41. Salvatore Granello was also given MCT-41. Frank Chavez was MCT-3. Interestingly, so was Hank Greenspun. Edward K. Moss was MCT-23. So was Klaus Barbie, a Nazi war criminal, who was also on the Security Index.
There’s one exception to the above rule: if the case was older, such as from the early 1950s, and the person had an SE versus an ST number and they were also listed on the Security Index, then they don’t appear to have needed an MCT number. I guess the SE number was all that was needed to convey the message that “this one’s huge.” Two people who had SE numbers and who were on the Security Index but who didn’t appear to have MCT numbers are Richard Colvin Cox and Thomas Rodman Peasner, Jr.
Update! Charles McCullar had three MCT numbers (MCT-13, MCT-21, and MCT-23), which may lead you to wonder, whoa, who was this guy? Actually, this is in keeping with our theory that MCT numbers were assigned to people on the Security Index, though, admittedly, three MCT numbers seem excessive for an outdoorsy guy who liked to hike and take photos. Also his numbers are interesting. I mean, good heavens, his MCT-23 matches Edward K. Moss’s and Klaus Barbie’s numbers.
Another possible reason for his MCT numbers may have to do with the heightened degree of interest from U.S. representatives and senators who wrote letters to the FBI and DOJ on behalf of the McCullar family. Charles McCullar’s MCT-21 and MCT-23 stamps were placed on letters to Attorney General Edward Levi from U.S. Senator William Scott, of Virginia. His MCT-13 was stamped on a note from Representative Joseph L. Fisher of the 10th District. Regardless, I continue to believe that Ron Tammen’s and Charles McCullar’s cases are different despite having some similar markings. The next four markings were found on Ron’s documents but not Charles McCullar’s.
Hac
This past June, I brazenly suggested that the letters Hac appearing in the upper righthand corner of ten of Ron’s FBI records was someone’s way of referring to the House Assassination Committee. I theorized that it could be shorthand for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). I said this because Ron’s ST-102 stamp was shared by a large cast of characters who were indeed investigated by the HSCA for JFK’s assassination, as you could see in the graphic above. To be honest, I’m not married to my original theory, since, to date, I’ve only found two other Hac notations in all of the JFK documents. Both were on FBI records for an alleged plot to burglarize records in Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun—a burglary plot in which Watergate participants E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and James W. McCord were implicated. Both appear to have been written by the same person who wrote Hac on Ron’s documents.
Update! At the time of the House and Senate investigations into the intelligence community, which began in 1975, the intelligence agencies had created an ad hoc committee to the United States Intelligence Board (USIB) to keep tabs on what materials Congress was seeking and, you know, make sure everyone was in cahoots. Its official title was the Ad Hoc Coordinating Group on Congressional Review of the Intelligence Community, but sometimes they referred to themselves as “The Ad Hoc Group” or just “The Group.” You can tell which memos the FBI provided to The Group by the words “Ad Hoc” written in the bottom lefthand corner.
Although I’m still attempting to figure out who wrote Hac at the top of Ron’s and Hank Greenspun’s documents, I have a theory. My theory is that it was written by the FBI’s liaison to the CIA at that time, a guy named Leon Francis Schwartz. (He went by Frank.) The reason I think so is because the Hoc in Ad Hoc looks a lot like the Hac at the top of Ron’s pages. Also, Frank’s initials, LFS, are written beneath one of those Ad Hocs.
I need to point out that the Ad Hoc notations were made on documents from 1975 and beyond and my current theory is that the Hac from Ron’s and Hank Greenspun’s documents were made in 1973. Also, Schwartz ended up leaving his post in December 1975 to work for the House Appropriations Committee, whose acronym also, sadly, sadistically happens to be HAC.
Mind you, it’s still a theory, and I have a couple other possible contenders in mind as well—one from Domestic Intelligence and one from Legal Counsel. But if the FBI official who had an inside line to the people at the top of the CIA and, by extension, the Ad Hoc group, was the same person who was writing Hac on ten of Ron’s docs, that seems, again, huge.
2-D
The 2-D on page one of Ron’s documents indicates that two copies of Ron’s file were sent to the Department of Justice. It’s a big enough deal for one copy to be sent to the DOJ, so for two of them? Say it with me: huge.
Update! Oddly enough, with all of the documents that the DOJ should have on Ron Tammen—namely the FD-122 form that the FBI submitted to them in order to add Ron’s name to the Security Index, plus two copies of his file—they don’t appear to have them anymore. I’d submitted a FOIA request to them seeking his FD-122, and they suggested I contact the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which, yeah, they don’t have it. I’d already asked NARA for anything on Tammen back in 2016 to no avail. I’ll continue trying to find someone who has Ron’s FD-122. Also, I’ll submit a FOIA request reminding the DOJ about the two copies of Tammen’s file that the FBI had sent them, and asking for one of them. I think we can all guess what their answer will be.
lb or lf
The weird little lf notation (I’m pretty sure it’s an lf, not an lb) shows up on four of Ron’s documents. From my experience, they’re incredibly rare. In my blog post, I shared only two other cases that had lf’s on their documents, and they had to do with James W. McCord and his Watergate accomplices and the alleged burglary plot of Hank Greenspun’s office implicating James W. McCord and his Watergate accomplices. After writing my post, I found one more lf on a document having to do with the Watergate hearings. Are you detecting a theme here? Same. For this reason, plus all of the other reasons discussed above, I think Ron Tammen was somehow affiliated with James W. McCord and may have been working for him.
ph
The letters ph (or pL, but I’m going with ph) are scribbled in the left margin of ten of Ron’s documents, and as I discussed in walking tour stop #5, I think it was written by someone in the Domestic Intelligence Division (or, if it was after 1975, Intelligence). My reasoning is that someone made similar markings on a document dealing with FBI informant protocol from the files of William O. Cregar, who was in charge of Counterintelligence. Cregar also happened to sit on the Ad Hoc Group, by the way.
By now, this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. We already know that Ron was on the Security Index. The person who oversaw the Security Index was housed in Domestic Intelligence. I believe Ron’s ST-102/REC-19 numbers were assigned by Domestic Intelligence as well, not to mention his MCT-49. And my current theory is that a person in Domestic Intelligence had written the Hac at the top of his documents. Honestly? During the summer of 1973, as I was turning into my adorably angsty, self-conscious, and perpetually embarrassed 15-year-old self, I’m picturing a bunch of serious and sedate Domestic Intelligence agents handing off Ron’s papers to one another while occasionally being called into impromptu side conferences, usually behind closed doors.
Update! My theory is that the person who made the ph’s was an assistant to one of the bigwigs in that division. The person I have in mind is Theresa D. Poston, who was an assistant to Frank Schwartz, the CIA liaison, in addition to other higher-ups. She often typed up Schwartz’s memos. She was clearly a trusted employee who was privy to sensitive intelligence information. Included below are Theresa’s initials, which I think look as if they were written in the same handwriting as the ph’s. I have another person in mind as well, but I thought I’d open this possibility up for discussion.
As for the meaning of the ph, I don’t know. Although it’s possible that it could mean an informant of some type, it doesn’t appear as if every person with that mark would have served in that capacity. I’ll continue digging.
Ron’s missing person (MP) numbers
Ron’s most commonly cited missing person number is 79-31966, which is the number that was assigned by FBI Headquarters. Because Ron’s case originated with the Cleveland Field Office, his number there was 79-0-615-B. (The B is likely a subcategory.) It’s perfectly normal for a case originating at a field office to have one number from the field office in addition to another number assigned by Headquarters.
What’s not normal is for Headquarters to assign a second missing person number. At the top of page one of Ron’s documents, they’ve written “MP# 17699, Posted 6-2-53,” accompanied by the letters Jh. Note that the 79, which precedes all missing person cases, is left off, probably to save the writer a little time.
In general, the FBI numbered its missing person cases in chronological order, whereby a new case would be given the next available number under the 79 classification. I’ve stumbled upon the occasional outlier, but for the most part, this was the system. At the FBI’s Cleveland Field Office, Ron was the 615th missing person case on the books. At FBI Headquarters, he was listed as the 31966th missing person case according to their most cited number. But what about the other number—the 17699? It’s interesting, because 17699 is so much smaller than 31966—to the tune of roughly 14,267 missing person cases smaller.
As I described in my November 27, 2022, blog post, my theory is that Ron was assigned number 79-17699 on June 2, 1953, when the FBI was younger and more nimble and only had 17,698 other missing person cases to contend with. However, that number was ostensibly retired at some point, as if the case had been, I don’t know, closed or canceled or something? When the Cincinnati Field Office wrote to Headquarters 20 years later, in May 1973, asking them to compare the man from Welco Industries’ fingerprints to Ron’s, the folks in the Identification Division were likely pretty confused. They had to look around for wherever Ron’s missing person documents were hiding and then they had to assign a new missing person number to them, with the next one available being 79-31966. Then, inexplicably, they turned around and removed Ron’s newly renumbered missing person documents “from Ident files,” which sounds very much like they didn’t view him as missing anymore.
Update! I continue to view June 1973 as a pivotal time when a lot was happening with Ron’s missing person documents. Considering how other notations and stamps were ostensibly added during that period as well—namely ST-102/REC-19, “see index,” MCT-49, Hac, lf, etc.—this theory still stands. I’d just really love to know what led them to retire the 17699 number to begin with.
F 189
The F numbers are perhaps the most flummoxing of all the FBI’s marks. (Maybe the F stands for “flummox.”) Lots of people and subjects have one, and they’re assigned with no discernable rhyme or reason. The F numbers are handwritten in the bottom left corner of an FBI document, and as far as I can tell, always near a date stamp. Most F numbers are three digits and, as of today’s date, I haven’t seen an F number that exceeds 500.
Ron’s F number is F 189, which is at the low end, and in his case, there are a couple repeats. The other two men who appear to have been assigned that number are Edward K. Moss, who has both the F and the 189, and gay activist Harry Hay, who has the 189 in the correct spot, but not the F.
Update! Currently, I’m not putting a ton of stock in someone’s F number in comparison to other marks. That may change if any clear patterns emerge.
Ron has a pitchfork-looking mark on three of his documents. The document dated May 26, 1953, has one pitchfork to the right of the first paragraph, which was a description of the items Ron had left behind as well as the law enforcement agencies who’d been notified. The undated letter from Ron’s father referencing an Associated Press photo of a soldier in Vietnam published in the October 2, 1967, Plain Dealer has a pitchfork next to the first paragraph mentioning the FBI and the Selective Service Act. The document dated 5-9-73 has three pitchforks: one is next to his name, a second is next to his official fingerprint jacket number (358-406-B), and the third is next to a stamp that is most interesting of all. I’ll discuss that stamp a little later.
Click on image for a closer view.
When I consulted the book Are You Now or Have You Ever Been in the FBI Files, I found no mentions of pitchforks. I did however find discussions about free-floating letters that looked like C’s or U’s, which I surmised someone may have drawn a line through. Ron’s marks look more like the letter U, which has two possible meanings. If it’s found on a search slip that agents filled out when researching case files, the U means “unavailable reference.” If it’s on a regular FBI doc, the U stands for “Unclassified,” which means that the classifying officer had made a conscious decision not to classify a key detail that they perhaps could have classified if they felt like it. It’s kind of like they’re telling their superiors that “I’m not shirking my duties. I’m very much aware that this is a detail that would normally be classified, but I think it’s better if we leave it unredacted this time.” As for the long line through the U, that’s not addressed in the book. Could it mean that a conscious decision was made to undo the unclassified decision? If so, shouldn’t there be a redaction instead? Or maybe it’s an indication that someone else looked it over and agreed that the info shouldn’t be classified. I have no idea.
Lots of FBI documents have C’s and U’s, and some also have slashes through them. What I’ve been looking for are U’s with lines through them that are up-and-down versus slanty and longer than normal. One document that I’ve found so far that fits the bill is dated March 21, 1975, and has to do with the Rockefeller Commission, which was also investigating CIA activities at that time. The memo is from W. Raymond Wannall, who headed up…wanna take a guess?…the Intelligence Division. (Its name was changed from Domestic Intelligence that year.) In the “to” line is James B. Adams, who was an associate director at the FBI overseeing all of the investigative divisions: Intelligence, Legal Counsel, General Investigative, and Special Investigative. He was a big deal. (Remember his name. You’re going to need it later.) In the bottom lefthand corner is the pitchfork, next to the word “Enclosures,” and the letters FJC:aso. FJC are the initials for Fred J. Cassidy, who was another senior official in Intelligence who’d worked as a CIA liaison before Fred Schwartz. (Alas, I can’t find who aso was.)
I’m sure there are more pitchforks out there, and I’ll let you know when I find them. But for now, the takeaway is that if you see a pitchfork on Ron’s documents, I believe it signifies a detail that the FBI felt could have been classified or redacted, but, for some reason, they chose not to. More on this at the end.
Jas cy per WSH
I’d now like to direct you to the letter dated October 11, 1967, from J. Edgar Hoover to Mr. Tammen, This was Hoover’s response to Ron’s father after he’d written to Hoover, asking whether the soldier in the Associated Press photo might be Ron.
Click on image for a closer view.
Hoover’s letter couldn’t have been more of a cop-out. Rather than having someone like Helen Gandy or Clyde Tolson contact the AP to find out who the soldier was and having his Identification staff run a comparison of fingerprints between the soldier and Ron, both of which they had on file, Hoover told Mr. Tammen that he should check with the adjutant general of the Army. Yeah, no. Not helpful.
At the bottom of Hoover’s dismissive missive are some notes that were typed onto the FBI’s copy about Ron’s Selective Service violation and whatnot, and above that is a scribbled message that looks something like “Jas cy per WSH.”
Well, guess what, you guys? I know precisely who wrote that incomprehensible scrawl, thanks to some similar scrawls below. We can all be grateful to the person who asked him to spell out his last name in the third example since his first name is consistently illegible:
It was written by James B. Adams of the March 1975 Rockefeller Commission memo fame! In 1967, Adams was working in Personnel, which was part of the Administrative Division, and his boss was William Stewart Hyde, aka WSH. It appears that Adams was signing memos for WSH quite a bit at that time. (Don’t ask me what the cy stands for. I have no idea. There’s also a chance that it could be an M, in which case I have no idea what an M would stand for either.)
I have a few thoughts about James B. Adams’ signature on Hoover’s letter to Mr. Tammen. First, I wonder why someone in Personnel would be signing off on it. Wouldn’t someone in Personnel be concerned with, you know, personnel matters as opposed to a letter from the parent of a missing person? Was Ron employed by the FBI in some way? Who knows—maybe Ron was on the FBI’s payroll as an informant, as the ph notation we discussed above might represent.
Second, you might wonder if Adams had helped the folks in Identification figure out who Ronald Tammen was when Cincinnati sent them the Welco guy’s fingerprints in 1973. Hoover could have told Adams everything he knew about Ron back in 1967, and I imagine those would be details a guy couldn’t easily forget. The folks in Identification would have seen Adams’ signature on the Hoover letter and asked him about it. In 1972, Adams was 1600 miles away from D.C. serving as special agent in charge of the San Antonio office, but in 1973, he was back at Headquarters heading up the Office of Planning and Evaluation. The next year, in 1974, he was named deputy associate director and was overseeing all investigative operations. So it’s possible that Adams would have been able to shed some light on the Tammen case.
Lastly, do you remember when I told you about the FBI official from Oxford, Ohio, whose mother used to work for the Oxford National Bank at the same time that Ron Tammen and Dorothy Craig had checking accounts there? His name was Richard G. Hunsinger and, according to the university’s website, he graduated from Miami University in 1947 after having served in WWII. In 1971, Hunsinger was in the Administrative Division overseeing the FBI’s Equal Employment Opportunity program. James B. Adams was the FBI’s personnel officer, and by all indications, he was Hunsinger’s direct boss. Several years later, in 1975, Hunsinger was the deputy assistant director of the Administrative Division when James B. Adams was deputy associate director of investigative operations. Both men were at the top of their respective ladders at the FBI, they knew each other well, and they also knew something about Ron Tammen. Do you think they ever talked about him?
LFP
In my July 3, 2024, post, I pointed out a three-letter stamp at the bottom of the 5/9/73 memo from the Cincinnati Field Office which had been scribbled over so thoroughly that it looks purposely redacted. I theorized that it stood for ESP, as in espionage, and I thought that might be proof that the FBI had determined Ron was working as a spy, which has always been my hope for Ron. What wasn’t working for my theory was that whenever I’ve seen the letters ESP stamped on FBI documents, the letters SEC follow, as in the Espionage Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division. So I don’t think it’s ESP after all.
Today, I am revising my theory and saying that the three-lettered stamp is actually LFP, which stands for latent fingerprints. I believe that people in the Latent Fingerprint Section of the Identification Division were consulted to compare the guy from Welco’s fingerprints to Ron’s fingerprints. In my July post, I posted two versions of the memo: a lighter version, which I’d obtained from the FBI’s FOIA office in 2010, and a darker version, which I’d obtained from the Butler County Sheriff’s Office. The darker version shows the L and F quite clearly. Mystery solved.
Here’s the rub though: A latent fingerprint is generally a poor-quality, partial print that’s left at a crime scene on such items as wine glasses and windowsills and door handles or on evidence such as guns thrown into wooded areas or murky ponds. Because they’re incomplete, they’re a lot harder to examine than when the FBI has a full set of inked prints. But the FBI had 10-finger inked prints for the Welco guy as well as Ron Tammen, albeit from when he was in the second grade. Why did they ask the latent fingerprint experts to step in?
Maybe they didn’t think Ron’s prints were very good, although they should have been satisfactory. He’d been fingerprinted by a law enforcement officer in his town. Alternatively, is it possible that they had a set of latent prints from a 20- or 30-something year old Ronald Tammen that had been left at some sort of crime scene? In addition, why did they feel the need to cross out the LFP stamp so that it was basically unrecognizable? They didn’t feel the need to blacken the LFP stamp when they were looking at James Earl Ray’s possible latent prints in their investigation into the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., as shown in the below memo.
Click on image for a closer view. Thanks to the Mary Ferrell Foundation at maryferrell.org for access to this document.
Division numbers
Throughout this post, I’ve been referring to the FBI’s various divisions by name. However, to simplify things, the FBI assigned each division a number, which would periodically be written or stamped on a relevant FBI report. Let’s review each division’s assigned number, at least two of which, and possibly three, were stamped or written on Ron’s missing person documents.
It should be noted that one division number, and possibly two, doesn’t appear on Ron’s documents even though we know people from that division were reviewing his documents. (I’m looking at you, Domestic Intelligence! Also possibly you, Legal Counsel!) Perhaps they didn’t want the FOIA-wielding members of the general public to know they were somehow involved.
The division numbers and their associated divisions in 1975 are as follows:
ONE – Identification Division
TWO – Training Division
THREE – Administrative Division
FOUR – Files and Communications Division
FIVE – Intelligence Division (formerly Security Division and Domestic Intelligence Division)
SIX – General Investigative Division
SEVEN – Laboratory Division
EIGHT – External Affairs Division
NINE – Special Investigative Division
TEN – Inspection Division
ELEVEN – Legal Counsel Division
TWELVE – Computer Systems Division
THIRTEEN – Office of Planning and Evaluation
Here are the numbers that appear on Ron’s documents:
ONE
No surprises here. Ron’s FBI documents have the number ONE either stamped or written on multiple pages. In fact, his docs were probably living in Division ONE, the Identification Division, and more specifically the Ident Missing Person File Room, for roughly 20 years after he went missing. Because of the words “Removed from Ident” on several of his documents, we know that they were moved out of the Identification Division in June 1973, after the Cincinnati Office requested a comparison of Ron’s fingerprints with the guy from Welco Industries.
NINE
On the same memo where the LFP stamp resides (5-9-73 Cincinnati memo), the number NINE is stamped at the bottom right. This tells us that Ron’s documents had made their way to the Special Investigative Division. According to the booklet Know Your FBI, published in 1969, the Special Investigative Division oversaw investigations dealing with organized crime; the Security of Government Employees program, which investigated government employees who were potential security risks as part of Executive Order 10450; and fugitives.
10
Whenever you see the word Hac in the top righthand corner of Ron’s documents, you also see the number 10 close by. Every single time. While it’s possible that the number signifies the Inspection Division, which was the division that annually evaluated the activities of every other FBI division and field office, I’m not so sure if that’s what it means here. First, it doesn’t make sense that an inspector would write the number 10 on every document he or she had reviewed. If that were the case, you’d think that pretty much all FBI documents would have the number 10 on them at some point. Other than Ron’s, I’ve seen none.
Second, the placement isn’t correct. Typically, division numbers are written or stamped in the bottom right, not the top right.
Lastly, I’ve seen various single-digit numbers in the top right corner of other people’s FBI files. For example, Charles McCullar has 7’s on many of his records. On Hank Greenspun’s documents that, like Ron’s, have Hac written in the top right, there’s another number nearby. On one document, it’s 4- and on another one it’s 4-1. I still don’t know their meaning, but I have a theory, which we can discuss more if you’d like. Regardless, I feel it’s worth mentioning and I’m still working on it.
Sealed Encl.
Let’s revisit the 5-9-73 Cincinnati memo with the LFP stamp and the three pitchforks. The pitchfork in the bottom left is drawn directly through a stamp that says “SEALED ENCL.” From what I can tell, very few people have the word SEALED stamped on their FBI record. Charles McCullar most definitely doesn’t have that stamp. Neither does anyone else on the Security Index that I’ve found so far. I’m sure there must be others—otherwise, why have a stamp made?—but it isn’t common.
At least for now, the only person for whom I’ve seen the words “Sealed” (which is written) and “Enclosure” (which is stamped) in the bottom left corner of his records are, wait for it, Hank Greenspun.
Click on image for a closer view. Thanks to the Mary Ferrell Foundation at maryferrell.org for access to this document.
This particular record is from 1967 when he was a victim of extortion. I did manage to find a document from 1977 that discusses the need to seal envelopes having to do with the relocation plan for members of Congress in the event of a national emergency. Those sealed envelopes were to be kept in a “strict security location” in Los Angeles.
If the word sealed is as loaded as I think it is, then it makes sense that someone at the FBI would need to make the conscious decision regarding whether it should be classified or not. As for why they chose to unclassify it on Ron’s documents, well, I have an idea about that. We can talk about it in the comments if you’d like.
Whew! I feel as if I’ve been doing all the talking at this party! It’s now time for me to shut up and let you all take a look at two notations and provide a little help. Both can be found on the 5-9-73 Cincinnati memo. I won’t be giving you my thoughts so I don’t bias you in any way.
Here they are, all blown up. What do you think they say?
Mark #1
366 what?(don’t worry about the date)
Click on image for a closer view.
Mark #2
What does the writing in the left margin say?
Click on image for a closer view.
Thanks for coming!
OK, I think it’s time to wind things down tonight. Thanks so much for coming. Also, as usual, a big thanks to The Black Vault and the Mary Ferrell Foundation for access to these documents.
Our last stop will take a little longer, since we’re going to need some background. This post has to do with Thomas Rodman Peasner, Jr., whom I’ve brought up before, most recently when we discussed his 2-d notation, which was a number-letter combination on page one of Ron’s FBI documents as well. The other two people that I could find who had the 2-d/2-D notation are James McCord and Jack Ruby, both of whom we’re familiar with.
So, who was Thomas Peasner? Tom Peasner was a musician—a pianist and a composer. He was born in Pittsburgh on October 19, 1929, 10 days before the stock market crash that spiraled into the Great Depression. His father worked in the steel industry as did most of the men in their neighborhood. His mother worked at home, as did most of the men’s wives. In the 1940s, his family moved to Dallas, Texas, where Peasner attended Bob Storey Junior High School and, later, Crozier Technical High School.
As a high schooler, Tom Peasner was tall and slender with a flop of wavy dark hair. During his senior year, he was the accompanist for the chorus club in addition to serving as its president. Tom dated one of the cutest and smartest girls in his class, Ethyl Lackey (she went by Eve), and it doesn’t tax the brain to understand why Eve went for Tom. There’s just something about a real-deal musician, amiright?
After graduating from high school in 1947, Tom attended Oklahoma A&M University in Stillwater for a short while and also played in the Richard Walls’ Orchestra there. But then, in August 1949, Tom joined the Army. After the U.S. entered the Korean War in June 1950, Tom was sent to the front lines.
On April 23, 1951, Tom Peasner was captured by the CCF—the Chinese Communist Forces—where he was taken to a prison camp named Peaceful Valley. He was soon moved to Mining Camp, and, in September 1951, was permanently relocated to Camp #1, on the Yalu River, which separates North Korea from China.
I’ve seen no indication that he was ever tortured. He’d lost several toes on his left foot, but according to a fellow prisoner’s account, it was Tom’s own actions that led to this. Apparently, he had a disease that caused his feet to feel intensely overheated at times. He tried to relieve the discomfort by burying his bare feet in the snow, which led to a bad case of frostbite and the need for amputation.
The foot incident notwithstanding, Tom Peasner did manage to make quite a name for himself in and around Camp #1. To summarize the words of more than 80 fellow prisoners who’d spoken with U.S. Army interrogators after they were freed, he was well known as one of the most dedicated champions for the communists—commonly referred to as “progressives” at that time—in the entire camp.
That’s right. Tom Peasner, with the dark, wavy hair and the mad piano skills, had turned into a hardcore communist.
Before we judge, let’s put his situation into context. When Tom Peasner was captured by the Chinese in April 1951, he was all of 20 years old. In those days, the Armed Forces hadn’t been training soldiers on what to do if theywere captured by their communist foes—they were generally operating under the “don’t get caught” playbook. At the time of their capture, American POWs in Korea were left to their own devices. So there he was, a scared 20-year-old without a clue of what to do or say and probably thinking less about his country’s national security and more about getting through this nightmare alive.
By the time Tom Peasner was captured, the Chinese had taken over the camps, and they had a different philosophy regarding the treatment of its prisoners. When a prisoner was brought to a camp, the Chinese would offer him their hand in friendship as opposed to a bayonet to the ribs. Prisoners would be rewarded with special privileges when they cooperated (such as cigarettes, better food, and the ability to leave camp on occasion) and punished when they didn’t. Many of the Army POWs chose to cooperate with the communists, some ostensibly converting to communism, and others just pretending.
Tom did pretty much everything that a soldier could do in order to become a turncoat: he was writing letters and newsletter articles advocating for the interests of the Chinese, he was making recordings to be broadcast by Radio Peking, he sat on Camp #1’s leadership committee called the Peace Committee, he attended voluntary lectures and study groups, and he was occasionally singled out to go on walks with party leaders, which was reserved for only the truest and bluest of reds. It was honestly as if he was vying for MVP of Camp #1. If they’d had a marching band, he probably would have tried out to be drum major.
Now, imagine what it would have been like to be Tom Peasner on the day of his release from captivity from the Chinese, on August 16, 1953, as part of Operation Big Switch. Do you think Military Intelligence would have liked to have a word with him? Um, yeah, I think so.
Just like the other POWs, Tom went through several interrogation sessions. In one momentous session conducted on August 24, 1953, aboard the USNS Marine Adder, his Phase II interrogator, a man by the name of George H. Rodgers, described him as “apparently successfully brainwashed,” which is…interesting. Because you guys? Returning POWs who’d been described as “brainwashed” were exactly the sorts of people that the CIA had wanted to speak with as possible human subjects for Project Artichoke.
Here’s what George H. Rodgers had to say about Tom Peasner. The fact that the only copy available is a negative photostat makes it especially creepy.
In fact, at a CIA Artichoke conference held four days before Peasner’s Phase II interrogation, agenda item 2 says:
[REDACTED] opened the Conference by stating that Mr. [REDACTED] of the SO [CIA’s Security Office] and [REDACTED] were on a trip involving interrogation of returning POWs from Korea. The purpose of the trip was twofold—[REDACTED] was primarily interested in learning what had been applied in the way of so called “brain washing” techniques by the Communists, planning to use this information in connection with an operation in his office. It was explained that [REDACTED’s] interest was along similar lines and, in addition, anything that might be developed would be of interest to the ARTICHOKE program. These interests were explained in more detail by [REDACTED] who stated that the ARTICHOKE program was interested in any techniques or methods which could be used offensively or defensively.
Click on image for a closer view.
What do YOU think? Do you think that the CIA’s Project Artichoke people would have had any interest in speaking with Thomas Peasner, who was characterized by his fellow POWs as being one of the most ardent supporters of communism and by an interrogator as being “apparently successfully brainwashed”? I’d bet my life on it.
An Army photo of Tom and Eve after he was released from Camp #1; it’s from the same negative photostat copy, but at least we can see how happy they are
Fast forward to 1963. Tom Peasner has moved on with his life. He and Eve had married after he was honorably discharged from the Army, though, unfortunately, they’d split several years later. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree with honors in music from North Texas State College, and he was working as a pianist at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. According to an FBI report, on November 9 (a Saturday), he’d left his employment there—which sounds as if he quit—and immediately went to a Sears and Roebuck to purchase an automatic rifle with a check that would later bounce. That was 13 days before JFK’s assassination.
Here’s the February 16, 1964, report, written after an Arlington police officer contacted the FBI’s Dallas Field Office with the tip. As it so happens, the officer had direct knowledge of the incident, since he worked part-time at Sears as a detective.
Click on image for a closer view.
My favorite line in the report is the last one: “Peasner purchased this automatic rifle prior to the President’s assassination, and has since disappeared.”
Allow me to summarize the scenario thusly: A POW who’d been labeled as brainwashed by Army intelligence and who (I’m quite sure) had been “interviewed” by someone from the Project Artichoke team at some point was working at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club in November 1963. Then, less than two weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, he quit his job, went straight to Sears and Roebuck to write a bad check for an automatic rifle, and disappeared.
Questions? Concerns?
If you attempt, like I did, to obtain information from the FBI regarding what they did in response to receiving this potentially explosive lead, they will likely tell you what they told me. They destroyed it. Here’s their exact wording:
“Records potentially responsive to your request were destroyed.”
They also checked the box that said “Records potentially responsive to your request were transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration, and they provided file number 100-HQ-405298 as a reference.
Let’s put the above development in perspective. The write-up on Thomas Peasner and his rifle was included in the Warren Commission Report, on page 44 of Commission Document 736, FBI Clements Report of 03 Apr 1964 re: Ruby/Oswald, to be super specific. If the FBI had investigated that lead and discovered any information that would either support or refute its potential relation to JFK’s assassination, wouldn’t you think they’d hang onto it or send it to the Warren Commission? But no. Whatever they did or didn’t do as follow-up has (ostensibly) been destroyed. As for what’s at NARA, I know all about file number 100-HQ-405298. Here’s a list of what’s available on maryferrell.org for that file number. I’m sure NARA is no different. Most are dated from the 1950s. Unless the FBI record is dated after February 16, 1964, it doesn’t pertain. Other than requests for documents on Peasner from the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 and from the Assassination Records Review Board in 1998, I’ve located nothing after February 16, 1964.
This concludes our backgrounder on Thomas Peasner. I’d now like to show you an FBI document on Peasner that has a scribble in the left margin that resembles one of Ron’s scribbles. That scribble is, “see index,” which refers to the FBI’s Security Index.
Here’s Peasner’s:
Click on image for a closer view. Zoom in on the left margin.
Here’s Ron’s again:
Click on image for a closer view. Zoom in on the left margin.
And here’s the “see index” on the document discussing the planned burglary of Hank Greenspun’s safe, of which James McCord is one of the persons who was implicated. We’ve discussed how this “see index” resembles Ron’s, but now we can see that it resembles Peasner’s too:
Click on image for a closer view. Zoom in on the left margin.
You guys, they look to me as if they were written by the same person. There’s the same lowercase s in cursive but also, look at how the slash of the x is so long, it looks like a y. They also look as if they were written at roughly the same time.
And now, my announcement:
I think that the FBI believes Ron Tammen and Tom Peasner and James McCord have something in common. And because James McCord was doing Project Artichoke work for the CIA, and Ron Tammen has a tie to Project Artichoke through St. Clair Switzer, and Tom Peasner has a probable tie to Artichoke through his POW interrogation experiences, I think Project Artichoke may very well be what links them to each other.
I just wonder what—if anything—this might have to do with the assassination of JFK.
I know—this title is very lame and likely to attract perhaps the smallest number of visitors yet, but it’s all I could come up with, considering the scribble we’ll be addressing today. But if you do get past the title and read to the bottom…first, thank you! and second, you’re going to be glad you did. You know why?
Because we’re getting very close to a major revelation.
The scribble in question looks like this, and Ron has four of them on his missing person documents, always in the righthand column, about midway down.
Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.
The first letter is a lowercase l. Usually it looks like a straight line, but sometimes they gave it its characteristic loop, which enables me to state with confidence that it’s an l. The second letter could be a lowercase b, or it could also be an f. (I actually lean toward the latter.) It’s always underlined–always. But bear this in mind: this is not a common mark on FBI documents. In fact, I was just about to give up on finding a match until I delved further into James W. McCord, Jr.’s Watergate records. Then: pay dirt.
Here’s just a sampling I found on McCord et al.
Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view. Note that the ‘b’ or ‘f’ has been cut off, but it’s written by the same person, as indicated by the underline. Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.
Our friend Hank Greenspun has one as well.
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Also Daniel Ellsberg, patriot and hero who risked going to prison to publish the Pentagon Papers, finally exposing the truth about the Vietnam War, has one.
Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view. This is the same document as the one above it, however the lb/lf appears to have been erased.
All of these individuals are bound together by none other than James W. McCord, Jr., and they all involve burglaries: one of the DNC Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, one “alleged planned” burglary of Hank Greenspun’s office safe at the Las Vegas Sun, and one at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding. All of these burglaries or planned burglaries were coordinated with “the White House plumbers,” and James W. McCord, Jr., played a lead role.
A few things I’ve noticed about the maker of the lb’s/lf’s:
They are privy to sensitive intelligence information.
The mark doesn’t match the initials of the usual FBI assistant directors. It could be that he or she is attempting to conceal their identity.
Judging by the date stamps on Ron’s documents, it appears that the person wrote his/her mark on them in June 1973. Interestingly, that same person was making that same mark on the Watergate docs during that same time period.
And this brings me to our next announcement:
You guys, I think Ronald Tammen was palling around with James W. McCord, Jr., and may actually have been working for him.
Just a quick word that we have one last announcement to make on our tour, which I’ll be making later this week. Then, shortly thereafter, I’ll be throwing a Walking Tour After-party, where we’ll be discussing some of the less prominent, but still important scribbles on Ron’s docs. At that point, the tour will be officially over, and we’ll be going back to more in-depth reporting. Because…I mean…I don’t know about you, but I think we have a lot to discuss.
Coming next: A Korean War POW who worked at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club in 1963 and who bought a Sears & Roebuck rifle shortly before Kennedy’s assassination but who then disappeared has something on his FBI docs that looks very much like one of Ron’s docs
As we’ve been going through the scribbles on Ron’s docs, it’s becoming clear that having one or two of them strategically placed on a document is one thing. But to have a whole menagerie of them, including the ST-102 and MCT stamps, PLUS a “see index” in the left margin of the first page? Hoo boy. Pretty soon, I imagine that the FBI is going to start taking Ron Tammen seriously.
Well, just wait, because I’ve found another scribble that, to the best that I can determine, would be akin to sticking the biggest reddest sticky note on top of his file folder as a warning to passersby.
Before I proceed, I want to remind my readers—be you a government official, a representative of law enforcement, a member of the military, or a fellow member of the general public—that what I am doing is 100% permissible by law. I am reviewing declassified documents, some having been declassified only recently, and comparing them with each other to discover similarities and patterns. Once these records were declassified and released to the public, I was immediately given carte blanche to report on them. It is my inalienable right.
OK! So here we go:
On page 1 of Ron’s missing person documents, in the bottom lefthand corner, is a notation that, again, isn’t very common among FBI records. The format is consistent: there’s a number, which, in my experience, is either 1 or 2, there’s usually a dash, and there’s the letter D, which is either written in lowercase or uppercase.
For a while, I thought that the D stood for detention and the numbers were assigned according to their priority level on the FBI’s Security Index. So in my initial hypothesis, 1-D would be the individuals of highest priority, who would be detained first in the event of a national emergency. 2-D would be second highest priority, so they’d be detained next, and 3-D, which, to date, I’ve never seen, would be everyone else whose name resides in the Security Index.
But then… I found the below document, which happens to concern James W. McCord, our friend from Watergate fame. To remind readers, James McCord did things long before Watergate, which took place on June 17, 1972. He was in the CIA from 1951 to 1970, which is more than enough time to become entangled in something pernicious, especially during those wild years. Throughout his time with the CIA, McCord was employed by the Office of Security, and, from what I can tell, had been part of the Security Research Staff until 1962, which was headed up for many years by Paul Gaynor. Morse Allen, whom I’ve written about in other posts, was a colleague as well. Security Research was the epicenter of Project Artichoke, the CIA’s interrogation research program. As you know, I strongly believe that Ron Tammen’s psychology professor, St. Clair Switzer, was recruited as a consultant for Project Artichoke for his expertise in hypnosis and drugs as well as his strong ties to the United States Air Force. Louis Jolyon West ostensibly started out with Project Artichoke too, but then he moved over to MKULTRA. (As has been pointed out by H.P. Albarelli, Jr., and Jeffrey Kaye in 2010, Project Artichoke didn’t just evolve into MKULTRA, as many people have mistakenly claimed—including yours truly when I was just getting started in my research. The two programs were operated in tandem for nearly 17 years after MKULTRA’s start in 1953!) I guess what I’m trying to say is that whenever I write the name James W. McCord, don’t just think Watergate. Think Project Artichoke too. Maybe even think Project Artichoke before you think Watergate, since Artichoke came first.
OK, so let’s look at the document from July 7, 1972. When you examine the bottom lefthand corner, in the distribution list, you see that they made 2 copies for the Bureau—which means FBI Headquarters—and that number is circled. However, in the white space northeast of the circled 2, someone has written: “1 – Dept.; 2 of T file copy.”
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I take that to mean that of the 2 Bureau copies, one will go to the Department, and the second of two (T stands for two) will be the file copy at FBI Headquarters.
And that’s when it hit me: d or D stands for Department, as in the Department of Justice, the umbrella organization under which the FBI falls. So whenever we see a 1-d or 1-D, one copy went to the DOJ. When we see 2-d or 2-D, two copies were sent to the DOJ, which, it seems to follow, is more…um…elevated in importance. Doubly so, in fact.
You guys…Ron has 2-D written on the first page of his missing person documents.
Click on image for a closer view.
I will now post some of the people who had 1-d’s or 1-D’s on their docs, many of whom you know well. (I’ve provided links to a couple who may be new.)
LEE HARVEY OSWALD
Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.
Trust me, we will be discussing these folks more in the future, particularly James McCord and Thomas Peasner. But for now, here’s today’s announcement:
Of the four individuals I’ve found who have 2-Ds, two of them (Jack Ruby and Thomas Peasner) have been investigated for having possible ties to the assassination of JFK. One (James McCord) was reported by two separate sources to have been in Dallas on November 22, 1963. That just leaves us with Ron.
We’re going to take a break from the “see index”es for a little while—but, trust me, we’ll be circling back. There’s something I’m saving for the end of the tour that (in my view) is a rather big deal.
In the meantime, let’s talk about a scribble that’s noticeably prominent in the left margin of a bunch of Ron’s missing person documents. It looks like a lowercase p and h written in cursive—or is it a lowercase p and capital L?
Whatever it is, it’s another one of those identifying marks that seems to be rarely seen on other FBI documents in general, but when you do, it’s an instant thrill. It’s like when a 10-point buck warily steps out of the woods to peer at you from the opposite end of a one-lane underpass just as it’s your turn to drive through (which happened to me a week or so ago!). Or a hummingbird that swoops in out of nowhere and hovers over your friend’s hostas as you’re standing a foot away knocking on her front door (which happened to me in July!). The magnificently elusive ph (or pL…it’s very hard to tell sometimes) was typically reserved for people who weren’t regarded as choir boys. To be sure, many, though certainly not all, of the recipients lived some seriously sordid lives. Other recipients were wonderful people whom the FBI didn’t trust—people like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Harry Belafonte.
Today I’ll be showcasing all of Ron’s ph’s and/or pL’s along with a gallery of others I’ve found that were unmistakably written by the same person.
I’ll also be presenting similar handwriting that occurs on an FBI document that discusses…well…I’ll tell you at the end when I make today’s announcement.
Here are Ron’s documents that have the ph/pL on them:
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And here are other people’s documents. If you’d like additional background, click on the link for each subject.
Angleo Bruno was boss of the Philadelphia crime family from 1959 until his assassination in 1980. He was referred to as “The Gentle Don” because he preferred to resolve issues without resorting to violence.
The FBI’s Extremist Photograph Album (actually, there were more than one) was just that… photo albums of extremists to supply background information and to assist in identification. In this memo, the FBI’s Intelligence Division is discussing the Secret Service’s request for a copy.
Hank Greenspun was the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun whose office safe was the target of an “alleged planned burglary” in 1972 by E. Howard Hunt, James W. McCord, and G. Gordon Liddy, among others. In my last post, I wrote about how Greenspun’s FBI documents share notations with Ron Tammen, namely “see index” and Hac. Now we have another notation that they share. By the way, I’m excited to announce that there’s a movie about Hank Greenspun that’s narrated by Anthony Hopkins!
Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view. Note that the “ph” (or pL) is circled.
Richard Cox, from Mansfield, Ohio, was a cadet at West Point Academy who disappeared January 14, 1950. His story has some interesting parallels to Ron’s, which we’ve detailed on this blog.
COINTELPRO was a program in which the FBI surveilled and engaged in other illegal activities to disrupt organizations that they felt were dangerous, including the Communist Party, the KKK, the New Left, the Black Panthers, and others. COINTELPRO stands for Counterintelligence Program. NEW LEFT refers to a broad umbrella of people advocating for liberal-leaning social causes. (Note that the ph is on the right side, while all of the others were like Ron’s, on the left.)
The SCLC continues to thrive as a human rights organization that had its start with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the organization’s first president.
Klaus Barbie was a notorious Nazi who was nicknamed “the Butcher of Lyon” for the atrocities he committed as Gestapo chief in Lyon, France. After WWII, the U.S. Army helped him escape to Bolivia in exchange for his assistance in reporting communist activities. In 1983, he was spotted in Peru and was extradited to France to face trial for war crimes. He was convicted and died of cancer in 1991 while serving a life sentence.
Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.
Now, as promised, I’d like to share with you two pages from a lengthy FBI document that has handwriting that, in my view, looks quite a bit like our ph or pL, though not exactly. The document was sent to members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence in August 1975 in response to a request they’d made. (The House Select Committee on Intelligence preceded the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which was created the following year, in 1976.)
Written at the top of the first document, among other notes, are the words “Place in file in folder.” I’m thinking that the “Pl” in “Place” looks a lot like our ph’s or pL’s. On the second page is a ph or PL or pl in front of the word Dean. Again, it looks a lot like the same handwriting to me.
Click on image for a closer view.Click on image for a closer view.
Once you get past the telephone directories, the lion’s share of this FBI document discusses “Informants” and it appears to be part of the FBI’s Manual of Instructions on how agents are instructed to work with and reimburse criminal or security informants. I have no idea if that topic applies to our documents—in fact, I highly doubt that they do. What I do find intriguing and helpful is the source of these documents. On the title page of a section called “Policy – Informant and Informant Payments,” a page that’s near the end of a lengthy “Item H,” someone has written “Cregar Copy.” In fact, “Cregar Copy” has been written on several pages in this document, which leads me to believe that all of the informant pages came from someone named Cregar.
As it turns out, the Cregar in question is William O. Cregar, who headed up the Counterintelligence Section of what was, by then, called the Intelligence Division (as opposed to Domestic Intelligence). Earlier in his career, he’d been the FBI’s liaison with the CIA, though the person in that role in 1975 was Leon F. Schwartz.
I have a guess as to who the person was who made the ph or pL marks on the aforementioned documents, but I don’t think today’s the day for me to go public with that. But here’s what I think we can deduce, which is my next announcement:
I think that whoever made Ron’s ph’s or pL’s was either part of the FBI’s Intelligence Division (likely a staffer in Bill Cregar’s Counterintelligence Section) or someone on the House Select Committee on Intelligence. And if I have to choose between the two of them, I choose the former.
