Part 46

Mr. McCLOY. It may be admitted.

(The document referred to, previously marked as Commission Exhibit No. 762, for identification, was received in evidence.)

Mr. STERN. Turning to the first page in the summary of Exhibit 762, Mr. Bouck, you have taken the Protective Research cases from November 1961 to November 1963, which involve residents of the State of Texas, and these were how many cases?

Mr. BOUCK. 34.

Mr. STERN. And you have broken them down by the source of the information in four categories which are----

Mr. BOUCK. Letters or phone calls; detected by the Secret Service; reported by Federal agencies; reported by local authorities.

Mr. STERN. Then towards the bottom of that page you have given gross figures during the same 2-year period of the nationwide activity. Would you state what the nationwide caseload was?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes. The cases we received nationwide and did not investigate because they didn't meet the criteria for investigation were 7,337. The cases we received and investigated were 1,372.

During the same period on these cases we arrested 167 people and 91 investigations were unproductive. They did not solve the cases.

Mr. STERN. You stated that the volume of information received has been rising. Would you describe the total for the years 1943, 1953, and 1963?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes. These do not represent cases. These represent items of information reported.

In 1943 we had about 7,000 such items coming to our attention; in 1953 this had increased to somewhat over 17,000 items. By 1963 this had increased in excess of 32,000 items.

Mr. STERN. Each of those items is examined by one of the five Special Agents working on this area?

Mr. BOUCK. That is right.

Mr. STERN. Now of the 34 Texas cases in this 2-year period----

Mr. DULLES. Could I ask a question before you get on the Texas cases, on this record, it indicates that about 6,000 cases were "received but not investigated" it seems to me for the record it would be well to have a little more on that as to why they weren't investigated, and so forth.

I suppose in a great many cases, you couldn't find who it was. It was an anonymous letter that came in. Would that be included?

Mr. BOUCK. Not for the cause of this, sir. I assume you are speaking of this 7,337 cases.

Mr. DULLES. That is right.

Mr. BOUCK. In the bottom table.

Mr. DULLES. Of those 1,372 were received and investigated?

Mr. BOUCK. We receive a great deal of information on people that we do not feel at that time intended to harm the President, but that would bear watching. We aren't quite sure whether they will become worse in the future, and this is----

Mr. DULLES. Is that among about the 6,000 cases I am referring to?

Mr. BOUCK. The 7,000.

Mr. DULLES. Well, there are 7,337 cases received, but not investigated.

Mr. BOUCK. These are two separate ones. The investigated cases are in addition.

Mr. DULLES. This is in addition to that?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes.

Mr. DULLES. I see.

Mr. BOUCK. The 7,000 cases are cases that we received, we looked at, and felt that we will file it and see if anything more happens on this, but it doesn't warrant investigative attention until we get something more alarming than we have.

Mr. DULLES. Who makes that judgment, is that made in your department?

Mr. BOUCK. That is made in my department by one of these five agents that are listed in this document.

Mr. DULLES. Do you review their determination?

Mr. BOUCK. I do not review all of them. I review a percentage of their determinations, and I am consulted on any that are borderline or that are difficult.

Mr. STERN. Of the 34 Texas cases, almost half or 15 were reported by Federal authorities. Is this typical of all information received by PRS in the course of a year?

Mr. BOUCK. No, this would be typical of the investigated cases but not typical of the entire quantity of cases received.

Mr. STERN. I see.

Representative FORD. Are the 34 listed here included in the 7,337 or the 1,372?

Mr. BOUCK. 1,372.

Mr. STERN. Do you have a judgment, Mr. Bouck, as to the proportion of cases coming to you from other agencies, Federal agencies, State and local agencies, of the total number of cases you have?

Mr. BOUCK. About 90 percent of the cases generated would be other than from agencies. The 10 percent that come from Federal and local agencies, the majority of that come from Federal agencies. I wouldn't know quite the percentage. But the majority of the 10 percent would be Federal agencies.

Mr. STERN. And predominantly from any one agency?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes, predominantly from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Mr. STERN. As to the 90 percent that is generated internally, as it were, do you have an opinion as to how many of those arise because of correspondence with the White House by the subject?

Mr. BOUCK. The great majority of them arise from telegrams, telephone calls, unwelcome visitors, letters to the White House.

Mr. STERN. Unwelcome visitors at the White House?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes.

Mr. DULLES. Do you know how many cases within the 7,337 noted here, which I understand is nationwide, were from Texas?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes. I believe we show that in the third paragraph, 115 cases were in Texas.

Mr. STERN. Yes.

Mr. BOUCK. In addition to the cases investigated. It is up in the third paragraph from the top, right under the table, the second paragraph under the table, sir; right where your finger is, the first line there.

Mr. DULLES. 115?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes.

Mr. DULLES. Did the name of Lee Harvey Oswald appear in your files at any time prior to the 22d of November 1963?

Mr. BOUCK. No, sir; we had never heard of him in any context.

Mr. DULLES. His name doesn't appear at all?

Mr. BOUCK. Not as of that time. Prior to Dallas, it did not appear in any fashion. We had no knowledge of the name.

Mr. DULLES. You had no report from the State Department or the FBI that covered his trip to Russia or anything of that kind?

Mr. BOUCK. No, sir.

Mr. McCLOY. Or of the CIA?

Mr. BOUCK. No, sir.

Mr. STERN. Mr. Bouck, what kind of information do you look for, what are the criteria you apply, in determining whether someone is a potential danger to the President? What do you ask other agencies, Federal, State, and local to be on the lookout for?

Mr. BOUCK. Our criteria is broad in general. It consists of desiring any information that would indicate any degree of harm or potential harm to the President, either at the present time or in the future.

Mr. STERN. Had you ever prior to Dallas had occasion to--for any part of your activities--list criteria that you would apply in trying to determine whether someone is a potential danger?

Mr. BOUCK. We had not had a formal written listing of criteria as such except in this general form of desiring everything that might indicate a possible source of harm to the safety of the President. We had some internal breakdown of information for the processing of certain kinds of material where the criteria were involved.

Mr. STERN. I didn't mean to restrict my question to criteria for external sources, but those you used internally as well.

Mr. BOUCK. We had some internal, as well.

Mr. STERN. I show you now a one-page document entitled "The following criteria are used as guides in determining whether White House mail is to be accepted for PRS processing," which has been marked for identification as Commission Exhibit No. 763. Can you identify that?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes, sir; this is a document that I helped draft some years ago. It is a document I prepared for the Commission. It is a document that was used up to and at the time of Dallas.

Mr. STERN. For what purpose?

Mr. BOUCK. For the purpose of screening White House mail. The White House gives us a considerable quantity of mail, not all of which we--it is desirable that we keep, and this is a guide to the agents in determining what we should keep and what should go back to be answered by the White House staff.

Mr. STERN. This guide is not used by the White House mailroom? This is an internal guide for your own agents?

Mr. BOUCK. My own agents.

Mr. STERN. What instructions does the White House mailroom have as to mail that is to be sent to you?

Mr. BOUCK. The White House mail has two general instructions: One, we supply them with identification information on all existing cases in which mail is concerned; that any further mail in those cases is automatically referred to us.

Their criteria are the same as our other general criteria--that in addition to these known cases we desire letters, telegrams, or any other document they receive that in any way indicates any one may have possible intention of harming the President.

Mr. STERN. Have you----

Mr. DULLES. Could I ask just one question here?

Mr. STERN. Yes, sir.

Mr. DULLES. I note that this list does not include membership in various types of organizations, such as the, for example, the organizations that are on the Attorney General's list. Have you ever considered that?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes; if I might explain, sir; the letters we are talking about are letters that are written by people, and they rarely include that kind of information, but we do in other categories, this is for a special purpose. This is letters only that are sent to the President which is all this is applied to. This does not apply to other sources of information, only the one source of letters.

Mr. STERN. Have you had occasion, Mr. Bouck, before Dallas, to put in writing criteria to be employed by Secret Service agents in dealing with uninvited callers at the White House?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes, sir.

Mr. STERN. I show you now a document which I have marked for identification Commission Exhibit No. 764, one page, entitled "The following criteria are used as guides in determining whether White House callers should be committed for mental observation." Do you recognize that?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes, sir.

Mr. STERN. Did you have it prepared?

Mr. BOUCK. I did.

Mr. STERN. How was this employed?

Mr. BOUCK. A great percentage of the people who come to see the President or to the White House gates have been found to be suffering from mental illness. This involves a determination as to whether a legal process will take place of committing these people, and in discussions with the Mental Commission in Washington and elsewhere, we have found that certain criteria meet their desires in whether or not we should legally process them. So this was prepared as a guide to agents in trying to determine whether we could send these people down for commitment to a mental institution or consideration by the Commission on Mental Health.

Mr. STERN. Under the District of Columbia commitment procedures?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes; that is right.

Mr. STERN. Beyond these criteria for dealing with White House mail and uninvited visitors at the White House, what instructions within the broad framework of your criteria do you give to Treasury law enforcement officers, including Secret Service agents, with respect to the kind of information you are interested in receiving?

Mr. BOUCK. We have participation in a broad program of Treasury schools which include all of the Treasury agencies as well as participation of certain other people in our own schools. We have a coordination setup in Treasury on which the heads of organization levels meets regularly.

In all of those the Secret Service jurisdiction, the Secret Service desires and needs in the way of protection of the President have been included many times over.

It is a constant, one of those things that is constantly brought up many times both in the schools and in the coordination needs of the Secret Service needs and functions in these areas.

Mr. STERN. Do you participate in other training programs of other law enforcement agencies?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes.

Mr. STERN. Will you describe that and with particular reference to this problem?

Mr. BOUCK. We participate both on the national level and at the field level. Our agents in the field are instructed to accept any invitation to teach in a police school of any level or security school, and we have prescribed exact outlines of material they should get across. One of the main topics being the protection topic.

We teach in Marine schools here in Washington. We teach in some of the State activities; a number of the different military activities. We have had students from most of the bigger agencies of government, CIA, State, and so forth, who have attended these portions of our training schools.

Mr. STERN. What requests do you make to other Federal agencies?

Mr. BOUCK. We make this same request--that we desire any and all information that they may come in contact with that would indicate danger to the President.

Mr. STERN. How are these requests communicated?

Mr. BOUCK. They are fundamentally communicated by personal contact of varying degrees with the FBI. We have a personal liaison contact in which an individual, a liaison officer actually makes daily contact.

With the other agencies, other security agencies and enforcement agencies, we are--people on my staff have personal relationships where we can call on the telephone and do call on the telephone very frequently, sometimes some agencies everyday, and they in turn call us.

Mr. STERN. What agencies do you have these liaison relationships with--Federal agencies?

Mr. BOUCK. We have on a commonly used basis, we have some liaison with almost all of them but on a common using basis we have these relationships with CIA, with the several military services, with the Department of State. I have mentioned the FBI.

Mr. STERN. Central Intelligence Agency?

Mr. BOUCK. Oh, yes; very much so. They are, especially on trips very, very helpful.

Mr. DULLES. Foreign trips?

Mr. BOUCK. Foreign trips, yes.

Representative FORD. How often do your people check to see procedures which are used by these various agencies for the determination of whether an individual is a dangerous person?

Mr. BOUCK. We don't do that systematically. We frequently have such discussions but they are usually on a specific basis. Our representative will call up and say, "We just received this information. Would this be of interest to you."

In these borderline cases, we have much of that, and after discussion we decide whether it would or would not be. But outside of raising this question as it comes in connection with business between our agencies we do not make a practice of just simply querying them on this. We have not done that, as I recall.

Representative FORD. You don't lay down a particular criterion for Agency X, Y, or Z?

Mr. BOUCK. No. We have the one general criterion that we have advocated for many years. I think it is quite well understood. We do not see signs that there were any lack of knowledge that this was our job and we wished this kind of information.

Mr. DULLES. Have you made any study going back in history of the various attempts that have been made, and successful and unsuccessful attempts, that have been made against Presidents or----

Mr. BOUCK. Rulers.

Mr. DULLES. Or people about to be President, or who have been President?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes, yes. We have not only studied all of our own but we have studied all of the assassinations that we could find any record of for 2,000 years back. And strangely enough some of the thinking that went on 2,000 years ago seems to show up in thinking of assassinations today.

Mr. STERN. Do you increase protection on the Ides of March?

Mr. DULLES. Is that available? Is that--I don't know.

Mr. BOUCK. It is available in a rather crude form. It has not been boiled down to a concise report.

Mr. DULLES. How voluminous is this? I should be very much interested in thumbing through it because I have been trying to study the past history.

Mr. BOUCK. The rough notes on this are this high.

Mr. DULLES. A few thousand pages?

Mr. BOUCK. The studies didn't go beyond that.

Mr. DULLES. By cases?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes. Of course, in many of these cases it is very spotty and these are handwritten notes. We never, outside of extracting in this in training material and what not, we have never systematized it down to where it is a readable document as such.

Mr. DULLES. Have you tried to draw any conclusion out of this study as to the type of people, the types of causes, the types of incentives?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes; we have.

Mr. DULLES. That is in your department, is it, to do this?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes; it is. We have arrived at some conclusions from it.

(Discussion off the record.)

Mr. McCLOY. On the record. Your study of the prior assassinations would take into account Czolgosz, Guiteau, what type of persons they were?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes, sir.

Mr. McCLOY. The thing to me that seems very worthy of research is the plotter, I mean the political plotter as against, for want of a better word, the loner, the man who is self-motivated against the man who has to have a group around him. How do you tell one from the other? I just was reading last night in Loomis about Madame Corday. She was just as much of a loner as apparently Mr. Oswald was.

Mr. DULLES. So was Czolgosz so far as I can make out, and so was Zangara. Zangara, I was told, planned to shoot Hoover and then he decided that the climate of Washington wasn't very healthy in February and March for him because he had stomach trouble, so he decided that F.D.R. was coming to Miami and it was just as good to shoot him. You have situations of that kind that defy it.

Mr. BOUCK. I believe he intended to shoot the King of Italy before that but he got a chance to migrate before he got an opportunity.

Mr. DULLES. Zangara?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes.

Mr. McCLOY. Do you have any look out for defectors as such?

Mr. BOUCK. As such we have never been quite able to determine that that is a valid criterion. We do not as such.

Mr. McCLOY. You have some suspicions, now, don't you?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes; we have some suspicions now; yes, sir.

Mr. DULLES. I wonder whether it would not be useful for this Commission to have, if it could be reduced to readable form and to assist, the conclusions of your study if you have such conclusions?

Mr. BOUCK. We will do that, sir.

Mr. DULLES. What do you think, do the rest of you agree to that?

Mr. McCLOY. I think it is part of our mission to try to make recommendations in regard to the future protection of the Presidents. Actually, we don't want to go into anything which is going to compromise the future security of Presidents. We simply want to augment. What we are concerned about is how well equipped we are to do the job in the light of all the circumstances and I would think that any conclusions that you have in this regard, if you--the Secret Service, Treasury--could convey them to us in a form that perhaps we might endorse, it might be helpful from your point of view and our point of view.

Representative FORD. I would agree with that observation.

Mr. DULLES. You can possibly define categories. You may find the loner, you may find a fellow engaged in a plot with others for political reasons and that would help us very much because we find that particularly the case we are investigating falls into one of these classes.

Mr. BOUCK. All right.

(Discussion off the record.)

(At this point Senator Cooper entered the hearing room.)

Mr. McCLOY. I think we are ready to go ahead.

Mr. STERN. Fine, Mr. Chairman. I would like to turn now to the actual processing by PRS of the information they receive and have Mr. Bouck tell us what happens to an item of information when it is received, how it is processed, how the references to field offices are made, and perhaps you might illustrate, Mr. Bouck, from the cases that are summarized in Commission Exhibit 762.

Mr. BOUCK. In Exhibit 760, the second memorandum applies to that, and I will basically follow that unless questions differ.

Mr. STERN. I think it would be better for you not to read it but to paraphrase it, tell us what happens.

Mr. BOUCK. When a document is received by the Secret Service, it is first searched against our files to see if we have any previous experience with this individual or with this threat. If it is found that we do have previous material there is an analysis made, and then a determination is made at that point as to what the apparent degree of threat would be on this.

If it appears that on the surface there is a threat, lookouts will immediately be issued to the White House detail, the White House police and various other security details, in order that they may be alerted to any danger that happens.

If the danger seems quite strong, a telephone call will be made to the field office in order to begin the investigation without even waiting for the mail. The threat is then processed and sent through the mail with the documents to the office concerned.

If it is determined that it is a possible danger, a card is put in a particular file which would alert us in case the President went to that area that an investigation of a dangerous person were underway. After the field office has investigated they would attempt to take corrective action if a law has been violated, the individual will be prosecuted, if practical, and if the individual is determined to be mentally ill, attempts will be made to get commitment into a mental institution.

When the report is submitted back, if the individual is not confined or is not evaluated as being no danger, then we would put cards in several control devices, one being a trip index file to make sure that we alerted the field office when the President went to that area; another being a control checkup device which means that if this individual is regarded as dangerous we will keep checking up on him every few months to see if he is getting worse or see what he is doing.

Mr. STERN. Could you illustrate by a case or two from Exhibit 762 the different kinds of matters that come to your attention and the different ways in which they are processed?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes. On page 2 of this exhibit happens to be a case that had its origin in the field, in Denton, Tex., of a potential threat that appeared to apply to Dallas. It was investigated in the field, and pictures were obtained, and information was obtained and dispensed to the White House detail at the time President Kennedy went to Dallas, and in this particular case, it was subsequently referred to PRS and has been placed in our files and indexed in our indexes. Case No. 3 is a similar----

Mr. DULLES. May I ask a question there? When you refer to the field offices, this is the field office of the Secret Service?

Mr. BOUCK. Field offices of the Secret Service.

Mr. DULLES. How many do you have?

Mr. BOUCK. Sixty.

Mr. DULLES. Sixty?

Mr. BOUCK. In the United States, and I believe one of those is in Puerto Rico and one is in Paris, of the 60.

Mr. DULLES. Those offices cooperate with the FBI offices?

Mr. BOUCK. Yes. If you will look over these cases, you will see that as a matter of fact, this page 3, this case is given as originating with the chief of police of Denton, Tex., but the FBI already also determined that and they reported that to us almost simultaneously.

Mr. DULLES. Yes; that doesn't show up on this particular page.

Mr. BOUCK. No; it is stated, I think in some other exhibit but I erroneously neglected it here. But you will find in many of those, that was true on page 5, that indicates a case where the FBI has picked up information and gave it to us.

Mr. STERN. You might mention, perhaps, Mr. Bouck, the cases under the last tab of your exhibit which were cases that were not investigated, just as a contrast.