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.
Mr. BOUCK. That is right. These referrals from the FBI are all through
here. Page 8 is another one where they picked up information and gave
it to us. The first four sections relate to the cases in the four
offices of Texas during a 2-year period. The very final one illustrates
just a little sample of the kind of cases we received in Texas which we
did not think warranted investigation. That will give you an idea of
what those cases amounted to. Why we didn't go into them.
Mr. McCLOY. Let me ask you this: Are your records and equipment modern
in the sense that you have got punchcards on all these, have you got
the type of equipment that you would think that extensive files and
extensive information and quick access to them might be very important.
Do you have IBM machines and do you have punchcards, for example, so
that you can have quick cross references?
Mr. BOUCK. No, sir. Our files are conventional, card indexes,
conventional folders. We do not have machine operation in that sense.
Mr. McCLOY. Don't you think that with all this mass of information that
comes in that that would be an asset to you?
Mr. BOUCK. If I might defer to Mr. Carswell again, I believe that is
in the document you are handling, discussion of that, am I right, Mr.
Carswell, or in the studies that are going on.
Mr. CARSWELL. Yes.
Mr. BOUCK. This is part of this big overall consideration again.
Mr. McCLOY. It just seems to me this is almost a typical case of where
that type of thing can do you a great deal of good. You have it in
industry to a very marked degree. I wonder whether it could be--I don't
know enough about the flow of these things.
Mr. BOUCK. This is under a great deal of consideration as a part of
this post-Dallas study that Mr. Carswell referred to and I am quite
sure that it will be contained in the final results.
Mr. McCLOY. Very well. Go ahead.
Mr. DULLES. Could I ask one question in that connection? You say at
the bottom of the page, this introductory table page, that the total
exceeded 32,000 items.
Mr. BOUCK. Yes.
Mr. DULLES. Does that mean now you have cards on 32,000 people?
Mr. BOUCK. Oh, no; we have cards on close to a million people.
Mr. DULLES. A million people?
Mr. BOUCK. Yes.
Mr. DULLES. This total then is 1-year total?
Mr. BOUCK. This is a 2-year total--no, wait a minute. I beg your pardon.
Mr. McCLOY. 1963.
Mr. BOUCK. This is a 1-year total for 1943, 1-year total for 1953, and
1-year total for 1963.
Mr. DULLES. That is just the number, and these figures are cumulative
that you have here?
Mr. BOUCK. No; everyone is a year.
Mr. DULLES. That is what I mean, you have the total you have to add
this up for previous years, but you don't keep them forever, you take
some of these out.
Mr. BOUCK. These are not all cards, but these are items of information.
In 1-year cases we might get 40, 50 items in a particular case, and
these items would go in the case files.
Mr. DULLES. Do you know how many names you have carded now,
approximately?
Mr. BOUCK. We have not counted them but we think in the vicinity of a
million but they are not all active, you see. We have no way of knowing
when people die in some cases and things like that. So we don't know
just how many of these million are now active. Certainly very much less
than a million.
Mr. DULLES. But you have a million names carded?
Mr. BOUCK. Yes. In the indexes.
Mr. STERN. In the files which you describe as basic files, I believe,
how many cases are current, either in your office or within easy access?
Mr. BOUCK. About 50,000.
Mr. STERN. About 50,000. So that 950,000 are in some other storage?
Mr. BOUCK. Not all of these cards, you see, will represent cases
because we have some cases in which many people are involved. There
would be considerably less cases than there would be card indexes, but
we do have a very sizable storage of cases under National Archives,
some of the older ones having gone to places like the Roosevelt Library.
(At this point Representative Ford left the hearing room.)
Mr. STERN. These are your basic files which now have something in the
order of 50,000 active cases?
Mr. BOUCK. Yes.
Mr. STERN. And some of these involve more than one individual?
Mr. BOUCK. Yes.
Mr. STERN. In these cases?
Mr. BOUCK. Yes.
Mr. STERN. A case might be an organization, as I understand it, rather
than an individual?
Mr. BOUCK. That is right.
Mr. STERN. And the members of that organization would be collected
under that one case?
Mr. BOUCK. Yes.
Mr. STERN. Would they also be listed individually?
Mr. BOUCK. They would be listed individually if they were of interest
to us as individuals. Sometimes we would get the membership of a group
of people that attended a lecture, let's say, where very derogatory
information was given out about the President, but most of these
people seem like ordinary citizens and it doesn't seem like worth
investigating. We might have 200 people listed in that, this would not
be normal, but it would be a few cases like that.
Mr. STERN. Now, as I understand it you by no means investigate every
individual who is in one of these 50,000 cases?
Mr. BOUCK. That is correct.
Mr. STERN. And what are the criteria that you use?
Mr. BOUCK. The criteria for investigation are feelings that there is
indeed an indication that there may be a danger to the President.
Mr. STERN. But there has to be some indication of a potential danger to
the President to get that individual into a case to begin with, I take
it. If it were clear he was not?
Mr. BOUCK. Yes; but not necessarily a current indication. We take many
of these where we think an individual is becoming hostile and a little
bit disgusted with the President, we take many of those cases to watch
these people. We keep getting information here and there along, and
frequently after we get the second or third piece of information, we
decide indeed this individual is perhaps--does perhaps constitute a
menace, and at that point we would investigate it.
Mr. STERN. As I understand it, one of the main purposes of your
investigation is to attempt to deal with the dangerous individual at
that time?
Mr. BOUCK. Yes, sir.
Mr. STERN. How would you deal with these people whom we are speaking
about?
Mr. BOUCK. We deal with them primarily in three ways. First, if a law
violation is involved an attempt will be made to see if a prosecution
is in order.
Mr. STERN. What sort of law violation?
Mr. BOUCK. Well, we have a threat law, for one, that is under our
jurisdiction. Then in the case----
Mr. STERN. This is threats against the President?