Mr. McCLOY. Fully armored; no. That is right.
Secretary DILLON. Closed car.
Mr. McCLOY. Usually on those motorcades you like to be seen.
Secretary DILLON. Yes.
Mr. RANKIN. Have you covered your planning document, then, Mr.
Secretary?
Secretary DILLON. I think that covers this.
Mr. McCLOY. May I ask a question at this point? I have a date at the
White House at 1 o'clock, not with the President, but with Mr. Bundy,
who wants to talk with me.
How long do you think we will be with the Secretary and will we resume
after lunch?
Mr. RANKIN. I was hoping to get through. I presume he was hoping we
would.
Secretary DILLON. I would like to if we could. I have to leave tomorrow
to go to Japan.
Mr. McCLOY. Well, would it interrupt you if I ask a few questions?
Mr. RANKIN. No; go ahead.
The CHAIRMAN. Ask what questions you want?
Mr. McCLOY. You testified, Mr. Secretary, you felt with these additions
that the Secret Service would be competent to cope with the added
requirements for the protection of the President which have occurred.
In testifying to that effect, do you include--you include the
investigative services of your own which are quite apart, as I
understand it, from the information that you may gather from other
agencies?
Secretary DILLON. That is correct; yes.
Mr. McCLOY. We have had the thought that perhaps the Protective
Research Section or Division of your organization wasn't as well
equipped as it should have been nor as it might have been presumably
for the purely preventive investigative work.
Do you feel that with this new plan of yours, that that would, be
adequately taken care of?
Secretary DILLON. Yes; I do. It was not equipped, I think, adequately
in two ways. First, it did not, as is clearly shown by the events in
Dallas, receive information on enough dangerous people. At least, they
didn't receive the information on Lee Oswald.
So that what is required is the development of criteria, better
criteria, that can be circulated to law enforcement agencies generally,
and which will insure that adequate information comes in. We are making
progress there.
I think you have already seen a document with some criteria that were
developed, which has been circulated in Washington. A similar document
has now been circulated by the Secret Service Chief to all special
agents asking them to write a briefer but somewhat similar letter to
all chiefs of police, sheriffs, and State police in their localities
which asks them to furnish any such information to the local Secret
Service agent. That is being disseminated now throughout the country.
It will be completed within the next 6 weeks or so.
In addition, we have established an interagency committee which has as
one of its jobs the development of better criteria that will really
result in getting the kind of information we want without swamping
us. If we are too broad in our criteria and we get a million names,
obviously nothing can work.
This committee is holding its first formal meeting next week. It has
representatives of the President's Office of Science and Technology,
of the Department of Defense, which is the Advanced Research Projects
outfit, of the CIA, an individual who is highly competent in their
file section and who understands the setting up of complex files and
retrieval, that sort of business, and four people from PRS, the PRS
head inspector, Mr. Thacker, the head of the research and development,
Mr. Bouck, the head of the files section, Mr. Young, and Mr. Stoner,
who is now handling the liaison job.
There will also be, although the individual has not yet been named,
a representative of the FBI, and with that I think that we will be
able to develop criteria that will both be useful to us and be an
improvement on criteria that was so far developed with the help of
outside consultants.
Mr. McCLOY. Mr. Secretary, the impression has been gained, I think, by
the Commission that perhaps too great emphasis has been directed to
the mere investigation of the threat, of the particular individual,
the crank, or the fellow that sends the poison food or the threatening
letter, and perhaps not enough in a broader scope, recognizing, of
course, that you can't be too broad without defeating your own purpose,
but that there are perhaps groups or other areas of ferment that could
provoke an attack quite without the threat. Would you comment on that?
Secretary DILLON. Yes; one of the criteria that is presently out is
meant to cover individuals who have threatened bodily harm to any high
Government official, with the idea that threat might be switched and
visited upon the President.
That would have worked in this particular case in Dallas if that had
been a specific criterion on at that time, which it wasn't. We are just
talking about threats to the President. So I think that was one obvious
case.
We hope that this committee would be able to possibly come up with
other groups that can be identified that would fit into this without
bringing in too many names.
There is one that may or may not work out. I just cite this as an
example. People with bad conduct records in the Marine Corps for some
reason have had a very bad record thereafter and there is quite a
connection of crime with that class of individual.
It may be that it would even be worthwhile, if it is not too large, to
cover this. Why that is so, nobody has quite figured out. I think the
eye was focused on them because of this event in Dallas, but then it
was discovered that this group has been involved in an awful lot of
other crimes of violence.
Mr. DULLES. As you read the Oswald life story, it looks as though he
was going into the Marines as a kind of escape.
Secretary DILLON. It could have been.
Mr. DULLES. What you say is very interesting in that connection.
The CHAIRMAN. Will you excuse us just a moment until we see if we can
finish up.
Secretary DILLON. I would think you might want to put into the record
at this point a copy of the memorandum that I mentioned from Mr. Rowley
to the special agents asking them to send letters to the local law
enforcement institutions.
Mr. RANKIN. Yes. Mr. Secretary, I ask you to examine the memorandum
dated August 26, from Chief Rowley and ask you if that, with the
attachment, is the memorandum that you just described?
Secretary DILLON. That is. Fine. Yes.
Mr. RANKIN. Mr. Chief Justice, I ask leave to give this document that
the Secretary has just referred to the next number in order and offer
it in evidence as part of this examination.
The CHAIRMAN. It may be admitted.
(The document referred to was marked Commission Exhibit No. 1053-C, for
identification and received in evidence.)
Secretary DILLON. There is one other item--you asked whether there
is anything else in general. We felt that the Secret Service did not
have adequate regularized scientific advice. They got some--they have
been getting it over the years from time to time from the President's
office of Science and Technology, but we tried to regularize that.
I have worked out an arrangement with Dr. Hornig and written him a
letter which embodies that arrangement so that they would have their
services constantly available to the Secret Service and would give
certain specific advice; first, keeping the Secret Service informed of
scientific developments of possible use in providing protection for the
President, etc.; advising or arranging for scientific advice to the
Secret Service in connection with specific problems of Presidential
protection as they may arise; and reviewing the technical aspects of
the protective operations of the Secret Service and its development
program, and assisting it in establishing priorities and schedules for
introducing technical and scientific improvements. I have an answer
from Dr. Hornig saying they would be glad to carry this out and saying
that he concurs in my judgment that the increasingly complex nature of
Presidential protection requires that the Secret Service have access to
the best scientific advice and that they are glad to take on this job.
Mr. RANKIN. Mr. Secretary, I will ask you if the exchange of letters,
dated August 31, between you and Mr. Hornig are the copies that I have
just given you?
Secretary DILLON. That is right.