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.