Daily, and sometimes more than once daily, the agency will telegraph by Telex the name, date, and place of birth of its applicants, the people who have come in that day to make an application.
Mr. Coleman. Could we mark as Exhibit No. 952 the teletype that came in on Oswald. I think that would help the Commission to indicate how it comes in.
(Commission Exhibit No. 952 was marked for identification and received in evidence.)
Mr. Chayes. Yes.
Mr. Coleman. You had better explain the "NO" which is beside Oswald's name. name.
Mr. Chayes. Yes; well here you see the Telex coming in from New Orleans, and there are 25 names on it with date of birth beside each name, and it is interesting that opposite Lee Harvey Oswald is capital letters "NO" which might be rather interesting except that it stands for New Orleans, and every Telex that comes from New Orleans has that mark on it. It is covered by our abbreviations manual, and one of your investigators made, of course with our knowledge in our office, but not in the Passport Office, a surprise visit to the Passport Office to make sure that they were, in fact, putting NO on these things, and they are.
That is the designation of the office.
What happens is when these 25 names come in, the lookout file is searched for those names, and if there is no lookout card, then a responding Telex is sent back. It says here 561, OW561. That is this one, "All okay." OW is office to Washington. WO is Washington to office. So the control number of the outgoing from Washington is WO38, and it says that on your OW561, all the names were okay.
Now it is interesting, the Telex came in and it is stamped June 24, 4:19 p.m.—June 24, 1963. It went out June 25, 10:57 a.m. and these 25 people all got the passports.
Now it is only on the basis of that kind of a system that you can get out a million passports in a way that really provides first class service to the American people. Miss Knight in her administration of the office, which extends back into the previous administration, has cut down the time from something like 2 weeks to 24 hours in most of the cases.