1965 State Dept. memo belies official Earhart line

The below document appeared in the February 1995 edition of the Amelia Earhart Society Newsletters, and is aptly titled, “A U.S. STATE DEPT. MEMO DATED FEB. 8TH, 1965.”  It contains references to former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke and GI Earhart witnesses on Saipan, and appears to have a direct relationship to author and researcher Fred Goerner’s early 1960s Earhart investigations on Saipan.  Click on image for larger view.

This document has been marked as “DECLASSIFIED” at its top and bottom borders.  It’s impossible to determine when this declassification occurred, but it was likely later than early 1965, when it was created.  The memo may have been included in the package of 1967 declassified Navy files, which I do not have in its original form. 

Herein we learn here that the State Department’s Earhart file “complete jacket” is identified as number “200.113 (1960-1),” and that “the copy of Adm. [Arleigh] Burke’s letter of Dec. 24 1960 to Assistant Secretary Parsons“ as well as Parson’s reply of Dec. 30, 1960 have been sent to the recipient(s) of this letter, identified as “EA/J – Mr. Knowles and P/HO Richardson Dougall.”

The only reference about John F. Knowles an Internet search found was as a State Department official listed in a Memorandum of Conversation of Dec. 4, 1962 on State’s Office of the Historian website.  The subject was “Japanese Copper Ore Purchases; Trade Liberalization by Japan; Trade Expansion Act.”  

Much more can be found about the other addressee in the memo, Richardson Dougall.  In a 1985 interview with the Minnesota Historical Society, we learn that Dougall was a retired State Department Historian (thus the “HO” in the address line) and organist, 68 years old, living in Portland, Ore.  A search of Amazon reveals he wrote at least seven books, most relating to his State Department position, all quite obscure and non-selling.  Clearly, Knowles and Dougall were inside players in the State Department’s Earhart cover-up during the mid-1960s.

Adm. Arleigh Burke was Chief of Naval Operations from 1955 to 1961, distinguishing himself during World War II and the Korean War, and this is the first time I’ve seen his name connected in any way to the Earhart disappearance. 

Fred Goerner with witness Dr. Manuel Aldan on Saipan, June 1960.  Aldan was a dentist whose patients were Japanese officers, who told them of the lady spy in they called “Earharto!”  See page 85 of Truth at Last for more.  (Courtesy San Francisco Library Special Collections.)

The “references to photographs [and presumably, accounts] in the Game-Goerner article” of the two individuals described in No. 4, “a former member of Army Intelligence from New York, who took a ‘photograph from a Japanese officer during Saipan’s 1944 invasion showing Earhart before Japanese aircraft,’ ” and an “ex-Marine from Virginia, who fought across Saipan’s Red Beach One in 1944 and ‘tore a snapshot of Amelia Earhart, shown with a Japanese officer, off the wall of a house the Japanese had occupied’ ” were included in Fred Goerner’s 1966 bestseller The Search for Amelia Earhart.  

The Saipan GIs were Sgt. Ralph R. Kanna, of Johnson City, N.Y., and Robert Kinley (rank unknown), of Norfolk, Va., respectively.  Their accounts, as well as other finds of Earhart-related photos, can be found in my March 13, 2020 post, “Veterans recall seeing Earhart photos on Saipan.”

Below the negatively exposed memorandum, AES President and newsletter editor Bill Prymak offered the following comments:

QUESTIONS:  Why should the State Dept. still be interested in Earhart in 1965 if they took the official position in 1937 that she was simply lost at sea?

Who is RM/R?  Why the interest in the photos from Saipan?

Is the above mentioned file part of the same Earhart file(s) that Col. [Rollin] Reineck has been trying to get released?

STAY TUNED. . . . . we may have more coming.