An appropriate notice has been placed in the lookout card section of the Passport Office in the event that Mr. Oswald should apply for documentation at a post outside the Soviet Union. 72

Despite these indications that a lookout card was prepared, the Department of State on May 18, 1964, informed the Commission that "investigations, to date, failed to reveal any other indication or evidence that a lookout card was ever prepared, modified or removed." No such card was ever located, and certain file entries indicate that such a card was never prepared. 73

The State Department has advised the Commission that as of October 1959 the Department had "developed information which might reasonably have caused it to prepare * * * a lookout card for Lee Harvey Oswald." 74 The Passport Office employee who prepared the refusal sheet, for Oswald has suggested as a possible explanation of the failure to prepare a lookout card that between the day she prepared the refusal sheet and the time the records section would normally have prepared the lookout card, Oswald's file was temporarily pulled from its place because the Department received some additional correspondence from the Embassy. When the file was returned, she suggested, it may have been assumed that the card had already been prepared. 75

Had a lookout card been prepared on the ground of possible expatriation, it would have been removed and destroyed after the decision was made in 1961 that Oswald had not expatriated himself and thus prior to the time that he applied for a second passport in June 1963. Hence, the Department's apparent failure to prepare a lookout, card on Oswald had no effect on its future actions. As of February 20, 1964, the Department issued additional regulations regarding the manner in which the lookout file is to be handled. 76 On March 14, 1964, a category was established for returned defectors, so that these persons automatically have lookout cards in their files, and on July 27, 1964, the Office of Security of the Department of State issued a procedural study of the lookout-card system, with recommendations. 77