"A Flat-Out Lie"

During his long week before the Ervin committee, John Dean made frequent reference to a TIME story last spring that provoked White House consternation. The background: On Feb. 22 Correspondent Sandy Smith filed an exclusive report stating that three years earlier Attorney General John Mitchell had authorized FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to place taps on the phones of a number of Washington newsmen. Two days later, Smith discovered that phones of a number of White House staffers had also been bugged, apparently in an Administration effort to trace leaks to reporters.

Smith learned that when L. Patrick Gray became acting director of the FBI after Hoover's death, he agreed to a White House order that the taps be continued; the bugging stopped only after the Supreme Court ruling in June 1972 that domestic wiretaps were illegal unless authorized by a court. When TIME asked for White House reaction to the story, Dean was in "a real quandary" and went to John Ehrlichman for advice. According to Dean, both he and Ehrlichman knew that the story was true, but Ehrlichman said, "Just flat out deny it." "Now," Dean added, "that was a flat-out lie." As a result, Ziegler told reporters: "The inquiry came to us from TIME magazine as to whether or not anyone here at the White House was aware, knew of, or at any time was involved in that [wiretapping], and the answer is a flat no, of course not." John Mitchell scoffed: "A pipe dream. Wiretaps on reporters were never authorized by me." TIME stuck by its information and printed the story--with Administration denials--in the issue of March 5.

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