The Mystery of the Missing Tapes

Struggling to recover his balance, Richard Nixon last week stumbled into yet another Watergate morass. Now it was the mystery of the missing tapes. Conceded one of his closest legal advisers: "We've created a credibility cul-de-sac of such monstrous dimensions that even the most innocent transaction appears suspect."

This particular transaction unreeled just as one of Watergate's long-awaited moments of truth finally seemed to be at hand. Nixon had vigorously protected nine recordings of his White House conversations through three painful months of litigation. His fight had precipitated a constitutional collision and had done much to undermine the claim that he was determined to "set forth the facts" about the scandal. But under overwhelming public pressure after the "Saturday Night Massacre" at his Justice Department, he had grudgingly agreed to yield to the demand of prosecutors and the courts. He would give up his nine tapes. Then, as he was about to do so last week, came the incredible admission: Nixon's lawyers told Federal Judge John J. Sirica that two of the most-wanted tapes did not even exist.

The disclosure moved Sirica to begin open hearings at once into the circumstances of the tapes' being or nonbeing and inspired a new surge of protest telegrams, which deluged official Washington with fresh demands that Nixon must leave office. Even some of Nixon's least likely critics turned against him. Columnist Joseph Alsop, ardent champion of the President's foreign policies, said that he must resign. Howard K Smith, ABC-TV'S highly independent commentator, declared that the tapes revelation "deepens suspicion inevitably that there has been a cover-up all along and it is still going on." Nixon, he said, must quit or be impeached.

Conservative Republicans too worried that the limits of public tolerance had been passed. Nixon's credibility, said Senator Barry Goldwater, "has reached an alltime low from which he may never recover." The President, insisted New York Senator James Buckley, now "has the clear burden of satisfying the American people that he has been speaking the truth."

No Certainty. Indeed, so universal was the dismay in Republican ranks that it produced a rare concert of behind-the-scenes congressional arm twisting of the White House: on terms virtually dictated to him by the Senate Republican leadership, Nixon approved the appointment of a new special prosecutor, replacing the dismissed Archibald Cox, and chose a new Attorney General to succeed the resigned Elliot Richardson (see stories beginning on page 40).

Those concessions were largely lost in the explosion over the disclosure that two of Nixon's tapes--recordings once viewed as crucial to the truth about Watergate--were not to be found. In making that admission, Presidential Special Counsel Fred Buzhardt predicted: "By the end of this hearing, we will have established with mathematical certainty beyond any doubt that those two tape recordings were never made." After three days of testimony before Judge Sirica, with more to come this week, no such certainty seemed yet in sight.

The two tapes in question were of potentially great importance. One was a brief telephone conversation between Former Attorney General John Mitchell and Nixon on June 20, 1972, apparently the first communication between the two intimate associates after the arrests at Democratic national headquarters three days earlier. Prosecutor Cox had especially wanted to hear this tape because Mitchell had apparently just been briefed about the participation in the Watergate espionage of G. Gordon Liddy, counsel to Nixon's re-election finance committee. Mitchell claimed that he did not tell Nixon about Liddy--who at that point had not yet been arrested--much less about his own role and that of other high officials in Liddy's wiretap plans. To many investigators, that seemed most unlikely.

Buzhardt told Sirica that the Mitchell conversation was not recorded because Nixon had made the call on a telephone not connected to the extensive secret White House recording system. The White House claims that the President used a hall telephone in his residential quarters.

The Sirica hearings centered mainly on the other missing tape,* one that was believed to have been made of a conversation on April 15, 1973 between Nixon and his fired former counsel, John Dean. In that talk, Dean has testified, Nixon admitted he had been "foolish" in discussing Executive clemency for E. Howard Hunt in exchange for his silence. He had also said, according to Dean, that his previous assurance that it would be easy to raise $1,000,000 for silence money for the arrested men was intended only as a joke. That, as Dean saw it, meant that Nixon was trying to cover up that earlier discussion; it contradicted Nixon's later claim that he had actually told Dean that it would be wrong to raise and pay such bribe money. Ironically, it was Nixon's behavior at that session, Dean related, that first led him to suspect their conversations were being taped.

Dead Interval. The 55-minute talk, the White House claimed, was never recorded. Buzhardt at first said that the recording was not made because of "a malfunction or a basic inadequacy of the system." Raymond Zumwalt, a Secret Service technician who had supervised the installation of the system, then theorized that a timing device that was supposed to switch automatically from one recording machine to another when a tape ran out had failed to work.

Later, he suggested that since normally there was a half-hour delay while the timer activated the back-up recorder, Dean's conversation might have taken place in that dead interval. When the length of the conversation was pointed out, Zumwalt suddenly recalled that the changeover timer was set to operate only six days a week, since a single six-hour reel could normally handle the relatively limited weekend conversations. That meant no back-up recorder takeover on Sunday if the tape ran out.

The White House aides thus claimed that the first reel had simply run out because the President had been unusually busy on that Saturday. White House Archivist John Nesbitt, who logs every Nixon meeting, produced records accounting for more than five hours of Nixon conversations on that Saturday. His testimony was marred, however, by his admission that he had reconstructed parts of that day's log some three months later--on July 26, three days after Cox had announced he would subpoena the nine tapes. Buzhardt said that he had ordered the revision of the log because of conflicting statements about who had consumed the President's time that day.

Also baffling was the fact that the carton in which the Saturday-Sunday tape apparently had been kept was marked Part I, suggesting strongly that there had been a Part II. White House Aide Stephen Bull, who had supervised the recording operation, said that he had made the Part I notation on the assumption that "there had to be another reel." The carton was also marked "full removed," while other tapes that had run out before the completion of conversation, it was explained, were marked "tape ran out." That discrepancy, too, has not yet been adequately explained.

As mysterious as the nonexistence of the two tapes is the White House failure to admit long ago that they did not exist, thus avoiding at least part of the latest crisis of credibility. Buzhardt said that he had only positively determined the absence of the tapes on Oct. 27, as he prepared the material for Sirica's inspection. Yet Bull testified that Nixon himself had noted the omissions as he listened to recordings on Sept. 29, before he had decided to yield the tapes.

Investigators were incredulous that the discovery had not been made much earlier. The amazingly sloppy Secret Service record of how the tapes had been handled--some notations of withdrawals were scribbled on scraps of brown wrapping paper, and the returns never noted at all--indicated that Bull had withdrawn 26 reels of tapes on June 4, 1973--the day that Nixon spent nearly twelve hours listening to them. The critical April 15 date was covered by these withdrawals, and it would be astonishing if Nixon spent all of that listening time without trying to hear that vital conversation.

The Watergate investigators intend to subpoena Nixon's tapes for June 4--on the ingenious theory that as he listened to the various tapes in his Executive Office Building hideaway his automatically activated recording system may have picked up the playing of the other tapes. Only if Nixon had listened through headphones would these early recordings be inaudible on the June 4 tape. Buzhardt said in court that the June 4 tape would not be surrendered because "it's not relevant."

Into Isolation. The April 15 date was also covered in a withdrawal of nine reels between July 9 and July 11 by Bull, who gave them to H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's former chief of staff. Bull also said that he checked out 22 tapes on April 25 and 26 and had given them to Haldeman--a surprising fact that Haldeman had not reported in his Senate Watergate testimony. Haldeman has admitted listening to only two tapes (Sept. 15 and March 21), He has been subpoenaed for questioning this week in the Sirica hearings. Further confusing the matter, Senate investigators insisted that Bull told them that Buzhardt had listened to the April 15 tape in late June. Bull testified last week that he had been "educated" that Buzhardt had actually heard a March 20 recording.

Amid the new controversy, Nixon retreated ever more into isolation, restlessly retreating to Camp David, then abruptly departing for Key Biscayne. He left behind his usual traveling aides, Alexander Haig and Ronald Ziegler, and for the first time, the permanent standby pool of seven White House correspondents and photographers who are traditionally near the President at all times.

In Florida, Deputy Press Secretary Gerald Warren said that Nixon would be willing to produce for the court the tape of a memo he dictated about the April 15 conversation with Dean--although Nixon's version is hardly apt to satisfy any of the many Watergate investigators. Some are openly skeptical of the White House claims and suspect that the missing April 15 tape might have been destroyed when Haldeman had it in his possession in July. Warren insisted that Nixon was determined "to clear up this matter" of the tapes and again felt compelled to reiterate that Nixon had no intention of resigning.

* The other tapes include: a June 20, 1972 meeting at which Nixon first discussed the Watergate arrests with Aides John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman; a June 30, 1972 meeting at which Nixon and John Mitchell discussed Mitchell's resignation as Nixon's campaign director; and five meetings involving John Dean and Nixon. According to Dean, Nixon congratulated him on Sept 15 1972 for helping to limit indictments; Nixon first mentioned silence money and clemency with him on March 13 1973; Dean warned Nixon at two meetings on March 21, 1973 of a "cancer" growing on the presidency and who was implicated in it; ways to counter the Senate investigation were discussed on March 22, 1973.

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