His Loyal Staff

"One big fat pain in the ass," is how Secretary of State Alexander Haig raged about leaks, at a private meeting of his staff last June.

"Too much stuff [is] coming out of the department." If he only knew what was to follow. Notes taken at nearly two dozen private sessions with his senior staff found their way to Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward and last week ended up splashed on the paper's front page.

As recorded by the anonymous notetaker, the private Haig is, well, candid in commenting about some of the people he deals with. On former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's penchant for shuttle diplomacy: "I didn't go over [to the Middle East] to pull a rabbit out of the hat a la Kissinger. This Secretary of State is not putting on Kissinger's fedora." On Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington's reluctance to commit Britain to participation in a peace-keeping force for the Sinai: "Duplicitous bastard. European friends --just plain cowardly. British, lying through their teeth."

Luckily for Haig's standing with the White House, his one published comment on Ronald Reagan is a testament to his boss's persuasive powers in "one-on-ones."

Haig in private was often more pessimistic about world problems than in public. He warned his staff in January that once Israel returns the rest of the Sinai peninsula to Egypt in April, "Egypt will go back into [the] Arab world, with [the] U.S. isolated as Israel's sole defender." Egypt's position, he said, is "180DEG different" under Hosni Mubarak than it had been under slain President Anwar Sadat.

The Post did not disclose the source of the handwritten notes, nor is there any indication of why they were leaked. Most are from Haig's daily 8:30 a.m. meetings with a dozen or so senior staffers in the State Department's seventh-floor conference room. It was with tight-lipped humor that Haig last week tried to deflect comment on the titillating, and unsettling, revelations. Referring to Kissinger's excessively candid 1972 interview with an Italian journalist, he said, "Well, Kissinger had Oriana Fallaci, and I have my loyal staff."

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