Seven Down on Watergate

After laboring for three months, the Justice Department last week obtained the long-expected indictments in the Watergate bugging case--and announced that the investigation was "over, for all intents and purposes." The indictments, which did not involve John Mitchell, Robert Mardian or any high-level personnel of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, failed to explain the motives for the political espionage at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, or who on the President's committee authorized the secret funding of the spy project.

The five men arrested in the Watergate on June 17--James W. McCord, Bernard L. Barker, Eugenio R. Martinez, Frank A. Sturgis and Virgilio R. Gonzalez--were all charged with conspiring to break into the Democratic offices in order to plant bugs, tap telephones and intercept conversations. Also charged were G. Gordon Liddy, a onetime White House aide and former counsel to the Re-Election Committee's finance division, and E. Howard Hunt, a former White House consultant. The violations carry penalties of up to 34 years in prison and $80,000 in fines.

Not indicted was a man who, TIME has learned, monitored and transcribed many of the Democrats' conversations from a Howard Johnson motel room across the street from the Watergate. He is Alfred Carleton Baldwin, a former FBI agent who served as a bodyguard for John Mitchell and his wife Martha when the former Attorney General headed the Re-Election Committee. Baldwin has explained his role in the Watergate affair to both the Justice Department and attorneys for the Democratic National Committee, and is expected to be the Government's key witness in the impending cases.

Baldwin had complained of boredom in guarding the Mitchells and was assigned by McCord, chief security coordinator for the Re-Election Committee, to monitor the bugs. For three weeks in May and June he typed the conversations and gave them to McCord, who converted them into memos that went, Baldwin contends, to the Re-Election Committee. Baldwin's own involvement became known because he had found the bugging, too, a bit boring, and for diversion had placed a call from the motel room to his home in West Haven, Conn. The motel kept a record of the call.

The grand jury investigation also did not go into allegations of mishandled campaign funds, a charge brought against the C.R.P. by the General Accounting Office. The Justice Department has not yet even asked the FBI to investigate those accusations. With the Democrats' civil suit against the Re-Election Committee now apparently stalled in the courts, Democrats in Congress are taking up the challenge, in hopes of learning more before the election. Last week the House Banking and Currency Committee, headed by Texas Democrat Wright Patman, issued a report detailing the movement of $100,000 in Nixon campaign contributions through Mexico and contending that some of it was used in the bugging plot.

The Patman committee report states that Maurice Stans, the C.R.P. national finance chairman and former Secretary of Commerce, knew about the Mexican transactions. Stans discussed the case with investigators for Patman's committee and at first denied any such knowledge. Pressed by Patman, however, he conceded that he had received a call from Texas about the $100,000. TIME has learned that just before talking to the Patman staff, Stans received a call from President Nixon in San Clemente. It was described by White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler as a "keep-your-spirits-up type call." Stans has resisted a formal committee hearing, however, and Democrats hope to subpoena him. Last week Stans filed a $5,000,000 libel suit against the former National Democratic Committee Chairman Larry O'Brien, for "falsely and maliciously accusing" him of "a number of criminal acts." Stans also filed a $2.5 million suit against O'Brien and his attorneys for using the courts "to create headlines for partisan ends." O'Brien has attempted to add Stans as a defendant in the $1,000,000 violation-of-civil-rights suit that he has filed against the Watergate Five. Considering the slowness of the courts and the confusing nature of all the litigation, it seems likely that the Watergate battle will now shift to Capitol Hill.

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