An Excessive Need to Know

Was it an updating of Seven Days in May, Fletcher Knebel's 1962 novel in which the military tries to take over the U.S. Government? According to news accounts, the Pentagon had planted a spy ring in the White House to ransack Henry Kissinger's classified files and copy documents relating to the National Security Council's most sensitive deliberations. The stolen information was then relayed to Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other Pentagon brass.

The bizarre--but basically true --tale raised a host of disturbing questions. Why did the military have to resort to spying to get information that it claimed was essential to maintain the nation's defenses? Was the Pentagon prying into matters that were none of its business? Were some leaders of the armed forces contemplating a coup? As it turned out, the story of the Pentagon v. the White House was not quite Seven Days in May but several deeply disquieting days in January (when the story first surfaced). It was something less than apocalyptic, but troubling nonetheless to a nation already alarmed about Government duplicity and secrecy. By authorizing the secret surveillance in the first place, by initially denying and finally admitting complicity in the affair, America's military found itself caught in the same kind of unseemly episode that has besmirched the record of the Nixon Administration.

The Plumbers. The Pentagon's snooping occurred in 1971, when the Administration was engaged in a series of delicate foreign policy initiatives--an open-door policy with Peking, arms talks with Moscow, parleys with Hanoi to end the war in Southeast Asia. Fearing that publicity might imperil these negotiations, Nixon and his national security adviser, Kissinger, resolved to keep them secret. Not even Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers were to be fully informed.

For all the precautions, there were still leaks. In June the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon papers. As Nixon later contended: "There was every reason to believe this was a security leak of unprecedented proportions." To find out who was responsible, Nixon created the plumbers, an investigative unit designed to locate and seal off leaks. Yet the unauthorized disclosures continued. In July a Times story outlined the U.S. negotiating position at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Helsinki.

In December 1971, Columnist Jack Anderson obtained documents that quoted Kissinger as telling his staff that Nixon wanted the U.S. to "tilt" toward Pakistan during its war with India. Infuriated, Kissinger demanded a White House investigation of the leak.

The plumbers soon turned up a prime suspect: Yeoman First Class Charles E. Radford, now 30. He was serving as admiral's writer (military parlance for secretary-stenographer) to Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, now 49, who was the Joint Chiefs' liaison to the National Security Council. Welander's job was to attend NSC meetings, take notes and brief the Chiefs on what happened, as well as to pass on other authorized data about foreign policy.

All this was strictly legitimate; swiping secret documents was not. Because somebody was getting such documents out of the NSC, however, Kissinger requested and then Attorney General John Mitchell ordered that the FBI tap the telephones of Radford and four associates for a six-month period. Radford, a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, admits knowing Anderson--they worshiped at the same Mormon church in Washington--but he denies that he was the source of the leak.

Despite such denials, the plumbers concluded that Radford and perhaps also Welander were clandestinely delivering national security information to the Joint Chiefs. But when the investigators followed the trail to the Pentagon and proposed giving lie detector tests to military personnel, Defense Secretary Laird threw them out. Laird also ordered J. Fred Buzhardt, then the Pentagon's general counsel, to find out what was going on. Buzhardt reported back that Radford and Welander had indeed provided high-ranking officers with copies of purloined classified information.

Among these were documents obtained by Radford when he was Kissinger's secretary-stenographer on trips abroad; one of these trips may have been the secret visit to China in July 1971, five months before the snooping was discovered. Buzhardt did not implicate Moorer; that was done in a report to the White House in early 1972 by David Young, who had been transferred from Kissinger's staff to the plumbers' unit.

No Discipline. Despite Young's findings the Administration decided for several reasons not to discipline anyone involved. Nixon did not want to broadcast the quarrel between Kissinger and the military while delicate negotiations were under way. Evidence of Moorer's involvement was not conclusive at that point, and the President feared that punishing Radford and Welander might somehow cause more diplomatic secrets to be revealed to the public. Radford was shifted to Salem, Ore., where he now works as a personnel administrator at the U.S. Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Training Center. Welander was sent to Charleston, S.C.; he commanded a flotilla of destroyers there until May 1973, when he became an Assistant Deputy Chief of Naval Operations in the Pentagon. In June 1972, Nixon reappointed Moorer Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. To prevent future military snooping, Kissinger abolished the Joint Chiefs' liaison with the Security Council.

When the story of the stolen documents finally broke this month, a Pentagon spokesman tried to dismiss it as the result of "overzealousness and overexuberance" on the part of low-ranking staff members. Some officers privately said, however, that far from being gung-ho, Radford and Welander did no more than what is expected of most liaison personnel. The military, loathing surprises, takes extraordinary steps to keep itself apprised of what is going on in Washington. At least 515 liaison officers are assigned to civilian agencies; there are even five in the U.S. Postal Service. Declared one retired admiral: "Military people are spying on every branch of Government. There are ten of them on Capitol Hill and [part of] their job is to report back not only normal information but also the eating and drinking habits of everybody up there. We had a hard time cracking the General Accounting Office, but now the Navy has a commander at the GAO to keep it informed." Said another naval officer: "We used to handle cable traffic for the State Department, and we weren't above picking off a few messages."

"Back Channel." At first Moorer dismissed the whole snooping story as "ludicrous" and declared that he had never authorized anything like it. Last week, however, he admitted on NBC'S Today show that he had received some illicitly obtained documents from Kissinger's office in the form of "roughs" and "carbon copies." He had not closed off this "back channel" of information, he said, because everything he got was "essentially useless." In any case, he later got the same information through regular contacts with the White House. Moorer's confession left many viewers incredulous. Was he saying that, if the information he was receiving on the "back channel" had proved to be essentially useful, he would have choked off the spies? That seemed so implausible as to be ludicrous indeed.

For their part, Administration officials initially depicted the snooping affair to newsmen as extremely serious and as justifying the work of the plumbers. (That work included the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist.) By last week White House officials were shifting gears and insisting that the snooping case was really unimportant after all. Just why they did so is unclear. Perhaps the Administration realized that few people would accept the Pentagon's spying as the real reason why Nixon did not want the plumbers to be fully investigated. In any case, both the White House and the Pentagon obviously hoped that the story of the snooping affair would quickly fade away.

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