Animals in the Forest

The outcome of the Watergate investigation may hinge to a considerable degree on the tangled White House tapes. Last week the Central Intelligence Agency admitted that it had destroyed several other tapes that were recorded at the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters and could have had a direct bearing on the case.

Two weeks ago, Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, Republican vice chairman of the Ervin committee, learned that the CIA's offices until recently were equipped with a tape-recording system similar to the one that was in the White House until last summer. Since there were known to have been meetings or telephone calls between the White House "plumbers" and CIA personnel, it occurred to Baker that he might be able to get tape recordings of these conversations from the agency's files. When he asked about the tapes, however, he was told that they had all been destroyed on Jan. 18, 1973. That was exactly one day after the CIA had received a letter from Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield requesting that all evidence relevant to the Watergate investigation be safeguarded.

CIA Director William Colby, who has been on the job only since last September, says that the tapes may have been destroyed inadvertently, but he has promised to cooperate fully with Baker in an investigation. For a start, Baker has requested a report on why the material was destroyed after Mansfield's letter arrived, and a reconstruction, if possible, of the contents of the tapes.

Says Baker of the episode: "It's possible, of course, that the Mansfield letter was somehow lost in channels before the destruction occurred. But when you recall all the talk of CIA involvement and the President's own statements about the possibility that the CIA might be compromised, and then when you hear that the CIA had original documentary evidence and 'routinely' destroyed it -- well, it seems to me at best to be questionable judgment."

Subtle Motives. Baker learned about the CIA tapes while conducting his own private investigation of the national security aspects of the Watergate affair -- everything from the Pentagon papers case, which led to the formation of the plumbers' unit in June 1971, to the Pentagon's spying on the National Security Council, which first came to light last month (TIME, Jan. 28).

Some Democratic observers in Washington openly question the Senator's motives in pursuing his private investigation. They speculate that he may be making a subtle effort to rescue the Administration, perhaps by announcing on the eve of an impeachment vote in the House that the President had been right, and that grave matters of national security were, after all, inextricably intertwined with the Watergate affair. Baker maintains that he is simply trying to get to the bottom of the President's repeated assertions that the White House was anxious to limit the Watergate inquiry not to cover up wrongdoing within the Nixon Administration but to prevent probers from compromising the nation's security. "There are animals crashing around in the forest," says Baker. "I can hear them, but I can't see them."

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