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>Convicted Wiretapper James W. McCord Jr. contends that unnamed high officials urged that the defendants in the Watergate wiretapping case claim that the operation was directed and authorized by the Central Intelligence Agency. Attorneys handling the case felt that top CIA officials would maintain "a discreet silence" and would go along with this defense.
> Before the Government's case against Pentagon Papers Defendants Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo was thrown out of court (see page 28), unnamed Justice Department officials said that Nixon twice in the past three weeks had tried to keep the department from informing Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. that the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist had been broken into by covert agents operating on orders from people in the White House. Nixon reluctantly agreed to pass along this information only after high Justice Department officials repeatedly advised him that the Los Angeles court had every right to know.
> TIME has traced the missing records of FBI wiretaps, including the interception of a Daniel Ellsberg conversation in 1971 that contributed to the dismissal of the Pentagon papers case. On the orders of Robert C. Mardian, then an Assistant Attorney General, the records were taken from the files of FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover by one of his deputies, William Sullivan, and turned over to Mardian. They went from Mardian to the White House office of John Ehrlichman, chief domestic affairs adviser. Whether they were destroyed, which would be a criminal offense, or are still in the White House is not known. TIME also learned that summaries of the conversations picked up by these taps, which were on the telephones of some newsmen and Administration officials, were sent by the FBI to the office of H.R. Haldeman, White House chief of staff.
>The Watergate contamination spread ever more widely as it was revealed that—in response to requests from White House officials—the CIA and the State Department had helped Convicted Wiretapper E. Howard Hunt Jr. carry out covert activities. These involved either the investigation of Ellsberg or the fabrication of cables falsely implicating President John Kennedy in the assassination of South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.
To sift these and other conflicting claims of guilt, innocence and complicity, the Ervin committee intends to begin in a low-key, methodical manner. The first witness will be Robert C. Odle Jr., Director of Administration for the Nixon re-election committee, who will describe how the committee was set up and operated. Next will be one of the policemen who discovered the five men hiding sheepishly behind a desk in an office at Democratic headquarters at 2 a.m. on June 17. Then some of the convicted conspirators will tell their now-familiar stories of how and why they bugged, burgled and bungled. Another early witness will be Sally Harmony, secretary to Convicted Wiretapper G. Gordon Liddy. She will tell about typing summaries of the illegally intercepted Democratic conversations.