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Sharper Focus. Never seriously shaken in the courtroom was the implication that someone had deliberately, although crudely, manipulated Miss Woods' recorder until satisfied that the 18.5-minute Watergate segment of the Haldeman-Nixon conversation was obliterated. The multiple short erasures were amateurish: a single long erasure would be far more likely to have been interpreted as an accident. Even after making all of the short starts and stops —apparently listening to a portion, then erasing it, then moving on to another part—a shrewder operator would have activated a final continuous sweep of the tape past the erase head. This might have erased the telltale marks on the tape.
As the week's testimony progressed, the focus in time and suspects gradually grew sharper. Ben-Veniste quizzed Louis B. Sims, chief of the technical security division of the Secret Service, which had installed and operated Nixon's secret recording system. Its existence had been publicly revealed by a former White House aide, Alexander Butterfield, on July 16 in the televised Senate Watergate hearings. He said Nixon had had the microphones installed in the summer of 1970 in his Oval Office, Executive Office Building hideaway and in the Cabinet Room to preserve a historical record. Most conversations on his business telephones also were automatically taped.
Sims testified that on Oct. 1 he was asked by Bull, the President's appointments secretary, to secure a recorder "with a foot-pedal capability." Miss Woods had begun working on the June 20 tape at Camp David on Sept. 29, using a Sony 800B machine, but had complained that transcribing was difficult without a foot control. Sims testified that the Secret Service maintained a pool of four Uher 5000 recorders, but none were "in-house" when Bull asked for one. So Simms immediately purchased one for $528.80 from Fidelity Sound Co. in downtown Washington at about 12:30 that afternoon. He checked the machine out and delivered it to Bull by 1:15 p.m. It apparently reached Miss Woods moments later. Up until that time, Sims said, neither Bull nor Miss Woods had received a White House Uher machine from the Secret Service.
The point was significant, since Bull had supplied recorders for listening to tapes to both the President and Haldeman. Sims said that when Nixon spent 12 hours reviewing tapes on June 4, Bull had set up five recorders for the playback—but all were Sony 800Bs. Similarly, when Haldeman listened to tapes on April 25 and 26, Bull did not withdraw a Uher from the pool, Sims said.
If the experts are correct in identifying Miss Woods' Uher as the machine on which the erasure was made, the act must have been committed on or after the Oct. 1 purchase date. The period in which the erasure could have occurred apparently ended on Nov. 12. Sims' assistant, Ray Zumwalt, testified that that was the day on which he rendered the