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Spying Gone Haywire "I don't care whether he's a hawk or a dove or a—. If the son of a bitch leaked, he's not for the Government... I've studied these cases long enough, and it's always a son of a bitch that leaks." Thus—according to the transcript, newly released by the Judiciary Committee, of a conversation between the President, his chief domestic adviser John Ehrlichman and Special Assistant Egil Krogh—did Richard Nixon in July 1971 show his outrage over continuing leaks of classified material and his determination to stop them. Since just after taking office in 1969, the President had been disturbed by the appearance of classified information in the press, beginning with a New York Times disclosure that the U.S. was secretly bombing in Cambodia and including Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon papers and the publication of the Administration's position in arms limitations [SALT] talks with the Soviet Union. His concern, argues James St. Clair, was entirely justified, and the wiretaps that he ordered to find the source of the leaks entirely legal. But the evidence on domestic surveillance released last week by the committee shows that the President and his men grossly abused their authority to spy on Americans. Surveillance that began out of concern for national security was used by people whose purposes were purely political. It is illegal, of course, for the White House to use FBI wiretaps to assemble political intelligence.
The evidence recounts much that was already known about the wiretapping that was ordered by the White House and carried out by the FBI. Between May 1969 and February 1971, 13 Government employees and five newsmen were tapped for periods ranging from less than a month to 21 months. So secret was the surveillance that the FBI did not even keep the wiretap logs in its regular files; copies were held by the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover or his assistant William Sullivan, while other copies went directly to the President or one of his closest advisers.
The impeachment panel's volumes show that three people continued to be tapped after they had left the National Security Council and thus had no access to classified material. They were Anthony Lake, Morton Halperin and Daniel Davidson, all former aides to Henry Kissinger at the National Security Council. Furthermore, Lake and Halperin were tapped after they left the Government entirely. According to the impeachment evidence, the political intelligence gleaned in this manner included:
> The "activities of certain potential Democratic candidates for national office." That information was revealed by the tap on Lake, whose phone was monitored for nine months after he left the Government, at a time when he was advising several political Democratic candidates on foreign policy.
> Information about the man whom Nixon at one time considered his most dangerous political rival, Maine Senator Edmund Muskie. This information was gained from the tap on Halperin when he worked as an adviser for Muskie in 1970-72 after leaving the Government.
> Information about the plans of former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford to