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> Italy. The search for "Antelope Cobbler" is on again. When portions of a U.S. Senate subcommittee report were leaked last April, they referred to an Italian Premier (code-named Antelope Cobbler in various memorandums) who allegedly received payoffs from Lockheed between 1965 and 1969. Speculation about his identity centered on three former Christian Democratic Premiers: Giovanni Leone (now President of Italy), Aldo Moro and Mariano Rumor, all of whom denied any involvement. The allegations remained unsubstantiated. Then last week the Italian leftist weekly L'Espresso published three documents purportedly showing that Lockheed intended to pay $43,000 in bribes to current Premier Giulio Andreotti. The immediate public and press response was suspicion that right-wingers had planted forged documents in an effort to break up Andreotti's fragile, five-week-old Christian Democratic minority government, which relies heavily on tacit Communist support. Carl Kotchian and Dale H. Daniels, the Lockheed officials who were supposed to have written two of the documents published by L'Espresso, denied any knowledge of them last week. The U.S. Senate subcommittee reportedly had received no testimony on Andreotti, who dismissed the charges as "pure invention."
> West Germany. The newly opened election campaign heated up last week when the Bonn government announced that it would send a high Justice Ministry official to Washington in the next few weeks to make final arrangements for access to U.S. documents concerning the Lockheed scandals. This rekindled interest in the allegations that Lockheed bribes had gone to the right-of-center Christian Social Union, the Bavarian ally of the Christian Democrats, and its longtime leader, former Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss.
Late last year, former Lockheed Lobbyist Ernest Hauser, the man who first brought Prince Bernhard's name into the Lockheed scandals, told Senate investigators that Strauss and the C.S.U. had received at least $10 million for West Germany's purchase of 900 F-104 Starfighters in 1961. The party and its leader denied the allegations, and Strauss filed a slander suit against Hauser. The quarrel ended what was left of a longstanding friendship that went back to Mauser's days as a U.S. Army intelligence officer during the postwar occupation of Germany. Hauser had helped Strauss get his start in local Bavarian politics, and Strauss repaid him years later when, as Defense Minister, he asked Lockheed to put Hauser on the payroll. Since Hauser's allegations were not corroborated, the Lockheed issue was simply dropped in Bonn.
Now that Chancellor Helmut Schmidt has said he is sending a Justice Ministry official to the U.S., Strauss is angrily claiming that Schmidt deliberately dawdled in gaining access to the documents, which he says could clear him long before the Oct. 3 elections.