'Holy cow!' - CSI: Watergate - Has an amateur historian found the key to the lost 18 ½ minutes?

[kpete]

CSI: Watergate
Has an amateur historian found the key to the lost 18 ½ minutes?
—By David Corn

...............

"I went, 'Holy cow!'" Mellinger recalls. There were only two possibilities: Either Haldeman had sat through a long stretch of discussion with Nixon and had written nothing down until the last minute or so, or he had taken notes for the rest of the time, and they had somehow gone missing. (Stanley Kutler, a prominent Watergate historian, says that a conversation of this length would normally have caused Haldeman to produce several pages of notes.) Mellinger took a close look at the two pages. There were four sets of staple marks at one corner—as if the pages had been taken apart and put back together several times.

A gap in the notes matching the gap in the tape? Had no researcher, historian, or archivist noticed this before? (Apparently not.) And if there were missing pages, was there a way to find out what had once been on them? Mellinger had an idea: electrostatic detection analysis. That's a proven forensic technique used to capture indentations and impressions on a piece of paper—such as the marks made on a page in a pad by a pen writing on the pages above it. As the book Forensics Demystified describes the procedure, a sheet of paper is subjected to an electrostatic field: "Charged electrons from this static field are attracted to the damaged or impressed fibers in the paper where the indentations have been made." Then toner can be placed on the paper—or on a thin cellophane sheet—and it will adhere to areas that have indentations: "The writing becomes pronounced." Voilà, notes can return from the shredder. The original is not harmed.

Days after his eureka moment, Mellinger emailed David Paynter, the archivist in charge of the Watergate records, requesting that the Archives submit the two pages of Haldeman notes to this procedure. Attached was a nine-page analysis laying out his case. "I believe we now may have an approach to resolving the infamous 18 ½ minute gap," Mellinger wrote.

..............................

Now the Archives, thanks to Mellinger, is once again hopeful. After he filed his request, a document forensics expert at the Archives examined the Haldeman notes, found indented writing on the second page, and concluded that electrostatic detection analysis could work on this document, according to Paynter. So Paynter recommended to higher-ups at the Archives that the Haldeman notes be tested. At press time, Paynter was awaiting the green light from his superiors. "The reason we're going forward with this," Paynter says, "is that we've already tried with the tape itself. Here's another avenue to shed light on an important episode in history. It's very exciting."

more:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/csi-watergate

[ContinentalOp]

1. That is a truly amazing story! -nt-

[BlooInBloo]

2. You mean this 18.5 minute gap?

:rofl:

[kath]

3. Wasn't that called the "Rosemary Reach"?

or something like that?

How con-veeeeeen-ient!

[ColbertWatcher]

22. Another view of the "reach" ...

[Drunken Irishman]

4. I don't get it.

:(

[trackfan]

5. Nixon's loyal secretary, Rosemary Woods (?) demonstrated for the press

how she may have accidentally erased the tape. (No one ever believed this).

[BlooInBloo]

6. That's Nixon's secretary. There's some piece of tape that was claimed to be "accidentally" erased...

a long piece of tape - not sure if it's the same one as the OP or not.

A reporter asked her to demonstrate the position she would have had to hold for an extended period of time, in order to "accidentally" erase the tape, as claimed.

EDIT: Or something like that. I was busy uttering profound remarks like "Goo goo!" and watching colorful shiny things float around in front of me at the time.

[Drunken Irishman]

7. I figured it was his sec...but didn't know the full story.

Thanks!

[kath]

21. But "But a panel of audio experts appointed by US District Court Judge John Sirica found there had

been four to nine consecutive, manual erasures that could not have happened accidentally":
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=110&dat=19770902&id=oHANAAAAIBAJ&sjid=KUoDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6539,5743496

[ControlledDemolition]

45. Great catch! Such coincidence however is not suspicious in a post 911 world! n/t

[MADem]

10. The very one--because everyone puts their foot on the 'record' pedal while they answer the phone! nt

[The Backlash Cometh]

27. Is she a time piece or what?

Someone should put together a cocktail book called, "Famous Secretaries."

That would be dishy.

[hlthe2b]

8. that is fascinating....

I wonder what might be revealed.....

[MADem]

9. This is TOO COOL. We won't get the racist swearing or the nasty comments,

but we'll get a sense of what was discussed.

[TacticalPeek]

11. Rose Mary Woods

"The buttons said on and off, forward and backward. I caught on to that fairly fast. I don't think I'm so stupid as to erase what's on a tape."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_tapes#18.C2.BD_minute_gap_tape

[aquart]

12. Ripped out the tape AND the notes?

That must have been 18 and one-half minutes of being very bad boys, indeed.

[readmoreoften]

13. It'll be nothing compared to what the Republicans do now.

You can bet on that.

[Demeter]

23. It Will Be the Basis for Everything They Do Now

Nixon really started it all, and Regan/Bush took it oer after they sabotaged and stymied Carter for 4 years.

Yes, if this actually happens and we get to hear about it, it should be very enlightening.

[Johonny]

29. they deleted all their email records

and congress did nothing.

[ControlledDemolition]

46. ... and "snuffed' their own IT guru! Another mysterious light aircraft 'accident'! n/t

[kpete]

28. popcorn worthy?

[nilram]

14. holy cow, indeed!

[Sophree]

15. Hooray for Archives and Archivists!

And hooray for amateur historians, too!

:applause:

[Kablooie]

16. Is there anyone still around who might not want this exposed?

[sofa king]

17. Cheney, Rumsfeld, both Bushes, Fidel Castro, and the Washington Post

To name a few.

[ControlledDemolition]

47. E. Howard Hunt doesn't care anymore! GHWB does!!! Therefore...

... "Move right along... nothing to see here." Or, Gerald Posner will write a book re-blaming Castro for JFK's murder.

[bleever]

18. Includes Pat Buchanan arguing that white paper is fine, and built this nation without carbon paper,

and using carbon paper could only lead to trouble.

[BlooInBloo]

19. I love white paper - I use white paper - yaaaay white paper!

:rofl:

[eppur_se_muova]

33. But what color of ink does he use? If it's not white, he's just being a hypocrite.

(again)

[TaffyMoon]

20. I sure hope he can recover the notes -

What a revelation they could be!

[gordianot]

24. More on Cubans and the whole Bay of Pigs thing?

Could even Haldeman have brought himself to write that down?

[L. Coyote]

25. Maybe some who killed who? Who contributed millions? More felonies, NO DOUBT!

[leveymg]

26. Haldeman: "Nixon references to Bay of Pigs . . . actually refererring to the Kennedy assassination."

(6) H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978)

Years later, former C.B.S. correspondent Dan Schorr called me. He was seeking information concerning the F.B.I. investigation Nixon had mounted against him in August, 1971.

Schorr later sent me his fascinating book Clearing the Air. In it I was interested to find that evidence he had gleaned while investigating the C.I.A. finally cleared up for me the mystery of the Bay of Pigs connection in those dealings between Nixon and Helms. 'It's intriguing when I put Schorr's facts together with mine. It seems that in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.

(Interestingly, an investigation of the Kennedy assassination was a project I suggested when I first entered the White House. I had always been intrigued with the conflicting theories of the assassination. Now I felt we would be in a position to get all the facts. But Nixon turned me down.)

And, this from Time Magazine (1978): http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,919342-6,00.html

Much Ado About Haldeman
Monday, Feb. 27, 1978

Once again, Haldeman claims no direct knowledge of who erased that 18/^ minutes from the tape, but he nonetheless accuses Nixon. "My own perception had always been that Nixon simply began to erase all of the Watergate material from the tapes when he started to worry that they may be exposed," Haldeman says. This was the first taped post-burglary conversation. Haldeman believes Nixon set out to censor it, but since he "was the least dexterous man I have ever known," he discovered that "it would take him ten years" to wipe out all the incriminating words. Indeed, court-appointed tape experts detected at least five, and probably nine, starts and stops in the erasure. Haldeman claims he later was "confused" when Nixon referred to the gap as "Rose's 18 minutes"—but that could easily have been the President's way of shifting blame in Haldeman's mind to Rose Mary Woods, who claimed to have accidentally erased at most five minutes of this tape.

As for the smoking-gun tape from three days later, Haldeman adds some spectacular—but unverified—ramifications to the White House efforts to persuade top CIA officials to intercede with the FBI in order to impede the FBI's investigation of the money found on the arrested Watergate burglars. That tape, in which Nixon instructed Haldeman to ask the CIA to do this, put the lie to Nixon's repeated claim that he had not tried to block the criminal investigation into Watergate and had wanted only to protect any CIA secrets involving national security. It showed his real fear was that the money would be traced to his re-election committee, and protecting his own political standing was his real aim.

Haldeman says he was puzzled in that conversation when Nixon told him what to tell the CIA: "Look, the problem is that this will open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing again." When Haldeman did ask CIA Director Richard Helms that day to intercede with the FBI, he reports he at first got nowhere. Helms insisted that no CIA operation would be compromised if the FBI traced the money through a Mexican bank. But then Haldeman did as he was told by Nixon, warning that "the Bay of Pigs may be blown."

According to Haldeman, the reaction was galvanic. "Turmoil in the room, Helms gripping the arms of his chair, leaning forward and shouting, 'The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this. I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs.' " Recalls Haldeman: "I was absolutely shocked by Helms' violent reaction. Again I wondered, what was such dynamite in the Bay of Pigs story?" In fact, the CIA officials then did ask Acting FBI Director Pat Gray to slow the money tracing—and he did for a week or so.

SNIP

In the end, all that we're going to get from Corn's analysis of those notes is more reinforcement of the ZR-RIFLE diversion and Nixon blathering on about the inner cover-story that the JFK assassination was Castro's revenge. The inner cover-story was the one told to the Warren Committee members, and perhaps to Nixon, as well.

[ControlledDemolition]

48. Was Nixon at Murchison's 'shindig' the night before 11/22/63? n/t

[AntiFascist]

51. More background info here...

Written by a successful journalist who covered the Nixon White House:

http://crimemagazine.com/03/richardnixon,1014.htm

Giancana's half-bother Chuck and nephew Sam claimed in their 1992 book Double Cross that the Mafia don had a long, warm, and mutually rewarding relationship with Nixon that dated back to the 1940s. In those times, Giancana was helping Chicago Syndicate boss Anthony Accardo consolidate the city's rackets and gambling operations, and Nixon was a freshman congressman from California. In recounting for his relatives a big favor the congressman did for Giancana back then, the gangster established a direct link between Nixon and a Chicago hoodlum who later moved to Texas and went on to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald: "Nixon's done me some favors, all right, got us some highway contracts, worked with the unions and overseas. And we've helped him and his CIA buddies out, too. Shit, he even helped my guy in Texas, (Jack) Ruby, get out of testifying in front of Congress back in forty-seven … By sayin' Ruby worked for him."

...

But the Warren Commission had not looked carefully at the alleged assassin's ties to the Syndicate. In New Orleans — where Oswald spent significant portions of his life — Oswald's uncle and substitute father was Charles "Dutz" Murret, an important bookie in godfather Carlos Marcello's gambling apparatus. Oswald's mother, Marguerite, dated members of Marcello's gang. Oswald friend David Ferrie worked for Marcello; had alleged ties to the CIA; and, in 1967, was named by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison as a key JFK assassination plotter.

...

That the note was meant for E. Howard Hunt makes sense. Oswald and Hunt once worked out of the same office building in New Orleans. On behalf of the CIA, Hunt had set up a dummy organization called "The Cuban Revolutionary Council" at 544 Camp Street — the same address Oswald put on pro-Castro leaflets he handed out. The same building also housed the detective agency of former FBI agent Guy Banister — who was associated with the CIA, the Mafia, Cuban exile leaders, and suspected JFK assassination plotter David Ferrie.

Ex-CIA agent Victor Marchetti has linked Hunt and Sturgis with Ferrie. Sturgis has claimed: that he knew Oswald; that documents existed at the CIA detailing the role of Ruby in the Kennedy killing; and that Oswald and Ruby once met in a hotel in New Orleans. Sturgis also claimed that CIA Director Richard Helms refused repeated orders from President Nixon turn over to him all of the spy agency's most sensitive files on the JFK assassination.

[truth2power]

52. In the tapes, I always thought Nixon's references to "the Cuban thing"

was a reference to the Kennedy assassination. It's all connected.

I'm reading "Barry & the Boys" by Daniel Hopsicker. I know just about everyone here knows about this book, but if not, it's worth trying to get your hands on it. All the above characters make their appearances. Unfortunately, this book is very expensive, so doesn't have wide distribution (lucky for the Bushies and the Clintons, among others). I got it through interlibrary loan.

A couple of excerpts:

“In November of 1973, while Nixon was still in the White House, an article called, ‘From Dallas to Watergate: The Longest Coverup” came out in muckraking ‘Ramparts magazine, written by UC Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott.”**

“’I believe that a full exposure of the Watergate conspiracy will help us to understand what happened in Dallas and also to understand the covert forces which later mired America in a covert war in Southeast Asia,’ he wrote. ‘What links the scandal of Watergate to the assassinations in Dallas is the increasingly ominous symbiosis between U.S. intelligence networks and the forces of organized crime.’” (xviii)


Another person interviewed by Hopsicker stated that “All these secrets are the same secret” referring to Mena Arkansas and the drug smuggling there, Watergate, the Kennedy assassination etc. (p. 25)



**Apologies to the gatekeepers here. Peter Dale Scott is now writing on 9/11, which, in my view, also falls into the category of “the same secret”.




edit> fixing my html tags for clarity.

[AntiFascist]

55. Yes, thank you for pointing that out!

Mena is always associated with Clinton since he was governor of Arkansas at the time, and Repubs like to smear him with it, but it was also the site of a huge Iran-Contra operation run under Reagan-Bush, and was likely the result of underworld dealings with Latin America. Feds may have cracked down on the mafia-run cocaine operations in Florida, but did they get co-opted elsewhere?

[formercia]

30. This technique works well

I've used it in training. It's easy to do but it takes a bit of practice to do it well. The equipment has been around at least 25 years that I know of.

[nilram]

31. can you get more than one of the prior pages?

If Haldeman took "copious notes" then it seems to me that there must have been more than one page ahead of the last couple. Here's hoping he applied lots of pressure with his writing...

[formercia]

34. It all depends how much pressure was put on the pen.

I did bust some NSA guys overseas. We were sharing accommodations, when I found a legal pad under the coffee table with obvious pen impressions. After doing a partial rubbing with a soft lead pencil, I was able to determine that it was a report on the work that they had been doing. I asked them if it was theirs and they denied it, so I turned it over to the Chief of Station.

I always tell people to use a felt tip pen that won't leave impressions.

They were lucky. It could have been the bad guys that found it.

[H2O Man]

32. Wow!

That is exciting news.

[theMark]

35. I don't know...

...it could be a couple of pages of smiley faces, hearts, and " Mrs. H.R."Bob" Nixon " written about 100 times.

[robertpaulsen]

36. K & R! Can't wait to find out!

:kick:

[jimlup]

37. You mean its not Arlo's Alice's Restaurant?

Sorry for the cynicism. Arlo has always told this as a joke.

[Bette Noir]

41. Ah, you beat me to it.

[gmoney]

44. well, how many things in the world ARE 18.5 minutes long?

"You can get anything you want..."

[pleah]

38. I'm on pins and needles waiting to find out what was on that missing page.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.....

[Bette Noir]

39. Arlo Guthrie revealed years ago what was in that gap.

Chip Carter invited him into the Oval Office when his dad was inaugurated, and told Arlo that they had found a copy of "Alice's Restaurant" among Nixon's personal effects. Arlo believes that Nixon chose to resign the Presidency, rather than let it be known that he had been listening to "Alice's Restaurant."

[jimlup]

40. Yeah Arlo!

Yep, you remember Arlo's story too.

[troubledamerican]

42. Mystery Question

Why not?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.07/nixon_pr.html

[GETPLANING]

43. I have written on many sites

that if a forensic computer engineer can recover deleted files from a hard drive, what is so hard about recovering erased audio from a magnetic tape? Try this at home. Record something on a cassette. Erase it. Put on some headphones and listen to it. The recording is still there, it's just very faint. You have to "overwrite" it a few times to make the recording completely disappear.

[ControlledDemolition]

49. The assassination story of Lincoln stuck... there is only a slight chance that JFK's won't.

Too many people simply, "... can't handle the truth"!

[surrealAmerican]

53. Computer files are much easier to recover because ...

... they are typically NOT erased. The reference to them in the file allocation table (a sort of index that tells where to find them on the disk) is what is erased. The actual file, unless it has been overwritten, is still there.

[defendandprotect]

50. They've been saying that some day the tape, itself, might be recoverable .. . ???

[yellowcanine]

54. Nixon tells Haldeman, "would you please tell Pat Buchanan to stop blowing Spiro?

[havocmom]

56. .