Audio Experts to Tackle Watergate Tape Mystery

On June 20, 1972, President Nixon sat down with his top aide, H. R. Haldeman, to discuss the Watergate crisis that soon would engulf his administration.

What they said has become one of the most enduring mysteries in American political history: the contents of the infamous 18 1/2-minute gap on a tape rolling in the office of White House secretary Rose Mary Woods.

But on Wednesday, the National Archives, encouraged by a committee of technical experts, took the first step toward solving the mystery, setting in motion a process of using modern technology to try to restore the erased words.

The archives is inviting audio experts to demonstrate state-of-the-art techniques that might recapture sounds on that 29-year-old tape, which Haldeman’s handwritten notes showed had included a discussion about Watergate.

“Can it be done? Absolutely, it’s possible,” said Baltimore sound expert Steve St. Croix, who served on a National Archives advisory committee that decided historians should have a crack at finding out what was on the tape.

If the experts are successful, the restoration would leave only one major Watergate mystery still unsolved: the identity of Deep Throat, the person who provided crucial information about the scandal to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.

The conversation between Nixon and Haldeman, which took place three days after the June 17, 1972, break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters, has long been considered the Holy Grail by Nixon-era historians and a landmark challenge by forensic tape experts.

“It was the first time after the break-in that the major participants in what later proved to be a conspiracy to obstruct justice were back in Washington and available to meet together,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor and now a Washington lawyer.

Nixon had been in Florida at the time of the break-in.

A panel of authorities convened in 1974 by then-Chief U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica was not convinced that Woods, Nixon’s confidential secretary, accidentally erased the recording as she was trying to make a transcript, as she testified in court. Rather, someone did it deliberately in five distinct segments, that panel concluded.

Stanley Kutler, a University of Wisconsin professor and Watergate historian, said he is “certain this tape contains discussions on attempts to use the CIA to thwart the investigation,” which might be more incriminating than the “smoking gun” tape, of an Oval Office conversation, that surfaced late in the federal probe and led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

St. Croix said that “any tape that has ever had sound on it can never be completely free of that audio, though sometimes only infinitesimal amounts remain.”

When a recording is made, magnetized particles of iron oxide line up in patterns to represent the sounds being recorded, he said. When a tape is erased, most of the particles are disrupted but some are moved only partially.

And it is these few particles that experts try to hear, according to St. Croix.

One recovery technique involves painting the tape with a chemical substance that allows the patterns to be seen under a special light and then possibly digitized into computer data and evaluated, he explained.

“It might be that we do all this and you get a beautiful digital image of absolutely nothing,” he added. “If it’s not there, we can’t get it.”

Steven Smolian, another audio expert who served on the archives committee, noted that 1970s-era tape-recording and erasing devices were more crude than today’s equipment, which gives hope to some experts.

“I simply don’t know if any voices can be deciphered,” Smolian said. “The original White House recording system was slow, and the sounds are muddy. And I’m unsure whether anyone can recover conversation out of the noise that was substituted when the tape was erased.”

David Pappas, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology labs in Boulder, Colo., said that “if there’s information left there, we’ll get it back without a doubt.” But Pappas doubts that an entire conversation can be re-created.

The archives will ask outside technicians to demonstrate “whether they have the technology of retrieving voices or whatever was on the original tape,” according to spokeswoman Susan Cooper. But technicians must ensure “that the tape will come back to us in its original condition,” she said.

“What the archives is saying,” said Smolian, is “we’re not going to be taken advantage of. You guys show us you can do it and then we’ll invest some money in it. And they should be commended for that.”

Cooper said testing and possible recovery of any sounds could take up to a year.

The conversation between Nixon and Haldeman, both of whom have died, was initially subpoenaed by the Watergate special prosecution force. But the White House subsequently informed Judge Sirica, who oversaw the Watergate case, that a gap existed in the tape. Woods, who is retired and living in the Midwest, took responsibility for it.

Called to a hearing in Sirica’s courtroom, Woods testified that while listening to the tape on Nixon’s instructions she had inadvertently depressed a foot pedal for several minutes while talking to a friend on the telephone.

Although prosecutors could never disprove her testimony, tape experts appointed by Sirica at the time concluded that the recording most likely was erased by hand--and in five separate steps. A suspect was never identified.