CSI: Watergate
Has an amateur historian found the key to the lost 18 ½ minutes?
By David Corn
Mother Jones
Tue July 28, 2009
ON JUNE 20, 1972, President Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, met in Nixon's hideaway office at the Old Executive Office Building. Three days earlier, White House-connected dirty tricksters had been nabbed breaking into the Democratic National Committee's Watergate offices, and the 79-minute-long conversation—with Nixon's secret taping system running and Haldeman taking his typically meticulous notes on a tablet of yellow lined paper with a ballpoint pen—at one point turned toward the break-in and how to craft a counterattack. What exactly the two men said to one another would become one of the great political mysteries of the 20th century: Sometime during the Watergate scandal, 18 ½ minutes were suspiciously erased from the tape recording of this meeting.
Many have since tried to figure out what transpired during that gap. But now, Phil Mellinger, a one-time systems analyst at the National Security Agency (NSA) who went on to a career in high-tech corporate security, thinks he has discovered a way to determine what was wiped off the tape. And the National Archives believes he's on to something. In response to a request from Mellinger, the Archives unit in charge of the Watergate files has proposed conducting a scientific test that could yield information on what was said during the missing minutes. This procedure would not, as has been tried unsuccessfully in the past, seek to recover the obliterated audio. Mellinger's approach takes a simpler route: resurrecting Haldeman's notes via a CSI-ish technology that can extract information from the imprints made by a ballpoint pen.
(Original here.)
By David Corn
Mother Jones
Tue July 28, 2009
ON JUNE 20, 1972, President Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, met in Nixon's hideaway office at the Old Executive Office Building. Three days earlier, White House-connected dirty tricksters had been nabbed breaking into the Democratic National Committee's Watergate offices, and the 79-minute-long conversation—with Nixon's secret taping system running and Haldeman taking his typically meticulous notes on a tablet of yellow lined paper with a ballpoint pen—at one point turned toward the break-in and how to craft a counterattack. What exactly the two men said to one another would become one of the great political mysteries of the 20th century: Sometime during the Watergate scandal, 18 ½ minutes were suspiciously erased from the tape recording of this meeting.
Many have since tried to figure out what transpired during that gap. But now, Phil Mellinger, a one-time systems analyst at the National Security Agency (NSA) who went on to a career in high-tech corporate security, thinks he has discovered a way to determine what was wiped off the tape. And the National Archives believes he's on to something. In response to a request from Mellinger, the Archives unit in charge of the Watergate files has proposed conducting a scientific test that could yield information on what was said during the missing minutes. This procedure would not, as has been tried unsuccessfully in the past, seek to recover the obliterated audio. Mellinger's approach takes a simpler route: resurrecting Haldeman's notes via a CSI-ish technology that can extract information from the imprints made by a ballpoint pen.
(Original here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home