Sticky Fingers

The plot thickened as the Senate Armed Services Committee last week pressed its investigation of the documents pilfered from Henry Kissinger's national security office and passed on to the Pentagon. The week's most sensational witness was Yeoman First Class Charles E. Radford, who swore that he had been ordered to spy on the White House. By his account, he had made a fine job of it.

A skilled secretary-stenographer, Radford, 30, was assigned in September 1970 to the Joint Chiefs' liaison office with the National Security Council, which was--and is--presided over by Henry Kissinger. Radford told the Senators that he was ordered "to keep my eyes open for any and all information that might be useful to the Joint Chiefs."

The order came from Rear Admiral Rembrandt C. Robinson, the liaison officer to the NSC for Admiral Thomas H.

Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When Robinson was transferred out in 1971 (he later was killed in the Gulf of Tonkin), the order was reiterated, Radford maintained, by Robinson's successor, Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander.

Staying low-key, as he said he had been drilled by Robinson, keeping his eyes open for anything that might interest the Joint Chiefs, Radford had an easy time stealing and passing on hundreds of papers and documents. "It was a perfect thing," Radford had earlier told the New York Times. "I had everyone's confidence." And, he pointed out, "I had sticky fingers."

After accompanying General Alexander Haig, then Kissinger's deputy and now President Nixon's chief aide, on two trips to Southeast Asia in 1970-71, Radford came back with sheaves of top-secret documents, including "eyes only" memos between Haig and Kissinger.

Radford said that Admiral Robinson took the papers and hustled off in the direction of Moorer's office. The yeoman claimed that Moorer's assistant, Captain Harry Train, once declared, "Radford, you do good work."

In July 1971 Radford managed to get hold of Kissinger's notes of his secret conversation with Chinese Premier Chou Enlai. (Kissinger testified that he believed Radford had actually rifled his burn bag.) According to Radford, Admiral Welander accepted the notes and warned that "I should never tell anybody that I had done it."

Radford also said that he managed to lay hands on an advance agenda for an important meeting chaired by Nixon that Moorer was to attend after the Kissinger trip. Radford testified that Welander gratefully told him that "I had no idea how helpful it was for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to walk into a meeting and to know what is going to be said."

Sensitive Documents. Admiral Welander had a different story to tell the Senators. He hotly denied that he had ever ordered Radford to spy, though he did admit receiving and routinely passing on to Moorer two special packets from Radford. These contained, Welander said, material that supplemented what he had already received from the NSC staff. The new information was in the form of carbons and crumpled Xeroxed copies of staff reports, memorandums of conversations and the like. But, Welander added, he had assumed that Radford had acquired the material as a regular part of his duties, just as he had all the hundreds of other papers and documents that were routinely and properly shared with the Joint Chiefs.

Welander admitted that perhaps he should have tried to find out more about the information provided by Radford. But far from staying on the defensive, the admiral accused the yeoman of being out to get him. Welander's charge stemmed from the fact that in December 1971 he had been the first to suspect that Radford was the one who had leaked a number of highly sensitive documents to Columnist Jack Anderson. The job of finding the leak was turned over to the plumbers and their chief, John Ehrlichman, then Nixon's top domestic adviser.

But when Radford was questioned by the plumbers, according to Welander, the yeoman turned the inquiry round by detonating the bombshell that he had been stealing documents on orders of his superiors since 1970. Ehrlichman then called in Welander and demanded that he sign a statement on White House stationery that, in the admiral's words to the committee, admitted "totally false charges of 'political spying' on the White House." Welander refused to sign.

When he learned about the plumbers' investigation of Radford, Admiral Moorer testified, he twice recommended starting court-martial proceedings against the yeoman, only to be overruled by a "higher authority," whose identity was never revealed to him.

In their appearances before the Senate committee, both Kissinger and Moorer tended to play down the whole episode. Although Kissinger testified that "I must say I was outraged" when he learned that his private papers were being stolen, he absolved the military from any diabolic schemes. Said he: "I think some eager beaver was trying to get Brownie points with his superior."

Since January, Moorer has been insisting that he had not approved the spying, had not known that it existed, and had not realized at the time that anything he received was unauthorized. He did admit to the Senate committee that "on two occasions I was shown papers by one of my staff officers which, it turns out, were acquired in an unauthorized way." The officer was Welander, and the papers were the ones that he testified supplemented the standard flow of material. Moorer maintained that he had not thought the papers unusual because, he said, he was seeing similar ones all along.

Clearly Kissinger and Moorer wish that the whole sorry affair would blow over, but there is certainly still more to come. The Senate committee is planning to call other witnesses to get to the bot tom of the bizarre scandal. As Demo cratic Senator Harold Hughes pointed out, either Admiral Welander or Yeo man Radford has committed perjury. Of particular interest to the Senators is why the White House did not move more forcefully by court-martialing them on charges of theft and espionage.

Play Down. Instead, the only action was that of Kissinger, who summarily disbanded Welander's liaison of fice. The admiral was sent to command a destroyer flotilla for 16 months (he is now back in the Pentagon with the important job of Assistant Deputy Chief of Naval Operations). Radford was as signed to a reserve center in Oregon, where he is unlikely to find anything worth stealing or leaking. In June 1972 Moorer was reappointed to his second two-year term as Chairman of the JCS.

Behind the Nixon Administration's decision to play down the affair was the apparent belief that seeking to punish any of the principals would cause serious foreign policy problems. At the time that he was negotiating the end of the Viet Nam War and arms limitations with the Russians, the President did not want to risk public disclosure of a breach between Kissinger and the military. In the case of Admiral Moorer, there existed no solid evidence linking him to the spy operation. As for Yeoman Radford and Admiral Welander, no charges were brought against them because Nixon and Kissinger were uncertain how much classified material they might reveal in a trial. The President expressed fears of such revelations to Republican Senator Howard Baker, saying that he doubted any convictions could be secured without releasing as evidence na tional security documents in the case -- and this the President said he was flatly unwilling to do.

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