The "FBI Report"

Last Dec. 1, in closed hearings held by the Senate Rules Committee investigating the Bobby Baker case, Mary land Insurance Agent Don B. Reynolds leveled a barrage of charges against Democrats in high office, testified to parties where "beauties and whisky and money flowed freely." Only last week was the substance of Reynolds' testimony made public -- along with the release of a 30-page document rebutting Reynolds' charges, one by one, which the Rules Committee chairman, North Carolina's Democratic Senator B. Everett Jordan, pretentiously called "the FBI report."

Among the charges and rebuttals:

> Reynolds said that Bobby Baker had told him that "the leader" --meaning then Vice President Lyndon Johnson-- had "interceded" to make sure that the controversial $10 billion TFX fighter-bomber contract was awarded to General Dynamics Corp. The so-called FBI report quoted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as saying that any claim of official pressure brought to bear about the TFX contract was "definitely and categorically" wrong.

> Reynolds said that a Grumman Aircraft official, anxious to land a fat TFX subcontract, visited Baker's Capitol office, left behind a bulging blue flight bag containing $100,000 in "hundred dollar bills that were bound in brown paper or some sort of thing." The report quoted the Grumman official as saying that he had never been in Baker's office and had never paid Bobby so much as a penny "for any purpose whatsoever."

> Reynolds said that in 1949 Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, then a Democratic Representative, while on a European junket used counterpart funds--local funds accumulated by the U.S. abroad and often used to meet official Government expenses--to buy "many articles," including a statue called Dawn. The report quoted Mansfield as saying that if he had indeed spent counterpart funds, it was only for such legitimate expenses as hotel bills, and that his wife had bought the controversial statue with $110 of "her own personal funds."

>Reynolds said that in 1961 Vice President Johnson, while in Hong Kong, spent 150,000 Hong Kong dollars in counterpart funds "in a period of 14 hours in buying personal gifts for people." The report says that at the time Johnson was there, the counterpart fund was down to 37,642 Hong Kong dollars.

The Rules Committee's six-man Democratic majority promptly seized upon the report to try to bring an end to the Baker investigation. "I think it's over," said Chairman Jordan, explaining that the report "makes it obvious beyond a doubt that the testimony of Don B. Reynolds is unworthy of belief."

But did it? In fact, the report was not written by the FBI at all, but rather by a team of Justice Department functionaries who boiled down hundreds of pages of raw FBI interviews. Unlike Reynolds, none of the persons interviewed by the FBI were under oath. The only part of Reynolds' testimony that has at any time been tested by a sworn statement from an adversary witness turned out to be true: that was Reynolds' claim that he had purchased advertising time on a Johnson-owned Austin TV station in return for selling insurance on Johnson's life. The claim was recently corroborated in substance by former White House Aide Walter Jenkins.

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