"Some Foolish Mistakes"

Ever since the Watergate breakin, many observers have wondered whether the CIA was involved in planning and carrying it out. Five of the seven burglars had been involved with the agency at one time or another, and they certainly used its methods, however ineptly. Former Presidential Counsel Charles Colson even went so far as to speculate that the CIA might have been responsible for the whole Watergate operation.

No one has pursued the CIA connection more diligently than Senator Howard H. Baker Jr., vice chairman of the Senate Watergate committee. Indeed, he has been criticized for attempting to divert blame from the White House. Last week, after nine months' research, he finally released his long-awaited report. While it raised disconcerting questions about CIA participation, it provided no evidence that the agency either planned or executed the Watergate operation. If anything, the agency was apparently a victim of White House machinations.

The most questionable act that Baker examined was the burning of James McCord's files shortly after the breakin. McCord, one of the arrested burglars, worked for the CIA until 1970. When his wife set fire to his papers in their house, a CIA operative named Lee R. Pennington Jr. happened to be on hand. Pennington testified that his presence was just coincidental, but the Baker report charges that Pennington "destroyed documents which might show a link between McCord and the CIA."

Wiped Tapes. The CIA did not at first report the incident to the FBI or the Senate Watergate committee, the report charges, because CIA officials feared that Pennington might have operated as a domestic agent, possibly in violation of the agency's charter. Not until last February was the information released to the Ervin committee, and then only because a CIA employee stubbornly insisted on it. Explaining its delay in taking action, the CIA claims that its director of security did not learn of the McCord episode until last February.

Another murky episode was the destruction of some CIA tapes in January 1973, just before Richard Helms departed as agency director. Among the materials lost were tapes of Helms' telephone conversations with President Nixon, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. A few days before the destruction, the Senate had requested the agency to safeguard all evidence pertaining to Watergate; Helms later insisted that none of these conversations were related to the matter. He also explained that the wipe-out of the tapes was customary before a new director took over. But the report contends that never before had there been such a sweeping destruction of CIA tapes.

A third key area of focus in Baker's report is the relationship of Watergate Conspirator E. Howard Hunt with the CIA. A longtime employee who retired from the agency in 1970, Hunt exploited his CIA connections to assist him in his Watergate activities. At White House request, CIA psychiatrists helped put together a profile of Daniel Ellsberg, who had released the Pentagon papers; other agents used CIA labs to develop photos taken by Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy when they were casing the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

Hunt had still another CIA connection. Upon retiring from the agency, he went to work for Robert R. Mullen & Co., a Washington public relations firm that once served as a CIA cover in addition to its regular commercial jobs. Working with Mullen President Robert Bennett, Hunt conducted an investigation of Senator Edward Kennedy's accident at Chappaquiddick, persuaded Lobbyist Dita Beard to issue a statement intended to clear the Nixon Administration of any impropriety in its dealing with ITT, and estimated the cost of a wiretap of Author Clifford Irving on behalf of Howard Hughes. CIA officials denied any involvement in these activities.

Baker admits that there are no "conclusions" to be drawn from his report on the basis of the evidence he has been able to gather. After reading the report, Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the Watergate committee, said that he had learned nothing new about the CIA role.

"I think it made some foolish mistakes," he added, "but Watergate came directly out of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, with the assistance of certain White House aides."

Yet the report is dismaying because it shows how easily some CIA employees were drawn into the scandal and, with too few questions asked, gave aid to lawbreakers and cooperated with dubious White House requests. In the process, the CIA was tarnished -- along with virtually every other individual and agency connected with Watergate.

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