Race To 'Unerase' Watergate Tapes
[Original headline: Solving an 18 1/2-minute mystery]
Race on to `unerase' missing portion of 1972 Watergate conversation
WASHINGTON - Richard Nixon's early mutterings about Watergate vanished like footprints in a downpour, removed from secret White House Tape No. 342 by someone who hit the erase button five times or more.
But can the late U.S. president's voice, lost for 30 years, come alive again through the tinkerings of audio experts and machines that pick apart the remnants of sound?
Almost 500 hours of conversations, mostly recorded between January and June, 1972, were opened to the public Thursday at the National Archives complex in College Park, Md., allowing people to copy the tapes on their own recorders.
But we're talking originals here, and federal archivists say they may soon lift the notorious tape from a security vault so an expert, not yet selected, can try to "unerase" the lost 18 1/2 minutes.
The odds against success are steep. All the Nixon tapes are hard to understand, and previous exams of Tape No. 342 offer dim prospects that his voice will rise through the stubborn hum left by the mysterious erasure.
But with new tools of audio and computer analysis — and with years to ponder such a gambit — a handful of audio experts will compete for a chance to scan the flimsy, dime-store tape for words or phrases. The payoff could be spectacular, historians agree, if deciphering reveals what secrets were so damaging to prompt the feverish erasure.
Audio engineers and technicians entertain a variety of fantasies about uncovering the hidden words. All bank on the idea that the original recording or erasure was somehow imperfect.
Some hope the recording was off-centre, leaving vestiges of sound on the tape's edges even after the erasure. Others hope the erase head did not perfectly touch the tape.
One slim possibility, according to James Reames, a retired audio expert for the FBI, is that a speck of dirt may have interfered with the erasure, leaving enough signal behind to reconstruct words or phrases.
"Hopefully, the White House didn't clean and maintain the equipment," says Reames, president of JBR Technology, a Springfield, Va., company that analyzes and restores tapes that have been tampered with or are hard to hear.
The basic science of tape recording has not changed since Watergate.
An audiotape consists of the tape itself, blanketed with tiny iron particles, and an adhesive that keeps the particles bound to the tape. On a blank tape, the particles are lined up in one direction, a uniform pattern like a new-mown lawn.
When sound is made, air moves in vibrations that are picked up by a microphone, which translates them into an electrical signal relayed to the recorder.
In the recorder, the sound signal goes to the record head, a thimble-sized metal box with a slit on one side. The signal goes out the slit in the form of a vibrating magnetic field and hits the recording tape, where the iron particles are rearranged into a pattern that can be read by a playback head, which recreates the original sound.
An erasure occurs when the tape is run over the erase head. That head once again rearranges the iron particles, this time into a random pattern that, if played, simply makes a hiss.
Sound experts tackling the Nixon erasure must search the 1,000-inch gap for any still-organized pattern and enhance it into words — like drawing a landscape from stray brush strokes on a canvas.
Nixon secretly recorded conversations in several locations for about 2 1/2 years, beginning in early 1971. Historians believe he wanted a record for his memoirs, plus an accurate accounting of what was said in private meetings.
Taping also eliminated the need for note-taking aides, whom Nixon deemed "scribbling intruders."
But Nixon's taping systems had numerous flaws, says John Powers of the National Archives and Records Administration, stewards of the Nixon tapes.
The system was voice-activated; recorders switched on when Nixon spoke. But unreliability resulted in frequent starts and stops that left tapes with numerous "whip" or "blip" sounds. The machines sometimes switched on when Nixon was gone, recording unknown aides' conversations, cleaning crews' vacuums and other room noises.
Nixon wanted to minimize system maintenance, so he installed recorders that turned at 15/16 inch per second, an extremely slow speed. This crammed more than six hours of talking onto each reel, but sound quality suffered.
And Nixon's taping environs were acoustical disasters. In the Oval Office, where five microphones were hidden in his desk, recordings were interrupted by Nixon writing on his desk, the thump of his coffee cup and the rotors of Marine One, the presidential helicopter, hovering outside.
Recordings from Nixon's hideaway in the nearby Old Executive Office Building, where he worked on speeches and met with staff, were marred by noise from open windows, electrical interference from air conditioners, a ticking desk clock and the sound of Nixon bumping into his desk.
"The president knocked his knees on the desk a lot," Powers says.
While recording flaws have frustrated federal archivists processing the 950 Nixon tapes, that job is a cakewalk compared with hopes for unerasing the 18 1/2-minute gap in a tape that was faint and distorted to begin with.
But for some specialists, the challenge is too tantalizing to ignore.
"Hope springs eternal," says Paul Ginsberg, president of Professional Audio Labs, a Spring Valley, N.Y., company specializing in tape analysis. "I love a puzzle."
Anyone seeking to work on the original Tape No. 342 must first recover words erased from two test tapes made from the kind of machines used in the Nixon White House — a Sony 800B to record, a UHER 5000 to erase. The first test tapes have been mailed to contenders, who have 60 days to complete the first test.
Historians already have a vague idea of what might be on the tape. It was a conversation between Nixon and aide H.R. Haldeman on June 20, 1972, three days after burglars hired by the Nixon re-election campaign were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex here.
Nixon and Haldeman were worried about the arrests, as Haldeman's shorthand notes from the meeting indicate:
"be sure EOB office is thoroly ck'd re bugs at all times ... what is our counter-attack? PR offensive to top this. hit the opposition with their activities. pt. out libertarians have created public callousness. do they justify this less than stealing Pentagon papers?"
Still unknown is how Tape No. 342 was erased. Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's personal secretary, testified that she accidentally erased the tape while making a transcript.
Woods said she left her foot on a control pedal while answering a phone. Her explanation was widely discredited by forensic exams that showed the tape was erased repeatedly.
The best hope to recover the words, most expert say, involves machines with numerous playback heads aligned in a row to read the tape like traffic cameras aimed at a multi-lane highway.
So far, Tape No. 342 has been analyzed with one head, which reads the sum of the noise. But a multi-head machine could divide the tape into many parallel slivers, searching independently for subtle noise in each "track."
Most tracks, to be sure, will contain nothing. But something might have survived, specialists say. Maybe the original record head was askew or off-centre, delivering the signal to an unexpected place on the tape. If that's the case, computers can zero in on that promising signal while filtering out distortions.
"I can use a special amplifier to detect very low-level signals — hardly detectable," says Ginsberg.
Reames, the former FBI audio specialist, is already contemplating the elaborate treatment he'd give the tape if he is picked for the restoration.
Tape No. 342, now in cold storage, would be brought to room temperature over three or four days. When it came time to play the polyester tape on a multi-head machine, he'd shield it from outside electrical interference — power lines, taxi radios, planes, TV signals and cellphones.
A close-up video camera would document the condition of the tape as it rolls — capturing dimples, wrinkles and fingerprints.
"Whose fingerprints could we find?" Reames asks. "We don't know who handled the tape. We have no idea if the president did."
• Story originally published by:
The Star, Toronto / ON | Bruce Taylor Seeman - Mar 3.02
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