Watergate Tape: Nixon's Lost Minutes May Be Recovered

Aug. 7, 2009— -- When former President Richard M. Nixon waved his famous, awkward goodbye from the door of the presidential helicopter Marine One and left the White House in disgrace 35 years ago, he also left behind an enduring mystery.

It surrounds a June conversation between the president and his chief of staff three days after the infamous 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee's offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. The discussion between Nixon and H.R. "Bob" Haldeman was captured by the president's secret White House recording system, except for an 18 1/2-minute gap where the tape was later erased.

Efforts to electronically salvage the lost audio from the actual tape have not worked in the past, leaving historians to rely on Haldeman's normally detailed handwritten notes for clues about what he and Nixon talked about.

But amateur historian Phil Mellinger, who spent five years constructing an elaborate Watergate timeline, believes a large chunk of Haldeman's notes taken during that 18 1/2 minutes are missing. Now, he's proposing a high-tech way to make the few pages that do still exist give up their scandal-cloaked secrets.

"I've always been doing high-tech investigations of one type or another," said Mellinger, whose intelligence career has taken him from the Air Force and National Security Agency to the private sector.

He is now the chief technology officer for Turiss LLC, a Virginia-based company that develops software and strategies to fight cyber and financial fraud. "Haldeman," Mellinger said, "destroyed the first 17 minutes of his notes and left the conclusion of his notes, which was not incriminating."

Mellinger's unique proposal was first reported by Mother Jones, which detailed the amateur historian's 'eureka' moment in late July.

The two remaining pages of notes from the meeting -- written by Haldeman on yellow, lined pads -- are stored at the National Archives facility in College Park, Md. Mellinger, who has examined the documents, says there are faint impressions on the pages, made by a ballpoint pen writing on the pages above them.

Those indentations, Mellinger believes, could be deciphered with a forensic technique called electrostatic detection analysis.