Still Secret - Who Hired Spies and Why

The Watergate bugging trail was marked by questions not asked of witnesses, answers not given, witnesses not called to testify and some lapses of memory by those testifying under oath.

Five of the seven original defendants in the case pleaded guilty in the opening days of the trial, narrowing its scope from the start.

All seven men were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiring to obtain information from the Democrats by breaking into their headquarters at he Watergate, stealing their documents, photographing their correspondence, wiretapping their telephones and planting electronic eavesdropping devices in their offices.

The presiding judge said repeatedly that he wanted the trial to probe deeply into the bugging of the Democrats' Watergate headquarters -- its sponsorship, funding, purpose and possible relationship to allegations of a wider campaign of political espionage and sabotage.

But "all the facts have not been developed by either side," U.S. District Chief Judge John J. Sirica said last week to lawyers for the prosecution and the defense.

Twice Sirica ordered the jury from the courtroom after the prosecution's examination of key witnesses and then questioned them himself about matters not probed by the prosecution.

On Jan. 15, during the trial's second week, Sirica addressed four of the defendants after they had pleaded guilty and outlined some of the issues he said he expected to be developed in the courtroom. Sirica said that the jury in "going to wonder, who, if anyone, hired you to go in there, if you were hired.

"I am just assuming that they (the jury) will be asking themselves these questions," Sirica continued as the four men stood before him. "They are going to want to know if there are other people, that is higher-ups in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or any party who are mentioned or who are involved in this case and should be in this case, you understand that?"

"The question will arise, undoubtedly, what was the motive for doing what you people say you did," Sirica said. "They will want to know where this money cam from, who was the money man, who did the paying off ... They are going to want to know a lot of things before this case is over."

Those questions could have been posed to witnesses from three sources -- government attorneys representing the prosecution, lawyers for the defense and the judge.

When the trial of the last two defendants still on trial -- former White House aide G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord, Jr., the former security coordinator of President Nixon's re-election committee -- ended yesterday in conviction of all counts, the question remained unanswered. During cross examination of government witnesses, their attorneys quite expectedly have not pursued the lines of inquiry suggested by judge Sirica.

The government for its part, acknowledged that it knows the answers to many of the judge's questions but contends they are more inferential than legally conclusive -- and therefore should not have been raised by the prosecution during the trial.