WASHINGTON, Dec. 30— An account of a White House strategy meeting, published to day, asserts that during the recent war between India and Pakistan, Administration officials proposed to let Jordan or Saudi Arabia “quietly” transfer American‐furnished arms to Pakistan.
The account, published in the internationally syndicated column of Jack Anderson, reportedly incensed White House officials, as have other recent Anderson columns that have quoted verbatim from intelligence digests, State Department and other Government cablegrams and even from minutes of secret White House meetings.
Rumors of the Administration's behind‐the‐scenes plan to help Pakistan—which in fact was abandoned—have been published previously. But Mr. Anderson is the first journalist to cite participants in the White House meetings of Dec. 6 and 8 and to quote from their policy proposals.
According to informants in the executive branch, White House officials have strongly criticized their colleagues in the State Department, accusing them of leaking information to Mr. Anderson. These inform ants said that the State Department had vigorously denied the imputations and charged instead that the source of the leaks was probably the National Security Council staff in the White House.
Henry A. Kissinger, President Nixon's assistant for national security affairs and director of the National Security Council staff, was reported ill and un available for comment at Key Biscayne, the winter White House. Ronald L. Ziegler, White House press spokesman, who is on his way to Peking to prepare for the President's visit, confined himself to a “no comment” before leaving.
Mr. Anderson, citing the “miscalculations and misrepresentations” that entangled the United States in a “jungle war in far away Vietnam,” started his column today by declaring his intention to “publish high lights from the secret White House papers dealing with the crisis” between India and Pakistan.
Other Anderson Reports
“These papers bear a variety of stamps — ‘Secret Sensitive’ ‘Eyes Only,’ ‘ Specat (special category), ‘Exclusive,’ ‘Noform,’ (no foreign dissemination) and other classifications even more exotic,” he wrote.
Mr. Anderson wrote that the documents themselves “contain almost no information that could possibly jeopardize the national security.” Rather, he said, the security labels are often used to “hide the activities—and often the blunders— of our leaders.”
Reports extracted from classified documents and divulged by Mr. Anderson in recent weeks include the following:
¶Details of how President Nixon “apparently because he liked Pakistan's strong man, Yahya Khan,” overrode the advice of the State Department professionals and “placed the U. S. on the side of a minor military dictatorship against the world's largest democracy.”
¶Details of the White House meetings of Dec. 6 and 8 in which Mr. Kissinger reportedly asked whether the United States “had the right” to transfer American arms from Jordan or Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and in which Joseph J. Sisco, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs, reportedly urged that whatever could be done should be done “very quietly.” Others identified by Mr. Anderson as having participated in the meeting were Christopher Van Hollen, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near East and South Asian Affairs; U. Alexis Johnson, Under Secretary for Political Affairs, and David Packard, who recently resigned as Deputy Defense Secretary.
¶Details of a cable from Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster, commander of allied forces in Europe, to Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urging that United States officers assigned to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization not be required to testify before a House subcommittee investigating American commitments in NATO.
¶Details of secret intelligence reports regarding Soviet naval operations in and near Egyptian ports and a plot by Arab commandos to assassinate King Hussein of Jordan.
¶Details from United States intelligence reports of a meeting between Nikolai M. Pegov, Soviet Ambassador to India, and Indian Government officials during which the Soviet envoy assured India that the Soviet fleet in the Indian Ocean would “not allow the U.S. Seventh Fleet” to intervene on Pakistan's side.
¶Details of the “tug‐of‐war over U.S. policy among other top officials in Washington, New Delhi and Islamabad” with verbatim excerpts from cables from Kenneth B. Keating, American Ambassador to India, and from Joseph S. Farland, United States Ambassador to Pakistan, to Washington, with each urging American support for the country to which he was accredited.
¶Excerpts from a confidential cable from Emory C. Swank, United States Ambassador to Cambodia, criticizing Premier Lon Nol's “haphazard, out‐of‐channel and ill‐coordinated conduct of military operations.”
Syndicated to 700 Papers
Mr. Anderson, who was a colleague of Drew Pearson, took over the column on Mr. Pearson's death in September, 1969. It is now syndicated to 700 newspapers—of which about 100 are foreign—and is said to have a reading public of 45 million people.
Mr. Anderson said today that the confidential material published in his column did not affect national security.
“Memoranda which would be openly available on Capitol Hill are stamped top secret by the executive branch,” he said. “Meetings that would be open to the public in Congress are rigidly restricted by the executive branch on grounds of so‐ called security. Nine times out of ten there's no security — it's the Administration's way of hiding its blunders from the tax payers.”
Officials in the Administration conceded that Mr. Anderson's information appeared genuine. Several said privately that they learned more about top‐level intragovernmental policy discussions from the column than they would normally learn in the course of their official duties.
“We come in every morning just wondering what's going to hit us next,” said one official. “He's got onto something and no one seems to know how to stop him.”
Mr. Anderson declined to discuss his sources. He noted, however, that when elements of a huge government bureaucracy grow disenchanted with the government's policy, disagreement often takes the form of leaks to the news media.