Secretary of State Kissinger, testifying on behalf of the administration’s $5.2 billion foreign aid package at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that the United States had agreed to negotiate future American military assistance to Israel on a long-term rather than a yearly basis. This was the first official acknowledgement that the United States — in an apparent concession to Israel following the Syrian-Israeli agreement on troop disengagement — had granted a long-standing Israeli request to put American military sales and aid on terms of more than one year.
Well‐placed diplomatic sources said that during Mr. Kissinger’s protracted negotiations last month the Israelis emphasized their concern over their security at a time when they were being asked to give up occupied territory to Egypt and Syria. They also expressed concern over the United States commitment to Israel’s security in the light of the improved Arab-American ties. The diplomatic sources said that Israeli leaders had stressed the need for a long‐term relationship in which they would be guaranteed a complete arms program at a set rate, without the inevitable haggling that has occurred every few years, whenever the Israelis have sought new purchases. One source said that the Israelis were thinking of a 10‐year program, but American officials said that they understood the new program would be worked out on a five‐year basis.
American and diplomatic sources here said that the agreement for long‐term military programs was an oral understanding rather than a specific document, but it was not ruled out that a memorandum had been exchanged. In the past, the” United States has agreed to long‐term credit sales only of certain single military systems such as Phantom jets because it was impossible to build enough planes in one year to fulfill Israel’s needs. But now the new arrangement will allow Israel to plan ahead for all her military needs.
Israeli prisoners of war who returned from captivity in Damascus said in interviews today they had been brutally treated by their Syrian jailers. They spoke of harsh treatment during the first four months of their detention and of a marked improvement after the first visit by International Red Cross delegates on March 1.
A 30‐year‐old pilot, Gabi Gerzon, said he had parachuted safely after his aircraft was hit by Syrian ground fire but his interrogators smashed his left leg in the first day of questioning. He declined to discuss details of the questioning. He said he had been thrown into a cell and denied medical attention for two weeks. A medical orderly then inspected him and that night he was hospitalized and his leg amputated below the knee, he said.
At least one wounded soldier died under interrogation, according to the newspaper Maariv. It said he had not been brought back to his room after his third day of questioning and the man who shared the hospital room was told he had suffered a heart attack. The paper did not identity the victim or the source of the information. According to a report in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, the navigator of an Israeli jet downed near Damascus was dead by a MIG pilot as he descending by parachute story was told by the pilot, Ittamar Barnea, who said he himself had been shot in the leg by Syrian ground troops as he came down.
Wounded Syrian prisoners charged today that Israelis had mistreated them and failed to give them proper medical treatment. “Though we treated Israeli prisoners of war with every possible care, the Israelis inflicted psychological torture on captured Syrian wounded, through wrong or insufficient medical treatment,” said Colonel Iskandr Nabra Yazagi, the doctor in charge of Qatana military hospital 20 miles south of Damascus. Colonel Yazagi made the comments to a group of foreign and Arab newsmen who visited the hospital on a government trip to interview some of the Syrian P.O.W.’s who returned yesterday and entered hospitals here for treatment and further examination.
Israel began today a 19‐day phased evacuation of Syrian territory occupied in last October’s war, and military sources said United Nations troops had begun demarcation of the new Golan Heights buffer zone they will man. The official Israeli Armed Forces radio, in a report from the northern front, said the first transfer of land to United Nations troops would occur by late tomorrow. The army sources said Syrian civil authorities and villagers would move back into the evacuated area two hours after the United Nations took formal possession. The entire disengagement process is due to be completed by June 26, according to terms of the Israel‐Syria agreement signed in Geneva last week. At El Quneitra, the rubble-strewn Golan administrative capital that will lie within the buffer zone, a Canadian logistics unit installed itself in a camp due to house the headquarters of the 1,250‐man United Nations Disengagement Observers Force. Austrian, Peruvian and Polish contingents are also members of the force.
Two young Palestinians who hijacked a British Airways jet to Amsterdam in March were sentenced yesterday to five‐year prison terms in the Netherlands. Adnan Nuri, 23 years old, was convicted of air piracy, illegal possession of arms and arson. Sami Tamimah, 22, was convicted on piracy and arms charges. Asserting that they were under orders of the Arab National Youth for the Liberation of Palestine, on March 2 they hijacked a British VC‐10 with 102 aboard on a Bombay‐to‐London flight. They eventually surrendered peacefully at Amsterdam’s airport, freeing all the hostages. But the $6.9‐million plane was virtually destroyed by explosives.
Four more Cambodian Government ministers resigned today, informed sources said. Eight ministers in the government of Premier Long Boret have now resigned since the death of Education Minister Keo Sangkim during clashes Tuesday between military policemen and students. It Was not immediately known if President Lon Nol had accepted the new resignations, by Interior Minister Chhann Solthum, Commerce Minister. Saphon Sarasy, Public Health Minister Sok Heang Sun and Economic Affairs Minister Duong Sareth, the sources said. Two persons were killed as shells fell on Phnom Penh today.
Premier Mariano Rumor of Italy and his key ministers held long meetings to discuss the country’s worsening economic crisis. Meanwhile, there were reports in financial circles that the government would officially devalue the lira by 20 percent, and newspapers and politicians speculated that Premier Rumor’s cabinet might collapse.
The ballet dancers Valery Panov and Galina Ragozina, his wife, who have become central figures in a controversy over free emigration from the Soviet Union, will be permitted to emigrate to Israel, unofficial Soviet sources in Moscow said. They said that the decision to let Miss Ragozina accompany her husband had not been effected by pressure from the West.
After 205 days (almost seven months), hunger strikers at Brixton Prison ended their refusal, since November 15, to voluntarily eat, in return for some concessions within the prison. Force feeding of the strikers had started on December 23. The British Government announced that two Irish sisters on hunger strike in a London jail had taking light liquid food. For three weeks Dolours Price, 23 years old, and her sister Varion, 20, have been taking only water. They have demanded to be moved to a prison in Northern Ireland. Attempts to feed them forcibly had been abandoned. They are serving 20‐year sentences in Brixton Prison for their part in London car bombings last year, in which a man died and more than 200 persons were injured. The bombings were attributed to the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army.
The Government of South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu has made two significant gestures in the past two days that foreign and Vietnamese analysts say are rather clearly intended to improve its image in the United States. First, the Saigon Government freed Trần Ngọc Châu, a former lower house deputy who had been very close to a number of American officials in the sixties. Mr. Châu, who had spent four years in prison, was the most prominent political prisoner held by the government. Second, the government announced today that it was restoring the so‐called “privileges and immunities” of the military delegation of the Việt Cộng’s provisional revolutionary government at Tân Sơn Nhứt Air Base.
The government had cut off the Việt Cộng delegation’s telephone lines to the city, its weekly press conferences, and liaison flights to the Việt Cộng administrative center of Lộc Ninh, asserting that the Communists were launching an offensive in the south. Mr. Thiệu’s spokesmen had earlier insisted that the privileges would not be restored until the Communists manifested their “good will” on the battlefield. But, if anything, the fighting has become even fiercer, with North Vietnamese tanks and artillery striking at outposts only 25 miles from Saigon.
The court‐martial of 57 Chilean air force officials and 10 civilians accused of sedition moved into its final phase with the end of public hearings today. The court, headed by seven officers, is not expected to hand down sentences until the end of the month after reviewing testimony and in some cases recalling defendants, six of whom face the death penalty if convicted.
The court‐martial has attracted wide attention both in Chile and abroad because it is the only open trial of political prisoners here. It is also the first trial of military officials suspected of Marxist sympathies and activities in the days before the military coup last September 11 that overthrew the Government of President Salvador Allende Gossens. More than 6,000 Chileans remain under detention, many of them without official charges against them, and thousands more have faced secret courts-martial in military garrisons throughout the country.
The Chilean military junta announced today that it had made an energetic protest to Britain because of “offensive and intolerable” statements by Prime Minister Wilson. The Foreign Ministry released the text of the protest note, saying it had been delivered four days ago to the British Ambassador, Reginald Seconde.
Federal Judge Gerhard Gesell, weighing the possibility of citing President Nixon for contempt, declared that his rejection of a court-approved procedure for producing White House documents in the “plumbers” case was “offensive” and “borders on obstruction.” He rebuked James St. Clair, the President’s lawyer, for refusing John Ehrlichman and his lawyers access to all of Mr. Ehrlichman’s personal notes on presidential meetings. Mr. St. Clair agreed at a hearing last Monday to make the documents available.
Vice President Ford said today that the possibility that President Nixon might be cited for contempt of court “is a matter of major consequence.” Mr. Ford also said there could be “argument both ways” on whether contempt of court is an impeachable offense. “I would not pass judgment on that at this point,” he said.
Another federal judge, John Sirica, lifted the protective order that has kept secret for almost a month the court papers describing President Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Watergate cover-up? He did so at the request of the President, who said through his lawyer that news reports in which Mr. Nixon was said to be a co-conspirator had made further secrecy unnecessary.
Former Attorney General Richard Kleindienst wept when he was given a suspended sentence for misleading a Senate committee investigating the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Chief Judge George Hart of the Federal District Court placed Mr. Kleindienst on one month’s unsupervised probation and said that he was a man of “highest integrity” but has “a heart that is too loyal.”
With quiet-voiced defiance and profanity, Patricia Hearst promised in a tape-recorded message today to fight on for the Symbionese Liberation Army and declared she was not afraid to die. The voice of the 20-year-old heiress, broadcast over radio station KPFK at noon from a 33-minute tape found behind the studio, was identified by her parents in Hillsborough. “Yes,” a spokesman for Publisher Randolph A. Hearst said, “the voice on the tape is their daughter’s.”
But it was “Tania” who spoke of revolution, recalled her affection for dead SLA comrades and slandered her parents as “pigs,” not the UC student Patricia Hearst dragged screaming from her Berkeley apartment February 4. “Greetings to the people,” she began. “This is Tania.” Taking each in turn, Tania paid tribute to the six SLA members who died May 17 in a shootout with Los Angeles Police Department officers and FBI agents on 54th Street.
She declared her love for “Cujo,” Willie Wolfe, 23, one of those who died, and said Donald DeFreeze, the SLA’s “Cinque,” had taught her “virtually everything imaginable.” “He’d kick our asses if we didn’t hop over the fence fast enough or keep our asses down while practicing,” she said. “While I have no death wish. I have never been afraid of death,” Tania said. “For this reason, the brainwash-duress theory of the pig Hearsts has always amused me.”
Unemployment rose slightly in May, but remained in the general range that has prevailed since the start of the year, the Labor Department said in its monthly report on employment. The jobless rate rose to 5.2 percent from 5 percent in April. It was explained that much of the increase in May can be attributed to a quirk in the April figure, which probably showed unemployment dropping more in that month than it actually did.
A Manhattan psychoanalyst who treated Mrs. Daniel Ellsberg has disclosed that his office was searched by intruders in November, 1971, less than three months after the attempt in Los Angeles by the White House “plumbers” to steal Dr. Ellsberg’s medical records from the office of his former psychiatrist. Dr. Robert U. Akeret, who practices in a penthouse suite in New York, confirmed in a telephone interview that his office had been entered, apparently searched and left in considerable disarray, but that blank checks were the only things missing. At the time of the intrusion, a cabinet in Dr. Akeret’s office contained a file relating to his treatment of Patricia Ellsberg. The cabinet was unlocked, he said, and had also contained the blank checks. The doctor said he had no way of knowing whether or not the files on his patients had been photographed or otherwise tampered with.
The Justice Department today asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation why an agent had questioned a newsman about what the head of another branch of the department had said in a speech. Deputy Attorney General Lawrence Silberman sent the request to F.B.I Director Clarence M. Kelley after the publication of a report that the bureau had gone to a newsman for a transcript of a speech made by Donald E. Santarelli, who has resigned as head of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. “We’re concerned about the appearance that it created when an agent questions a reporter about what a department official said,” explained John W. Hushen, director of public information for the Justice Department.
Under a legislative agreement reached between Senate and House conferees, a temporary ban will be put on research involving the living human fetus, a subject which has aroused great controversy. The ban would be limited to research supported by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which includes a major part of all health-related research in this country.
Detectives and investigators of the prosecutor’s office sought to determine whether a number of South Jersey missing persons cases could be linked to Charles Haley, a 20-year-old factory worker who is suspected of slaying two high school girls who had been missing for three months, and who is accused of kidnapping two young women on Thursday.
Irish actor and singer Richard Harris (43) weds American actress Ann Turkel (27); they divorce in 1982.
The San Diego Padres draft Brown University shortstop Bill Almon #1.
The Giants top Pittsburgh 6–2, dropping the last-place Pirates’ record to 18–32, nine games out of first place. San Francisco righthander John D’Acquisto, winning his fourth game in nine decisions, struck out eight and walked two while scattering nine hits.
The Reds downed Philadelphia, 7–4. Johnny Bench doubled home two runs after two out in the ninth, snapping a 4–4 tie. Bench’s hit, ruled fair by Dick Stello, the third‐base umpire, and protested vigorously by the Phillies, scored Cesar Geronimo and Joe Morgan. Pedro Borbon, the third Cincinnati pitcher, picked up his fifth victory in eight decisions.
The Atlanta Braves blanked the Montreal Expos, 5–0. Buzz Capra held Montreal to three hits to win his fifth consecutive complete game, and Darrell Evans and Mike Lum provided Atlanta’s batting power with two‐run singles. Capra extended to 25 his consecutive shutout inning string, lowering his National League‐leading earned run average to 1.19.
Jim Northrup, who has won his share of games with his bat during 11 seasons in a Detroit uniform, provided the hit for another victory last night in Tiger Stadium. With two out and the bases loaded in the ninth inning, Northrup singled to right field to give the Tigers a rallying 5–4 victory over the California Angels.
At Comiskey Park, a popcorn machine catches fire in right field stands, delaying the game 70 minutes and sending fans fleeing for safety. The White Sox then pop Boston, 8–6. Dick Allen hit his 12th homer, a three‐run blow in the third inning, and Chicago added three more runs in the fifth without benefit of a hit.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 853.72 (+8.37, +0.99%).
Born:
Edward “Bear” Grylls, Northern Ireland-born British adventurer (Man vs. Wild); in Donaghadee, County Down, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.
David Filoni, American director, producer, and screenwriter (“Star Wars: The Clone Wars” (2008-2020 TV series); “The Mandalorian”), in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
Chris Richard, MLB outfielder and first baseman (St. Louis Cardinals, Baltimore Orioles, Colorado Rockies, Tampa Bay Rays), in San Diego, California.
Mahesh Bhupathi, Indian tennis player who won the eight of the Grand Slam events mixed doubles tournaments between 1997 and 2009, and five Grand Slam doubles tournaments from 1999 to 2002; in Madras (now Chennai), India.
Died:
Abdul Rahman Hashim, 50, Royal Malaysia Police officer, and Inspector-General of Police since 1973, was assassinated in Kuala Lumpur.
Émilie Charmy, 96, French avant-garde artist.
History Diaries 