News stories from Sunday June 3, 1973
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- The FBI, the CIA and high White House officials viewed the investigation in the weeks after the Watergate bugging in June, 1972, as a potential political bombshell and not as a matter of legitimate national security, according to high-level CIA intelligence memorandums. The memorandums were submitted last month to a Senate subcommittee headed by Lieut. General Vernon G. Walters, deputy director of the CIA, and James B. Schlesinger, Director of Central Intelligence. According to the documents, President Nixon's top White House aides repeatedly warned that the on-going FBI investigation into the Watergate episode could lead to high political figures. [New York Times]
- The Senate Watergate investigators have been told that government operatives have committed a number of burglaries besides the Ellsberg break-in, according to Newsweek. The magazine said that the Senate investigators have information from high administration officials that those additional burglaries included break-ins connected with the Seattle Seven, the Chicago Weathermen, the Detroit 13, and the Berrigan cases. In other developments in the Watergate investigation, Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the Senate committee investigating the Watergate scandal, voiced the hope that the hearings could be completed this month with testimony by key White House aides. [New York Times]
- Less than 48 hours after he resigned as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Whitney North Seymour proposed the breaking up of the FBI. Watergate-related disclosures have so shocked him, Mr. Seymour said, that he also recommends that "never again" should the United States Attorney General "be selected from among those actively involved in the political machinery responsible for putting the current administration in office or keeping it there." [New York Times]
- The Soviet Union's supersonic airliner exploded while tens of thousands of spectators watched it making a demonstration flight at the international air show at Le Bourget Airport, near Paris. It was the first known crash of a civilian supersonic airliner. The crew of six, the only persons aboard the Tupolev 144, died. The wreckage of the flaming plane fell on the nearby town of Goussainville, killing about eight persons and destroying or badly damaging many houses. [New York Times]
- Israel released 56 Syrian and Lebanese prisoners of war in exchange for three of her own captured pilots in the first mutual prisoner-of-war release in three and a half years. The men, many of whom had been held for three years, were exchanged in separate ceremonies on the Syrian and Lebanese frontiers after six months of negotiations through the Red Cross. [New York Times]
- Leaders of the political opposition intensified their campaign against the Greek government, declaring that the abolition of the monarchy was an illegal act designed to deceive the Greek people and the world.
Queen Mother Frederika is urging her son, King Constantine II, to fight the military regime in Athens more actively than he has done in the last few years, according to well-informed Greeks in Rome, where the King is living in exile. The Queen Mother reportedly did most of the talking during a two-day meeting of Greece's royal family after the announcement that the monarchy had been abolished.
[New York Times]