Weicker Cites White House Abuse of IRS

WASHINGTON--The White House made a total effort dating from the first days of the Nixon administration to use the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies to control its political and ideological opponents, Sen. Lowell P. Weicker (R-Conn.) said yesterday.

Weicker made public a series of memos which he said showed the systematic abuse of the IRS, starting with the creating in 1969 of a secret task force to collect tax information on activist groups.

Using another set of documents given the Senate Watergate Committee, Weicker detailed what he said were 54 separate undercover investigations conducted for the White House by retired New York City detective Anthony T. Ulasewicz.

They included three separate and unsuccessful attempts to link Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) to "wild parties" in California, Hawaii, and Arizona.

Testifying before a joint session of three Senate subcommittees investigating the extent of covert government intelligence operations, Weicker also produced documents indicating the White House had a strong interest in the tax problems encountered by presidential friends, evangelist Billy Graham and actor John Wayne.

Wayne has sent a telegram to Weicker saying he never asked for or received IRS favors.

Weicker advised Wayne in a telegram to take his complaints to the White House and said he was sending the actor the memos in which White House aides John W. Dean III and John Caulfield discussed his tax difficulties.

Weicker produced what he said was an IRS memo that showed that Ronald Reagan, now California's Republican governor, was assessed $13,091 in taxes owed for the years 1962 through 1965.

Weicker said the IRS memo on the formation of the special intelligence task force discussed various means by which the tax laws could be used to attack what it described variously as activist, ideological, radical, militant, or subversive groups.

The memo, signed by D.O. Virdin, added: "We do not want the news media to be alerted to what we are attempting to do or how we are operating because disclosure of such information might embarrass the administration..."