THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON

...At the time, he was also ADI's attorney—a dual role labeled by Senator William Proxmire "a clear and ob-vious conflict of interest which to this day he still refuses to recognize...

...Now heading up the CIA's Latin American Operations is Nestor Sanchez, a veteran operative who was notorious during his stay as Guatemala Station chief...

...But his per-sistence through the months has finally earned him a few fellow travelers...

...On one particular day, July 8, he seemed to put his finger on the button...

...But H?gel clearly did not have the support of the Ivyish, pipe-smoking old pros with the strong chins who make up the clandestine Services of the CIA—a bunch in retreat over the past half decade, but recently feeling their oats with the election of Ronald Reagan...

...The jury awarded the plaintiff $40,425...

...There used to be a "great time for the civil rights movement, and we all took pride," he noted during a long period on the floor...

...If he can't wait that long, the gov-ernorship may be tempting...

...As if to underscore that point, the very day (July 9) the United States announced that human rights considerations would no longer be a factor in arms sales, two Argentine women whose husbands have disappeared were stopped at the airport upon returning from abroad, and copies of Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number were confiscated from them...

...We are not going to be liberal with the Constitution...

...Casey turned the records over to Attorney General and campaign manager John Mitchell for "safekeeping...

...And what better a conduit than Bob Woodward, gener-ally credited (unfairly, I think) with ridding the country of Richard Nixon...

...Country desk officers at the State Department refer routine in-quiries to the press office, while their coun-terparts in the National Security Council say all interviews must be cleared with Richard Allen...

...September Briefing Gambling on the Environment Much was made of the oil...

...where he was brashly and arrogantly obtru-sive, the post required discretion...

...It is a long road...

...Weicker's stand against the HelmsJohnston attack on the Supreme Court ini-tially produced a big ho-hum...

...Having possibly put his—however reiue-tant—imprimatur on the H?gel purge, Casey himself may reap the continuing whirl-wind...

...Silkwood trial testimony established that plutonium resi-due in the floors and walls has been simply painted over to contain it...

...Thus, the Operation carried the requisite "plausible denial...

...RONME'S WORLD Tom Harkin, the earnest and hardworking Democratic Representative from Iowa, had a tough enough time during the Carter Administration...

...The dirty tricks boys are hungry, and may quickly covet the top job for one of their own waiting in the shadows...

...The story in The Post—known in many embittered corners here as "Pravda on the Potomac"—carried the by-line of Metropolitan Editor Bob Woodward, once the whiz kid of Watergate but more recently the embarrassed midwife of the Janet Cooke fairy tale...

...Casey instead used it for his own Company...

...Missing later were papers belong-ing to the board of directors of the associa-tion—papers that dealt with strategy for fighting the reorganization of OSM...

...H?gel was first an executive assistant to Casey, but when he was appointed to head the prestigious dirty tricks section of the spy agency, it turned out his experience in these matters was limited to an illegal stock manipulation in one of his companies several years ago...

...In other words, he would invalidate through legislative hat what the Supreme Court has ordered...

...The chorus of boos was broadeast live on PBS from coast to coast...

...Harkin Back to Iowa Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin, key human rights activist in the House of Representa-tives, is eyeing the Senate seat of New Right freshman Charles E. Grassley, open in 1987...

...In mid-July, the office was bro-ken into...

...Talking to an Alabama reporter about his chastity bill, Denton confidentially explained, "I don't care if they tickle where it itches, I'm talking about screwing...

...Behind Ctosed Doors Ronald Reagan's foreign policy Operation is battening down the hatches...

...WhoElectedHim...

...We are going to be precise...

...It's simply not true," he said in exas-peration when the decision became public...

...K-M officials say it is now "clean" enough to be reopened as a coal liquefaction research and development Operation...

...Representa-tive Joseph Addabbo...

...in addition to the recent Multiponics Company charges, the record (from hearings on his confirmation as Securities and Exchange Commission head in 1971) shows: 11 In 1961, as chairman of Advancement Devices, Inc...

...ADI), Casey settled out of court a suit that charged him with purveying false and misleading information in a Company prospectus...

...Apparently, H?gel was underqualified...

...It was easy to conclude that the ouster of H?gel was, in fact, one of the more clever dirty-trick Operations to surface in recent years...

...Through the blistering weeks of June and July, as the Reagan budget machine flattened the Congress, Weicker held the floor of the Senate against Helms and Johnston, maneuvering, cajoling, blocking, and appealing to the Senate's higher con-science—should there still be one...

...Yet Lowell Weicker would seem to merit a slap on the back for his lonely stand against the machinations of Republican Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Demo-crat Bennett Johnston of Louisiana to gut two decades of civil rights progress...

...Lower-ranking CIA officers there were so turned off, say the sources, that requests for transfers out from under Sanchez were common...

...Perhaps it began with his emotional outbursts during the Watereate hearines...

...He will need more friends, but perhaps, before it is too late, courage will be found among the Senators who are busy handing over the keys of the Government to industry and the Pentagon...

...While there, say sources, Sanchez ap-proved of the Guatemalan military's "death squad" missions to assassinate moderate as well as revolutionary leaders...

...A stock manipulation or two would nor-mally not be something over which CIA types would get exercised...

...We are not going to play fast and loose with it...

...11 In 1965, as part owner and chairman of the Kalvar microfilm Company, Casey was sued by stockholders who charged he sought to evade California securities laws during the takeover of another Company...

...when his spurting attackson Richard Nixon gained him affcc-tion from the public and derision on Capitol Hill...

...Except for oc-casional shots by White House aides across the bow of Alexander Haig, reporters' access to key middle-level officials has been severely restricted...

...The levels of violence and ar-bitrary arrests, in fact, have escalated...

...It's just like old times...

...The leaked remark drew a round of clucking in Alabama Moral Ma-jority circles whose members worked hard for Denton's election...

...Harkin is used to scrambling around David Rockefeiler, recalcitrant State Department officers, the Pentagon, and his fellow Repre-sentatives who think there's a future in helping tin-horn dictators, but wrestling with the Big Lie from the White House posed a new challenge...

...I want to make it clear that there are those of us on this floor who are going to do everything that we can to preserve the in-tegrity of the Constitution of the United States...

...Intelligence aficionados were snickering in their martinis at bars near the White House as they savored front-page revela-tions in The Washington Post of Hugel's misdealings...

...According to Interior Department records, contributors to Mountain States were involved in fifty-seven separate litiga-tions with the Department as of January 20...

...But he was sent reeling by the Reagan Administration's pronouncement early in July that human rights Performances in four Latin American dictatorships had so improved that the United States would now give a green light to grants from the World Bank and International Mone-tary Fund...

...But blood was in the water, and it's hard to teil when the mess will be cleaned up...

...But "this whole town," Weicker went on, the galleries now quiet and attentive, "is one big finger to the wind...

...gas, coal, and financial interests which bankrolled James Watt's Mountain States Legal Foundation, but tucked into the confidential lists of con-tributors to the anti-regulation group, we found, were two important gambling concerns: Harrah's, one of the biggest Las Vegas casinos, which is often mentioned in connection with organized crime investiga-tions, and Bally Distributing Company, manufacturer of slot machines...

...CAMPUS HIJINKS There was certainly something to chortle about in the destabilization of Max H?gel, the New Hampshire businessman and po-litical hack William Casey brought aboard as his number-two man at the Central Intelligence Agency last January...

...11 In 1959, as an editor with the Institute for Business Planning, Casey was sued for plagiarism by a writer who had entrusted him with merely delivering a manuscript to another publisher...

...Winged Victory Watch for a new Pentagon boondoggle to surface in the Rapid Deployment Force...

...The White House says the human rights Performances in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia have improved, and yet not a single group which monitors such things agrees...

...Watt's appointment is a cause of em-barrassment to the Republican Party...

...Hot Spot The Kerr-McGee plant where Karen Silkwood worked until her untimely death was shut down early in 1975 with an uncon-tested record of radioactive hazards...

...Proxmire exeoriated Casey's "attitude about the ethics of circumventing the California law...

...Helms, who considers himself a conservative, has proposed an amendment that would forbid the Justice Department to spend any money on efforts to achieve racial integration, par-ticularly through busing...

...In addition, eleven members of the Foundation's Board of Litigation held directorships in fifteen companies with matters to be decided by the Interior Department...

...From Washington with Love A new appointment at the Central Intelligence Agency may signal an even more Woody turn in U.S...

...This whole town is like a willow tree—at the slightest movement of air, bending here and bending there...

...Mile High Mischief Something funny's going on at the head-quarters of the Employes Association of the Office of Surface Mining (OSM) in Denver, where workers have been fighting a shut-down and transfers by Interior Secretary James Watt...

...Seems the brass spent millions on a "Aying hospital" that can't get there...

...After all, Casey has real reason to worry...

...Salty Dog Alabama freshman Senator and former POW Jeremiah Denton, who has been cru-sading in Washington for a new era of "de-cency" and who is Sponsor of a bill to en-courage chastity among teen-agers, is getting flak back home for his backroom language with the boys...

...He is not known for his devotion to detail, and his attention span often resembles the arc of a well-served tennis ball...

...Casey was in trouble for another case of stock manipulation even before these old cases were hurled at him...

...He had to go...

...policy toward Central America...

...Wrong...

...And finally,where the Job called for decades of heart-pounding experience as a spy all alone out in the cold, Hugel's career had been that of the back-slapping salesman ar-ranging phony stock deals over Scotch at the country club...

...After all, CIA Director William Casey is even more vulnerable than H?gel onthis account, and one of the great untold stories is the extent of embezzlement of operational funds in-side the agency...

...Woodward and The Washington Post went after poor Max H?gel because they're commies and they hate anything CIA-ish and, especially, anything Reaganesque, right...

...11 At the height of the Watergate investi-gations, Congressional probers sought records inside the Securities and Exchange Commission, where Casey was chairman, regarding questionable campaign dona-tions by International Telephone and Telegraph to Nixon...

...And to all insiders here, it appeared the sweetest of covert Operations: The seamy details of Hugel's business past, in all likelihood, originated within the Old Pro circuits of the CIA itself...

...Presidential counselor Edwin Meese has so thoroughly dominated both domestic and foreign policy in the White House that he's now called "the prime minister...

...New York Democrat, has asked the Pentagon to declassify its internal reports...

...The old pros of the CIA had been grumbling for months that H?gel, a Pinky Lee kind of loudmouth who alienated many in Reagan's entourage during the 1980 campaign, carried exactly the wrong bag of qualifications into the quiet corridors of the CIA's forested Virginia "campus...

...Where he was direct, the Job required obliqueness...

...During the routine acknowledgments to Congressional and Executive Offices for un-derwriting a July 4 concert by the National Symphony on the Capitol lawn, Watt's name drew a loud round of raspberries from an audience of more than 50,000 music-lovers...

...But as late as two months ago, the former Alameda County, California, assistant district attorney still found time to slip off to the coast for meetings of his military reserve unit...