One of a few surviving tapes. Most were wiped immediately after they were transcribed; this tape was never intended to be heard. They were made for the benefit of the NSC for transcription for record keeping purposes and then wiped. Only 20 or so survive from Reagan’s tenure. It’s a nice insight into Reagan’s way of handling things behind closed doors:
"At first sight it is surprising that any tapes were made, let alone survived. Watergate taught the White House many lessons, and one of the clearest was this: the tape recorder is not your friend. Nixon’s successor stripped out the semi-automated recording system installed in the Oval Office and other meeting rooms. Why were tapes still being made only a few years later?The answer is that the NSC staff used them to make accurate paper records of presidential phone conversations, which no one doubted had to be made. Calls were particularly difficult for the notetakers. For one thing, secure communications sometimes affected the audibility of the person on the other end of the line, making some words, particularly names, hard to catch. And the absence of visual cues made it harder still.
There was clearly no intention to keep such tapes: once transcription was complete, the policy was to wipe them by reusing the tapes for the next call. Life being what it is though, a small proportion of recordings survived, probably an entirely random selection. The taping was done in a small communictions centre just outside the White House Situation Room in the basement of the building, and perhaps there was a drawer, a box, a filing cabinet there that became a bit of a dumping ground."