SHALLOW THROAT
The self-outing of former FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt as "Deep Throat" still leaves the most important questions about Watergate unanswered.
Bob Woodward has said Felt was Deep Throat, and he was seen visiting Felt at his Santa Rosa, California home in 1999. What is cloudy is how much of a role Felt played in the Watergate saga. We know of Deep Throat not from the reporting Woodward and Bernstein did for the Washington Post in 1972, but from their book, "All the President’s Men."
But Woodward’s literary agent, David Obst, has said Deep Throat was not mentioned in the original book proposal, and emerged only after Woodward had discussed movie possibilities with Robert Redford.
Is Deep Throat a Hollywood invention?
Woodward said he met Felt when, as a naval intelligence officer on the staff of Admiral Thomas Moorer he "sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House."
Therein lies a tale which we in journalism have been reluctant to explore. At the time Woodward worked for him, Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was spying on the Nixon White House. Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, who was assigned to the staff of the National Security Council, admitted to investigators he "took so darn much stuff I can’t remember what it was."
It is doubtful that Yeoman Radford, a junior enlisted man, would have been Moorer’s chief spy, or that Woodward, Moorer’s messenger, would have been unaware of what his boss was doing.
In an interview two years ago, Alexander Haig told Christopher Ruddy of NewsMax he suspected Felt was Deep Throat, but added he doubted the FBI agent was Woodward’s sole source.
Felt couldn’t have been the source of the most important piece of information Woodward attributed to Deep Throat, the existence of an 18 ½ minute gap on the June 20th, 1972 White House tape, argues Joan Hoff, a history professor at Montana State University, who wrote a book about the Nixon presidency.
Only a handful of people at the White House, among them Haig, could have known that, she said.
It’s important to remember that what broke Watergate open was a letter one of the burglars, James McCord, wrote to Judge John Sirica (who had been threatening them with draconian sentences if they didn’t talk) on March 19, 1973.
When McCord retired from the CIA in 1970, he was head of physical security at headquarters in Langley. Of the five burglars, he was an unlikely candidate to break under pressure, and most unlikely to have made the elementary mistakes he made which led to the discovery of the break-in.
(Among other things, McCord taped open a door to the Watergate building horizontally, so it was visible to a security guard making his rounds, rather than vertically, as every would-be spy is taught in Tradecraft 101.) It’s almost as if CIA agent McCord wanted the burglars to be caught.
In his 1984 book "Secret Agenda," journalist Jim Hougan speculated the CIA got Nixon before Nixon got the CIA. Nixon was mad at the CIA for the well founded belief officials there leaked classified information to John F. Kennedy during the 1960 campaign.
Public disclosure of the CIA’s clumsy attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro would have humiliated the agency (as it did three years later when then CIA Director William Colby exposed the "family jewels."). Only weeks before the break-in, Nixon aide John Ehrlichman had been at Langley reviewing those files.
Despite the Felt revelation, Hougan still believes Woodward got most of his information from Robert Bennett, now a U.S. senator from Utah, but then the head of a CIA front which employed E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate burglars.
In a memo to his boss (obtained by Hougan under the Freedom of Information Act), Bennett’s CIA case officer, Martin Lukoskie, wrote that Bennett had told him he was feeding stories to Woodward, and that Woodward "was suitably grateful."
It’s apparent Woodward isn’t telling all he knows, and that his scoop was based less on his skills as an investigative reporter than on his prior contacts as a naval intelligence officer, one who may have been involved in a plot to spy on the president.
It isn’t time to close the book on Watergate just yet. Mark Felt isn’t Deep Throat. He’s Shallow Throat.
Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.