Deep Throat

 

Deep Throat is the pseudonym given to Deputy Director of the FBI William Mark Felt, Sr., who was the secret source who leaked information about the involvement of U.S. President Richard Nixon's administration during the first Watergate break-in and subsequent events that came to be known as the Watergate scandal.

For more than 30 years, the identity of Deep Throat was one of the biggest mysteries of American politics and journalism, the source of much public curiosity and speculation. Woodward and Bernstein insisted they would not reveal his identity until he died or consented to have his identity revealed. On May 31, 2005, after W. Mark Felt revealed himself in a Vanity Fair magazine article, Woodward, Bernstein, and former Post executive editor Ben Bradlee confirmed that Felt was the source they called "Deep Throat."

Deep Throat was an important source for Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who together wrote a series of articles on the scandal that played a decisive role in exposing the misdeeds of the Nixon administration. The scandal would eventually lead to the resignation of President Nixon as well as prison terms for White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, chief counsel Charles Colson, and presidential adviser John Ehrlichman.

Howard Simons, the managing editor of the Washington Post at the time, dubbed the secret informant "Deep Throat" as an allusion to the notorious pornographic movie of the same name. The name was also a play on the journalism term "deep background," referring to information provided by a secret source that, by agreement, will not be reported directly. "Deep Throat" came to public attention when Woodward and Bernstein wrote All the President's Men, a book also made into an Academy Award-winning movie. In the movie, Deep Throat was portrayed by Hal Holbrook.

Role in Watergate

Watergate
(timeline)
Events
Pentagon Papers Watergate burglaries Watergate tapes Saturday Night Massacre United States v. Nixon New York Times Co. v. United States
People
Ben Bagdikian Carl Bernstein Archibald Cox John Dean Deep Throat Daniel Ellsberg W. Mark Felt E. Howard Hunt Egil Krogh G. Gordon Liddy Angelo Lano John N. Mitchell Richard Nixon John Sirica Watergate Seven Bob Woodward
Groups
CREEP White House Plumbers Senate Watergate Committee List of people connected with Watergate

Main article: Watergate scandal

On 17 June 1972 at 2:31 AM, five men were arrested by police on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel building in Washington, D.C., inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Police had arrived on the scene after being alerted by Frank Wills, a security guard, who noticed that a door leading into the hotel had been taped open.

The situation was unusual in that the five burglars had $2,300 in hundred-dollar bills with serial numbers in sequence, some lock-picks and door-jimmies, a walkie-talkie, a radio scanner capable of listening to police frequencies, two cameras, 40 rolls of unused film, tear-gas guns, and sophisticated devices capable of recording all conversations that might be held in the offices.

At least one of the men was a former Central Intelligence Agency employee. This person, Jim McCord, Jr., was at the time of his arrest a security man for President Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President (also known by its acronym, "CREEP", among Nixon's political opponents). Notebooks were found on two of the men containing the telephone number of E. Howard Hunt, whose name in the notebooks was accompanied by the inscriptions “W House” and “W.H.”

The scandal immediately attracted some media scrutiny. A protracted period of clue-searching and trail-following then ensued, with reporters and eventually the United States Senate and the judicial system probing to see how far up the Executive branch of government the Watergate scandal, as it had come to be known, extended.

A pair of young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, wrote the coverage of the story over a period of two years. The scandal eventually was shown to involve a variety of legal violations, and it implicated many members of the Nixon White House. With increasing pressure from the courts and the Senate, President Nixon eventually became the first and only U.S. President to resign in disgrace, narrowly avoiding impeachment by the House of Representatives.

Woodward and Bernstein had an advantage over their competitors in writing their stories: the trust of a highly placed individual who happened to oversee the federal investigation of the crimes perpetrated by the Nixon Administration. Woodward had befriended this man years earlier, and had eventually come to see him as something of a mentor. This man provided Woodward with detailed tips and hints about how the investigation was proceeding, where to look for the clues, and how to proceed with uncovering the scandal on the pages of their newspaper. This man was the legendary informant, Deep Throat.

Secrecy was key

Woodward, in All the President's Men, first mentions Deep Throat on page 71. He describes him as "a source in the Executive Branch who had access to information at CRP as well as at the White House." The book also calls him "an incurable gossip", "in a unique position to observe the Executive Branch," and a man "whose fight had been worn out in too many battles."

Woodward claimed that he would signal "Deep Throat" that he desired a meeting by moving a flowerpot with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment. When Deep Throat wanted a meeting he would make special marks on page twenty of Woodward's copy of The New York Times; he would circle the page number and draw clock hands to indicate the hour. They often met "on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn," at 2:00 a.m. The garage is located at 1401 Wilson Boulevard.

Many were dubious of these cloak and dagger methods. Adrian Havill investigated these claims for his 1993 biography of Woodward and Bernstein and found them to be factually impossible. He noted that Woodward's apartment 617 at 1718 P Street, Northwest, in Washington faced an interior courtyard and was not visible from the street. Havill said anyone regularly checking the balcony, as "Deep Throat" was said to have done daily, would have been spotted. Havill also said that copies of The Times were not delivered to individual apartments but delivered in an un-addressed stack at the building's reception desk. There would have been no way to know which copy was intended for Woodward. Woodward, however, has since claimed that in the early 1970s the interior courtyard was an alleyway and had not yet been bricked off, and that his balcony was visible from street level to passing pedestrians. It was also visible, Woodward conjectured, to anyone from the FBI in surveillance of nearby embassies. Also revealed was the fact that Woodward's copy of the New York Times had his apartment number indicated on it. Former neighbour Herman Knippenberg stated that Woodward would sometimes come to his door looking for his marked copy of the Times, claiming "I like to have it in mint condition and I like to have my own copy." [1]

Further, while Woodward in his book stressed these precautions, he also admits to calling "Deep Throat" on the telephone at his home.

Motives

In public statements following the disclosure of his identity, Felt's family called him an "American hero," stating that he leaked information about the Watergate scandal to the Washington Post for moral and patriotic reasons. This view has been echoed by a majority of commentators and historians familiar with the details of the Watergate history who feel that Felt's contributions were vital in exposing the illegal actions and cover-ups of the Nixon White House. (A less laudatory view agrees, but criticizes Felt for his lack of courage — not coming forward himself.) Some media commentators, however, have suggested that Felt bore Nixon a personal animosity for having passed him over when appointing a successor to J. Edgar Hoover as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Others have claimed that Felt acted mainly out of institutional loyalty to the FBI, whose independence many believed had been constrained by the Nixon administration. Conservatives who worked for Nixon such as Patrick Buchanan and G. Gordon Liddy and so-called "Neo-cons" castigated Felt and asserted their belief that Nixon was unfairly hounded from office.^[1]

Hints to his identity

According to Woodward in his book, The Secret Man, released in July 2005, "Deep Throat"'s identity was known only to seven people: "Deep Throat" himself, Bob Woodward, Woodward's wife Elsa Walsh, Carl Bernstein, their editor Benjamin C. Bradlee, his successor Leonard Downie Jr., and by a perspicacious Assistant US Attorney General named Stanley Pottinger. Woodward said in repeated interviews that the identity of Felt would be kept confidential until Deep Throat died or agreed to let his real name be made public. Plans, however, fell apart, and Woodward revealed in The Secret Man that during a 1976 grand jury appearance over break-ins that Felt ordered, a grand juror asked Felt, "Were you Deep Throat?" Felt "seemed to go white" and answered no. Pottinger, present at the questioning, requested the stenographer stop typing and then whispered to Felt:

"You are under oath so you have to answer truthfully. On the other hand, I consider the question to be outside the bounds of our official investigation, so if you prefer, I'll withdraw the question. What would you like me to do?" Felt had the question withdrawn. At a lunch meeting with Woodward, Pottinger recounted his uncloaking to an astonished Woodward.

In the years prior to Felt's disclosure, there was much speculation about the identity of Deep Throat. Woodward would only confirm that Deep Throat was a specific man (and not a woman) in Nixon's administration — not a composite of several secret informants — and who smoked heavily and liked drinking scotch.

Woodward gave specific denials to six other possibilities, at the request of those people:

• General Alexander Haig
• Earl Silbert
• John Sears
• Diane Sawyer
• Cord Meyer Jr. (a CIA official)
• William Colby (the CIA director)

Criticism

Following the disclosure in May 2005 of Felt's identity, Slate writer Tim Noah claimed in a column that some of Woodward's characterizations, including the claim that Deep Throat was a heavy smoker, were misleading. Woodward in The Secret Man, however, said that Felt as he knew him was a heavy smoker, and speculates that the pressures on Felt had caused him to revert to heavy smoking habits.

In his 1979 book, Felt wrote "I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!" [2] [3]

Deep Throat revealed

Although confirmation of Deep Throat's identity remained elusive for over 30 years, there were a few suspicions that Felt was indeed the reporters' elusive source long before the public acknowledgement in 2005.

• Richard Nixon himself believed that Felt might be Deep Throat but did not try to oust him. His stated rationale for this was that if he had done so, Felt would have publicly revealed information damaging to the FBI, and to other powerful people and institutions. Nixon at the time stated Felt "knows everything there is to know in the FBI." Nixon's motives in not ousting Felt may not have been entirely altruistic. There is little doubt that the man who would have been most damaged, had Felt publicly revealed all that he knew, would have been Richard M. Nixon himself.

• Carl Bernstein did not even share Deep Throat's identity with his immediate family, which included his wife Nora Ephron. (As he said on NBC's Today Show on June 2, 2005, "I was never dumb enough to tell [Ephron]." She said, "...which was very smart because I would have told the whole world by now.") Ephron became obsessed with figuring out the secret and eventually correctly concluded it was Mark Felt. [4] In 1999, a 19-year-old college freshman, Chase Culeman-Beckman, claimed to have been told by Bernstein's son that Felt was "Deep Throat." According to Culeman-Beckman, Jacob Bernstein had said that he was "100 percent sure that Deep Throat was Mark Felt. He's someone in the FBI." Jacob had reportedly said this approximately 11 years prior, when he and Culeman-Beckman were classmates. Ephron explained that their son overheard her "speculations," and Carl Bernstein himself also immediately stepped forward to refute the claim, but many did not believe these claims.
• Bruce Roberts, in his 1975 memoir, The Gemstone Files, pointed to Felt as Deep Throat.
• James Mann, who had worked at the Post at the time of Watergate and was close to the investigation, brought a great deal of evidence together in a 1992 article in The Atlantic Monthly that fingered Felt and convinced many. He argued that the information that "Deep Throat" gave Woodward could only have come from FBI files. Felt was also embittered at having been passed over for Director of the FBI and believed that the FBI in general was hostile to the Nixon Administration. In previous unrelated articles, Woodward had made clear he had a highly placed source at the FBI, and there is some evidence he was friends with Felt.
• Woodward has kept in close touch with Felt over the years, even showing up unexpectedly at his house in 1999, after Felt's dementia began, and at the home of Felt's daughter, Joan, in Santa Rosa, California, as well. Some suspected at that time that Woodward might be asking Felt if he could reveal him to be Deep Throat, though Felt, when asked directly by others, had consistently denied being "Deep Throat."
• In 2002, Timothy Noah called Felt "the best guess going about the identity of Deep Throat."[5]

In February 2005, Nixon's former White House Counsel, news columnist John Dean, reported that Woodward had recently informed Bradlee that "Deep Throat" was ailing and close to death, and that Bradlee had written "Deep Throat"'s obituary. Both Woodward and the then-current editor of The Washington Post, Leonard Downie, denied these claims. Felt was something of a suspect, especially after the mysterious meeting that occurred between Woodward and Felt in the summer of 1999. But others had received more attention over the years, such as Pat Buchanan, Henry Kissinger, then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, General Haig, and, before it was revealed that "Deep Throat" was definitely not female, Diane Sawyer.

On May 31, 2005, Vanity Fair magazine reported that William Mark Felt, then aged 91, claimed to be the man once known as "Deep Throat." Later that day, Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee released a statement through The Washington Post confirming that the story was true, finally bringing to rest the most enduring mystery in modern American politics.

On June 2, 2005, the Washington Post ran a lengthy front-page article by Woodward in which he detailed his friendship with Felt in the years before Watergate. Woodward wrote that he first met Felt by chance in 1970, when Woodward was a Navy lieutenant in his mid-twenties who was dispatched to deliver a package to the White House's West Wing. Felt arrived soon after, for a separate appointment, and sat next to Woodward in the waiting room. Woodward struck up a conversation, eventually learning of Felt's high position in the FBI. Woodward, who was about to get out of the Navy at the time and was unsure about his future direction in life, became determined to use Felt as a mentor and career advisor, and so he got Felt's phone number and kept in touch with him.

After deciding to try a career as a reporter, Woodward eventually joined the Washington Post in August, 1971. Felt, who Woodward writes had long had a dim view of the Nixon Administration, began passing pieces of information to Woodward, although he insisted that Woodward keep the FBI and Justice Department out of anything he wrote based on the information. The first time Woodward used information from Felt in a Washington Post story was in mid-May of 1972, a month before the Watergate burglary, when Woodward was investigating the man who had attempted to assassinate Presidential candidate George C. Wallace of Alabama. Nixon had put Felt in charge of investigating the would-be assassin as well. A month later, just days after the Watergate break-in, Woodward would call Felt at his office, marking the first time Woodward spoke with Felt about Watergate.

Commenting on Felt's motivations for serving as his "Deep Throat" source, Woodward wrote, "Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable. He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and their efforts to manipulate the Bureau for political reasons."

In 1980 , Felt himself was convicted of ordering illegal break-ins at the homes of Weathermen suspects, and their families. Richard Nixon testified on his behalf. President Ronald Reagan pardoned Felt, and the conviction was later overturned on appeal.

Composite character theory

Although speculation always tended to focus on identifying "Deep Throat" as an individual, it was periodically suggested that the famous source was actually a composite character combining information the reporters obtained from several sources. When various accounts tried to identify the source based on the information provided by Woodward and Bernstein, they generally also sought to rebut alternative theories. The resulting evidence against each candidate suggested that either the reporters' tale was inconsistent, or that no single person fit the facts. Some analysts believed that the "Deep Throat" character was primarily a dramatic device used by the reporters to liven up their book's narrative. This comment was supported by both John Erlichman and Len Garment in a 1994 oral history of Nixon's Presidency.^[2] Before his admission, on previous occasions Felt himself had said he thought the character was likely a composite. It should be noted in this regard that the only person who knows the full "truth" of Deep Throat's identity is Woodward, since it was Woodward who identified Deep Throat to Bernstein, Bradlee et al.

Also, the agent who originally marketed the draft for All the President's Men publicly claimed that the initial typescript of the book contained absolutely no reference to Deep Throat. That led to speculation that Woodward and Bernstein played at condensing history in the same way Hollywood scriptwriters do: the writer sees that the real life hero doing the Great Deed had a dozen helpers, boils them down to a single person, and gives him a fictional name. In that reading, Mark Felt, a forgotten man whose life was wasted serving J. Edgar Hoover's whims, might remember ratting on the Nixon White House several times. He never conveyed the volume of info the fictional Deep Throat did, but he is as close a match as any. As Deep Throat is seen by many as a good guy, he lets the grand kids know the secret ID of the hero's helper. Woodward and Bradlee could therefore "confirm" Felt was Deep Throat, without addressing the point of whether their literary portrait of the man was accurate in all respects.

Other suspected candidates

Fred Fielding

Another leading candidate was White House Associate Counsel Fred F. Fielding. In April 2003 Fielding was presented as a potential candidate as a result of a detailed review of source material by William Gaines and his journalism students, as part of a class at the University of Illinois journalism school. [6] [7] Fielding was the assistant to John Dean and as such had access to the files relating to the affair. Gaines felt that statements by Woodward ruled out "Deep Throat"'s being in the FBI and that "Deep Throat" often had information before the FBI did. H.R. Haldeman himself suspected Fielding as being "Deep Throat."

Dean had been one of the most dedicated hunters of "Deep Throat." Both he and Leonard Garment dismissed Fielding as a possibility, reporting that he had been cleared by Woodward in 1980 when Fielding was applying for an important position in the Ronald Reagan administration. However this assertion, which comes from Fielding, has not been corroborated.

One reason that many experts believed that "Deep Throat" was Fielding and not Felt was due to Woodward's apparent denial in an interview that "Deep Throat" worked in the intelligence community:

LUKAS: Do you resent the implication by some critics that your sources on Watergate — among them the fabled "Deep Throat" — may have been people in the intelligence community?

WOODWARD: I resent it because it's untrue. Quote from Playboy interview, 1979

In retrospect, it appears that Woodward was only excluding the foreign intelligence agencies with that statement, and not the FBI.

Other credible candidates

Any candidate that died before the Felt admission ceased to fit Woodward's criteria at that time, since Woodward had stated that he was free to reveal his identity when "Deep Throat" died.

• John Ehrlichman: Nixon advisor. Died in 1999.
• Ron Ziegler: press secretary. Died in 2003.
• William E. Colby: head of the CIA. Died in 1996.
• Charles W. Bates: FBI executive that Mann mentioned but considered less likely than Felt.
• William C. Sullivan: former head of the FBI intelligence operations, fired by J. Edgar Hoover in 1971. Died in 1977.
• L. Patrick Gray: acting FBI director, who lived only four blocks away from Woodward, accused by a CBS documentary.
• Robert Kunkel: FBI Washington Bureau Chief that Mann considered less likely than Felt, as he moved to St. Louis partway through the investigation.
• Cord Meyer: CIA agent fingered in Mark Riebling's Wedgie: The Secret War Between the FBI and the CIA. However, Woodward stated that "Deep Throat" was not part of the intelligence community. Died in 2001.
• Raymond Price: Nixon speech writer.
• Stephen Bull: administrative assistant.
• Lowell Weicker: U.S. Senator from Connecticut, believed by Pat Buchanan to possibly be "Deep Throat."
• Secret Service technicians: Richard Cohen argued it was whoever in the Secret Service maintained Nixon's secret taping devices.

Less credible candidates

• William Rehnquist: Late Chief Justice of the United States, had a position in the Department of Justice early in the Nixon administration, working for Attorney General John N. Mitchell. More than five months before the Watergate break-in he was appointed to the Supreme Court and it would have been almost impossible for him to have had access to much of the information "Deep Throat" was meant to have provided. In February 2005, Dean reported that "Deep Throat" was ailing, leading many to believe that Rehnquist was "Deep Throat." However, Woodward later stated that the notion that "Deep Throat" was ailing was a misunderstanding.
• Henry Kissinger: Nixon's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, was out of the country on some of the dates Woodward reported to have met with "Deep Throat."
• George H. W. Bush: Was nominated in February 2005 by Adrian Havill — author of a 1993 biography of Woodward and Bernstein, Deep Truth (ISBN 1-55972-172-3) — following the unveiling of Woodward's notes at the University of Texas. Havill had argued in his biography that "Deep Throat" was a composite figure, but stated in a letter to Poynter Online that based on more recent events and research, he now believed "Deep Throat" was George H. W. Bush.
• General Alexander Haig: Authors Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin speculated in their 1991 book Silent Coup: The Removal of a President that Haig may have been "Deep Throat."
• Diane Sawyer: Was hired by White House press secretary Ron Ziegler to serve in the Richard Nixon Administration.
• Ben Stein: A Nixon speech writer and the son of Nixon economic advisor Herbert Stein; later an actor and political commentator.
• Gerald R. Ford: Nixon's successor.
• Pat Buchanan: Served as special assistant to the President, was nominated as a potential candidate by Dean in his June 2002 book Unmasking Deep Throat. Buchanan repeatedly denied the claim, stating in a Time magazine article on the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in that "The last time I cooperated with The Washington Post ... was in 1952 , when I was a paper boy delivering the damn thing in Northwest Washington." Buchanan was very interested in the mystery, however, and had a number of theories. He was most sympathetic to the idea of a composite Deep Throat.
• Richard Nixon: There was some suggestion that Nixon had used back-channels to communicate with Woodward in a bizarre attempt to showcase his persecution by the media which horrifically backfired. This theory was largely discredited. Died in 1994.
• Baruch Korff: "Nixon's rabbi": a strong supporter of Nixon in the media. Claimed to be Deep Throat on his deathbed. Died in 1995.

Literature

• The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat by Bob Woodward. The book, released in 2005, reviews the major points of the Watergate scandal, as well as the role of Mark Felt, as "Deep Throat," in uncovering the story. The book also deals with the personal relationship between Woodward and Felt, which existed for some time before Watergate. ^[3]

References

External links

• "I'm the Guy They Called Deep Throat". July 2005 Vanity Fair article that revealed that Felt is Deep Throat
• Washington Post Confirms Felt Is 'Deep Throat', a May 31, 2005 article
• "In the Prelude to Publication, Intrigue Worthy of Deep Throat", a June 2, 2005 article from the New York Times
• "How Mark Felt became Deep Throat". Bob Woodward provides a personal account of his friendship with the man who came to be known as Deep Throat
• Special Reports page on Deep Throat from the Washington Post
• Former FBI agent says 3 FBI officials helped W. Mark Felt leak information about Watergate probe to the press, a June 5, 2005 article from the Albany Times-Union
• "New Zealand man's Deep Throat mystery solved", an article from the New Zealand Herald confirming part of the Deep Throat secrecy legend
• Deep Throat Website Has news, articles, FAQs, links, gallery and forum
• References to Felt from the Nixon Presidential Materials maintained by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
• In a Surprise, E&P Voters Pick Rehnquist as 'Deep Throat'. Results of a poll by Editor and Publisher Magazine among journalists, published February 11 2005.
• ‘Deep Throat’ was FBI point man for Cointelpro New hero of liberals, Stalinists led secret police assault on political freedom the Militant June 27, 2005.
• Biography of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

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