Deep Throat (Watergate)

Mark Felt a.k.a. "Deep Throat"

Deep Throat is the pseudonym given to the secret informant who provided information in 1972 to Bob Woodward, who shared it with Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein were reporters for The Washington Post, and Deep Throat provided key details about the involvement of U.S. President Richard Nixon's administration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal. In 2005, 31 years after Nixon's resignation and 11 years after Nixon's death, a family attorney stated that former Federal Bureau of Investigation Associate Director Mark Felt was Deep Throat. Felt was suffering from dementia at the time and had previously denied being Deep Throat, but Woodward and Bernstein confirmed the attorney's claim.

Identity

Deep Throat was first introduced to the public in the February 1974 book All the President's Men by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which was adapted as a film two years later. According to the authors, Deep Throat was a key source of information behind a series of articles which introduced the misdeeds of the Nixon administration to the general public. The scandal eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon, as well as to prison terms for White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, Egil Krogh, White House Counsel Charles Colson, former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell, John Dean, and presidential adviser John Ehrlichman.

Howard Simons was the managing editor of the Post during Watergate. He dubbed the secret informant "Deep Throat", alluding to both the deep background status of his information and the widely publicized 1972 pornographic film Deep Throat. For more than 30 years, Deep Throat's identity was one of the biggest mysteries of American politics and journalism and the source of much public curiosity and speculation. Woodward and Bernstein insisted that they would not reveal his identity until he died or consented to reveal it. J. Anthony Lukas speculated that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt in his book Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (1976), based on three New York Times Sunday Magazine articles, but he was widely criticized. According to an article in Slate on April 28, 2003, Woodward had denied that Deep Throat was part of the "intelligence community" in a 1989 Playboy interview with Lukas.[1]

On May 31, 2005, Vanity Fair revealed that Felt was Deep Throat in an article on its website by John D. O'Connor, an attorney acting on Felt's behalf. Felt reportedly said, "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat." After the Vanity Fair story broke, Woodward, Bernstein, and Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Post's executive editor during Watergate, confirmed Felt's identity as Deep Throat.[2] L. Patrick Gray, former acting Director of the FBI and Felt's boss, disputed Felt's claim in his book In Nixon's Web, co-written with his son Ed Gray. Gray and others have argued that Deep Throat was a compilation of sources characterized as one person in order to improve sales of the book and movie. Woodward and Bernstein, however, defended Felt's claims and detailed their relationship with him in Woodward's book The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat.

Role in the Watergate scandal

On June 17, 1972, police arrested five men inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C.. In their possession were $2,300, burglary tools, a walkie-talkie, a radio scanner capable of listening to police frequencies, cameras, 40 rolls of film, tear gas guns, electronic devices which they apparently intended to plant in the Democratic Committee offices, and notebooks containing the telephone number of White House official E. Howard Hunt. One of the men was James W. McCord Jr., a former Central Intelligence Agency employee and a security man for Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President (popularly known as "CREEP").

Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward pursued the story for two years. The scandal eventually implicated many members of the Nixon White House, and Nixon became the only US president to resign. Woodward and Bernstein wrote in All the President's Men that key information in their investigation had come from an anonymous informant whom they dubbed "Deep Throat".

Methods of communication

Woodward, in All the President's Men, first mentions Deep Throat on page 71; earlier in the book he reports calling "an old friend and sometimes source who worked for the federal government and did not like to be called at his office". Later, 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 to "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 20 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 and has an historical marker that was erected in 2011. In 2014, the garage was scheduled to be demolished, though the county decided to save the historical marker, and the landowner promised to design a memorial commemorating the Watergate scandal.[3] As of 2017, the garage had not been demolished.[4]

Many were skeptical 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 New York Times were not delivered to individual apartments but delivered in an unaddressed stack at the building's reception desk. There would have been no way to know which copy was intended for Woodward. Woodward, however, has stated 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 neighbor 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."[5]

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

Controversy over 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. Other commentators, however, have speculated that Felt may have had more personal reasons for leaking information to Woodward.

In his book The Secret Man, Woodward describes Felt as a loyalist and admirer of J. Edgar Hoover. After Hoover's death, Felt became angry and disgusted when L. Patrick Gray, a career naval officer and lawyer from the Civil Division of the Department of Justice, with no prior law enforcement experience, was appointed Director of the FBI over Felt, a 30-year veteran of the Bureau. Felt was particularly unhappy with Gray's management style at the FBI, which was markedly different from Hoover's. Felt selected Woodward because he knew Woodward and Bernstein were assigned to investigate the burglary. Instead of seeking out prosecutors at the Justice Department, or the House Judiciary Committee charged with investigating presidential wrongdoing, he methodically leaked information to Woodward to guide their investigation while keeping his own identity and involvement safely concealed.

Some conservatives who worked for Nixon, such as Pat Buchanan and G. Gordon Liddy, castigated Felt and asserted their belief that Nixon was unfairly hounded from office.[6]

Revelation of identity

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

  • In Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, Max Holland reports that Felt leaked to two major sources, The Washington Post and TIME. While the Post reporters didn't reveal their source, TIME correspondent Sandy Smith told TIME's lawyer, Cravath, Swaine & Moore partner Roswell Gilpatric,[7] who told Assistant Attorney General of the United States Department of Justice Criminal Division Harry E. Peterson, who, in turn, revealed it to White House Counsel John W. Dean,[8] who reported it to President Richard Nixon,[9] who did not publicly mention learning it. Nixon's stated rationale was: if he had done so, Felt would have publicly revealed information damaging to the FBI and to other powerful people and institutions. Nixon stated, at the time, Felt "knows everything there is to know in the FBI". Nixon's motives in not outing Felt may not have been entirely altruistic, since Nixon would also have been damaged by Felt's potential revelations.
  • George V. Higgins wrote in 1975: "Mark Felt knows more reporters than most reporters do, and there are some who think he had a Washington Post alias borrowed from a dirty movie."[10]
  • Carl Bernstein did not even share Deep Throat's identity with his immediate family, which included his wife, writer Nora Ephron. (As he said on NBC's Today Show on June 2, 2005, "I was never dumb enough to tell her...which was very smart because I would have told the whole world by now.") His wife became obsessed with figuring out the secret and eventually correctly concluded that he was Mark Felt.[11] It had previously been revealed that Deep Throat was definitely a man. In 1999, a 19-year-old college freshman, Chase Culeman-Beckman, claimed to have been told by Bernstein's son that Mark Felt was really 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 Chase Culeman-Beckman were classmates. His wife explained that their son overheard her "speculations"; Carl Bernstein himself also immediately stepped forward to reject the claim, but many did not believe these claims.[12]
  • 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.[13] Mann recalled that prior to the Watergate scandal, Woodward had made references to a high-placed source he had in the FBI. Mann 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 had 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. Some suspected at that time that Woodward might be asking Felt if he could reveal him as 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".[14]
  • In 1976, Assistant Attorney General John Stanley Pottinger had convened a grand jury to investigate a series of potentially illegal break-ins that Felt had authorized against various dissident groups. Felt was testifying before the jury when a juror asked him, out of the blue, "Are you Deep Throat?" Pottinger reports that Felt "went white with fear". Pottinger explained to Felt that he was under oath and would have to answer truthfully, but since Pottinger felt the question was outside the purview of the investigation, he offered to withdraw it if Felt wished.

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 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 Alexander Haig, and before it was revealed that "Deep Throat" was definitely not female, Diane Sawyer.

On May 31, 2005, Vanity Fair reported that Felt, then aged 91, claimed to be the man once known as "Deep Throat".[15] Later that day, Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee released a statement through The Washington Post confirming that the story was true.

On June 2, 2005, The Washington Post ran a lengthy front-page column[16] 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-20s 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 position in the upper echelon of 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 1972, a month before the Watergate burglary, when Woodward was reporting on Arthur Bremer, who had attempted to assassinate presidential candidate George C. Wallace; Nixon had put Felt in charge of investigating the would-be assassin. 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 subsequently expunged from the record.

Composite character theory

Prior to Felt's revelation and Woodward's confirmation, part of the reason historians and other scholars had so much difficulty in identifying the real Deep Throat is because no single person seemed to truly fit the character described in All the President's Men. This had caused some scholars and commentators to come to the conclusion that Deep Throat could not possibly be a single person, and must be a composite of several sources. Woodward and Bernstein consistently denied the theory.[17]

From a literary business perspective, this theory was further supported by David Obst, the agent who originally marketed the draft for All the President's Men, who stated that the initial typescript of the book contained absolutely no reference to Deep Throat.[17] Obst believed that Deep Throat was invented by Woodward and Bernstein for dramatic purposes.[17] It also led to speculation that the authors played at condensing history in the same way Hollywood scriptwriters do.[17]

Ed Gray, the son of L. Patrick Gray III, stated in In Nixon's Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate that his examination of Woodward's interview notes pertaining to Deep Throat at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin provided "convincing evidence that 'Deep Throat' was indeed a fabrication".[18] According to Gray, the file contained notes regarding four interviews that were attributed to either Felt, "X", or "my friend", and a fifth interview dated March 24, 1973, that was unattributed.[18] He said he discovered that he had already seen the paper in 2006 after Woodward released interview files with people who were not Deep Throat.[18] Gray wrote that he contacted Stephen Mielke, the archivist who oversees the Woodward-Bernstein collection at the University of Texas, who said that a carbon copy of the paper contained a note in Woodward's handwriting attributing the interview to Donald Santarelli, an official with the Department of Justice during the Watergate era.[18] Gray wrote that he contacted Santarelli who confirmed that the March 24 meeting was with him.[18] Other interview notes attributed to "X" were interpreted by Gray as containing content that could not have been known by Felt.[18]

Regarding Gray's allegations, Woodward wrote that the March 24 notes were obviously not from an interview with Felt because Felt is referred to by name twice in quotes from the source, and that he never stated or wrote that he met with Deep Throat on that date.[19] According to Woodward, Mielke said the page was likely misfiled under Felt due to a lack of source.[19]

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.[20][21] 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 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.[22]

Other credible candidates

Any candidate who 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.

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 attributed to "Deep Throat". In February 2005, Dean reported that "Deep Throat" was ailing, and Rehnquist was known to be suffering from cancer, which caused his death later that year. The report caused a resurgence of speculation that Rehnquist was "Deep Throat". However, Woodward later stated that the notion that "Deep Throat" was ailing had been 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". Died in 2010.
  • Diane Sawyer: Was hired by White House press secretary Ron Ziegler to serve in the Richard Nixon Administration. On his deathbed, Nixon supporter Baruch Korff wrongly claimed that Sawyer was Deep Throat.
  • Ben Stein: A Nixon speech writer and the son of Nixon economic advisor Herbert Stein; later an actor, political commentator, and game show host.
  • Gerald R. Ford: Suggestion that Ford may have been Deep Throat as he was next in line for the presidency.
  • 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 himself: 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 backfired horrifically. This theory was largely discredited.
  • J. Fred Buzhardt: White House counsel to President Nixon.
  • G. Gordon Liddy: Member of the White House Plumbers. Largely dismissed.

Fictional portrayals

Films

Games

Literature

  • In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel The Truth (2000), in a reference to or parody of Deep Throat, the talking dog Gaspode takes on the role of Deep Bone, acting as an informant to the novel's protagonist William de Worde regarding the attempted framing of Patrician Vetinari.

Television

  • In the Fairly OddParents episode "Channel Chasers", Tootie uses the "Deep Toot" undercover persona to help out Mr. and Mrs. Turner against Vicky.
  • In the Family Guy episode "Deep Throats", Kermit the Frog plays a similar role to provide evidence of Mayor Adam West's corruption to Brian and Stewie.
  • In The Simpsons episode "Sideshow Bob Roberts", Waylon Smithers played a similar role to Deep Throat's when covertly helping the Simpson children find a way to depose the newly elected mayor of Springfield, Sideshow Bob (he even paraphrased one of Deep Throat's statements).
  • The X-Files featured an informant who used the name "Deep Throat" to leak information to Agent Mulder in early episodes in a manner similar to the meetings described by Woodward. It is never specifically mentioned whether he was intended to be the same Deep Throat from Watergate.
  • In season 1 of Lois and Clark the New Adventures of Superman Perry White has a Government contact called Sore Throat.[25]
  • In Frasier, season 4 episode 11 "Three Days of the Condo", Fraiser meets a secretive informant in an underground parking garage who supplies him with information.

References

  1. ↑ Noah, Timothy. "Was Fred Fielding Deep Throat?", Slate, April 28, 2003.
  2. ↑ Woodward, Bob. The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat, Simon & Schuster, 2005. ISBN 0-7432-8715-0
  3. ↑ Simpson (15 June 2014). "'Deep Throat' garage from U.S. Watergate scandal to be razed". Reuters. Retrieved 16 June 2014.
  4. ↑ Goff, Karen (13 March 2017). "Monday Properties asks for more time to redevelop 'Deep Throat' garage". Washington Business Journal. Retrieved 28 December 2017.
  5. ↑ "New Zealand man's Deep Throat mystery solved". The New Zealand Herald. June 3, 2005. Retrieved September 27, 2011.
  6. ↑ Morgan, Dan (June 1, 2005). "Contemporaries Have Mixed Views", The Washington Post, May 31, 2005.
  7. ↑ Max Holland (March 6, 2012). "Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat". Univ Pr of Kansas. p. 119. ISBN 978-0700618293.
  8. ↑ Michael Dobbs (June 27, 2005). "Revenge Was Felt's Motive, Former Acting FBI Chief Says". Washington Post.
  9. ↑ Max Holland (March 6, 2012). "Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat". Univ Pr of Kansas. p. 98. ISBN 978-0700618293.
  10. ↑ George V. Higgins (1975), The Friends of Richard Nixon, 1976 reprint, New York: Ballantine, Ch. 14, p. 147, ISBN 978-0-345-25226-5.
  11. ↑ Ephron, Nora (May 9, 2010). "Deep Throat and Me: Now It Can Be Told and Not for the First Time Either". Huffington Post. Archived from the original on June 3, 2005.
  12. ↑ "Deep Throat". tribunedigital-thecourant.
  13. ↑ Mann, James. "Deep Throat: An Institutional Analysis", The Atlantic Monthly, May 1992.
  14. ↑ Noah, Timothy. "Why Did Bob Woodward Lunch With Mark Felt in 1999?", Slate, May 2, 2002.
  15. ↑ O'Connor, John D. (May 31, 2005). "I'm the Guy They Called Deep Throat". VanityFair.com. Retrieved November 28, 2008.
  16. ↑ Woodward, Bob (June 2, 2005). "How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat'". The Washington Post. Retrieved November 28, 2008.
  17. 1 2 3 4 Greenberg, David (June 1, 2005). "Throat Clearing; Watergate conspiracy theories that still won't die". Slate. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  18. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Gray III, L. Patrick; Gray, Ed (2008). "The Watergate Books: Fact and Fiction" (PDF). In Nixon's Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate. New York: Times Books. pp. 291–300. ISBN 9780805089189.
  19. 1 2 Woodward, Bob. "Full Biography". bobwoodward.com. Bob Woodward. Retrieved July 24, 2014.
  20. ↑ Deep Throat: Uncovered (archived), Department of Journalism, University of Illinois
  21. ↑ Who Was Deep Throat?, Smithsonian Magazine, December 2003
  22. ↑ Noah, Timothy. "Deep Throat, Antihero: His unmasking makes everybody look a little less noble", Slate, May 31, 2005. Quote from Playboy interview, 1979.
  23. ↑ Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11-How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security, (2002) Touchstone ISBN 0-7432-4599-7
  24. ↑ Deborah Davis, 'Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post' (1987) National Press, ISBN 0-915765-43-8.
  25. ↑ "Honeymoon in Metropolis" – via www.imdb.com.
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