Deep Throat: The irreconcilable differences between image and fact

William Safire traces the origins of Watergate back to the wiretaps placed on White House staffers and reporters beginning in 1969. However, this domestic security operation plays a very small role in the Watergate narrative of All the Presidents Men. Now that we know who Deep Throat was, this blind spot is revealing and raises troubling questions about Felt's motives and the price reporters pay for using anonymous sources with personal agendas.

Woodward and Bernstein did not break the wiretap story. Its outline first appeared in Time magazine in February 1973. Deep Throat kept this operation secret from his young reporter friend. Mark Felt knew about the bugging because it was a national security operation authorized by the Attorney General, blessed by J. Edgar Hoover, and conducted by the FBI.

When the story came out in Time, Woodward met with Deep Throat to ask about the wiretaps. His source fed him lies. He laid the blame on Liddy and Hunt. "There was an out-of-channels vigilante squad of wiretappers that did it." The leaders were "ex-FBI and ex-CIA agents who were hired outside of channels."

More telling, Deep Throat laid down a warning about following Time's story too hastily:

"Don't jump too fast."

Deep Throat had protected the FBI by deflecting blame to the White House and CREEP. He shielded Kissinger and Haig who had been involved from the beginning and had helped select the targets for the tapping.

Felt's silence and subsequent lies are revealing for several reasons. First, it undercuts the idea that his Watergate revelations had an altruistic motive. The man who helped bring down Nixon had no problem with the FBI bugging reporters and White House staffers. He kept the NSC wiretaps secret for over three years. That is hard to square with his image as a patriot trying to defend the Constitution. Second, Felt's actions demonstrate that his relationship with Woodward was pragmatic with no hint of benevolence. He hid a big story from a young reporter, he minimized its scale as the story began to surface, and he flat out lied when the cover-up broke down.

It is perplexing, then, to read Woodward's accounts of his thought after that February meeting:

"It was enough to know that Deep Throat would never deal with him falsely."

Skip forward to May 1973. The month begins on a high note for both the source and the reporter. The hated L. Patrick Gray was forced out of the FBI on April 27. On the 30th Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kleindienst, and Dean resigned. Woodward and Bernstein wrote a story on 3 May that reiterated that the NSC taps were a Liddy/Hunt/CREEP operation. But Deep Throat was fighting a read-guard action. With so many investigations underway, the truth about the FBI wiretaps were bound to come out. Matters soon came to a head.

On 14 May FBI director Ruckelshaus revealed that the NSC wiretaps had been an FBI operation. On 15 May, Sy Hersh revealed in the New York Times that Henry Kissinger himself had worked with the FBI to select which staffers would be bugged.

The next night (16 May) Woodward met with Deep Throat. By any reasonable standard, the reporter should have been angry and skeptical. After all, his friend at the FBI had misled him for three months. The Post had been scooped by the Times and Time magazine because he had believed Deep Throat. How many other lies had been told, and how many other false stories had Woodward and Bernstein written?

Instead, Woodward meekly "listened obediently" to Deep Throat's next yarn. He was not allowed to ask questions as his now unreliable source held forth.

This is a moment of high drama in All the President's Men. Woodward goes back to apartment and calls Bernstein. When his partner arrives, he does not speak. With music playing in the background (more on that in a later post), they communicate via typewriter and scrawled notes.

"Everyone's life is in danger."

What spills out of the typewriter is the outline of a conspiracy so immense it defies belief and sends stabs of fear down everyone's spine. Nixon was using the CIA. Surveillance was everywhere. Howard Baker was in the tank. The cover-up was not about Watergate but a much bigger plot.

What follows is several days of clandestine adventure. They go to Bradlee's house for a meeting on a "half-dark street that ends at 4.00a.m. Editorial meetings are held outdoors or in vacant offices.

"For several days afer Woodward's meeting with Deep Throat, Bernstein and Woodward hehaved cautiously. They conferred on street corners, passed notes in the office, avoided telephone communications."

It makes for a fine story and a better movie, but it does not sound like good investigative reporting. How can two respected reporters be so trusting of a source that lied to them? If we believe W/B, then we must conclude that the reporters were gullible. They were so enamored with their secret source that they had taken leave of their critical faculties. They were not hard-bitten skeptics. Instead, they behaved like brainwashed cultists who accept any outlandish claim made by the trusted master.

The key thing is that Deep Throat's behavior torpedoes his image as a tortured patriot. His behavior is understandable but reprehensible nonetheless. He used the Washington Post to protect the FBI. He shifted blame for the wiretaps to two convenient targets (Liddy and Hunt) who he knew were innocent. He lied for bureaucratic advantage.

This story, it seems to me, must be the starting point for evaluating Mark Felt. It explains why he leaked instead of going to Congress as an honest whistle-blower. He leaked because he wanted to lie. In this case, he could not go to Congress because the truth hurt the FBI, not L. Patrick Gray.