Woodstein gets played: Deep Throat, Gray, and Hunt's notebooks

In light of the previous post, you have to wonder: How did L. Patrick Gray get tagged as a big fish in the Watergate cover-up?

It turns out that John Dean lied about him to divert attention form dean's own involvement in the Watergate burglary and cover-up. Deep Throat helped by feeding incorrect information to Woodward when the story broke.

After the arrest at the Watergate, Dean went through Howard Hunt's White House safe. He eventually turned over most of the material to FBI investigators. He gave two folders to Acting Director Gray. He himself kept two notebooks in which Hunt recorded the details of the spying operations and his covert career.

In October 1972, Hunt's lawyers filed a motion for the government to produce the notebooks. The prosecutors and FBI did not have them and feared that their disappearance could result in a dismissal of the case against Hunt.

In December, the prosecutors met with Dean and pressed him about the contents of hunt's safe. He pleaded poor memory when it came to the specific items found there, but insisted that he turned everything over to the FBI.

In the middle of the meeting, Dean pulled Assistant Attorney General Henry Peterson aside and told him that he gave the most sensitive items directly to gray. "If there are missing documents, he's got them."

This is from Dean's own account in Blind Ambition.

At a stroke, Dean (falsely) implicated Gray in the Watergate cover-up. He bought himself time and turned attention away from his own actions.

Dean claims that he destroyed the notebooks in January 1973.

What Gray actually received from dean were two pieces of "research" Hunt had worked on at the White House. One concerned JFK and the Diem assassination. (Hunt may have been trying to forge cables that would implicate JFK in the assassination of Diem.) The other was a dossier on ted Kennedy. They were sensitive because they were proof that Hunt was involved in political intelligence for Nixon and may have been gearing up for some very dirty tricks. However, neither file related to the Watergate burglary.

In December, 1972 Gray burned them.

On 26 April 1973, the New York Daily News broke the story of Gray's destruction of the files. By this time Dean had cut a deal with prosecutors and his narrative was the impetus for the "revelation". He did not mention at this time that he had retained the notebooks and destroyed them himself.

Woodward reports that he called Deep Throat soon after he heard about the Daily News story. Deep Throat confirmed it was true. He added that gray had been warned by the White House that the material was "political dynamite" and "could do more damage than the Watergate buggings themselves". He also stated (inaccurately) that Gray destroyed them within a week of receiving them.

It is impossible to determine how much of the distortion in Deep Throat's account was from Dean and how much was Felt putting the knife to the hated outsider who was his boss. In any case, Gray had the misfortune to wind up in the crosshairs of two willful men with personal agendas and a deficit of character. Woodward, Bernstein, and the rest of the press ended up carrying water for the bad guys in this case.
Dean did not admit that he destroyed the notebooks until after he cut his deal with prosecutors and became their star witness. This was after he testified to the Ervin committee. His gripping testimony in the summer of 1973 was a part of his own, personal, cover-up.

The April revelations were a deathblow to Gray's chances of being confirmed to head the FBI. With the fate of Hunt's notebooks still a mystery, his destruction of the two files seemed more sinister than it was.

Felt, however, did not gain from Gray's troubles. Nixon nominated another outsider to be FBI Director (William Ruckelshaus) and Felt would soon leave the bureau.