Deep Throat’s Felony

Mark Felt’s conviction for authorizing illegal FBI break-ins is usually treated as an ironic footnote to his role in Watergate. It is glossed over and few reporter or historians are interested in using it to draw any inferences about the personality, character, or motives of the most famous secret source in history.

Amy Goodman did an interview with one of the targets of the FBI harassment who described what Felt’s men did to her:

JENNIFER DOHRN: I was aware of a lot of it. I was certainly aware of being followed a lot. I wasassumed that perhaps my phones were tapped, and I had no idea of the level of extent under which I was being surveilled. I had no idea that break-ins were repeatedly happening into my apartments. I remember when I was pregnant with my first born feeling extremely vulnerable because I was being followed a great deal of the time, and then it was revealed when I received my Freedom of Information Act papers, over 200,000 documents, that there actually had been developed by Felt a plan to kidnap my son after I birthed in hopes of getting my sister to surrender. So, my imagination
AMY GOODMAN: The F.B.I. plans?
JENNIFER DOHRN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: To kidnap your son?
JENNIFER DOHRN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: How did it say that in the documents?
JENNIFER DOHRN: It said that this was a plan that had been developed and ultimately was not implemented.

The operation went way beyond over-zealous police work. G. Gordon Liddy might have had second thoughts about some of Deep Throat’s tactics. Did the fevered, paranoid Nixon White House ever ponder kidnapping a new born infant? No wonder Bon Woodward skipped over the facts in The Secret Man.

That Deep Throat was presented with a pair of panties as a trophy from the illegal operation is another critical bit of information. It suggests that some parts of the Bureau thought and acted like a bunch of thuggish frat boys who reveled in their invulnerability.

If Dohrn is telling the truth, it is hard to picture Felt as a tortured patriot who only broke the rules when his sense of duty allowed him no other choice.

What we do see is the product of Hoover’s FBI: a man who answered to no authority beyond J.E. Hoover himself.

This Time magazine piece gives a good picture of how the FBI stonewalled the investigation into Felt’s operation. The Nixon White House never came close to pulling off this kind of determined and unified cover-up.