Washington Decoded

The Secret That Wasn’t: Deep Throat Exposed in 1973

Editor’s Note: This week marked publication of a new book by Bob Woodward. The War Within is the fourth installment of his quartet on the Bush administration. And, as has been the case since 1974, when All the President’s Men was published, Woodward’s latest book contains headline-making revelations.

Washington Decoded first examined the Watergate roots of the phenomenon that is Woodward in a May 2007 piece entitled “Deep Throat 3.0.” The article below draws from newly-found evidence.

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By Max Holland

    Of all the legends about Watergate, perhaps the most enduring is that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein religiously protected the identity of W. Mark Felt, aka “Deep Throat.” In fact, they did more to expose their fabled secret source than has ever been appreciated.

    One big fat clue escaped all notice during the many years of guessing. It appeared in The Washington Post on June 17, 1973, a year to the day after the break-in and 10 months before Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 best-seller, All the President’s Men, introduced the American public to Deep Throat. If this clue in plain sight had been remembered, it’s unlikely that “Who Was Deep Throat?” would have ever surpassed “Whatever Happened to Judge Crater?” as the national guessing game. It all but pointed the finger at W. Mark Felt because it indicated where Deep Throat worked in the federal government: the FBI.

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    In the late spring of 1973, just as Watergate was bursting open, a distinguished Washington Post reporter named Laurence Stern got it into his head to write what turned out to be a most insightful article about the all-consuming scandal. Stern’s idea was simple: to juxtapose the first year of Watergate with what had been one of the most traumatic years ever at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    Such a thoughtful approach was second nature for Stern, who had been “winning awards and cutting a wide swath in both American and international journalism” since joining The Washington Post in 1952. He had started off just as Bob Woodward had—on the metropolitan staff—and for nine years worked his way up through local, suburban, and state news beats. By the time of the Watergate break-in, Stern was the Post’s so-called “Dulles airport correspondent,” meaning he was available 24/7 to cover the latest cold war crisis anywhere in the world.[1] As the biggest home-grown star in the Post’s firmament, Stern had almost a free rein at the newspaper and moved effortlessly between national and international stories.

   During the latter half of 1972 and into 1973, as the Watergate story slowly gained hurricane force, Stern was preoccupied with other, seemingly bigger stories: the ongoing war in Vietnam and agonizing peace negotiations in Paris; the presidential election, including George McGovern’s ill-fated choice of a running mate; and the involvement of the IT&T Corporation in Chilean politics. 

    By late April, however, as Watergate began destroying the reputations of men and institutions, Stern’s involvement became inevitable. In May, he took charge of one of the story’s hottest elements: was the Central Intelligence Agency complicit in the June 1972 break-in? And had the Nixon White House attempted to circumscribe the FBI’s investigation by falsely invoking CIA equities? It already seemed as if the reputation, if not fate, of the Nixon presidency might hinge on that question.[2]

    Stern died from a heart attack in 1979, at the age of 50, so his reasoning cannot be retraced. But the idea for a story about the FBI and Watergate seems to have come out of Stern’s dozen or so articles about CIA involvement in the scandal. He interviewed several top CIA officials, including Richard Helms, the CIA director at the time of the break-in, for these stories, and it is highly likely that the one FBI article Stern wrote was inspired by something he gleaned from these conversations.

    The leaks to the media right after the break-in had been the subject of intense speculation among top CIA officials, and for good reason. Many of the disclosures kept pointing to some kind of CIA involvement, and that left the agency in the difficult position of trying to prove a negative. As Helms suggested in his 2003 memoir—published two years before Felt was unmasked as Deep Throat—CIA officials in 1972 thought that someone in the FBI was the likely culprit. Wrote Helms, “One question arose repeatedly: were the leaks coming from the FBI? In J. Edgar Hoover’s day this would not have been the case. But what about the new bureau administration? Was discipline as strong as it had been? We did not know.”[3]  

    During his career, Helms was widely regarded as an incisive analyst, a detached observer of men, institutions (including his own), and what was really going on behind newspaper headlines, out of the public’s eye or ken. And few officials were shrewder students of the FBI than Helms, owing to his first-hand exposure to the bureau’s machinations under long-time director J. Edgar Hoover. Helms considered Hoover “the most accomplished American bureaucrat of the twentieth century . . .  with a superb grasp of how things are done in Washington.” That description was not intended to be ironic.[4]

    One of Stern’s CIA articles, dated May 16, quoted Helms to make a penetrating and under-appreciated point about the bureau from an insider’s point of view. The break-in had occurred just one month after Hoover’s death in office, which had hit the FBI like the death of dictator: utterly predictable and incomprehensible at the same time. “Can you imagine the predicament of a new FBI director,” Helms said, “coming into office and having this thing break over his head?”[5] This remark suggests that the former CIA director shared with Stern his educated conjectures about what had really been going on. 

    The gist of Stern’s June 17 article on the FBI was that the Watergate scandal had “brought egg to [the FBI’s] face and demoralization to its ranks.” L. Patrick Gray III, the acting director who had the misfortune of succeeding Hoover, was only the most obvious victim of the wreckage. The bureau’s reputation and image, long the most unsullied in Washington, was in tatters. It stood accused of “leaking like a sieve, relaxing surveillance of domestic subversives, and turning its back on the rest of the intelligence community.” Bereft of Hoover, whom Stern aptly described as the “Compleat Bureaucratic Infighter,” the FBI faced more questions and uncertainty about its future than at any time since 1924, when Hoover, then 29 years old, inherited an agency steeped in scandal, political intrigue, and illegal activities.[6]

    Stern traced the stunning estrangement that had developed between the bureau and the Nixon administration. No president had seemed more likely to get along with Hoover than Nixon, who, 20 years earlier, had exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. Instead, Hoover’s advancing age, caution, and territoriality had been a continuous source of frustration for the Nixon White House, which felt itself (and the nation) under siege from violent radicals, shrill anti-war protesters, and black militants.

    This portion of Stern’s article was not exactly novel, as similar accounts had been published elsewhere. Rather, it was the rest of the article that was the real gem. It provided exactly the kind of insight that had given Stern a deserved reputation for writing about the news in a way that was unusually profound.

The Ford Files

The Warren Commission posing for its official picture. Representative Gerald R. Ford (R-Michigan) is sitting in the lower left corner, followed by Representative Hale Boggs (D-Louisiana), Senator Richard B. Russell (D-Georgia), Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senator John Sherman Cooper (R-Kentucky), John J. McCloy, Allen W. Dulles, and J. Lee Rankin, the panel’s general counsel.

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By Max Holland

   Gerald R. Ford’s FBI files, released under the Freedom of Information Act this month, will not force an instant reappraisal of America’s 38th president some 20 months after his death.[1] 

    Unlike John F. Kennedy’s bureau file, which documented JFK’s trysts in the 1960s with Judith Campbell (a Mafia moll) and Ellen Rometsch (a suspected East German spy), the FBI files on Ford hold no information about any dangerous liaisons.

    The files do contain information, though, on a curious liaison. Ford secretly arranged to share information with the FBI while serving on the Warren Commission, the panel charged with investigating President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. This would surely have been an explosive revelation but for one fact: Ford’s covert dealings with the bureau in 1963-1964 have been public knowledge since 1978, when 58,000 pages from the FBI’s files on the assassination were first released.[2]

    Notwithstanding the passage of 30 years, there is a great deal of misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what Ford’s secret liaison with the bureau in 1963-1964 signified. A recent Washington Post article on the newly-released files, for example, insinuated that Ford all but volunteered to steer any skeptical colleagues on the Warren Commission to the conclusion already reached by the FBI in early December 1963—namely, that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated President Kennedy.[3]

     The problem with such breathless accounts can be traced to a lack of historical understanding. The Post article both misread the documents and missed their point because it did not put the FBI memos into the context of what was going on at the time. This article will describe what troubled Ford about Warren’s leadership of the commission in the weeks immediately following the assassination.

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    The 1948 election, which initially brought Jerry Ford to Washington, was the first to be conducted after the onset of the cold war. But foreign policy was not the main issue in the September GOP primary. Instead, bread-and-butter issues like veterans’ housing defined the difference between the candidates in the race to represent Michigan’s fifth congressional district. In a stunning upset, Jerry Ford, a 35-year-old lawyer and Navy veteran with no political experience, defeated Bartel “Barney” Jonkman, a five-term incumbent who campaigned all too casually against a novice. And winning the primary was tantamount to being elected, because the fifth district was overwhelmingly Republican.

    Still, foreign policy was the subtext of the campaign, if not the reason for the primary contest in the first place. The 64-year-old Jonkman was an isolationist, notwithstanding the causes and consequences of World War II, whereas Ford was now a committed believer in US world leadership. In fact, one of the Senate’s leading internationalists, Arthur H. Vandenberg (R-Michigan), had quietly encouraged Ford to challenge Jonkman, though Vandenberg could not openly take sides in a primary in his home state.

    The flip side to Ford’s internationalism, of course, was a deeply embedded anti-Communism both foreign and domestic. Once Ford arrived in Washington in January 1949, he aligned himself with those congressmen who were unstinting supporters of the FBI, the arm of the government directly involved in combating the US Communist Party and Soviet espionage. Indeed, one of the ancillary revelations from the bureau’s files is that Ford himself came close to being on the front lines of the domestic war against subversion. In early 1942, while apparently uncertain about his Navy appointment, Ford applied to become an FBI agent. His background check was favorable, save for his role in organizing the “America First” committee while attending Yale University’s law school in the fall of 1940.[4]

    One of freshman Ford’s earliest statements on the House floor directly involved J. Edgar Hoover, who had already been FBI director for 25 years by 1949. Ford had nothing but praise for the director, although it was already abundantly clear that Soviet spy rings had operated with near-impunity in war-time Washington. “The question of domestic security is of vital importance,” Ford noted on July 8, and “Mr. Hoover’s record for the past 25 years is unassailable.”[5] 

    Ford’s statement occurred during a discussion of compensation for top federal employees, including the directors of agencies. Ford believed that Hoover should not receive a penny less in salary than men in comparable positions, such as the much newer director of the Central Intelligence Agency. This statement of support was bound to attract Hoover’s attention and warm his heart, for the FBI’s legislative office regularly monitored the Congressional Record for all mentions of the bureau or its director. “It is always extremely gratifying to learn of such favorable observations,” Hoover wrote in response a few days later, as he thanked Ford for his “gracious comments” and expression of confidence.[6]

   Over the next decade, as Ford concentrated on issues of interest to his district or national defense, the Michigan congressman actually had little direct business with the bureau. But since he held a coveted seat on the Appropriations Committee—though not on the subcommittee with direct oversight of the FBI’s budget—Jerry Ford was a valuable man to cultivate as part of the bureau’s “Hill contact” program. As one internal memo put it, Ford represented “a contact in the event his services are needed on matters of interest to the bureau.”[7] 

    During the 1950s, Ford also became close friends with Louis B. Nichols, an assistant director whose duties included liaison with members of Congress. Nichols, who developed many of the FBI’s public relations techniques, was considered one of the most influential officials in the bureau until his 1957 retirement. Then too, Ford was clearly a Republican politician on the rise; by 1960, he was even being mentioned as a possible running mate for Richard Nixon, the GOP’s presidential nominee. So every two years, when fifth district voters returned Ford to Washington by wide margins, Hoover made sure to send a hearty note of congratulations and his best wishes. 

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    The second session of the 87th Congress began in January 1963 on a familiar note for Jerry Ford and the FBI. Shortly after the Congress convened, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, the FBI’s congressional liaison, personally presented Ford with a special gift in light of the re-elected congressman’s “friendly attitude” toward the bureau.[8]  It was a signed copy of the director’s latest book, A Study of Communism (which was actually written by William C. Sullivan, assistant director of the Domestic Intelligence Division, but publicly credited to Hoover). The gesture affirmed that Ford stood in good stead with the FBI, and certainly complemented the picture of Hoover that had been furnished to Ford the year before.

    Then, late in 1963, the cordial relationship between Ford and the FBI suddenly took a very serious turn. The reason was the assassination of President Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson’s appointment of Ford to the presidential commission headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Cold War Origins

When did the cold war really begin?

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By Sheldon M. Stern

    It has often been argued that the ideological and geopolitical conflict between the former Soviet Union and the United States began not in 1945, but in 1917-18. Ostensibly, Washington’s congenital antipathy to the Bolshevik revolution—as evinced by an “American invasion” (or “intervention”) that targeted the new regime in Russia—planted the seeds of the cold war by generating a Soviet anger and distrust of the United States that was wholly justified. From this perspective, the US decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan in 1945 was not even the opening salvo in the cold war because US responsibility for the conflict was already manifest during the waning months of World War I.

    This general argument can be found in the work of academic historians like William Appleman Williams and has been popularized in the writings of Noam Chomsky.[1] It has also become casually accepted fare in some state high school US history standards, as I discovered while conducting a survey several years ago.[2] A leading college-level textbook as well, published by a prominent historian in 1995, noted that before the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, President Woodrow Wilson had already “ordered the landing of American troops in the Soviet Union.” These forces “soon became involved, both directly and indirectly, in assisting the White Russians (the anti-Bolsheviks) in their fight against the new regime.” Lenin “survived these challenges, but Wilson refused to recognize his new government, nevertheless. Diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were not restored until 1933.”[3]

    But do such accounts adequately convey important aspects of US-Soviet relations from 1918 to 1933?

    For one, the military intervention in Russia was not exclusively or even primarily American. Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Italy, Japan, Poland, Romania, and Serbia also put troops in Russia in 1918. Indeed, Poland (12,000), Greece (24,000), Czechoslovakia (50,000), and Japan (72,000) inserted far larger forces than the United States (9,000).[4] The Bolsheviks, it must be remembered, had made a separate peace with the Kaiser’s government in March 1918 and had withdrawn from the war. A month later, a German division landed in Finland and was within striking distance of the port of Murmansk as well as the strategic Petrograd-Murmansk railway. The Western allies shared a justifiable concern that the Germans would seize substantial arms depots and strategic port cities in Russia. Britain, in particular, put pressure on President Wilson to send US troops with the aim of halting, or at least slowing, the potentially decisive transfer of German forces to the Western front. So in July, Wilson dispatched 9,000 troops to the Archangel-Murmansk area. The president did not regard US intervention in Russia to be an act of war, but rather an effort to help the Russians extricate themselves from German domination.

    To be sure, it wasn’t the first US move in opposition to the new revolutionary regime in Moscow. Wilson had already sanctioned covert aid to anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia before the US troops were sent, and for the same strategic reason, to keep Germany fighting on two fronts. Because of Wilson’s public support for national self-determination, these secret commitments, as historian David Foglesong concluded,

evaded public scrutiny and avoided the need for Congressional appropriations. … Trying to avoid actions that would blatantly contradict liberal democratic ideals, Wilson and other U.S. officials did everything they felt was practicable to accelerate the demise of Bolshevism…. [Nevertheless] the small U.S. expedition and the many shipments of supplies to anti-Bolshevik forces were enough to provoke dissent at home and resentment in Soviet Russia, but not sufficient to secure the goal of a reunited democratic Russia.[5]

    Wilson also persisted in measures that could be termed anti-revolutionary. He opposed seating Soviet Russia at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and supported the plan by Herbert Hoover, director of the American Relief Administration, to send food to anti-Bolshevik forces in the Baltic region. Yet, these half-measures failed to bring down Bolshevism and only exacerbated “the fears of hostile encirclement and foreign subversion that buttressed the Soviet government for seven decades.”[6] Still, neither Soviet leaders at the time nor anyone else characterized the eleven-nation 1918 intervention as an “American invasion”—at least not yet.

    Ironically, an exclusively American intervention in Russia did begin soon after the withdrawal of US troops in 1920. The Bolshevik policy of forcibly seizing food from often rebellious and starving peasants, combined with drought and pestilence, resulted in a massive famine by 1921, one that ultimately cost 5 million lives and threatened the survival of Lenin’s government. Soviet authorities reluctantly permitted the internationally-renowned writer Maxim Gorky to issue a public plea for food and medicine. The United States, fortunately,

had ready for action an extraordinarily efficient volunteer relief organization, designed for just such emergencies and possessed of equipment, experienced personnel, and some funds for current operations in Europe. The American Relief Administration [ARA], under Herbert Hoover, was world famous for its work in Belgium and twenty-two other countries. Hoover, although he took a very dim view of communism, promptly answered with an offer to bring food, clothing, and medicine to a million Russian children.[7]

      Hoover even persuaded Congress, barely a year after the Red Scare, to appropriate $20 million for Russian famine relief—an astonishing achievement given that the United States did not even have diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia. By 1923, the ARA had distributed more than half a million tons of food which reached over 10 million people a day. In addition, eight million Russians were inoculated against deadly diseases, and scores of hospitals were restocked with 1,300 sets of surgical instruments and tons of medicines and medical supplies which saved the lives of millions of Russians.[8]

    There was a politico-economic edge to ARA’s altruism. Hoover undoubtedly hoped that the ARA’s work would persuade the Russian people to abandon communism for a democratic/capitalist system. “It was only natural,” he believed, that ARA relief would, “by spreading goodwill, serve to promote US economic interests.” Yet he had also recognized that Soviet officialdom was already suspicious and could easily turn obstructionist. Consequently, Hoover had instructed ARA representatives not only to avoid political activities, but to abstain from even discussing politics.[9]