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.

Outing Deep Throat

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By Max Holland
            

    In an editorial written a few days after W. Mark Felt was unmasked, The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus perceptively opined that Felt had given every indication of preferring to take his secret to his grave. “I am glad, I suppose, to finally know the secret of Deep Throat,” Marcus wrote on June 5, 2005. “I am less confident that Mark Felt wanted me to know.”

    Marcus suggested that Felt’s family euchred him into revealing what he had labored so hard to keep secret:

To comprehend how thoroughly Felt believed that it wouldn’t fit for him to be both Mark Felt and Deep Throat, consider how insistently he kept his secret hidden from his own family. The more you read of Vanity Fair’s account of the outing, the sorrier you feel for a failing old man prodded and even tricked by his relatives into telling all—to get “closure,” as his daughter put it, perhaps finally to profit from what the family, if not Felt, viewed as his heroism.

    In point of fact, decades before Felt’s family sought profit from the secret, Bob Woodward irrevocably compromised Felt’s clandestine role by revealing Deep Throat’s existence in 1974, and benefited greatly from doing so. Two years later, Woodward compounded that betrayal by unilaterally deciding that he would identify Deep Throat by name at a time of Woodward’s own choosing, i.e., after Felt’s death. The first person, in other words, to disrespect Felt’s consistent behavior and exploit Deep Throat was the reporter entrusted with the secret.

    The end to Washington’s favorite guessing game in 2005 meant that history and perspective could finally displace a fixation. And with the benefit of hindsight comes the clarity to ask some long-neglected questions about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s protection of the most fabled confidential source in journalism history.

    When a newspaper reporter negotiates an understanding with a source, does that agreement extend to only the newspaper medium? If the reporter wants a change of terms, is he or she honor-bound to obtain the source’s express permission? Or are silence and the absence of protest sufficient? And finally, what is the effect of the passage of time? Does it give license to a reporter to re-interpret an understanding unilaterally?

    At several pivotal moments, Woodward amended the terms of his “deep background” agreement with Mark Felt to suit his, Bernstein’s and The Washington Post’s best interests, but not necessarily Felt’s. Woodward’s situational adherence to his arrangement with Felt does not rise to the level of Janet Malcolm’s controversial remark about journalists. But it might be best not to hold up the famed journalist’s treatment of Deep Throat as an exemplar to budding reporters.

     It certainly makes for an interesting case study though.

Deep Throat 3.0

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By William Gaines and Max Holland

    June 17, 2007 will mark the 35th anniversary of a “third-rate burglary” at the Watergate office complex that burgeoned into the downfall of Richard Nixon. If past were prologue, the anniversary would surely have sparked off a whole new round of speculation about the identity of the fabled secret source known as “Deep Throat.”

    But two years ago, the “source to end all sources” was unmasked after three decades of more or less successful anonymity.[1] Deep Throat turned out to be W. Mark Felt, the number two man in the FBI hierarchy at the time of the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.[2] And with the guessing game over, the 35th looms as the first major anniversary where the thrill is gone. The Watergate scandal is now relegated to history, where it firmly belongs. Perspective can finally displace a national fixation.[3]

    Some recently available documents, as well as older ones, when taken together, paint a far different portrait than the one Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have long propagated about Deep Throat’s role in the investigation that brought them accolades, fame, and fortune. Mark Felt was far from being just one of many sources, and an ambivalent, reluctant confirmer of information. At critical junctures, he provided vital guidance, knowledge, and leads. He sharpened and expanded upon information reported to him by Woodward. On occasion, Felt would even supply raw information, known only to the FBI, which could be popped into The Washington Post virtually unchanged. All of these contributions were instrumental to Post's leading coverage of the Watergate break-in. It’s fair to say that but for Deep Throat, in 1972 the Post would have been just another groping member of the press pack rather than its crucial, and mostly solo, leader.

    A revised look at Deep Throat also raises some long-neglected questions regarding Woodward and Bernstein’s protection of the most fabled confidential source in journalism history. When a newspaper reporter negotiates an understanding with a source, does that agreement extend to only the newspaper medium? If the reporter wants a change of terms, is he or she honor-bound to obtain the source’s express permission? Or are silence and the absence of protest sufficient? And finally, what is the effect of the passage of time? Does it give license to a reporter to re-interpret an understanding unilaterally? At several pivotal moments, Woodward amended the terms of the “deep background” agreement to suit his, Bernstein’s, or the Post’s best interests, but not necessarily Felt’s.

The Making of Two Myths

    During the 31 years Washington’s favorite parlor game lasted, Woodward and Bernstein stoutly maintained that for all the sound and fury, Woodward’s über-secret source was far less important than everyone believed. Deep Throat’s contributions were famously described in 1974, when All the President’s Men was published and revealed the existence of the source dubbed Deep Throat for the very first time. In the book it was claimed that Woodward’s discussions with Deep Throat were “only to confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere and to add some perspective.”[4]

    That formulation or some variant of it would be repeated endlessly for the next three decades, despite the fact that any careful parsing of the text would have revealed many internal inconsistencies.[5] As recently as 2005, Woodward would tell a C-SPAN interviewer that Deep Throat “was one of many sources. He provided a context and explained that Watergate was much larger and much more abusive. Others hinted at that but didn’t quite have the concept of the scope and magnitude.”[6]

    The hyperbolic counter-myth about Felt’s role seemingly had its origins in the taut film version of All the President’s Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, and written by William Goldman. Actor Hal Holbrook’s menacing portrayal of Mark Felt dramatized the secret source all out of proportion to his actual significance. Deep Throat became a mythic figure, to the point where the popular mis-impression was that Woodward and Bernstein had only one source. Or as one critical Post editor put it, it was as if Woodward “did little more than show up with a bread basket that Deep Throat filled with goodies.”[7] That Felt had been dubbed with a “sexy moniker,” borrowed from a pornographic 1972 movie that was the first crossover X-rated film, didn’t hurt the myth-making either.[8]

     But while the popular fable about Deep Throat was obviously wrong-headed, the account offered up by Woodward and Bernstein also needs revision.

Bradlee’s “Especially Privileged Seat at the Parade”

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By Max Holland

    Ask the nation’s most celebrated newspaper editor the burning journalistic question of the day – whether or not to publish the Unabomber’s manifesto – and the response from Ben Bradlee is uncharacteristic avoidance: “The wisdom of the ages cries out for silence from Bradlee,” he says.

    Now, Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee is not your shy, retiring type, so the question must be an awkward one for him. It’s not because when he faced a similar situation, he decided differently. Rather, it’s because he has just written a memoir suggesting that newspapers should not turn over their pages to political extortionists.

    The episode Bradlee recounts in A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures (Simon & Schuster, 1995) occurred in 1976. Croatian terrorists had hijacked a TWA 727 en route from Chicago to New York, and were threatening to kill all passengers unless five newspapers printed a screed demanding Croatian independence from Yugoslavia. One of those papers was The Washington Post, which Bradlee had been more or less running since 1965.

    “The idea of anyone . . . telling me that I had to run something in the paper that I didn’t want to run, much less that I had to run it on page one, was inconceivable to me.” Bradlee writes. “Yet I followed their instructions meek as a lamb. Once. I’m not sure I’d do it twice.”

    Whatever private doubts Bradlee, who stepped down in 1991, nurses about the Unabomber cave-in, you will never find him publicly second-guessing his old publisher, Donald Graham, or his successor as executive editor, Leonard Downie. In the Bradlee firmament of values, where courage, grace and honesty are prized, no quality is held in higher esteem than loyalty.

    And it was the Post, after all, that gave Bradlee the opportunity to preside over a powerful newspaper in the nation’s capital, a city where information is almost as prized as currency. The Post was also the vehicle that enabled Bradlee, during the 1972 Watergate scandal, to reach a pinnacle of professional recognition (and mass celebrity) that most editors can only dream about. Finally, it was the Post and Graham who stood behind Bradlee during his hour of mortification in 1981, when a Pulitzer Prize-winning front-page story turned out to be an utter hoax.

    To the degree that Bradlee has enjoyed “an especially privileged seat at the parade,” as he puts it, he owes nearly everything to The Washington Post and its owner for the past 60 years, the Graham family. But they owe him, too. It’s largely due to Bradlee’s stewardship that the Post is considered one of the nation’s best newspapers.