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Julius Caesar
Act III By now everyone has heard that 91-year-old W. Mark Felt,
former second in command at the FBI during the Watergate scandal
that eventually took down the 37th President of the United States
has finally come forth as the identity behind the infamous Deep
Throat. The most notorious anonymous source in the history of
journalism, so dubbed after the celebrated porn film of the same
name by then Washington Post Managing Editor Howard Simons, the
paper that unleashed the investigative talents of Bob Woodward
and Carl Bernstein to uncover a series of outlandish crimes by
Richard Nixon, has been bandied about in books, college classrooms
and documentaries for three decades. None of which had successfully
fingered Felt among dozens of suspects. Some still argue it could
not have merely been Felt, and I agree.
Up until Felt’s confession, the accepted theory was that
Deep Throat, as most deep-background anonymous sources, was a
composite of several hidden voices. This made sense purely because
Deep Throat’s knowledge of numerous interconnected events
and key characters was so vast and his access inside the White
House so complete that anyone outside of Nixon’s most loyal
inner sanctum could not have achieved it. However, the composite
theory works on a simpler level. Woodward, merely a metro reporter
who had been with the Post for a lousy nine months would have
had a tough time selling several off-the-record sources as evidence
that the most powerful position in the land had plotted and bankrolled
this kind of cheap underhanded prank. One "deep" imbedded
source was an easier pitch.
But those are simply theories. Evidence that an FBI source, however
"high-ranking", would not have been able to provide
the kind of evidence portrayed in the Post’s 1973 stories
appears in more detail in Woodward and Bernstein’s masterful,
"All The President’s Men". The book contains, as
do many of the ’73 articles, several references to Deep Throat
as a White House source or top-level insider, someone with first-hand
knowledge of the Nixon tapes, incriminating documents, and a spectacular
history of insidious plots hatched by the most powerful people
in the country. Could this have merely been Felt?
Of course Felt was apprised of the evidence compiled by the FBI
in the ongoing investigation at the time, but as a top man in
the bureau, could he have been doing his job while snooping around
gathering dirt from several different sources himself?
John Dean, then White House counsel and point man for the 1972
break-in said this week that Felt’s prominent position at
the FBI so soon after the death of lifetime director J. Edgar
Hoover made it practically impossible for Felt to have had the
time or the balls for such tasks as writing cryptic messages in
Woodward’s NY Times to arrange clandestine garage meetings
that sometimes took up hours of the participants’ time. Dean
had his finger on the pulse of events from start to finish. It
was his riveting testimony at the hearings that was corroborated
word-for-word on the infamous smoking-gun tape that ultimately
buried Nixon.
When the president finally asked him to put his name to paper
outlining the gory events leading up to Watergate, one of several
blatant scapegoat moves, Dean turned coat to save his ass. When
he went to the FBI with his story, Dean admits he pretty much
knew who could have been leaking what, and Felt never made his
list. No doubt Felt was a prime candidate. He had an axe to grind,
believing, among many of his colleagues at the FBI that Nixon’s
appointment of Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray as director
instead of a veteran insider reeked of an overt kind of self-serving.
Gray’s name was later pulled when he admitted to sharing
the FBI’s investigation of Watergate with Dean, who then
had designs on helping the White House cover-up their party to
the incident.
Felt was also privy to all of the mounting evidence that began
to "grow as a cancer on the presidency", so much so
that Nixon urged his cronies to steer the FBI away from the proceedings
claiming it a CIA matter that was of utmost importance to national
security. Right then Felt, wounded by being passed over and wanting
to seal Gray’s fate, would have had ample evidence and motivation
for spilling the beans on Nixon. It is also important to note
that Felt, originally a spy detector for the bureau, was later
convicted and then pardoned by Ronald Reagan for authorizing FBI
break-ins of war protester headquarters in the ‘70s. He knew
well the tactics of the Beltway and could identify a juicy breach
from a mile away. After the revealing Vanity Fair article was
presented to the press this week, Woodward, who met in a DC garage
seven times with Felt during the Post’s investigation, corroborated
the confession in a statement followed by a brilliantly detailed
column unfurling his close friendship and series of spot-on info
Felt had funneled him long before Watergate. Woodward tells of
Felt’s fears of the Nixon Administration’s "corruption"
spilling into the FBI’s domain of illegal wire-tapping, opening
of mail, and authorized break-ins – all later corroborated
tactics of the Nixon era.
This is precisely why all this talk lately about Felt being some
kind of traitor snitch who should have gone through the proper
legal channels to prosecute Nixon instead of leaking evidence
to cub reporters is ludicrous. By the time Felt, rightly or not,
was passed over for FBI director the bureau was in turmoil. Hoover,
the FBI’s only director, was dead. For decades he ran the
tightest ship in DC, and in many ways held more sway than the
president. The White House, as many had tried in the past, was
beginning to put a stranglehold on several forms of the government,
especially Hoover’s former untouchable domain. It was hard
to fathom who was Nixon’s bitch and who was up and up. Well-worn
stories of Gray dumping vital evidentiary records into the Potomac
are all Felt would need to know before unburdening his soul.
To hear Woodward tell it, the best case scenario taking all of
the evidence through the ringer; the surveillance of Woodward’s
apartment to arrange the garage meetings to the detailed descriptions
of major conversations and documents coming straight from the
Oval Office to third-rate burglars and CIA rejects etc., it is
fair to deduce that if Mark Felt was The Deep Throat and not a
source composite, then he had help, much help in gathering the
type of gaudy facts that eventually, with air-tight precision,
destroyed the presidency of one of the most crooked politicians
this country has ever produced. Woodward concludes in his latest
piece for the Post, "Because of his position virtually atop
the chief investigative agency, his words and guidance had immense,
at times even staggering, authority. The weight, authenticity
and his restraint were more important than his design, if he had
one." But the question remains for this reporter: Who was
behind Deep Throat?
© James Campion June 5th '05
realitycheck@jamescampion.com
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