Politics > Politics-USA > Nixon: "You know, suppose that Felt comes out and unwraps the whole thing?"
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Politics > Politics-USA |
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"MrPepper11" |
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01 Jun 2005 12:28:58 AM |
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Nixon: "You know, suppose that Felt comes out and unwraps the whole thing?" |
June 1, 2005
Conflicted And Mum For Decades
By Dan Balz and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
W. Mark Felt always denied he was Deep Throat. "It was not I and it is
not I," he told Washingtonian magazine in 1974, around the time that
Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace after a lengthy
investigation and threat of impeachment, aided in no small part by the
guidance Felt had provided to The Washington Post.
It was a denial he maintained publicly for three decades, until
yesterday. Throughout that period, he lived with one of the greatest
secrets in journalism history and with his own sense of conflict and
tension over the role he had played in bringing down a president in the
Watergate scandal: Was he a hero for helping the truth come out, or a
turncoat who betrayed his government, his president and the FBI he
revered by leaking to the press?
There were plenty of reasons that he felt such conflict. He was an FBI
loyalist in the image J. Edgar Hoover had created for the bureau in its
glory days -- a career official who lived by the bureau's codes, one of
which was the sanctity of an investigation and the protection of
secrets. He chased down lawbreakers of all kinds, using whatever means
were available to the bureau, and was convicted in 1980 of authorizing
illegal break-ins -- black-bag jobs, as they were known -- of friends
of members of the Weather Underground. He was later pardoned by
President Ronald Reagan.
But if there were reasons to resist playing the role of anonymous
source, there were other motives that drove him to talk. Felt believed
that the White House was trying to frustrate the FBI's Watergate
investigation and that Nixon was determined to bring the FBI to heel
after Hoover's death in May 1972, six weeks before the break-in at the
Democratic National Committee's Watergate offices occurred.
"From the very beginning, it was obvious to the bureau that a cover-up
was in progress," Felt wrote in his 1979 memoir, "The FBI Pyramid."
Felt may have had a personal motivation as well to begin talking to
Post reporter Bob Woodward. At the time of Hoover's death, he was a
likely successor to take over as FBI director. Instead the White House
named a bureau outsider, L. Patrick Gray III, then an assistant
attorney general, as acting director and then leaned on Gray to become
a conduit to keep the White House informed of what the FBI was
learning.
Felt's identity was revealed with the help of his family in a Vanity
Fair article released yesterday. A statement from the family, read by
Nick Jones, Felt's grandson, described how conflicted he was over
whether his role was noble or dishonorable.
"Mark had expressed reservations in the past about revealing his
identity and about whether his actions were appropriate for an FBI
man," Jones said. "But as he recently told my mother, 'I guess people
used to think Deep Throat was a criminal. But now they think he's a
hero.' "
Felt operated during extraordinary times in U.S. history, and in the
history of the bureau he had been trained to protect at all costs.
Faced with a rogue White House, an explosive investigation and
political pressure that must have been excruciating, he decided to
spill secrets, anonymously helping to change the course of history
through clandestine meetings with Woodward in the middle of the night
in underground parking garages.
Nixon and his White House colleagues during this period were engaged in
what the House Judiciary Committee would eventually call a series of
criminal acts -- obstruction of justice, withholding of material
evidence, coercion of witnesses, and misuse of the CIA and the Internal
Revenue Service.
A secret investigative unit was run from the White House, supported by
the CIA and financed by campaign funds to spy on enemies and to break
into a psychiatrist's office in a search for confidential files.
Twenty-one participants in what came to be known as the Watergate
scandal, including the president's counsel, chief domestic adviser,
attorney general and campaign finance director, pleaded guilty or were
convicted of the crimes documented by the FBI and brought to light --
with Felt's help.
Throughout his career, Felt was seen as a model FBI official. Harry
Brandon, who retired from the FBI as deputy assistant for
counterintelligence and counterterrorism, recalled making a
presentation to Felt as a young agent in the bureau. "He was a tough
guy," Brandon said yesterday. "Straight. Very honest. Very straight."
Felt was born in Idaho in 1913. He graduated from the University of
Idaho and George Washington University Law School, and joined the FBI
in January 1942. He spent World War II in the bureau's espionage
section -- experience that came into play 30 years later as he set up
the series of signals and codes he and Woodward used when they needed
to meet with one another.
He steadily rose through the bureau's ranks. By the early 1970s, as one
of the bureau's top officials, he was beginning to demonstrate
political independence. At a White House meeting in 1971, he resisted a
directive to begin massive wiretaps or polygraph tests to find the
source of leaks about the Nixon administration's national security
strategy.
In March 1972, the administration was deeply embarrassed by the
disclosure of a memo written by a lobbyist at telecommunications giant
ITT. It stated that a $400,000 contribution to Nixon's reelection would
cause the Justice Department to abandon an antitrust suit against ITT.
White House special counsel Charles W. Colson asked Nixon's personal
counsel, John W. Dean III, to obtain an official FBI judgment that the
memo was a forgery. Hoover assigned the task of overseeing its
inspection to Felt. But Felt reported several days later that the
agency's laboratory could not "make a definite finding," a conclusion
that undermined the forgery claim, according to Dean's 1976 book,
"Blind Ambition."
"Colson, outraged, called Felt to complain. . . . He insisted that I
persuade Felt to change the [FBI's summary] letter, at least to make it
innocuous. Felt would not budge, because the director would not budge,"
Dean wrote. Felt, in his memoir, confirmed that the bureau had been
subjected to "partisan instructions and pressure" in the case.
Yesterday, Colson said he was stunned to learn that Felt was Deep
Throat, saying he never suspected the FBI official because "he was a
professional and that wasn't a professional way to behave."
Shortly after that incident, Hoover died and Felt was passed over to
succeed him in favor of Nixon loyalist Gray. As the Watergate
investigation began to unfold, Felt was infuriated by what he saw as
Gray's capitulation to the White House. Gray was "sharing all the
Bureau's knowledge with the White House staff," he wrote in his memoir,
which "felt they had neutralized the FBI."
"For me, as well as for all the Agents who were involved, it had become
a question of our integrity," Felt wrote. "We were under attack for
dragging our feet, and as professional law enforcement officers, we
were determined to go on."
Within a week, in fact, the FBI's investigation had begun to develop
productive leads; its investigators figured out that funds to pay the
burglars were laundered through a bank account in Mexico City linked to
Nixon's reelection effort. As a result, Nixon's chief of staff, H.R.
"Bob" Haldeman, met with the president on June 23 to urge that Vernon
A. Walters, then the CIA's deputy director, tell Gray to "stay the hell
out of it" on grounds that it would compromise CIA activities in
Mexico, according to a transcript of their conversation.
Gray wanted to do so, Haldeman added, and he just needed an order:
"He'll call Mark Felt in, and the two of them -- and Mark Felt wants to
cooperate because he's ambitious." Nixon replied, "Yeah." Haldeman went
on: "He'll call him in and say, 'We've got the signal from across the
[Potomac] river to put the hold on this.' "
Later in the conversation, Haldeman sought reassurance that this was
the right course of action: "You seem to think the thing to do is get
them to stop?" Nixon replied, "Right, fine." Walters met with Gray that
day, and according to a memo Walters wrote, Gray told him "this was a
most awkward matter to come up during an election year and he would see
what he could do."
None of this was known publicly at the time. But two junior reporters
at The Post -- Woodward and Carl Bernstein -- repeatedly wrote articles
that pointed toward White House involvement in the break-in and the
subsequent coverup.
In doing so, they relied heavily on a man they described in their 1974
memoir, "All the President's Men," as "a source in the Executive Branch
who had access to information at [the Nixon reelection effort] . . . as
well as at the White House. He could be contacted only on very
important occasions" and asked to confirm information learned elsewhere
and provide "perspective." In print, the duo attributed their
information only to "sources close to the Watergate investigation."
The leaks infuriated the White House, which pressured Gray into
interrogating all the field agents -- an act that Felt said had sowed
wide resentment. "Numerous times, when Gray was out of the city, John
Dean called me, demanding that . . . steps be taken to silence the
leakers," Felt wrote. "I refused to take such action and frequently I
was able to point out to him that some of the leaks could not possibly
have come from the bureau."
White House officials suspected Felt was leaking to The Post as early
as October 1972. According to an account written five years ago by
Chase Culeman-Beckman, who contended that Bernstein's son had told him
Felt was Deep Throat, Nixon, Haldeman and Dean were speculating about
Felt during one of the sessions tape-recorded in the White House.
"Is he Catholic?" Nixon asked. Told by Haldeman that Felt was Jewish,
Nixon replied, "[Expletive], [the bureau] put a Jew in there?" To which
Haldeman responded, "Well, that could explain it."
Contrary to their belief, Felt is not Jewish.
On Feb. 28, 1973, Nixon and Dean again tagged Felt as the potential
leaker. He was, Dean told Nixon, "the only person that knows" such
details. But Nixon was skeptical. No one would risk his career to
become an informant.
According to a tape recording from that day, Nixon said, "You know,
suppose that Felt comes out and unwraps the whole thing? What does that
do to him? . . . He's in a very dangerous situation. . . . The informer
is not wanted in our society. Either way, that's the one thing people
do sort of line up against. They . . . say, 'Well, that [expletive]
informed. I don't want him around.' "
Gray was never confirmed as FBI director, and in 1973 William D.
Ruckelshaus was nominated to replace him. Felt clashed repeatedly with
his new boss and left the bureau later that year, well before Nixon was
to leave office.
In 1978 he was indicted, along with Edward G. Miller, for nine illegal
break-ins in New York and New Jersey carried out in 1972 and 1973. When
he was arraigned, several hundred FBI agents showed up at the
courthouse in a sign of solidarity. The two maintained they had
operated within the law but were convicted in 1980. In April 1981,
Reagan pardoned both men, saying they had served the country with
"great distinction."
In his memoir, Felt acknowledged speaking once to Woodward, but in that
book and whenever else he was asked, he denied being Deep Throat. In
1999, Felt denied it again to the Hartford Courant after there was
another suggestion that he was Deep Throat.
"I would have done better," he told the paper. "I would have been more
effective." That summer, Felt told Slate's Tim Noah it would have been
contrary to his responsibilities at the FBI to leak information.
On the day of his conviction in 1980, Felt spoke to reporters outside
the courthouse to express his disappointment with the verdict. "I spent
my entire adult life working for the government, and I always tried to
do what I thought was right and what was in the best interest of this
country and what would protect the safety of this country," he said.
Looking back after yesterday's revelation, that quotation may express
one of the motivations that led this otherwise unlikely public servant
to engage in the surreptitious actions that led to Nixon's political
demise.
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