M Felt aka Deep Throat: Hero or Villain?

[Tim Gratz]

Shanet wrote:

PAT BUCHANAN, BERNARD BARKER and CHARLES COLSON are on record as stating that FELT was somehow in the wrong.

Shanet, you are leaving out G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, both of whom are on record condeming Felt. (Hunt most recently in an interview in the June 5, 2005 Miami Herald.)

It is not clear the extent Deep Throat actually advanced the criminal investigation but assuming he did I suppose it would not be unexpected that those who served time due to Felt's actions are not rising to lionize him.

Shanet also wrote:

Mr. Felt is the patriot, Mr. Gray and Mr. Nixon are the corrupt politicians.

Shanet, here is where you are wrong. It is not an either/or, good guy/bad guy dichotomy. Corruption of one's office is wrong even if one's motive is pure (and in Felt's case even that is open to question).

I go back to my Fuhrman/Simpson analogy. If Fuhrman indeed planted the glove, the fact that Simpson was a murderer does not render Fuhrman a hero. Fuhrman, if he did plant evidence, was a corrupt cop, and Simpson was a murderer. The fact that Fuhrman was (rightly) convinced Simpson was a brutal murderer who hacked two innocent people to death does not make him a hero. Same with Felt. A law enforcement officer does not go corrupt even if he does so to ensure the conviction of a guilty man. So too the fact that Nixon was a scoundrel does not make Felt a hero or a patriot. (Which is not to say that in the course of his career Felt did not engage in heroic and patriotic actions; for that matter, so did Nixon).

Edited June 6, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[John Simkin]

Some people argue Felt's actions were justifiable because despite his famous protestation to the contrary Richard Nixon was a crook.  IMO that does not justify breaking the law any more than the national security concerns cited by Felt in authorizing illegal entries into the homes of political dissidents authorized those "black bag" jobs.

Next question is: what are the ethics of a journalist who knowingly accepts information from a source who he knows is commiting  a crime in releasing the information?

Nixon may very well have been a crook.  So was Mark Felt.

Tim, I cannot understand your comments about Mark Felt being a crook. I am no fan of Felt. I accept that his leaks were motivated by Nixon’s decision to appoint his old crony L. Patrick Gray as Director of the FBI. It was generally believed in the FBI that the post would go to Felt (William Sullivan had been the favourite to take over from Hoover but he had been sacked a few months earlier).

As Felt had done what he could to help Nixon (for example, leaking false information that Arthur Bremer had been stalking Nixon as well as Wallace). Felt was also willing to break the law by authorising illegal break-ins and wire taps of people connected to suspected domestic bombers. This related to the investigation of the terrorist group, the Weather Underground. He had done this at the request of Nixon after the Weather Underground had planted bombs at the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the State Department. It was this action that led him to be convicted in 1980 (the incident that you refer to as turning him into a “crook”).

President Ronald Reagan pardoned Felt on 15th April, 1981. Reagan said that Felt had "acted on high principle to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation." Don’t you think that your beloved Bush would have done the same as Reagan?

What upset Felt and other FBI agents was L. Patrick Gray attempts to hinder the Watergate investigation. This included instructing FBI agents not to interview key witnesses. Understandably those eventually convicted of carrying out dirty tricks against the Democrats were not very happy that people like Felt leaked this information to the press (what is your excuse for condemning his behaviour). I am surprised that even you are willing to quote people like Liddy and Hunt as being some sort of experts on moral behaviour.

Chuck Colson, that so-called born again Christian, said a few days ago that “Mark Felt, he insisted, should have reported his misgivings to his superiors rather than spill the beans to the press.” That seems a very good idea. His superiors, John Mitchell, the attorney general, and L. Patrick Gray III, the acting head of the FBI, were both involved in the cover-up.

Felt accepts that what he did was nothing to be proud of. As he said: “I don’t think being Deep Throat was anything to be proud of. You should not leak information to anyone." However, he added: "If you know your government is engaging in illegal and/or immoral acts, then you have an obligation to speak out that overrides confidentiality agreements and secrecy laws. It's never wrong to inform on serious criminal acts no matter who is perpetrating them." Well said.

[Steve Ulman]

To be honest I haven't followed the revelations about Mark Felt very closely. Has anyone found the reason why he didn't go to Judge Sirica or to Sen. Erwin, etc., but went to the Post instead?

I read AtPM when it first came out but haven't thought much about Watergate since then. I always believed that DT was someone in the White House simply because DT used Woodward/Bernstein and didn't go through the "legal" channels, which is why I was surprised DT=Felt.

Edited June 6, 2005 by Steve Ulman

[John Simkin]

To be honest I haven't followed the revelations about Mark Felt very closely.  Has anyone found the reason why he didn't go to Judge Sirica or to Sen. Erwin, etc., but went to the Post instead?

This is a good question. Especially as he resigned from the FBI in June, 1973 and did not have to worry about his career. What is more, he would have been seen as a national hero and would have made a fortune from his memoirs. One possibility is that he was not Deep Throat at all. I have tried to explain this here:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...opic=3956&st=45

It is worth remembering that in 2001 Felt had a stroke that robbed him of his memory. We therefore have to rely on the testimony of his son and daughter and his lawyer, John O'Connor. They have made it clear that their main intention is to make money out of his claim. Vanity Fair only paid the family $10,000 (£5,500) but the whole project is linked to a multimillion book deal (HarperCollins) that is likely to be written by Bob Woodward. It is therefore in Woodward's interests to say Felt was Deep Throat. It also lets Woodward off the hook if the Deep Throat scam was really a CIA "limited hangout" to direct the media away from the real story behind the Watergate break-in.

[Pat Speer]

It is worth remembering that in 2001 Felt had a stroke that robbed him of his memory. We therefore have to rely on the testimony of his son and daughter and his lawyer, John O'Connor. They have made it clear that their main intention is to make money out of his claim. Vanity Fair only paid the family $10,000 (£5,500) but the whole project is linked to a multimillion book deal (HarperCollins) that is likely to be written by Bob Woodward.  It is therefore in Woodward's interests to say Felt was Deep Throat. It also lets Woodward off the hook if the Deep Throat scam was really a CIA "limited hangout" to direct the media away from the real story behind the Watergate break-in.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hold on, John, you're sliding down a slippery slope here. When your pet theory hits a snag, you can't just decide that this means "the conspiracy is even bigger than we thought." Instead of deciding that somehow Felt and Woodward are both secretly helping to get the CIA off the hook, why don't we accept their words at face value. This still leaves plenty of questions.

1. Was Felt basically a disgruntled employeee, upset because he didn't get the position he wanted?

2. Was Felt disgusted with the way Nixon was trying to co-opt the FBI into becoming his private police force? Was Nixon's use of Sullivan seen by Felt as damaging to the integrity of the FBI? If so, did Felt have other FBI agents loyal to Hoover working with him to expose Watergate?

3. Did Felt know of Nixon's behind-the-scenes maneuvering to remove Hoover? If so, did Felt have reason to suspect the timely exposure of Cointelpro after the unsolved break-in in Median Pennsylvania, was a Nixon operation? If so, did Felt have reasons to suspect that Hoover's sudden and uninvestigated death was by anything other than natiural causes?

There may be a lot more to this story than meets the eye, but it would seem to involve the FBI. Trying to make it about the CIA at this point is just muddying the waters.

Edited June 6, 2005 by Pat Speer

[Tim Gratz]

John wrote:

Tim, I cannot understand your comments about Mark Felt being a crook.

BUT John also wrote:

Felt was also willing to break the law by authorising illegal break-ins and wire taps of people connected to suspected domestic bombers. This related to the investigation of the terrorist group, the Weather Underground. . . . It was this act that led him to be convicted in 1980 (the incident that you refer to as turning him into a “crook”).

No, John, it was his actual CONVICTION of a felony that means he was a crook.

John wrote:

President Ronald Reagan pardoned Felt on 15th April, 1981. Reagan said that Felt had "acted on high principle to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation." Don’t you think that your beloved Bush would have done the same as Reagan?]

Now this is interesting. Certainly bringing an end to terrorism is a laudable and important goal. Do you and Pat believe therefore that Felt was justified in authorizing the black bag jobs to end terrorism? By your comments re my "beloved Bush" I think your answer would be no. So is mine. My position is, at least, consistent. It was wrong for Felt to break the law to counter terrorism, just as it is wrong to break the law to bring down a corrupt President (or, as you state, rightly I think) to retaliate because you did not receive the job to which Felt felt (SORRY) entitled. And it was wrong for Reagan (my favorite president) to pardon him, implicitly condoning his conduct. As it would have been wrong for Bush to do so had it been his call.

Of course, it was also wrong for Gray to obstruct the investigation at Nixon's request. Remember the famous quote from the White House Tapes that they would leave Gray to "twist slowly in the wind?" The rewards of loyalty!

I should research whether there is a statute that actually prohibits releasing confidential information. I am certain his oath did. As Steve pointed out, he could have gone either to Judge Sirica (the Judge presiding over the Watergate defendants) or to Sen. Erwin, whose committee was investigating the break-in.

One possible reason he did not do so was sheer cowardice. He could count on the reporters to keep his secrets. If his story came out in court or in congress he could have suffered at the hands of Nixon or his successor. In the man's defense, if his motive was honorable he was in a difficult position to be sure.

Edited June 7, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Pat Speer]

Tim, I understand but do not condone Felt's behavior on the taps and break-ins. On the other hand, if they were gonna send him to jail, there should have been hundreds of men to follow. If you don't believe the FBI and CIA engaged in wanton disregard for the law, in their efforts to protect "REAL AMERICANS" from trouble-makers, you should go back and read the Rockefeller report and the Church Committee hearings.

So if breaking the law makes one a crook, I'll agree that Felt was a crook. But you should at least acknowledge that Nixon was both a crook and a xxxx. To repeat, by accepting the pardon, Nixon acknowledged he was guilty of a criminal act. Ford explains this in his book. Nixon is certainly no less a crook than Felt. The way you've been going on about Felt, I can't help but get the impression you believe Felt was somehow worse than Nixon, when that's ludicrous. Felt didn't betray anyone besides another crook. Nixon betrayed the whole country.

You should also remember that Felt DID NOT run to Woodward and spill his guts. He merely provided background and confirmation. He kept the boys on the right track. He clearly wanted the truth to come out. But he was troubled by this act and was unable to let himself completely spill the beans. The argument can be made that the only reason Nixon was re-elected in 72 over McGovern is because Felt kept his mouth shut and observed what you wrongly consider a sacred oath.

Edited June 7, 2005 by Pat Speer

[Tim Gratz]

Pat, perhaps we are getting closer to an agreement here!

You agree Felt was a crook.

But you state: "If you don't believe the FBI and CIA engaged in wanton disregard for the law, in their efforts to protect "REAL AMERICANS" from trouble-makers, you should go back and read the Rockefeller report and the Church Committee hearings. "

I agree with you completely here. As I have previously posted (at least thrice) I think the CIA officials who plotted the assassination of Castro were guilty of conspiring to murder and should have been indicted. There is a fierce debate, of course, re how much the Kennedy brothers knew about, and approved, the assassination plots. But we do know that Laurence Houston and Sheffield Edwards met RFK in his office in May of 1962 and discussed with him the CIA's engagement of the mafia to kill Castro. Col. Edwards was clearly involved in this. As he testified, RFK got angry at the use of the mafia and instructed them that if they ever contemplated the use of the mafia again, they should consult with him. But Edwards noted that he did not expressly forbid future assassination attempts that did not use the mafia. Well, in my opinion, he should have arranged for the arrest of Bissell, Edwards, Maheu, Rosselli, Giancana and Trafficante. The problem with this, of course, is that it would have created a furor, perhaps wrecked the CIA and demonstrated that some of the things Castro was saying about US terrorism against Cuba was correct.

You write:The way you've been going on about Felt, I can't help but get the impression you believe Felt was somehow worse than Nixon, when that's ludicrous. Felt didn't betray anyone besides another crook. Nixon betrayed the whole country.

I did not mean to imply that Felt was worse than Nixon and I have never felt that he was (sorry, just couldn't resist).

That being said, however, and I suspect this may start another debate: I recently reread Lasky's "It Didn't Start With Watergate" and he makes a very persuasive point that many of the abuses of the Nixon White House also occured during both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. I am sure there were some abuses peculiar to Nixon but many were not. For instance, Lasky proves that Kennedy used the IRS to harass his political enemies. Now the fact that previous administrations engaged in similar conduct in no way justifies or minimizes Nixon's abuses, nor does it mean that Felt was worse than Nixon. But it does prove that at least for some of the scandals associated with Nixon, "it didn't start" with Nixon.

I will have to reread the Watergate books to verify that all Deep Throat did was to confirm or deny information previously discovered by Woodward and Bernstein.

And I do think it is a sacred oath that Felt violated, an action not justified by the importance of his objective--any more than Fuhrman would have been justified in planting evidence because he knew Simpson had brutally murdered two people. There is a danger when one argues that rules can be violated if the cause is important. Once you open the door to law-breaking you may discover it is not so easily closed. There is an old adage "Hard cases make bad law". You may need to enforce the rules, even when the enforcement will bring a terrible result, because if you do not you are making "bad law". Let us return to the assassination attempts against Castro. Let us assume they could be justified because Castro was a butchet, etc. But you have then approved of murder as an instrument of out foreign policy. A dangerous precedent indeed!

Edited June 8, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[John Simkin]

It is worth remembering that in 2001 Felt had a stroke that robbed him of his memory. We therefore have to rely on the testimony of his son and daughter and his lawyer, John O'Connor. They have made it clear that their main intention is to make money out of his claim. Vanity Fair only paid the family $10,000 (£5,500) but the whole project is linked to a multimillion book deal (HarperCollins) that is likely to be written by Bob Woodward.  It is therefore in Woodward's interests to say Felt was Deep Throat. It also lets Woodward off the hook if the Deep Throat scam was really a CIA "limited hangout" to direct the media away from the real story behind the Watergate break-in.

Hold on, John, you're sliding down a slippery slope here. When your pet theory hits a snag, you can't just decide that this means "the conspiracy is even bigger than we thought." Instead of deciding that somehow Felt and Woodward are both secretly helping to get the CIA off the hook, why don't we accept their words at face value.

I have published a full account of my thoughts on Deep Throat here:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=4001

I believe the evidence suggests that Deep Throat was not one man. I have argued that given what we know about the information (the dates are vitally important) that Deep Throat gave to Woodward, Mark Felt could not have been the character portrayed in All the President's Men. I would argue that Deep Throat was at least four men: Mark Felt, William Sullivan, Richard Ober and Stephen Bull.

In his book Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (1993) Adrian Havill argues that Deep Throat was a dramatic devise used by Woodward. Havill visited the place where Woodward lived during the Watergate investigation. He discovered that the balcony where he placed the flower pot with a red flag faced an interior courtyard. Havill argues in his book that the only way Deep Throat could see the flag was "to walk into the center of the complex, with eighty units viewing you, crane your neck and look up to the sixth floor". Havill adds that Deep Throat would have been highly unlikely to have exposed himself if this way.

Nor was Havill impressed with the way Deep Throat communicated to Woodward when he wanted a meeting with the journalist. According to All the President's Men Deep Throat drew a clock on page 20 of his New York Times. Havill discovered that the papers were not delivered not to each door, but left stacked and unmarked in a common reception area. Havill argues that there is no way Deep Throat could have known which paper Woodward would end up with each morning.

When asked about this communication system Woodward can only reply: "I don't know how Deep Throat did it".

Mark Riebling, the author of Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11, points out that Bob Woodward described Deep Throat as having an aggregate of information flowing in and out of many stations" and "perhaps the only person in the government in a position to possibly understand the whole scheme, and not be a potential conspirator himself". Riebling goes on to argue that this indicates that Deep Throat was a senior official in the Central Intelligence Agency. He points out that Woodward virtually confirmed that his source was from the CIA: "As you know, I'm not going to discuss the identify of Deep Throat or any other of my confidential sources who are still alive. But let me just say that the suggestion that we were being used by the intelligence community was of concern to us at the time and afterward." PR Newswire (29th December, 1988). The last sentence is especially interesting.

[Steve Ulman]

Just a thought -

Could Felt have had multiple sources, possibly within the WH, CRP, Justice and/or CIA? I was thinking about this last evening, and came up with the following idea -

Felt wanted to expose the wrong-doing of the WH/CRP and knew a lot more than he would have based on his job because had sources in various places. The reason he went to Woodward was to protect these sources. By using Woodward as a conduit, he was able to get the information out without revealing any sources because Woodward accepted him as credible and probably would not ask many questions. If Felt had gone through "legal" channels, he would have had to reveal his sources.

Granted, this is speculation by a rank amateur, but it fits in with what is known about Felt. It would also explain why he felt guilty about going to Woodward - (If you take that part of the story at face value).

It has a nice symmetry about it - Felt was using Woodward as much as Woodward was using him.

[John Simkin]

Just a thought -

Could Felt have had multiple sources, possibly within the WH, CRP, Justice and/or CIA? 

Possibly. I think William Sullivan could have been his White House source. However, the major problem concerns the meeting that took place in the first week of November, 1973. Deep Throat told Woodward that their were "gaps" in Nixon's tapes. He hinted that these gaps were the result of deliberate erasures. On 8th November, Woodward and Bernstein published an article in the Washington Post that said that according to their source the "conservation on some of the tapes appears to have been erased".

According to Fred Emery (Watergate: The Corruption and Fall of Richard Nixon), only Richard Nixon, Rose Mary Woods, Alexander Haig and Stephen Bull knew about this erased tape before it was made public on 20th November. One of these four had to have given this information to Felt. I would rule out Nixon, Woods and Haig. I suspect therefore that it was Stephen Bull. I think there is much more chance that Bull would have gone direct to Woodward. The other possibility is that he gave the information to White House colleagues, William Sullivan or Richard Ober.

[Tim Gratz]

From a post John made in a different thread:

“The guy is deputy director of the FBI,” Colodny says. “Why is he not protecting the tapes? Why is he not arresting the people who are doing this? Why doesn’t he go to (Watergate Judge John) Sirica’s court, which is hearing this? He’s a sworn law enforcement officer. He knows there’s a crime being committed. But instead of doing something about it, he goes in a garage and talks to Woodward.”

Hoff makes the same basic point. “He is the top law enforcement officer in the country because there’s only an acting director (of the FBI) at that point,” says Hoff. “Why didn’t he go to Sirica or a grand jury and blow the story open?”

If Felt was concerned about the hostility between the FBI and President Nixon, Hoff counters, “This is the very story that he could have killed the Nixon Administration with. Why in God’s name would a top law enforcement officer meet in a garage with a rookie reporter and give him this information? It makes no sense.”

Does not this make the very same point I had made: that Felt should have gone to Judge Sirica, which was consistent with his responsibilities as a law enforcement officer, rather than going to the press?

Edited June 8, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Tim Gratz]

From a column in "The Village Voice" posted by Ron Ecker in a different thread:

Felt played a major role in directing and implementing the ruthless wrecking of people's lives. He led a goon squad in black-bag operations, invading homes and offices of friends and families of the Weather Underground and thousands of innocent citizens it decided were Communists. Hoover's FBI was celebrated as our premier law enforcement agency. In fact, it was a political intelligence operation, and a lousy one at that.

Under Hoover, FBI agents were trained to break the law. In their witch hunt for commies, FBI agents were told how to conduct warrantless electronic wiretaps, surreptitious entries, and burglaries to cover their tracks. Agents went to lock-picking schools. For jobs well-done, they were rewarded with bonuses. In 1966 the director banned black-bag jobs, but the burglaries and illegal bugging continued. This was Felt's world. He told a grand jury he had approved some of the goon squad jobs himself. When the Church Committee investigated these abuses, the FBI ordered the unit in charge of conducting black-bag jobs to investigate the culprits itself, and the unit soberly told the committee it had conducted 238 burglaries of 15 domestic groups between 1942 and 1968.

Subsequently, M. Wesley Swearingen, a retired FBI agent with 25 years' service, said FBI agents and bosses were a bunch of liars. He himself had conducted more than 238 jobs, he said, and his Chicago office had "conducted thousands of bag jobs." He himself had received commendations and a bonus for burglarizing Chicago-area homes of Communist Party members.

Felt claimed that the break-ins were related to the Nixon administration's expanded foreign-intelligence operations. Swearingen said that was "absolute nonsense," pointing out that during the seven years (1970-77) he served as coordinator of the Weather Underground case, no presidential authority had ever been cited for conducting break-ins. Frank Donner's The Age of Surveillance, which provides a detailed history of the Bureau during this period, puts the total number of black-bag jobs at around 7,500.

Pat, may I rest my case that Felt is not turned into a saint because he ratted on Nixon? Does the above not prove that Felt's revelations against Nixon were motivated by retaliation at Nixon's refusal to appoint him Hoover's successor rather than by his great moral sensibilities against political corruption?

[Pat Speer]

Pat, may I rest my case that Felt is not turned into a saint because he ratted on Nixon?  Does the above not prove that Felt's revelations against Nixon were motivated by retaliation at Nixon's refusal to appoint him Hoover's successor rather than by his great moral sensibilities against political corruption?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Felt is no saint, but to paint him as petty and vindictive is in itself petty and vindictive. The Hoover clan believed they were above the laws against wire-tapping and black-bag jobs when it came to protecting their country against evil-doers (including philanderous black clergymen). They believed that this made their crimes different than the crimes committed by Nixon and his cronies, which included secret slush funds, illegal break-ins for political intelligence, blackmail, destruction of evidence, suborning perjury, inciting riots for political reasons, physical assault (on Abbie Hoffman), and the planning if not actual acts of pimping, arson, and murder.

In short, Hoover and Felt wantonly broke the law under the belief they were serving a higher good. While Nixon may have told himself the same lie, to Felt and many others the "higher good" in Nixon's mind was Richard Nixon himself. Felt didn't personally profit from his crimes. Nixon's crimes and those of his cronies were committed largely for Nixon's personal (and political) profit.

[Tim Gratz]

If Felt went to the WP in retaliation for Nixon's refusal to name him FBI Director then he did personally "profit" from that act. And that would demonstrate that he was petty and vindictive.

His approval of the illegal break-ins (over seven THOUSAND!) demonstrates that his motive in "getting" Nixon arose not from some moral outrage over political corruption. Therefore, it WAS petty and vindictive.

Pat, if it could be proved that you had committed 7,000 plus burglaries, where would you be?

My analysis of Deep Throat would be far different if it had turned out to be some one who was NOT acting out of a personal motive but was indeed offended at the corruption in the White House--and who did not himself have a criminal record. For instance, if it had been Leonard Garment or Fred Fielding. But to sanctify a man who, as it turns out, clearly committed far more felonies than Richard Nixon, makes no sense at all. And there is no evidence that Nixon ever approved pimping or murder. (I'll have to check the record re the "arson" charge.) Although his subordinates did suggest pimping and murder (but apparently never accomplished either), so Nixon must bear some responsibility for that loose talk, of course.

Notice also from "The Village Voice" article that Felt tried to blame the break-ins on Nixon but according to Swearingen this was another Felt lie! Clearly Felt was not a man consumed by the "moral niceties". He was out to get Nixon, pure and simple. And content to blame Nixon to justify his own crimes, on top of it. 7,000 plus burglaries? Shouldn't he still be in jail?

Edited June 9, 2005 by Tim Gratz