M Felt aka Deep Throat: Hero or Villain?

[Raymond Blair]

This is an interesting moral issue that touches at the American culture in the form of the schoolyard code of honor. Don't be a rat, don't squeal, don't be a tattle tale.

I happen to believe that whistle blowing is a key and powerful democratic force in our society. I live in a country where there is free speech but there is not freedom from the consequences of doing so.

Was the act of leaking enough information out in the Watergate Scandal to help bring down the Nixon administration a good or bad thing?

In my mind it was one of the best things that have happened in American history. It put a check on some horrific misuse of power by the executive branch and helped preserve our democratic system.

Does this make Mark Felt a good person?

Hell no. He was one of the pack of thieves who actively misused our government and he was violating the rules of his job in revealing the information, and he was acting in a petty and vindictive manner. This makes his actions even more potent, because even at a time when informaiton is being used as a weapon and you are a crook surrounded by other people happy to distort and warp the system, there are always eyes on you and the "source" of your downfall could come from anywhere.

Why didn't Mark Felt come out publicly?

Well look at the social reaction thirty years later. I am assuming that he still made some money after leaving government. He must have wanted to keep his contacts.

Does anybody know the relationship between Woodward and Felt?

I don't and I am just starting to look at this issue.

Why didn't Mark Felt report this to the chain of command?

While John Mitchell was no longer Attorney General, he was working in an FBI with some ethical leadership problems, working for an administration desparate to keep the dirty tricks campaign quiet.

Whistle blowing was his best option. I think the people that are now attacking Felt are most upset that he violated his loyalty to those he was working with, not his loyalty to the Constitution or the American government.

Personally I am saddened by the commitment to loyalty as a primary job qualification that has resurfaced in recent years in the United States. Loyalty in this sense in overrated and dangerous. Why shouldn't our public officials speak their mind about things instead of constantly spouting the party line.

More openness and more candid public statements is a sign of a healthier democracy. Not spin-doctoring and staying on message, and limiting access to information as much as possible. This was the climate that helped produce the Watergate scandal. It is back in action in a government near me.

[Raymond Blair]

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

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Almost in the same league as Nixon.

[Tim Gratz]

An interesting essay by Lisa Pease on Felt's friend Bob Woodward:

http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr196-woodward.html

[John Simkin]

Jim Hougan, email (31st May, 2005)

In the last couple of hours I've gotten half-a-dozen emails, and a couple of phone-calls, about Mark Felt's belated declaration (in the upcoming Vanity Fair) to the effect that he's Deep Throat. I've just done an interview with Fox (James Rosen/Britt Hume), and it looks like this is the story de jour.

That said, it's possible, maybe even likely, that you have no absolutely interest in Wategate. If so, put this down as parapolitical spam, and stop reading.

Anyway, here's my take on Felt's declaration:

1. He was badgered into it by family and friends. Felt is 91 years old, and counting. A reporter who recently interviewed him found the interview an incoherent waste of time, and killed his own story.

2. Felt has always denied that he was Deep Throat until, as we're told, members of his family recently pointed out to him there might be a buck in it, and that his children and grandchildren have bills to pay. (And there is a buck in it: Bob Loomis told me, 20 years ago, that Throat could probably get a $4-million advance from Random House for his life-story.)

3. Felt wrote a book about his career in the FBI. In it, he goes out of the way to say that he met Woodward on a single occasion. This was in Felt's FBI office, and the upshot of it was that Felt told Woodward that he would not cooperate with him in his pursuit of "Watergate."

4. After a careful study of Throat's relationship to the Washington Post and to the White House, first in Secret Agenda and subsequently while working with Len Garment, it became clear that no one in or around the Nixon White Hoouse was in a position to know all of the things that Throat is alleged to have told Woodward. For example, Felt had no way of knowing about the 18-and-a-half minute gap in Rosemary Woods' tape. This strongly suggests that Throat was a composite.

5. Just as importantly, if Felt was Throat, he betrayed the people for whom he was a source. This is so because the biggest story that anyone could have broken in the Summer of 1972 was Alfred Baldwin's decision to come forward and tell what he knew. An employee of James McCord's, Baldwin told the U.S. Attorney's office and the FBI that he had monitored some 250 telephone conversations from "the Listening Post," his room in the Howard Johnson's motel across the street from the Watergate. The significance of this information was that the public and the press believed that the Watergate break-in was a failure, and that the burglars were arrested before they could succeed in placing their bugs. Because of that, the public believed, no telephone calls were ever intercepted. Baldwin gave the lie to that, and Felt knew it. For him to have withheld that information from the Washington Post would not only have been a betrayal - it would not have made sense if Felt's alleged intention (as Throat) was to keep the story alive. (The Baldwin story was eventually broken in the Fall of 1972 by the Los Angeles Times.)

6. What we have here, then, is the sad spectacle of an old man being manipulated.

For the record, it seems to me that if anyone proposes to identify Deep Throat, or to identify the lead singer in the choir of sources subsumed by the identity of Throat, they must meet a very basic criterion. That is, they must demonstarate, at a minimum, that their candidate met repeatedly and secretly with Bob Woodward. (Throat is obviously Woodward's creation. I don't think Bernstein would know him from a bale of hay.)

The only person who meets that criterion, to my knowledge, is Robert Bennett. Now one of the most powerful men in the U.S. Senate, Bennett was President of the Robert R. Mullen Company in 1972-3. This was the CIA front for which Howard Hunt worked. (It was also the Washington representative of the Howard Hughes organization.) As I reported in Secret Agenda, Bennett's CIA case officer, Martin Lukoskie, drafted a memo to his boss, Eric Eisenstadt, reporting on his monthly debriefing of Bennett after the Watergate arrests. According to Eisenstadt, Bennett told him that he, Bennett, had "made a backdoor entry to the Washington Post through Edward Bennett Williams' office," and that he, Bennett, was feeding stories to Bob Woodward, who was "suitably grateful." (Williams was the Post's attorney, and attorney, also, for the Democratic National Committee.)

Woodward's gratefulness was manifest in the way he kept the CIA, in general, and the Robert R. Mullen Company, in particular, out of his stories. (I obtained the Lukoskie memo under the Freedom of Information Act. Eric Eisenstadt's reaction to that memo, which I also obtained under FOIA, was considered so secret that it was delivered by hand to then - CIA Director Richard Helms.

What bothers me the most about all this, and what inspires me to write this unforgiveably long email to so many about something so few care about, is the gullibility of "the press" - by which I mean Talking Heads like Jeffrey Toobin - who have bought Felt's story hook, line and sinker.

That Woodward and Bernstein have taken a no-comment stance toward Felt's story is interesting and probably predictable. On the one hand, if I'm right about Bennett being Throat, they have a serious problem where their source is concerned - not just that he was a composite, but that their relationship to him was predicated on a quid pro quo concealing the CIA's involvement in the Watergate story.

[Dawn Meredith]

An interesting essay by Lisa Pease on Felt's friend Bob Woodward:

______________________

Very insightful article. Sure looks like we cannot believe Woodward.

Not to say that Felt was not also a source, just not THE source.

I don't think the powers that be ever anticipated that so many would connect the dots with the JFk assassination and Watergate. It is is accepted that Felt is DT, this road ends with RN being a crook and no one delves into what he meant by "the whole BOP thing". Which we all know is the assassination, and the press does not touch that topic.

So now on the 33rd anniversary - yesterday- of Watergate, one more lid is slammed shut.

Dawn

[James Richards]

This is Joe Scarborough talking to G. Gordon Liddy regarding Deep Throat.

FWIW.

James

******************

G. GORDON LIDDY, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: But there‘s an awful lot of fishy smell having to do with this thing.

First of all, we knew that Bob Woodward had a number of sources, and we knew the identities of some of the sources. And probably Mr. Felt may have given him more information than any other, and he can sort of stick the designation of Deep Throat on him, but it‘s still more of a composite. And I will tell you why I think so.

He wrote of this big, long past relationship that he had with his friend Deep Throat. And there‘s no evidence that there was any association or friendship between Mark Felt and Bob Woodward. Secondly, why would the number two man at the FBI, who wanted, presumably, to get information out, choose to leak to the metro reporter?

SCARBOROUGH: But what would Bob Woodward have to gain by pinning Deep Throat on one guy, instead of this composite you speak of?

LIDDY: Well, he has to—he has to—he has to have—he has to have him on—one, he has been dining out on this story now for, what, 30-some-odd years. And he got badly burned when Ted Koppel caught him, when he said that he had had that conversation with former CIA Director Casey, who was, at the time, aphasic.

And Ted Koppel embarrassed him mortally on that and his credibility hasn‘t been very good since.

SCARBOROUGH: Any final thoughts?

LIDDY: This, that if Mark Felt was Deep Throat, he is no hero. He is someone who behaved unethically, in that he did not take his evidence to the grand jury and seek an indictment. That‘s what he should have done, instead of selectively leak to one news outlet some of the information that he had.

SCARBOROUGH: All right. Thank you, G. Gordon Liddy.

[John Simkin]

I have argued that Deep Throat was not one man. However, what all the serious candidates for being Deep Throat had a close links with the CIA. This is except Mark Felt, who probably supplied the information that attempted to suggest that the CIA might have been involved in the break-in.

One of the main puzzles is why Deep Throat has not come forward to claim his reward for being the man who saved America from Richard Nixon’s corruption. Woodward has argued that the reason Deep Throat did not come forward is because “his post-Watergate public persona is so different from the persona of Deep Throat”. This of course does not apply to Mark Felt. It does however apply to Bennett. After all, he went on to become a Republican senator. I am not sure how popular he would be in the party if it emerged he was the one responsible for exposing Republican corruption.

Anyway, here are a few quotations you might find interesting.

(1) Robert F. Bennett, testimony before House of Representatives' Special Subcommittee on Intelligence (1974)

Hunt said: "They have nothing on me. I was nowhere near that place that night." He told me that the purpose of the (Watergate) team was to photograph documents. He said that this was not the first time they had been in the Democratic National Committee, that they-the ubiquitous term, and he never gave me names - but that they were so titillated by what the team had found the first time, they had sent them back for more.

(2) Robert F. Bennett, testimony before House of Representatives' Special Subcommittee on Intelligence (1974)

To impress the point upon him (the senior CIA official), I enumerated some of the more significant interviews to which I had been a part: "Bob Woodward of the Washington Post interviewed me at great length on... numerous occasions. I have told Woodward everything I know about the Watergate case, except the Mullen company's tie to the CIA. I never mentioned that to him. It has never appeared in any Washington Post story." I pointed this out to (the CIA official). I said, "As a result, I am a good friend of Woodward." I told him I considered mvself a friend of Woodward; that as a result of our conversations, Woodward had some stories.

(3) Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (1984)

On July 10, less than a month after the Watergate arrests, Bennett met with his CIA case officer, Martin Lukoskie, in a downtown Washington cafeteria. At that meeting, memorialized by Lukoskie in a handwritten memorandum of such sensitivity that he hand-carried it to CIA Director Helms, Bennett bragged that he had dissuaded reporters from the Post and Star from pursuing a "Seven Days in May scenario" implicating the CIA in a Watergate conspiracy. Moreover, Lukoskie wrote, "Mr. Bennett related that he has now established a 'back door entry' to the Edward Bennett Williams law firm which is representing the Democratic Party... Mr. Bennett is prepared to go this route to kill off any revelation by Ed Williams of Agency association with the Mullen firm."'

Bennett, then, was attempting to manipulate the press. That he was successful in the attempt-at least so far as he and the CIA were concerned-is established in a second memorandum, this one written almost a year later by Lukoskie's boss, Eric Eisenstadt: "Mr. Bennett said... that he has been feeding stories to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post with the understanding that there be no attribution to.. Bennett. Woodward is suitably grateful for the fine stories and by-lines which he gets and protects Bennett (and the Mullen Company)." Elsewhere in that same memo, Eisenstadt reports that Bennett spent hours persuading a Newsweek reporter that the Mullen Company "was not involved with the Watergate Affair."' In addition, the memo implies that Bennett helped to convince reporters for the Washington Star, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times that the CIA had not "instigated the Watergate affair" as the reporters seemed to suspect. As an example of Bennett's "achievements," Eisenstadt cited Bennett's inspiration of a Newsweek article entitled "Whispers about Colson" and a Washington Post story about Hunt's investigation of Senator Edward Kennedy.'

We do not know what Eisenstadt meant when he wrote that Woodward was "suitably grateful" for Bennett's help, or what the CIA official had in mind when he indicated that the reporter was "protecting" Bennett and the Mullen Company. The implication of the memo is that Woodward agreed to ignore Watergate leads that tended to incriminate the CIA in return for information that Bennett, himself a CIA agent, spoon-fed him. But is that conclusion fair? After all, it is possible that Bennett, in conversation with his CIA case officer, may have exaggerated his influence with the newspaper so as to enhance his own stature in the agency's eyes. Perhaps Bennett took credit for elisions in the Post's reports with which he had little or nothing to do. Neither Woodward nor the Post, after all, required cajoling to pursue the theory that the Nixon White House was solely responsible for the Watergate break-in and every other dirty trick. Still, the newspaper's willingness to turn a blind eye toward the CIA's involvement is disturbing. Although leaks about the Mullen Company's relationship to the CIA had been published elsewhere in Washington only a few weeks after the Watergate arrests, nearly two years passed before the Post itself reported on the subject." By then, of course, the information could have little or no impact on the scandal: the President's resignation was only a month away. Ten years later, in 1984, I asked Bob Woodward if he had agreed with Bennett to suppress the Mullen Company's links to Langley. Woodward said that he had not. He added that, on the contrary, "I think we were about the first to report it." Told that he was incorrect, Woodward became stubborn. "Are you sure?" he asked. "Have you read every story? Every story?" In fact Woodward is mistaken...

The first Washington Post reporter to explicitly identify the Mullen Company as a CIA cover, however, was neither Woodward nor Bernstein but the late Laurence Stern. In a July 2, 1974, article about Senator Baker's dissent to the Ervin committee's Final Report, Stern acknowledged the Mullen Company's CIA involvement, and made reference to the memoranda written by the CIA's Martin Lukoskie and Eric Eisenstadt. Nowhere in Stern's brief article, however, is Woodward mentioned, and neither he nor the Post's executive editor, Benjamin Bradlee, was asked to comment about the CIA's suggestion that its agent had manipulated the Post's reportage and planted stories in the press. Obviously, the Post was frightened of the subject.

Even so, Bennett must have been a valuable source. Aside from his connections to the intelligence agency, he was the employer of both Howard Hunt and Spencer Oliver, Sr. He had lobbied the White House on behalf of Hunt's consultancy there, and working with Liddy, he had helped to establish a battery of dummy commitand Liddy in the wake of the Watergate arrests; as the Lukoskie memo makes clear, he continued to share confidences with Hunt and others who were privy to the operation's secret details (Bennett, for example, knew when others did not that the DNC had been broken into during May). All in all, Bennett's record is astonishing for someone who figures only peripherally in the Post's reports and the Senate's investigation.

Indeed, Bennett's credentials as a Watergate source were so profoundly relevant that many reporters still consider him to be a leading candidate for Woodward's most important source, "Deep Throat." In fact, however, Bennett cannot have been Throat. A strict Mormon, he neither smoked nor drank (as we are told Throat did), and he was not an employee of the executive branch (as Woodward says Throat was). Bennett's task, moreover, was to steer Woodward and the Post away from leads implicating the CIA in the scandal, whereas Deep Throat had no compunction about suggesting that the CIA was involved in the affair." Finally, and most unusually, we have Woodward's word that Bennett is not Deep Throat. While the reporter's usual practice is to avoid comment when others claim to have identified his supersource, Woodward feels different about Bennett. In my interview with him, Woodward issued a "preemptive denial" that Bennett and Throat were one obviously, the Post reporter is concerned that the public should not come to believe that his best and most secret source was a CIA agent.

(4) Leonard Garment, In Search of Deep Throat (2000)

The most obvious fact about Mullen & Co.'s relationship to the CIA was that if it were revealed, the CIA would have to discontinue it, along with the financial benefits it provided to the company. That is in fact what happened not long after Watergate, when the company's cover was finally blown.

This set of mixed motives made Bennett, to my mind, even more plausible as a Deep Throat candidate. When some writer claims that Deep Throat acted because he hated Richard Nixon's Vietnam policy, the alleged motivation is murky and uncertain. But when I thought of Deep Throat acting to keep the bread and butter coming, I had found a motivation I understood.

In addition, when I thought of Bennett as Deep Throat I remembered the one positive clue that Woodward had given me. The reason Deep Throat does not come forward even after all these years, Woodward said, is that his post-Watergate public persona is so different from the persona of Deep Throat.

There could not have been a Deep Throat candidate whom this description fit better than Robert F. Bennett. After Watergate, Bennett left Washington and made his fortune. In due course, he re-entered politics - this time electoral politics in his home state of Utah. Bennett, once an obscure public relations entrepreneur, succeeded his father as senator from Utah. The younger Senator Bennett is now a figure of considerable stature within the Senate...

Bennett even had the physique attributed to Deep Throat in All the President's Men. He is extremely tall. That would explain how he could, without thinking, place a message for Woodward on a garage ledge that Woodward could not reach. Finally, Bennett was the only Deep Throat candidate on record as admitting that he had provided Woodward with unacknowledged, off-the-record information. He had access, opportunity, and motivation...

I wondered why the Bennett testimony, once declassified, had not been enough to settle the question of Deep Throat's identity once and for all. If Bennett was not literally Deep Throat, in my view at the time, he was the closest that any candidate would ever come. Bennett knew immediately about the Watergate break-in; he knew as well about the White House connections to the event, both before and after the fact. Bennett also had a powerful motive for playing the "source" card with the press: He was anxious to safeguard the existence and economic well-being of his company by protecting the secrecy of its relationship with the CIA. He had confirmed under oath that he had preserved this secret by disclosing to Woodward "everything" he knew about Watergate-which was, at the time, just about all there was to know.

[Douglas Caddy]

I find it interesting that Mr. Caddy is involved in this aspect of the Crime/Investigation in light of his apparent involvement representing the "Burglars" at the onset of the Watergate investigation.

See PG 10 of this PDF from the Nat'l Archives describing the FBI's early efforts:

Memorandum, L. M. Walters to Mr. Felt, "Subject: Watergate," May 23, 1973 - File # 139-4089-2261x

Is this simply a coincidence that several of these men are suspected conspirators in the assassination as well?

Chris

PS I think the Wallace's print that was identified in the TSBD is one of the most important leads to surface in the last 43 years. What was he doing there if he wasn't a "shooter"?

In regard to the FBI memorandum of 5/23/1973 prepared by L. M. Walters for Mark Felt that mentions my name in several places, I would merely point out that my role in Watergate is explained in prior posts in the Forum that draw upon my manuscript published in The Advocate magazine of August 16, 2005.

In brief, I was retained as an attorney in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972 by Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy to represent them in the case and to represent the five persons arrested within the Democratic Party's national headquarters.

My manuscript and the article that accompanied it in The Advocate can be read in their entirety using links provided in the Forum or provided by Google after typing in Douglas Caddy.

However, it may appropriate for me at this time to provide some additional information, especially since Mr. Newton ties my representation of these individuals to the JFK assassination.

(1) At the time the assassination occurred, I was enrolled in New York University Law School. I also was employed in the New York City office of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, located at 22 West 55th St, on the staff of Lt.-Gov. Malcolm Wilson. I received a phone call within minutes of the shooting of President Kennedy from a friend on Wall Street, who had read about it on the AP wires, and immediately informed Lt.-Gov. Wilson and Gov. Rockefeller's staff, none of whom had heard what had happened.

(2) The Walters' memorandum to Mark Felt of 5/23/1973, prepared in response to a directive of the prior day from Felt, is interesting in what is left out of the FBI document. This is the fact that it was Mark Felt who was Deep Throat and who was supplying Woodward and Bernstein with the inside information of the FBI's investigation. Felt's role is described in Woodward's book published last year, The Secret Man.

Not only is Mark Felt's role as Deep Throat left out of the FBI memorandum of 5/23/1973 but also omitted is the evidence that Felt was the primary cause of the Watergate coverup.

The evidence is as follows: I was retained by Hunt and Liddy on June 17, the day of the burglary. On June 28, 11 days later, while I was in the U.S. Court House working on my clients' case, I was served with a subpoena to appear Forthwith before the federal grand jury. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell physically pulled me by my arm into the grand jury room. Over the next three weeks I was to testify five times before the grand jury. I refused to answer a number of questions that I believed violated the attorney-client privilege but did so ultimately after being held in contempt of court by Judge Sirica and the contempt citation being affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals.

All of these events so early in the case were reported by Woodward and Bernstein in the Washington Post. These events had the effect of convincing my clients that they could not receive a fair trial if I as their attorney were being so badly treated. So they embarked on the coverup.

Operating behind the scenes and as an instigator of my being served with a subpoena on June 28, 1972, was Mark Felt. The role of the FBI towards me, under Felt's direction, is described in a two-part article in The Advocate of Feb. 23 and March 9, 1977 titled, Revelations of a Gay Informant: I Spied for the FBI. The article is part-interview with and part-reporting concerning the gay informant, Carl Robert 'Butch' Merritt. Merritt had been employed by the FBI, under Felt's direction, and by the Washington, D.C. police, to infiltrate and spy on the New Left, which was then engaged in vocal dissent against the Vietnam war. (Felt was subsequently indicted and convicted for some of his activities against the New Left. More on this later.)

The following is excerpted from the 1977 Advocate article:

Two days after the Watergate burglary, Carl Shoffler (one of Merritt's former police contacts) turned up with Sgt. Paul Leeper (these officers had been two of the three to have arrested the burglars) with what Merritt recalls as an offer of ˜the biggest, most important assignment" he'd ever had.

The officers, Merritt said, asked if he knew one of the Watergate attorneys. ˜They said he was gay." Merritt did not. They asked if I could get to know him. I asked them why. We'd like you to get as close as possible, they said, to find out all you can about his private life, even what he eats. Merritt says he explained that even if the attorney was gay, it wouldn't be likely that he could arrange to meet him. They said I would be paid quite well, that they weren't talking about dimes and quarters, that they were talking about ˜really big money".

Merritt says that he refused the offer, but that police kept returning to him with the same request, as late as December 1972, months after the city's police claimed to have ended their Watergate investigation.

Police, Merritt says, also tried to recruit him to inform on the gay community. He says he refused these offers as well.

The police and the FBI, Merritt charges, began to harass him soon after he was dropped by the bureau. ˜They threatened my life, broke into my apartment at least three times, they tried to plant drugs on me, they tapped my phone," Merritt charges.

Jim Hougan, in his 1984 book Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, wrote about Merritt's allegations:

"If we are to believe the disaffected informant, [police officer] Shoffler told him to establish a homosexual relationship with Douglas Caddy, stating falsely that Caddy was gay and a supporter of Communist causes."

As I have written in a prior post in the Forum, it was Edward Miller, a former Assistant FBI Director, who arranged for me in 1984 to visit with Assistant Attorney General Stephen Trott in the U.S. Department of Justice about Billie Sol Estes' desire to come clean with what he knew about LBJ and the Kennedy assassination.

At the time Miller was employed under a 1984 Moody Foundation grant to formulate strategy to combat Terrorism, being so engaged many years before it became the worldwide threat.

Previously, Miller had been convicted along with Mark Felt for "black bag" activities that they had carried out against the New Left in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Their trial and convictions were protested at the time by rank-and-file FBI agents across the country. Not long after his first election as President, Ronald Reagan set aside the convictions of Miller and Felt and granted them Presidential pardons. Reagan, who personally was sympathetic to the plight of Miller and Felt, did so upon the recommendation of Assistant Attorney General Trott.

In 1984, Miller told me that Mark Felt desired to meet me. At the time I only knew of Felt's role with Miller in the "black bag" case and subsequent Presidential pardons. I was unaware of Felt's role in Watergate. When Miller did introduce me to Felt at a meeting that took place in Washington, I found the occasion disconcerting because it became obvious from Felt's attitude towards me that he knew something that I did not. This was cleared up with the revelation last year that Felt was Deep Throat all during the time that he had directed the FBI's investigation into Watergate.

This is why I maintain Mark Felt, in addition to being Deep Throat, also engaged in outrageous official FBI activities that spurred Hunt and Liddy to embark upon the Watergate coverup, the subsequent exposure of which brought lasting fame and fortune to Felt and to Woodward and Bernstein.

[Pat Speer]

This is why I maintain Mark Felt, in addition to being Deep Throat, also engaged in outrageous official FBI activities that spurred Hunt and Liddy to embark upon the Watergate coverup, the subsequent exposure of which brought lasting fame and fortune to Felt and to Woodward and Bernstein.

Come on. While I won't disagree with your contention that Felt's zealous pursuit of the truth caused the cover-up, your last sentence implies he did this for "fame and fortune". That's ridiculous. He certainly never achieved that, nor is there any evidence he sought to achieve "fame and fortune" in return for his acts. The only book he wrote about his FBI experiences omitted his role as Deep Throat entirely.

It makes a lot more sense that he went after Nixon (or at least helped Woodstein in their pursuit of Nixon) for his own reasons, probably related to Nixon's putting the lapdog L. Pat Gray on the coveted Director's chair. It's quite likely Felt was concerned that the independence of the FBI was in danger. McCord and Walters had similar concerns about the independence of the CIA. Overtly and covertly, these men hoped to see Nixon take the fall. Humpty Dicky had reached too high.

I'm also confused by your contention that Hunt and Liddy embarked on the cover-up after Felt's heavy-handed treatment. They immediately embarked on a cover-up, destroying evidence etc. Hunt went into hiding. The White House opened his safe and gave its contents to Pat Gray. Liddy clammed up entirely and was more than willing to fall on his sword. He even got off on it.

If Felt's dogged pursuit of corruption scared these men into these desperate acts, I can only say that I wish we had more men like him today in Washington, when crimes the size of Watergate barely get a mention. I mean, why hasn't there been a public investigation into the no-bid Haliiburton contracts?

Edited February 5, 2006 by Pat Speer