Mark Felt Was A Criminal

[Annie]

Ok, confession time. I thought 'Deep Throat' was the hero in "All the President's Men". The book, not the movie. I quoted Garry Wills "Nixon Agonistes" wherever I went in later high school and college. Let me tell you, those two books were worth any number of A's.

Now that a retired FBI managerial position person, Mark Felt, has uncovered himself to be Deep Throat, well he earned the accolades back when, but he should have to pay the price now.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050704&s=goldberg

How Deep Throat Fooled the FBI

by DAVID CORN & JEFF GOLDBERG

[from the July 4, 2005 issue]

The recent dramatic revelation about W. Mark Felt--the former top FBI man who has confessed to being Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's secret source during the Watergate scandal--has yielded what seems to be the final chapter in the Deep Throat saga, and thus the conclusion to a three-decade-long whodunit rich in detail, psychology and irony.

But Felt's role as the most famous anonymous source in US history was even more complex and intrigue-loaded than the newly revised public account suggests. According to originally confidential FBI documents--some written by Felt--that were obtained by The Nation from the FBI's archives, Felt played another heretofore unknown part in the Watergate tale: He was, at heated moments during the scandal, in charge of finding the source of Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate scoops. In a twist worthy of le Carré, Deep Throat was assigned the mission of unearthing--and stopping--Deep Throat.And what he did to throw suspicion on others, while protecting himself was illegal. Abuse of position is not strong enough.

This placed Felt, who as the FBI's associate director oversaw the bureau's Watergate probe, in an unusual position. He was essentially in charge of investigating himself. From this vantage point Felt, who had developed espionage skills running FBI counterintelligence operations against German spies in World War II, was able to watch his own back and protect his ability to guide the two reporters whose exposés would help topple the President he served.

Felt at different points became an FBI plumber--in the parlance of the Nixon White House, a "plumber" was an operative who took care of leaks--even though he was the number-one leaker. He was in the perfect spot to deflect any accusations that might implicate him and to misdirect suspicion. And when President Nixon and his top aides became convinced that Felt was a key source for the Washington Post--they still couldn't touch him because of what he knew about their skulduggery.

The Felt memos do not cover the entire time period (from right after the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters to November 1973) during which Felt assisted Woodward. But when placed alongside the recent disclosure and the previously available accounts--most notably, the Woodward and Bernstein book All the President's Men; Felt's 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid (in which he denied he was Deep Throat); and the Nixon White House tapes--these memos (snapshots from inside Felt's world) significantly expand and shift the view that historians and the public now have of the unique, secret space Felt occupied during Watergate.

Immediately after the June break-in, Bob Woodward covered the arraignment of the five burglars. Two days later he called Felt, whom he had been cultivating as a mentor and contact for two years. Woodward had gotten a clue from Watergate burglar Bernard Barker's seized address book that Howard Hunt of the White House might have been involved in the break-in. He was hoping that Felt could confirm his suspicion about Hunt, or steer him off if he was wrong. Felt reported that Hunt was definitely involved in the burglary. He added that things were going to "heat up." Later that day, a nervous Felt assured Woodward that "the FBI regarded Hunt as a prime suspect in the Watergate investigation for many reasons." Thus, Felt had a hand in the first Post front-page story that tied the White House to the break-in.

From June to early September, Woodward and Bernstein produced more than twenty Watergate-related stories based on interviews with a variety of confidential sources. In All the President's Men Woodward and Bernstein are vague about Woodward's meetings with Felt that summer. The two rendezvoused at a parking garage in Rosslyn, Virginia. Felt's guidance was fairly general. At one meeting, he said "the FBI badly wanted to know where the Post was getting its information." He warned Woodward and Bernstein "to take care when using their telephones" and to be aware that they "might be followed." He advised that the White House was very worried.

But in the summer of 1972, the White House already suspected someone in the bureau was leaking to the Post (though it's unclear whether Felt was providing Woodward the information causing this suspicion). Woodward and Bernstein often cited "sources close to the investigation" or "federal sources" in their stories. White House officials presumed this mainly meant FBI officials, who were the primary investigators. FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray--who had been appointed by Nixon immediately after J. Edgar Hoover's sudden death in May--was cooperating with the White House to thwart a full FBI investigation, and the White House was pressuring him to shut off the various leaks to the media. According to FBI records, Gray held a meeting to chastise angrily all of the twenty-seven FBI field agents working on Watergate and told them not to talk to the press.

The Post's stories continued, and Gray, responding to White House pressure, assembled an intimidating FBI inspection team to question these same agents. Felt later wrote: "When that did not stop the leaks, he [Gray] ordered Assistant Director Charles Bates [head of the FBI's criminal division] to personally grill the men under oath." And when Gray was out of town, White House counsel John Dean would call Felt and demand that he stop the leaks. In one instance in late June, Felt, already helping the Post, ordered an investigation of whether any FBI official had leaked information to the Washington Daily News, but that inquiry produced nothing.

Through the summer of 1972, no one at the White House yet suspected Felt, according to the public record, but it was reasonable for him to fear the Nixon team was focusing on him, Bates, their underlings and the agents working on the Watergate case--the people with direct knowledge of the investigation.

On Saturday, September 9, the Post ran a major page-one story by Woodward and Bernstein that reported that federal sources were indicating that the Watergate criminal investigation was now "completed"--"without implicating any present officials of either the White House or the Committee to Re-elect President Nixon." FBI agents, the story added, were not being allowed to investigate allegations involving illegal campaign contributions to Nixon. (In All the President's Men there is no indication that Woodward spoke to Felt while preparing this story.) Two days later, in response to this article, Felt wrote a one-page memo to Assistant Director Bates that had at least two purposes. One was to make sure that senior officials inside the bureau understood that the FBI's investigation, despite the Post's claim, was not finished. The other was to suggest that Woodward and Bernstein might have been receiving secret FBI information from someone outside the FBI. Deep Throat was shrewdly taking this opportunity to direct suspicion toward another Woodward and Bernstein leaker.

In the September 11, 1972, memo, Felt noted that the county prosecutor in Miami, Richard Gerstein, might be the Post's main source. Anything to save his own hide! Gerstein was investigating how a $25,000 check from Nixon's campaign had ended up in the account of a Watergate burglar. Felt wrote: "It appears that much of the information which has been leaked to the press may have come from [Dade] County Prosecutor Gerstein in Florida." To search for the Post's leaker(s), Felt instructed the FBI's Special Agent-in-Charge (SAC) in Miami to interview every FBI official who had been in contact with Gerstein. Felt also expressed concern in the memo that the Post reporters had obtained information directly from an FBI report (called a "302") based on an official interview with a Watergate conspirator. Felt wrote, "I personally contacted [Washington] SAC [Robert] Kunkel [who was supervising the agents probing Watergate] to point out that it appeared the Washington Post or at least a reporter had access to the...302. I told him he should forcibly remind all agents of the need to be most circumspect in talking about this case with anyone outside the Bureau."

In retrospect, Felt's memo looks like an attempt to convince Pat Gray and other senior officials at the bureau that he was on top of the leak issue. But the leak probe he had triggered in Miami was a wild goose chase. A county prosecutor could not be the type to supply inside information to Woodward and Bernstein about the FBI's Watergate probe. (In late July Bernstein had obtained information from Gerstein about the suspicious bank transactions, but nothing about the federal investigations in Washington.) No FBI leakers were ever found via the Miami inquiry Felt orchestrated.

In the week after he wrote that memo, Felt broke his own admonition about discussing the investigation with people outside the bureau. According to All the President's Men, in two phone calls with Woodward he confirmed that two top campaign aides to former Attorney General John Mitchell (Nixon's close confidant who had suddenly resigned as his campaign manager on July 1) had been in charge of the campaign money that financed the Watergate break-in, that these funds also supported "other intelligence-gathering activities" and that these same aides had seen wiretap logs from the Watergate bugging. So while the FBI officials in Miami, spurred on by Felt, were busy trying to plug the supposed leak to the Post with a going-nowhere investigation, Felt was handing page-one information to Woodward. He was not just a high-level leaker or undercover whistleblower. He was a master manipulator. (Whether Felt had accomplices within the FBI, as has been alleged recently by former FBI agent Paul Daly, remains a matter of speculation, especially since the main suspects--Kunkel, Bates and another assistant director--are dead.)

At one point (probably in the early phase of Watergate), Felt even officially met with Woodward--in what appears to have been another move to cover himself. In his 1979 memoir--in which he declared, "I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!"--Felt noted that he spoke to Woodward "on one occasion." He claimed that after Woodward requested an interview, he agreed to see him; Felt then asked his assistant, Wason Campbell, a senior-level, twenty-five-year-veteran FBI agent, to be present "to make sure what I said would not be misquoted." In this account, Woodward "was not looking for information." He "simply wanted" Felt to confirm information he and Bernstein already had obtained. "I declined to cooperate with him in this manner," Felt wrote, "and that was that." Already trying to make $$$$ while lying to the public. It now seems obvious that Felt (probably with Woodward's cooperation) staged this meeting to make it look as if Felt was not assisting Woodward. (Perhaps Woodward will explain this in his forthcoming book on Deep Throat.)
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