Deep Throat: case not closed
_ G O D _
Deep Throat: case not closed
Keith Olbermann
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8085423/
So Bob Woodward has told his version.
And it's not that interesting. At times it reads less like "All The President's Men"
and more like Ted Baxter's autobiography (you know: "It all started in a 5,000-watt
radio station in Fresno, California").
Well, in this case, it all ends— at least until his book comes out next month— in a
5,000-word article in The Washington Post. Beaten to the Deep Throat scoop by his
own source, Woodward's revenge was an 87-paragraph anecdote that goes into
painstaking detail about how he met Mark Felt, but almost none about how he turned
what Felt told him into the backbone of the Watergate coverage he and Carl Bernstein
authored.
Most importantly, it is being greeted with exactly the reverse reaction it deserves.
Identifying Mark Felt is a satisfying detail— it is anything but a conclusion. And
that’s because it doesn’t take anything but common sense to realize, as one can now
visualize the face on the Deep Throat painting, that the gallery in which it hangs
must be full of other people.
Deep Throat could not have acted alone.
In yesterday’s Post, Woodward wrote nothing to even hint at how Felt could’ve had
reliable information about the discoveries of November, 1973, when he’d retired from
the FBI in June, 1973, nor the implications of that disconnect. Blow-by-blow details
of how Felt dreamt up the iconic image of the story, the meetings with Woodward in a
subterranean parking garage in Rosslyn, Virginia— nothing about the army of invisible
weavers who by definition must have been involved in arranging those meetings.
Turns out Woodward met Felt, by chance, in 1970. Woodward was still in the navy— that
night, a messenger boy— delivering a package to the Situation Room in the lower level
of the West Wing of the White House, when the-then head of the FBI's Inspection
Division, happened to sit down in the same waiting area. The rest is a very long
history:
Woodward explaining how he originally kept in touch with Felt merely in hopes of
advancing his own career;
How he phoned Felt at the FBI two days after the Watergate break-in and how Felt told
him only that the case was going to quote "heat up" and how Felt then hung up on him;
Woodward recalling that Felt believed Richard Nixon was trying to manipulate the FBI
"for political purposes";
Woodward remembering that Felt's ultimate motive in imparting him with basically
everything the FBI thought it knew about Watergate was "protecting the bureau by
finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI
interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure
to make Nixon and his people answerable."
That was about it.
Well, there was one revelation. It was the only part that should have been a tip-off
to sleuths that a real Deep Throat candidate had to have had espionage or
surveillance experience— and a team of similar assistants at his beck and call. It
was the description of how Felt took Woodward's need to reach him with questions, and
applied his old spy rules to it. Felt told him to think of a signal that could be
seen from outside his apartment, and Woodward remembered he had a red cloth flag,
sitting in an empty flowerpot on his apartment balcony:
“The signal, he said, would mean we would meet that same night about 2 a.m. on the
bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn.
“Felt said I would have to follow strict countersurveillance techniques. How did I
get out of my apartment?
“I walked out, down the hall, and took the elevator.
“Which takes you to the lobby? he asked.
“Yes.
“Did I have back stairs to my apartment house?
“Yes.
“Use them when you are heading for a meeting. Do they open into an alley?
“Yes.
“Take the alley. Don't use your own car. Take a taxi to several blocks from a hotel
where there are cabs after midnight, get dropped off and then walk to get a second
cab to Rosslyn. Don't get dropped off directly at the parking garage. Walk the last
several blocks. If you are being followed, don't go down to the garage. I'll
understand if you don't show. All this was like a lecture. The key was taking the
necessary time —one to two hours to get there. Be patient, serene. Trust the
pre-arrangements. There was no fallback meeting place or time. If we both didn't
show, there would be no meeting.”
The betting is 6-to-5 that we see that ten-paragraph one-man dialogue, more or less
intact, complete with its subtle evocations of Hal Holbrook in the movie, in Woodward’s
book.
But of course, the essence of the whole process remains unexplained.
Mark Felt was the operational director of the Bureau. His new boss, L. Patrick Gray,
was busy “twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.” Are we to assume that every day of
the year beginning on June 19, 1972, Mark Felt made at least one check of Bob
Woodward’s apartment balcony to see if there was a red flag in an empty flower pot
that had been moved to a precise location outside Woodward’s apartment?
Mark Felt had people to do that stuff for him.
And they didn’t do it without questions. The FBI isn’t the military. You’re not a
draftee or a brand-new volunteer whose Sergeant says “Go check the flower pots in
Sector Z at 0600, 1200, 1800, and 2300. And do it every day for the next year,” and
you salute sharply and go polish your field glasses. These are professional watchers,
and if you don’t tell them who they’re watching and why, it is almost impossible for
them not to figure it out— even if just by dint of being there all the time.
Mark Felt had to have people, in the FBI, who explicitly or implicitly, knew what he—
and consequently they— were doing, and with whom.
And if Felt didn’t let them in on the whys, if he couldn’t trust them to be
sympathetic or at least loyal, they probably would’ve ratted him out. I’m not talking
about spies spying on the spies, either— just the ordinary gossip that goes on in
every organization man has ever created or ever will create, from the Federal Bureau
of Investigation to the Visiting Nurse Association.
Mark Felt had to have confederates. Not that Woodward told us in the Post, and not
that he’ll necessarily tell us in the book.
Consider the reverse end of the signal system. Woodward writes of how Felt could
schedule a meeting by drawing a circle, and the hands of a clock, on Page 20 of the
copy of The New York Times that was delivered to Woodward's apartment each day.
“How," Woodward writes with an utter absence of profundity, "I never knew."
Are you going to take a guess, Bob?
Good grief. Your friend, who used to chase spies in World War II, carefully
established an intricate set of what might fairly be called “Woodward Rules,” and 33
years later it hasn’t struck you that there must have also been what might fairly be
called “Team Woodward”?
A 25-year veteran of the FBI, its operational chief, an imposing man with a great
unforgettable shock of white hair, looking surprisingly like the actor Andrew Morton
(he played the Russian symphony conductor in the movie “Bye Bye Birdie”), who is now
involved in the most important running news leak of the generation, and he’s taking
the chance to personally purloin your copy of the newspaper before sunrise, open it
up, write in it, and put it back?
He had accomplices.
And the implication of that undeniable— albeit unstated— fact, is that he could
easily have had accomplices who dealt not just in logistics, but also in data. Sure,
Felt might have culled all this information on Watergate during the course of his
daily leadership role at Bureau headquarters. But that’s only if he did nothing else
for a year. And, as Woodward wrote in the Post, as Watergate began, Felt was
intimately involved in the investigation of George Wallace’s would-be assassin,
Arthur Bremer. This was not a one-trick pony. This was the de facto chief of the
entire Bureau.
All of which ties in with John Dean’s masterful work on the necessary side effect of
the presumable fact of “Team Woodward.” Contrary to Ben Bradlee’s proud assertion
when Felt was unmasked on Tuesday, Deep Throat fed Woodward plenty of sour
information. He must’ve given him every rumor, every bit of gossip, every scrap the
FBI had on the investigation. Because, as Dean points out in his weekly column at
FindLaw.Com, something approaching 50 percent of the “facts” Woodward attributes to
Felt were wrong, and usually wildly so.
Before he appeared on Countdown last night, John was good enough to send me a draft
of his FindLaw piece, and, more importantly, his index of the Mark Felt Watergate
scoreboard. The Felt information, cut up into its individual component parts, goes on
for ten tightly edited pages. Dean put the stuff he knows or believes was factually
incorrect, in red.
He used a lot of red.
There are a few highlights which we discussed last night. In "All The President’s
Men," on page 317, Woodward writes that after meeting Throat on May 16, 1973, he puts
on a classical record at full blast and types— rather than says— what Throat has told
him, as Bernstein looks over his shoulder:
"Everyone's life is in danger. Deep Throat says that electronic surveillance is going
on and we had better watch it. The CIA is doing it."
But Dean— at that date, officially out of the Nixon White House for just 17 days—
insists the CIA steadfastly refused to do the Administration’s bidding for it. He
should know; he had been Team Captain of the cover-up. More over, he notes, nowhere
in the Nixon tapes is there the slightest hint of lives being in danger. Legendary is
the story of CIA boss Dick Helms erupting at the White House when H.R. Haldeman and
company tried to pressure the agency into creating a National Security alibi with
which to stave off the FBI.
It’s a reasonable guess that Felt was either trying to scare Woodward (and the Post)
into treating him and the story with grave urgency (and to take it all very, very
personally), or perhaps provide a cover in case Woodward caught sight of any of the
swarm of Deep Throat Juniors who had to be involved just in the signaling process
between Felt and Woodward.
In the same conversation (and on the next page of the book), Woodward twice quotes
Felt about Dean:
"Dean talked with Senator Baker after (the) Watergate committee formed and Baker is
in the bag completely, reporting back directly (to) the White House...” And:
"President threatened Dean personally and said if he ever revealed the national
security activities the President would insure he went to jail."
John Dean remembers everything. There is the legendary story of the question he was
asked by a Republican member of the Senate Watergate Committee during his epic
testimony in 1973. It had gone on, in intricate detail, for minutes, when it was
suddenly interrupted by the chair. “Wait a minute. The stenographer’s not here. You’ll
have to repeat the question from the beginning.” The questioner had no prayer of
repeating, even rephrasing, his question. Dean said that it was all right, he could.
He then proceeded to recite it, virtually word-for-word.
Heck, John Dean once surprised me by mentioning the name Zeke Bonura. He was an
obscure baseball player of the 1930’s. Dean has no great affection for baseball, but
he remembered Bonura— and all the other National League first basemen of the time—
simply because his father, who was a fan, used to talk about them half a century ago.
So when John says Nixon never threatened him with jail (and, oh by the way, it isn’t
on the Nixon tapes), and says that most assuredly, Howard Baker was anything but “in
the bag”— believe him.
Same for 50 other inaccuracies Dean notes in his column. Like one that came out of
the undated meeting between Woodward and Throat from Late February or early March,
1973: "Our President has gone on a rampage about news leaks on Watergate. He's told
appropriate people 'Go to any length' to stop them... At a meeting, Nixon said that
the money left over from the campaign, about $5 million or so, might as well be used
to take The Washington Post down a notch..."
Never happened. No tape of it, either.
Not that the FBI agents working the Watergate investigation might not have been told
that it did, and dutifully passed it along to Felt. And, alternatively, not that Felt
couldn’t have constructed it from thin air just to raise the stakes a bit.
But, intuitively, the former explanation rings truer. It’s been known to work this
way before. When Winston Churchill was out of power in England in the 1930’s, he had
a network of key sympathizers within the British military who, like he, understood
that Hitler was not abiding by the terms of the Versailles treaty, and was, in fact,
“rearming like a madman.” As Churchill’s authoritative biographer Martin Gilbert
recounts, not only did they pass as much data to Churchill as they could, but some of
them found, to their own surprise and relief, that their colleagues were also passing
data to them knowing full well it would wind up in Churchill’s hands.
This is all very dicey, journalistically. It makes the picture of Deep Throat not
clearer, but murkier. It suggests that we have the name of the guy atop the iceberg
now— but nothing else.
What it does not suggest— and I’ve heard this from some who are ready to put up
statues to Mark Felt in every major city— is that Felt was operating from anything
other than the highest kind of patriotism. Nor is it meant to imply for a moment that
Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, or the Post itself did anything but pursue
the truth at a time when it was a precious and endangered species.
It only suggests that there’s an iceberg out there. And it’s time for Woodward to
tell as much as he knows about it— or for others to do it for him.
E-mail KOlbe...@MSNBC.com
• June 1, 2005 | 3:54 p.m. ET
More questions than answers (Keith Olbermann)
SECAUCUS — As Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein continued to work on their promised
front page opus in Thursday’s Washington Post — no doubt hoping to avoid the title if
not the premise of “Now It Can Be Told!” — there are certainly hundreds of questions
they feel are worthy of answering.
There may be some surprises — among the questions as well as the answers — but if the
following eight headline queries aren’t addressed, they’ll have to write more than
just the one piece for the Post.
Question #1. About the 18-Minute gap — the infamous “erasure” on one of the tapes
recorded inside the Oval Office — which Nixon tried to blame on an “accident”
involving his faithful secretary, Rose Mary Woods. In November, 1973, long before the
gap was public knowledge, Woodward wrote that he learned of its “suspicious nature”
from Deep Throat.
But Mark Felt, passed over for promotion, had left the FBI five months earlier. Where
did he get the information about the tape? Gossip? Old friends?
Question #2. What old friends? Was Felt-Throat now no better than a third hand
source? Were there also Not-So-Deep-Throats — OTHER sources — whose information was
now combined with that from Felt? Did Felt himself mine sources inside the White
House and pass that information, and earlier stuff, on to the reporters?
Question #3. Is that journalistically ethical? Or did Woodward, Bernstein, the Post —
and Felt as Throat — abuse the concept of the confidential source?
Question #4. How old was Deep Throat and how likely was Mark Felt to have been, as
Woodward described him, “my friend,” even prior to Watergate? In a preliminary
manuscript of “All The President’s Men,” John Dean has found him described as
creating antidotes “to inexperience and lack of knowledge.” Mark Felt was
58-years-old on the day of the Watergate break-in. When he left the FBI — he retired.
Woodward was 29 at the time.
Question #5. What happened to the “public role” Woodward once said Deep Throat still
had? In 1997, Woodward told former White House counsel and continuing Throat sleuth
Leonard Garment that “Deep Throat’s public role and public persona had changed
radically since Watergate days; it was now so discordant with his former
garage-skulking behavior that Deep Throat would never come forward to identify
himself.” What public role was that? Mark Felt was never well-known and would never
be as well-known as the day he retired from the FBI in 1973 — at least until now.
Question #6. Garage-skulking. All The President’s Men has Felt-Throat meeting
Woodward at all hours of the night, in at least one underground parking lot. He has
Felt Throat writing notes inside Woodward’s home delivered copies of the New York
Times, and watching Woodward’s patio to see if the reporter was asking him for a
meeting by sticking a red flag in a flower pot. Asked about that by Ted Koppel
yesterday, Felt-Throat’s attorney and Vanity Fair biographer John O’Connor said
simply “You got me — Mark certainly doesn’t remember it.”
Question #7. Never mind why he did whatever he did in 1972 and 1973 — what about
Felt-Throat’s current motive? His lawyer/biographer O’Connor tried to sell the story
to Vanity Fair, then sell it as a book. Now O’Connor says that was just a ruse to get
Felt-Throat to open up by playing on his understandable desire to secure the finances
of his descendants.
But why didn’t Felt-Throat give any heads-up about his self-outing to the three men
who were most loyal to him? Woodward kept his secret for 33 years, Bernstein 32, Ben
Bradlee 31. Felt let Vanity Fair not just scoop them and the Post, but left the Post,
to borrow a Watergate phrase, “Twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.”
And if not loyalty to Woodward and Bernstein — what about to James W. Brawley of
Media General News Service? Who’s he? He’s Mark Felt’s nephew-in-law. He called him
“Uncle Mark” his whole life, including his 20 years as a reporter. He even asked
“Uncle Mark” if he was Deep Throat, many times. The answer “I don’t talk about
rumors.” Brawley today — scooped by his own Uncle — says only “I just wish he had
called me first.”
And Question #8 — the lightest of them all. That name. W. Mark Felt. Was it
coincidence, or an audacious clue. Woodward, fond of anagrams and other word games,
referred to his source as Throat only in his BOOK. Around the Washington Post, he
was, quote “My Friend.”
My Friend — as in M. F. — as in Mark Felt.
To raise it one higher level of farce: sometimes, editors like Ben Bradlee, Howard
Simons, and Harry Rosenfeld called the source “Woodward’s Friend”.
Woodward’s Friend — as in W.F. — as in W. Mark Felt.
John Dean joins me on Countdown tonight to have a shot at some of these questions —
plus the ones about Felt-Throat’s role as hero or villain, law-saver, or law-breaker.
Plus, we’ll have on the head of the college project that didn’t pick Felt as the
likeliest Deep Throat, and the once eight-year-old friend of Carl Bernstein’s son,
who did! 8 p.m. and Midnight ET on MSNBC.
What questions do you have? E-mail: KOlbe...@msnbc.com
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