/ 31 December 2008

Watergate’s ‘Deep Throat’ remained enigma to the end

Mark Felt, who has died at the age of 95, was appalled by the sleazy echoes of the pseudonym jokingly wished on him by Howard Simons.

Mark Felt, who has died at the age of 95, was appalled by the sleazy echoes of the pseudonym jokingly wished on him by Howard Simons, the managing editor of the Washington Post. But long after memories of Linda Lovelace’s pornographic film have vanished, Felt will live on in American political history as ”Deep Throat”, the mysterious insider whose leaks to the journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought ruin to the Nixon presidency.

There was a neatly ironic touch about Felt’s decision in 2005 to reveal his central role in exposing Richard Nixon’s links to the 1972 burglary of the Democrat offices in the Watergate building in Washington.

”Follow the money,” he had enjoined the two Washington Post reporters when they briefly stumbled in their investigation into the White House conspiracy. And it was Felt’s daughter’s dire need for funds, allied to her father’s failing health and memory, that fuelled the family’s decision to unmask him after more than 30 years of speculation.

The revelation unleashed a torrent of further information, including Woodward’s account of how he established Felt as a contact in 1970. They met by chance at the White House, where Woodward, then a young naval officer, was sent to deliver admiralty documents. Felt, a senior FBI agent, was also in the waiting room and they chatted. Felt gave Woodward his office phone number, which he later used as a new reporter to check odd tips that came his way. It was evident, even at this stage, that Felt had little love for the Nixon administration and was willing to break the law to damage it. In 1971 he told Woodward that the vice-president, Spiro Agnew, had received a bribe of $2 500, a claim that turned out to be accurate when Agnew was forced to resign two years later.

Felt’s attitudes were deeply ambivalent. He seemed to have accepted the FBI’s clandestine illegalities and played an active role in them. (They were exposed in 1971 after activists stole thousands of incriminating documents from an FBI field office in Pennsylvania.) But he also harboured a visceral loathing of the Nixon administration for the unconstitutional threat he thought it posed to American society at large, and to the independence of the FBI in particular.

Felt joined the bureau in 1942 at the relatively late age of 29. He had grown up in Twin Falls, Idaho, and had a fairly tough early life during the Depression. He worked his way through university by doing menial jobs, from waiting in restaurants to stoking boilers, but his luck changed after he married a fellow student, Audrey Robinson, in 1938. He was given a job with the state’s Democratic Senator, David Clark, and the couple moved to Washington. Felt studied law in the evenings at George Washington University and had just got his degree when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Felt’s age may have been a factor in his decision to opt for service with the FBI. He was soon immersed in counter-espionage against German agents, an activity he continued into the late 1940s with Russian agents as his new target. He was an admirer of the FBI’s legendary boss J Edgar Hoover and fitted seamlessly into the template of sober-suited, short-haired, clean-cut professionals that Hoover established for his staff.

The admiration seemed to be mutual and Felt was assigned to increasingly important postings in San Antonio, Seattle, Houston, Salt Lake City, New Orleans and Kansas. His reputation was enhanced in this last posting when he smashed the city’s organised-crime syndicate. He was brought back to Washington as second-in-command of agent training.

Two years later he became chief of the inspection division, responsible for checking the performance of agents in field offices.

Meanwhile, around him in the Washington headquarters, the ageing Hoover’s internal manoeuvres to maintain control became ever more byzantine. In 1971, in a coup designed to outflank his ambitious associate director, William Sullivan, Hoover created a new post for Felt that in effect made him the FBI’s third-ranking officer. Since Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s deputy, was ill and often absent, it put Felt in charge of day-to-day operations.

The train of events that followed could have been scripted for a bad melodrama. On 2 May 1972, Hoover died of a heart attack. Felt saw himself as the obvious successor and was stunned when Nixon appointed the assistant attorney-general Patrick Gray (widely seen as a Nixon flunky). Then, with the FBI still in shock over Gray’s hostile opening moves, five men were arrested on 17 June for breaking into offices rented by the Democratic party in the Watergate complex.

Within days the FBI had deployed 150 agents on the case and Woodward had made his first contact with Felt, who confirmed that the burglary had political implications. Meanwhile, Gray forced the resignation of several of Hoover’s closest associates, disbanded one of the divisions he thought hostile to himself, and made moves to reassign other senior officials, including Robert Kunkel, agent in charge of the Washington field office. That was the office handling the Watergate investigation, and it quickly became clear to Kunkel that Gray was helping the White House to obstruct the inquiry.

After Deep Throat’s identity had emerged, Paul Daly, a former FBI agent, broke cover to tell a newspaper in New York state that Felt had collaborated with Kunkel and two other senior agents to pass information to the Washington Post. This dissident group included Richard Long, who dealt with white-collar crime, and Charles Bates, responsible for criminal investigations. (By the time Daly told his story, Felt’s reputed collaborators had all died). According to Daly, Felt would meet his colleagues at the end of each day to review new material (there were eventually thousands of pages) and decide what could be passed on without giving clues to the source.

Woodward and Bernstein later described the elaborate precautions that Felt had required Woodward to take before arriving at the underground garage where their discussions took place — routines apparently based on Felt’s counter-espionage years.
In a wonderfully improbable twist to the tale, Gray ordered Bates to find the culprit and, when he predictably failed, put Felt in charge of the hunt. Felt had an inventive period as he searched for himself, successively throwing suspicion on the county prosecutor in Miami, on the US Attorney’s office in Washington, and even on someone in the White House.

In fact, as was revealed in the Oval Office tape for 19 October 1972, Felt’s cover had already been blown. Bob Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, told Nixon he had discovered that Felt was behind the leaks. He said: ”If we move on him he’ll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI. He has access to absolutely everything.” No action was taken.

The campaign to get rid of Gray succeeded when he was forced to admit at his Senate confirmation hearing that, at the behest of the White House, he had destroyed documents belonging to one of the Watergate conspirators. Nixon saw him off with the graceless comment, recorded on the tape for 22 March 1973, that ”the problem with him is that he is a little bit stupid”. But it did not help Felt achieve his ambition to run the bureau. Gray was succeeded by William Ruckelshaus, a much tougher nut who discovered that Felt had leaked details of the FBI’s illegal wiretapping to the New York Times. He forced Felt, aged 60, to resign.

It was not to be a quiet retirement. In 1978 Felt was indicted with Edward Miller, another FBI agent, for organising the burglary of people connected with the Weather Underground, a terrorist group accused of several US bombings. The FBI men said their actions had been lawful because they believed the Underground had ties to foreign powers. Their conviction and fine in 1980 brought an unprecedented public demonstration by other FBI agents on the steps of the Washington courthouse. In 1981 the two were pardoned by President Ronald Reagan with the comment that ”they had served the nation with great distinction”.

Felt remained an enigma to the end. On the face of it, he conformed to the classic stereotype of the ideal FBI man, and shared many of Hoover’s prejudices (he was, for example, deeply opposed to the recruitment of women agents). His colleagues saw him as tough but fair, and he had a reputation of being all things to all men. He was, however, a notorious gossip and it may have been this that first drew him to an eager young journalist. He grew disgusted with the Nixon administration and its ambition to seize every available lever of power. It had already subverted the CIA and the Internal Revenue Service and, with the death of Hoover, seemed determined to move in on the FBI. (The tape of 13 March 1973 records Nixon saying to his White House counsel, John Dean: ”Could we go after the bureau? How bad would it hurt the country?”).

With Hoover gone, Felt and his colleagues apparently decided that the time for action had arrived.

Fortunately for them and for America, Woodward and Bernstein were waiting in the wings.

Felt’s wife, Audrey, died in 1984. He is survived by his son and daughter. – guardian.co.uk