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Jewish World Review June 6, 2005 / 28 Iyar, 5765
It's not a shut case on the Watergate mystery
By Jack Kelly
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The self-outing of former FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt as "Deep Throat" still leaves the most important questions about Watergate unanswered.
Bob Woodward has said Felt was Deep Throat, and he was seen visiting Felt at his Santa Rosa, California home in 1999.
What is cloudy is how much of a role Felt played in the Watergate saga. We know of Deep Throat not from the reporting Woodward and Bernstein did for the Washington Post in 1972, but from their book, "All the President's Men."
Woodward said he met Felt when, as a naval intelligence officer on the staff
of Admiral Thomas Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he
"sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House."
Therein lies a tale which we in journalism have been reluctant to explore.
At the time Woodward worked for him, Moorer was spying on the White House.
Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, who was assigned to the staff of the National
Security Council, admitted to investigators he "took so darn much stuff I
can't remember what it was."
It is doubtful that Radford, a junior enlisted man, would have been Moorer's
chief spy, or that Woodward, Moorer's messenger, would have been unaware of
what his boss was doing.
In an interview two years ago, Haig told Christopher Ruddy of NewsMax he
suspected Felt was Deep Throat, but added he doubted the FBI agent was
Woodward's sole source.
It's important to remember that what broke Watergate open was a letter one
of the burglars, James McCord, wrote to Judge John Sirica (who had been
threatening them with draconian sentences if they didn't talk) on March 19,
1973.
When McCord retired from the CIA in 1970, he was head of physical security
at headquarters in Langley. Of the five burglars, he was an unlikely
candidate to break under pressure, and most unlikely to have made the
elementary mistakes he made which led to the discovery of the break-in.
(Among other things, McCord taped open a door to the Watergate building
horizontally, so it was visible to a security guard making his rounds,
rather than vertically, as every would-be spy is taught in Tradecraft 101.)
It's almost as if McCord wanted the burglars to be caught.
In his 1984 book "Secret Agenda," journalist Jim Hougan speculated the CIA
got Nixon before Nixon got the CIA. Nixon was mad at the CIA for the well
founded belief officials there leaked classified information to John F.
Kennedy during the 1960 campaign. Public disclosure of the CIA's clumsy
attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro would have humiliated the agency (as it
did three years later when then CIA Director William Colby exposed the
"family jewels."). Only weeks before the break-in, Nixon aide John
Ehrlichman had been at Langley reviewing those files.
Despite the Felt revelation, Hougan still believes Woodward got most of his
information from Robert Bennett, now a U.S. senator from Utah, but then the
head of a CIA front which employed E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate
burglars.
In a memo to his boss (obtained by Hougan under the Freedom of Information
Act), Bennett's CIA case officer, Martin Lukoskie, wrote that Bennett had
told him he was feeding stories to Woodward, and that Woodward "was suitably
grateful."
It's apparent Woodward isn't telling all he knows, and that his scoop was
based less on his skills as an investigative reporter than on his prior
contacts as a naval intelligence officer, one who may have been involved in
a plot to spy on the president.
It isn't time to close the book on Watergate just yet.
But Woodward's literary agent, David Obst, has said Deep Throat was not
mentioned in the original book proposal, and emerged only after Woodward had
discussed movie possibilities with Robert Redford.
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Felt couldn't have been the source of the most important piece of
information Woodward attributed to Deep Throat, the existence of an 18 1/2
minute gap on the June 20th, 1972 White House tape, argues Joan Hoff, a
history professor at Montana State University, who wrote a book about the
Nixon presidency. Only a handful of people at the White House, among them
Haig, could have known that, she said.