FBI agent Woodward

Deep Throat’s unmasking reveals an elaborate FBI coup of the democratically elected regime of Nixon

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Nonagenarian Mark Felt revealed last week that he was Deep Throat; Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward confirmed it. Deep Throat was the secret source for Woodward’s early 1970s investigative journalism articles that led to impeachment hearings against, and ultimately the resignation of, US president Richard Nixon.

Felt had always been one of the three or four prime Deep Throat suspects in the biggest riddle of the last half-century. But the revelation leads to the solution of an even bigger conundrum: How did a 28-year-old Navy intelligence officer who had no experience and no previous inclination to be a writer get himself hired by one of the leading and most reputable newspapers in the world, and then quickly set the high-water mark for the biggest scoops ever?

The answer as revealed last week: Woodward was a stooge planted at the complicit CIA-friendly newspaper in an FBI-orchestrated coup aimed at toppling the democratically elected executive of the US government.

Consider Woodward’s own testimony as printed in the Washington Post the day after former second-in-command at the FBI Mark Felt outed himself as Deep Throat. Woodward relates that he first met Felt as early as 1970—well into the first Nixon term, but long before the events at the Watergate Hotel that would prove his undoing in his second term. The venue was a White House waiting room where a 28 year-old Woodward, employed by Navy intelligence to deliver top-secret briefing papers to the president’s men, was joined by Mark Felt, then 56 years old and on an upward career trajectory at the FBI that already saw him widely acknowledged as Hoover’s heir apparent.

The nervous and aimless Woodward initiated conversation with the imposing and steely Felt by explaining how he was soon to be relieved of his duties in the Navy but was at a loss as to what to do with his life after that. Though he was directly in charge of the highly secret and extremely sensitive day-to-day operations of Hoover’s highly intrusive FBI agency, it seems Felt was moved that day by his one-sided conversation with the fidgety young man to share with Woodward not only his office phone number, but also his private home phone number as well. As Woodward freely admits, “It was Felt setting the hook.”

In later conversations, Felt discussed with Woodward the possibilities of being a reporter, even though Woodward had never been a writer of any kind and had never showed in his life any inclination to become one. Surprisingly, when Woodward went to the Washington Post anyway, Harry Rosenfeld, then metropolitan editor, agreed to see him. As Woodward relates, the extremely suspicious visit had the air about if of something going on behind the scenes: “Why [Rosenfeld] wondered, would I want to be a reporter? I had zero—zero!—experience. Why, he said, would the Washington Post want to hire someone with no experience? But this is just crazy enough, Rosenfeld finally said, that we ought to try it.”

Imagine a job interview like that! The scene would not get past the first re-write in Hollywood no matter how corny the musical. But Woodward insists it’s how he got the job. Clearly, Rosenfeld had had a phone call earlier from the top office suite at the FBI. Woodward even calls spy-master Felt his “career mentor.”

Felt arranged for his plant to develop by seeing to it that Rosenfeld sent him to the Montgomery Sentinel, a related paper, for a year before returning to Washington. There, he kept his young recruit on a short leash: “Though I was busy in my new job, I kept Felt on my call list and checked in with him. He was relatively free with me,” Woodward relates. But he “insisted that he, the FBI and the Justice Department be kept out of anything I might use indirectly or pass onto others. He was stern and strict about those rules with a booming, insistent voice. I promised, and he said that it was essential that I be careful. The only way to ensure that was to tell no one that we knew each other or talked or that I knew someone in the FBI or Justice Department. No one.” Felt obviously had plans for his young recruit—plans laid long before the Watergate Hotel was burgled.

As Woodward settled in uneasily at the Washington Post, Felt tried a couple of minor scoops on him to see if Woodward could keep to the rules under pressure. The first was a story about Arthur H Bremer, the would-be assassin of 1972 presidential candidate George Wallace. In this tale, Woodward reveals how he was eager to knowingly serve the interests of his “friend” at the FBI. After breaking the story that Bremer acted alone, he was, he says “mildly chastised” by Felt for nearly revealing him as the source. But he was kept on as a useful plant because, as Woodward himself says, “ the story that Bremer acted alone and without accomplices was a story that both the White House and the FBI wanted out.” The boy did alright.

The next test came with Felt feeding information to Woodward that vice president Spiro Agnew had accepted a $2,500 bribe in his office in the White House. Woodward handled this feed better, although he failed to get the story printed because his editor at the Post considered it fabricated. Woodward must have been under pressure to tell his editor it was a big and legitimate story, and suggesting the source for it would have set his career on high. But Woodward passed Felt’s test by allowing it to be spiked rather than telling his own editor the source was pristine. Agnew eventually was charged by police with taking a bribe.

Having passed these tests without outing the FBI, the main attraction was set to begin. Felt, along with Hoover, felt the Nixon White House was akin to fascists. Nixon, always paranoid about those who were out to get him, had good reason to fear a conspiracy: Felt and the FBI were out to get him, as Woodward reveals in conversations he had with Felt even before Watergate.

When an otherwise unremarkable break-in at the Watergate Hotel was brought to Woodward’s attention—he doesn’t say by whom or how—Woodward called his friend at the FBI to check it out. “It would be our first talk about Watergate. He reminded me how he disliked phone calls at the office [a trait Nixon would soon share with him!] but said the Watergate burglary case was going to ‘heat up’ for reasons he could not explain. He then hung up abruptly.” Having proved complicit in Felt’s FBI intrigues already, Woodward was to play a key role in heating up the cold Watergate story.

He makes no attempt to hide his work at the Washington Post as a willing accomplice of the FBI. As the young and naïve “reporter” says, “I suspect in his [Felt’s] mind, I was his agent.” Our only conclusion can be this: if a heavy-hitting middle-aged spy master deeply involved in the highest levels of political intrigue in his mind considers a 20-something lost-at-sea pretend-reporter “his agent” it is likely the case that he is. Woodward’s characteristic trait throughout his ensuing career is his utterly disarming naiveté. And why not—it’s how he got started in the first place.

Because Felt is crucified by lingering pro-Nixon rightists, the former spy chief at the highly corrupt and unconstitutional—and down right scary—Hoover-run FBI has been oddly celebrated by the left, despite even his conviction in 1980 for violating the civil rights of friends and relatives of the Weather Underground. And Woodward, all his career a strangely inept reporter, has escaped all notice as an outed FBI agent posing as a hero investigative reporter to generations of journalism students.

And the biggest story of the last hundred years, bigger even than Watergate, has been entirely missed by the whole media after last week’s revelations: We have essentially just been told that the FBI orchestrated a coup at the White House staged from within the heart of the American media. The smear on Nixon was so successful and his own fate so deserving, no one seems to mind that he was the democratically elected president and, as Felt’s revelation now makes certain, it was an overly powerful and out-of-control FBI that toppled his regime.

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