Bob Woodward was born
in Geneva, Illinois, in 1943. After graduating from Yale
University in 1965 Woodward joined the U.S. Navy where
he served as a communications
officer for naval intelligence. Later, Woodward was assigned to Admiral Thomas
Moorer, chief of naval operations.
Woodward
left the service in 1970 and began his career in journalism on the Montgomery
County Sentinel. The following year he joined the Washington
Post.
On
17th June, 1972, Frank Sturgis, Virgilio
Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Bernard
L. Barker and James W. McCord were arrested while
breaking into the Democratic Party campaign offices
in an apartment block called Watergate.
It appeared that the men had been to wiretap the conversations of Larry
O'Brien, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
The
phone number of E.Howard Hunt was found in address
books of the burglars. Reporters were now able to link the break-in to the White
House. Woodward and fellow journalist, Carl
Bernstein,
began working on the case. Woodward had a government source who was given the
name "Deep Throat". He informed Woodward that senior aides of President
Richard Nixon, had paid the burglars to obtain information
about its political opponents.
Bernstein
and Woodward discovered that in 1972 Frederick LaRue
worked with John Mitchell on Nixon's re-election
committee. On 20th March, LaRue attended a meeting of the committee where it was
agreed to spend $250,000 "intelligence gathering" operation against
the Democratic
Party. This included the decision
to plant
electronic devices from the Democratic campaign offices in
Watergate.
Frederick
LaRue
now decided that it would be necessary to pay the large sums of money to secure
the the silence of the burglars. LaRue raised $300,000 in hush money. Tony Ulasewicz,
a former New York policeman, was given the task of
arranging the payments.
In
January, 1973, Frank Sturgis, E.Howard
Hunt, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio
Martinez, Bernard L. Barker, Gordon
Liddy and James W. McCord were convicted of conspiracy,
burglary and wiretapping.
Nixon continued to insist that he knew nothing
about the case or the payment of "hush-money" to the burglars. However,
in April 1973, Nixon forced two of his principal advisers H.
R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, to resign.
A third adviser, John Dean, refused to go and was sacked.
On
20th April, Dean issued a statement making it clear that he was unwilling to be
a "scapegoat in the Watergate case". When Dean testified on 25th June,
1973 before the Senate Committee investigating Watergate, he claimed that Richard
Nixon participated in the cover-up. He also confirmed that Nixon had tape-recordings
of meetings where these issues were discussed.
The Special Prosecutor
now demanded access to these tape-recordings. At first Nixon refused but when
the Supreme Court ruled against him and members of
the Senate began calling for him to be impeached, he changed his mind. However,
some tapes were missing while others contained important gaps.
Under
extreme pressure, Nixon supplied tapescripts of the missing tapes. It was now
clear that Nixon had been involved in the cover-up and members of the Senate began
to call for his impeachment. On 9th August, 1974, Richard
Nixon became the first President of the United States to resign from office.
Nixon was granted a pardon but other members of his staff involved in helping
in his deception were imprisoned.
Woodward,
Carl
Bernstein, Ben
Bradlee and the
Washington Post received a great deal of
credit for exposing the Watergate Scandal and in
1973 the newspaper was awarded the Pulitzer Prize
for journalism. Bernstein and Woodward also wrote two books about Watergate: All
the President's Men (1975) and The Final Days
(1976).
In 1981 Woodward
was promoted to assistant managing editor of the Washington
Post. He continued to write books and titles included Wired:
The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi (1984), Veil:
The Secret Wars of the CIA (1987), The Commanders
(1991), The Agenda: Inside The Clinton White House
(1994), The Choice (1996), Maestro:
Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom (2000), Bush
at War (2002) and Plan of Attack: The Road
to War (2004).
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Forum Debate on Bob Woodward
Forum
Debate on Watergate
(1)
Bob Woodward,
The
Guardian (3rd June, 2005)
In
August 1970, I was formally discharged from the navy. I had subscribed to the
Washington Post, which I knew was led by a colourful, hard-charging editor named
Ben Bradlee. There was a toughness and edge to the news coverage that I liked;
it seemed to fit the times, to fit with a general sense of where the world was
much more than law school did. Maybe reporting was something I could do.
During
my scramble and search for a future, I had sent a letter to the Post asking for
a job. Somehow, Harry Rosenfeld, the metropolitan editor, agreed to see me. He
stared at me through his glasses in some bewilderment. Why, he 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. We'll give you
a two-week tryout.
After
two weeks, I had written perhaps a dozen stories or fragments of stories. None
had been published or come close to being published. None had even been edited.
See, you don't know how to do this, Rosenfeld said, bringing my tryout to a merciful
close. But I left the newsroom more enthralled than ever - I realised I had found
something that I loved. I took a job at the Montgomery Sentinel, where Rosenfeld
said I could learn how to be a reporter. I told my father that law school was
off and that I was taking a job, at about $115 a week, as a reporter at a weekly
newspaper in Maryland.
(2)
Carl
Bernstein and Bob
Woodward,
Washington Post (19th June, 1972)
One of the five men arrested early Saturday in the attempt to bug the
Democratic National Committee headquarters is the salaried security coordinator
for President Nixon's reelection committee.
The
suspect, former CIA employee James W. McCord Jr., 53, also holds a separate contract
to provide security services to the Republican National Committee, GOP national
chairman Bob Dole said yesterday.
Former
Attorney General John N. Mitchell, head of the Committee for the Re-Election of
the President, said yesterday McCord was employed to help install that committee's
own security system.
In
a statement issued in Los Angeles, Mitchell said McCord and the other four men
arrested at Democratic headquarters Saturday "were not operating either in
our behalf or with our consent" in the alleged bugging attempt.
Dole
issued a similar statement, adding that "we deplore action of this kind in
or out of politics." An aide to Dole said he was unsure at this time exactly
what security services McCord was hired to perform by the National Committee.
Police sources said last
night that they were seeking a sixth man in connection with the attempted bugging.
The sources would give no other details.
Other
sources close to the investigation said yesterday that there still was no explanation
as to why the five suspects might have attempted to bug Democratic headquarters
in the Watergate at 2600 Virginia Ave., NW, or if they were working for other
individuals or organizations..
"We're
baffled at this point.... the mystery deepens," a high Democratic party source
said.
Democratic National
Committee Chairman Lawrence F. O'Brien said the "bugging incident... raised
the ugliest questions about the integrity of the political process that I have
encountered in a quarter century.
"No
mere statement of innocence by Mr. Nixon's campaign manager will dispel these
questions."
The Democratic
presidential candidates were not available for comment yesterday.
O'Brien,
in his statement, called on Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst to order an
immediate, "searching professional investigation" of the entire matter
by the FBI.
A spokesman
for Kleindienst said yesterday. "The FBI is already investigating. . . .
Their investigative report will be turned over to the criminal division for appropriate
action."
The White
House did not comment.
McCord,
53, retired from the Central Intelligence Agency in 1970 after 19 years of service
and established his own "security consulting firm," McCord Associates,
at 414 Hungerford Drive, Rockville. He lives at 7 Winder Ct., Rockville.
McCord
is an active Baptist and colonel in the Air Force Reserve, according to neighbors
and friends.
In addition
to McCord, the other four suspects, all Miami residents, have been identified
as: Frank Sturgis (also known as Frank Florini), an American who served in Fidel
Castro's revolutionary army and later trained a guerrilla force of anti-Castro
exiles; Eugenio R. Martinez, a real estate agent and notary public who is active
in anti-Castro activities in Miami; Virgilio R. Gonzales, a locksmith; and Bernard
L. Barker, a native of Havana said by exiles to have worked on and off for the
CIA since the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
All
five suspects gave the police false names after being arrested Saturday. McCord
also told his attorney that his name is Edward Martin, the attorney said.
Sources
in Miami said yesterday that at least one of the suspects - Sturgis - was attempting
to organize Cubans in Miami to demonstrate at the Democratic National Convention
there next month.
The
five suspects, well-dressed, wearing rubber surgical gloves and unarmed, were
arrested about 2:30 a.m. Saturday when they were surprised by Metropolitan police
inside the 29-office suite of the Democratic headquarters on the sixth floor of
the Watergate.
The suspects
had extensive photographic equipment and some electronic surveillance instruments
capable of intercepting both regular conversation and telephone communication.
Police also said that
two ceiling panels near party chairman O'Brien's office had been removed in such
a way as to make it possible to slip in a bugging device.
McCord
was being held in D.C. jail on $30,000 bond yesterday. The other four were being
held there on $50,000 bond. All are charged with attempted burglary and attempted
interception of telephone and other conversations.
McCord
was hired as "security coordinator" of the Committee for the Re-election
of the President on Jan. 1, according to Powell Moore, the Nixon committee's director
of press and information.
Moore
said McCord's contract called for a "take-home salary of $1,200 per month
and that the ex-CIA employee was assigned an office in the committee's headquarters
at 1701 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Within
the last one or two weeks, Moore said, McCord made a trip to Miami beach -- where
both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions will be held. The purpose
of the trip, Moore said, was "to establish security at the hotel where the
Nixon Committee will be staying."
In
addition to McCord's monthly salary, he and his firm were paid a total of $2,836
by the Nixon Committee for the purchase and rental of television and other security
equipment, according to Moore.
Moore
said that he did not know exactly who on the committee staff hired McCord, adding
that it "definitely wasn't John Mitchell." According to Moore, McCord
has never worked in any previous Nixon election campaigns "because he didn't
leave the CIA until two years ago, so it would have been impossible." As
of late yesterday, Moore said. McCord was still on the Reelection Committee payroll.
In his statement from
Los Angeles, former Attorney General Mitchell said he was "surprised and
dismayed" at reports of McCord's arrest.
"The
person involved is the proprietor of a private security agency who was employed
by our committee months ago to assist with the installation of our security system,"
said Mitchell. "He has, as we understand it, a number of business clients
and interests and we have no knowledge of these relationships."
Referring
to the alleged attempt to bug the opposition's headquarters, Mitchell said: "There
is no place in our campaign, or in the electoral process, for this type of activity
and we will not permit it nor condone it."
About
two hours after Mitchell issued his statement, GOP National Chairman Dole said,
"I understand that Jim McCord... is the owner of the firm with which the
Republican National Committee contracts for security services . . . if our understanding
of the facts is accurate, added Dole, "we will of course discontinue our
relationship with the firm."
Tom
Wilck, deputy chairman of communications for the GOP National Committee, said
late yesterday that Republican officials still were checking to find out when
McCord was hired, how much he was paid and exactly what his responsibilities were.
McCord lives with his
wife in a two-story $45,000 house in Rockville.
After
being contacted by The Washington Post yesterday, Harlan A. Westrell, who said
he was a friend of McCord's, gave the following background on McCord:
He
is from Texas, where he and his wife graduated from Baylor University. They have
three children, a son who is in his third year at the Air Force Academy, and two
daughters.
The McCords
have been active in the First Baptist Church of Washington.
Other
neighbors said that McCord is a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, and also has
taught courses in security at Montgomery Community College. This could not be
confirmed yesterday.
McCord's
previous employment by the CIA was confirmed by the intelligence agency, but a
spokesman there said further data about McCord was not available yesterday.
In
Miami, Washington Post Staff Writer Kirk Schartenberg reported that two of the
other suspects - Sturgis and Barker - are well known among Cuban exiles there.
Both are known to have had extensive contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency,
exile sources reported, and Barker was closely associated with Frank Bender, the
CIA operative who recruited many members of Brigade 2506, the Bay of Pigs invasion
force.
Barker, 55, and
Sturgis, 37, reportedly showed up uninvited at a Cuban exile meeting in May and
claimed to represent an anticommunist organization of refugees from "captive
nations." The purpose of the meeting, at which both men reportedly spoke,
was to plan a Miami demonstration in support of President Nixon's decision to
mine the harbor of Haiphong.
Barker,
a native of Havana who lived both in the U.S. and Cuba during his youth, is a
US Army veteran who was imprisoned in a German POW camp during the World War II.
He later served in the Cuban Buro de Investigationes - secret police - under Fidel
Castro and fled to Miami in 1959. He reportedly was one of the principal leaders
of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the exile organization established with CIA
help to organize the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Sturgis,
an American soldier of fortune who joined Castro in the hills of Oriente Province
in 1958, left Cuba in 1959 with his close friend, Pedro Diaz Lanz, then chief
of the Cuban air force. Diaz Lanz, once active in Cuban exile activities in Miami,
more recently has been reported involved in such right-wing movements as the John
Birch Society and the Rev. Billy James Hargis' Christian Crusade.
Sturgis,
more commonly known as Frank Florini, lost his American citizenship in 1960 for
serving in a foreign military force - Castro's army - but, with the aid of then-Florida
Sen. George Smathers, regained it.
(3)
Richard
Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978)
My reaction to the Watergate break-in was completely pragmatic. If it was
also cynical, it was a cynicism born of experience. I had been in politics too
long, and seen everything from dirty tricks to vote fraud. I could not muster
much moral outrage over a political bugging.
Larry O'Brien might affect astonishment and horror, but he knew as well as I did
that political bugging had been around nearly since the invention of the wiretap.
As recently as 1970 a former member of Adlai Stevenson's campaign staff had publicly
stated that he had tapped the Kennedy organization's phone lines at the 1960 Democratic
convention Lyndon Johnson felt that the Kennedys had had him tapped - Barry Goldwater
said that his 1964 campaign had been bugged; and Edgar Hoover told me that in
1968 Johnson had ordered my campaign plane bugged. Nor was the practice confined
to politicians. In 1969 an NBC producer was fined and given a suspended sentence
for planting a concealed microphone at a closed meeting of the 1968 Democratic
platform committee. Bugging experts told the Washington Post right after
the Watergate break-in that the practice "has not been uncommon in elections
past... it is particularly common for candidates of the same party to bug one
another."
(4)
Carl
Bernstein and Bob
Woodward, All the President's
Men (1975)
Woodward had a source in the Executive Branch
who had access to information at CRP as well as at the White House. His identity
was unknown to anyone else. He could be contacted only on very important occasions.
Woodward had promised he would never identify him or his position to anyone. Further,
he, had agreed never to quote the man, even as an anonymous source. Their discussions
would be only to confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere and to add
some perspective.
In
newspaper terminology, this meant the discussions were on "deep background."
Woodward explained the arrangement to managing editor Howard Simons one day. He
had taken to calling the source "my friend," but Simons dubbed him "Deep
Throat," the title of a celebrated pornographic movie. The name stuck.
At
first Woodward and Deep Throat had talked by telephone, but as the tensions of
Watergate increased, Deep Throat's nervousness grew. He didn't want to talk on
the telephone, but had said they could meet somewhere on occasion.
Deep
Throat didn't want to use the phone even to set up the meetings. He suggested
that Woodward open the drapes in his apartment as a signal. Deep Throat could
check each day; if the drapes were open, the two would meet that night. But Woodward
liked to let the sun in at times, and suggested another signal.
Several
years earlier, Woodward had found a red cloth flag lying in the street. Barely
one foot square, it was attached to a stick, the type of warning device used on
the back of a truck carrying a projecting load. Woodward had taken the flag back
to his apartment and one of his friends had stuck it into an old flower pot on
the balcony. It had stayed there.
When Woodward had an urgent inquiry to make,
he would move the flower pot with the red flag to the rear of the balcony. During
the day, Deep Throat would check to see if the pot had been moved. If it had,
he and Woodward would meet at about 2:00 am. in a pre-designated underground parking
garage. Woodward would leave his sixth-floor apartment and walk down the back
stairs into an alley.
Walking
and taking two or more taxis to the garage, he could be reasonably sure that no
one had followed him. In the garage, the two could talk for an hour or more without
being seen. If taxis were hard to find, as they often were late at night, it might
take Woodward almost two hours to get there on foot. On two occasions, a meeting
had been set and the man had not shown up - a depressing and frightening experience,
as Woodward had waited for more than an hour, alone In an underground garage in
the middle of the night Once he had thought he was being followed - two well-dressed
men had stayed behind him for five or six blocks, but he had ducked into an alley
and had not seen them again.
If
Deep Throat wanted a meeting-which was rare-there was a different procedure. Each
morning, Woodward would check page 20 of his New York Times, delivered to his
apartment house before 7:00 am. If a meeting was requested, the page number would
be circled and the hands of a clock indicating the time of the rendezvous would
appear in a lower corner of the page. Woodward did not know how Deep Throat got
to his paper.
The
man's position in the Executive Branch was extremely sensitive. He had never told
Woodward anything that was incorrect. It was he who had advised Woodward on June
19 that Howard Hunt was definitely involved in Watergate. During the summer, he
had told Woodward that the FBI badly wanted to know where the Post was getting
its information. He thought Bernstein and Woodward might be followed, and cautioned
them to take care when using their telephones. The White House, he had said at
the last meeting, regarded the stakes in Watergate as much higher than anyone
outside perceived.
(5)
Ben
Bradlee,
The Good Life: Newspapering
and Other Adventures (1995)
When
I asked for details about Deep Throat's feeling that our lives were in danger,
Woodward and Bernstein insisted that we move outdoors. Fear began to seep in as
we talked more on my lawn. I thought I knew all about hardball, but I had never
yet felt that we were dealing with hitmen. I suspected our telephones were probably
being tapped, that our taxes were surely getting a worldclass audit, but I had
never felt physically threatened. Now they were saying that our lives were in
fact in danger.
(6)
Bob
Woodward memo to Ben
Bradlee
(16th May, 1973)
Dean talked with Senator Baker
after Watergate committee formed and Baker is in the bag completely, reporting
back directly to White House...
President
threatened Dean personally and said if he ever revealed the national security
activities that President would insure he went to jail.
Mitchell
started doing covert national and international things early and then involved
everyone else. The list is longer than anyone could imagine.
Caulfield
met McCord and said that the President "knows that we are meeting and he
offers you executive clemency and you'll only have to spend about 11 months in
jail."
Caulfield
threatened McCord and said "your life is no good in this country if you don't
cooperate..."
The
covert activities involve the whole U.S. intelligence community and are incredible.
Deep Throat refused to give specifics because it is against the law.
The
cover-up had little to do with the Watergate, but was mainly to protect the covert
operations.
The
President himself has been blackmailed. When Hunt became involved, he decided
that the conspirators could get some money for this. Hunt started an "extortion"
racket of the rankest kind.
Cover-up
cost to be about $1 million. Everyone is involved - Haldeman, Ehrlichman, the
President, Dean, Mardian, Caulfield and Mitchell. They all had a problem getting
the money and couldn't trust anyone, so they started raising money on the outside
and chipping in their own personal funds. Mitchell couldn't meet his quota and...
they cut Mitchell loose. ...
CIA
people can testify that Haldeman and Ehrlichman said that the President orders
you to carry this out, meaning the Watergate cover-up... Walters and Helms and
maybe others.
Apparently
though this is not clear, these guys in the White House were out to make money
and a few of them went wild trying.
Dean
acted as go-between between Haldeman-Ehrlichman and Mitchell-LaRue.
The
documents that Dean has are much more than anyone has imagined and they are quite
detailed.
Liddy
told Dean that they could shoot him and/or that he would shoot himself, but that
he would never talk and always be a good soldier.
Hunt
was key to much of the crazy stuff and he used the Watergate arrests to get money...
first $100,000 and then kept going back for more...
Unreal
atmosphere around the White House - realizing it is curtains on one hand and on
the other trying to laugh it off and go on with business. President has had fits
of "dangerous" depression.
(7)
The Deceptions of All the
President's Men, Probe
Magazine V3 N2 (1995)
In
his book Deep Truth, author Adrian Havill presents several events in All
the President's Men that are, to put it generously, highly suspect. One example
is the scene in which Woodward and Bernstein have made their first egregious mistake.
They sourced Hugh Sloan's grand jury testimony for a story that Sloan had never
told the Grand Jury, showing that Haldeman was one of the inner group at CREEP
controlling the mysterious slush fund. In the book, the dejected Woodward and
Bernstein walk home in the rain, beaten both physically and symbolically by the
elements, with only newspapers over their head to keep them dry. Havill did some
checking. It never rained that day. That might seem an inconsequential detail
to some, but others will understand that it was a device created to bring drama.
How many other "events" were merely fictional devices? Havill found
several. For instance, at one point, Carl Bernstein is about to be subpoenaed
by CREEP, and Ben Bradlee advised Carl to go hang out at a movie until after 5:00
p.m., then to call into the office. According to the book, Carl went to see Deep
Throat, hence the reason for the name "Deep Throat" having been given
to Woodward's secret source. But there was no Deep Throat playing anywhere in
D.C. at that time. In fact, the theaters were being very cautious, having recently
been raided by law enforcement authorities. Not one theater in town was showing
Deep Throat....
One of
the most astonishingly bald-faced inventions was the process by which Woodward
and "Deep Throat" allegedly made contact when they needed to speak to
one another. In the book, much is made of the spooky, clandestine meetings between
"Deep Throat" and Woodward. When Woodward needed to ask "Deep Throat"
something, he was to put a flower pot with a red flag in it on his sixth floor
balcony, which, we are supposed to believe, this high level source checked daily.
When "Deep Throat" wanted to speak to Woodward, a clock would supposedly
be drawn in his copy of the New York Times designating the meeting time. But neither
of these scenarios fits the reality of where Woodward lived. Woodward, who could
remember the exact room number (710) where he met Martha Mitchell just once, evidently
had trouble remembering the address at which he had lived. In an interview he
once said it was "606 or 608 or 612, something like that." However,
Havill found that Woodward's actual address was 617. This is important, because
the balcony attached to 617 faced an interior courtyard. Havill poked around and
found that the only way to view a flower pot on the balcony was to walk into the
center of the complex, with eighty units viewing you, crane your neck and look
up to the sixth floor. Even then, a pot would have been barely visible. There
was an alley that ran behind the building that allowed a glimpse of the apartment
and balcony, but at an equally difficult angle. And in both cases, we are to believe
that this source, who strove hard to protect his identify, would walk up in plain
view of the eighty apartments facing the inner courtyard or the alley on a daily
basis, on the chance that there might be a sign from Woodward. When Havill tried
to poke around, just to look at the place, residents of the building stopped him
and inquired who he was and what he was looking for. Unless "Deep Throat"
was well known to the residents of the building, his daily visits seem to preclude
being able to keep his identity a secret.
As
for the clock-in-the-paper, the New York Times papers were delivered not
to each door, but left stacked and unmarked in a common reception area. There
was no way "Deep Throat" could have known which paper Woodward would
end up with each morning.
Havill,
in fact, believes that "Deep Throat" is no more real than the movie
episode or the rain, but rather, a dramatic device. It certainly worked well.
And Woodward's and Bernstein's editor at Simon and Schuster, Alice Mayhew, urged
them to "build up the Deep Throat character and make him interesting."
While it is now clearly known that at least one of Woodward's informants was,
in fact, Robert Bennett, the suggestions from Colodny and Gettlin in Silent Coup
about Al Haig and Deborah Davis's suggestions in Katherine the Great about Richard
Ober may not be contradictory. Other names that have been suggested have included
Walter Sheridan (Jim Hougan in Spooks) and Bobby Ray Inman (also in Spooks). If
Havill is correct and there is no "person" who was known as "Deep
Throat", it is possible that any or all of the above were passing along information,
explicitly not to be sourced or credited to them in any way, on deep background.
(8)
Katharine
Graham, Personal History (1997)
Yet, despite
the care I knew everyone was taking, I was still worried. No matter how careful
we were, there was always the nagging possibility that we were wrong, being set
up, being misled. Ben would repeatedly reassure me possibly to a greater extent
than he may have actually felt by saying that some of our sources were Republicans,
Sloan especially, and that having the story almost exclusively gave us the luxury
of not having to rush into print, so that we could be obsessive about checking
everything. There were many times when we delayed publishing something until the
"tests" had been met. There were times when something just didn't seem
to hold up and, accordingly, was not published, and there were a number of instances
where we withheld something not sufficiently confirmable that turned out later
to be true.
At the time,
I took comfort in our "two-sources" policy. Ben further assured me that
Woodward had a secret source he would go to when he wasn't sure about something
a source that had never misled us. That was the first I heard of Deep Throat,
even before he was so named by Howard Simons, after the pornographic movie that
was popular in certain circles at the time. It's why I remain convinced that there
was such a person and that he and it had to be a he was neither made up nor an
amalgam or a composite of a number of people, as has often been hypothesized.
The identity of Deep Throat is the only secret I'm aware of that Ben has kept,
and, of course, Bob and Carl have, too. I never asked to be let in on the secret,
except once, facetiously, and I still don't know who he is.
(9)
Ben
Bradlee,
The Good Life: Newspapering
and Other Adventures (1995)
The
boys (Bob Woodward and Carl Beinstein) had one unbeatable asset: they worked spectacularly
hard. They would ask fifty people the same question, or they would ask one person
the same question fifty times, if they had reason to believe some information
was being withheld. Especially after they got us in trouble by misinterpreting
Sloan's answer about whether Haldeman controlled a White House slush fund.
And,
of course, Woodward had "Deep Throat," whose identity has been hands-down
the best-kept secret in the history of Washington journalism.
Throughout
the years, some of the city's smartest journalists and politicians have put their
minds to identifying Deep Throat, without success. General Al Haig was a popular
choice for a long time, and especially when he was running for president in the
1988 race, he would beg me to state publicly that he was not Deep Throat. He would
steam and sputter when I told him that would be hard for me to do for him, and
not for anyone else. Woodward finally said publicly that Haig was not Deep Throat.
Some
otherwise smart people decided Deep Throat was a composite, if he (or she) existed
at all. I have always thought it should be possible to identify Deep Throat simply
by entering all the information about him in All the President's Men into a computer,
and then entering as much as possible about all the various suspects. For instance,
who was not in Washington on the days that Woodward reported putting the red-flagged
flower pot on his window sill, signaling Deep Throat for a meeting.
The
quality of Deep Throat's information was such that I had accepted Woodward's desire
to identify him to me only by job, experience, access, and expertise. That amazes
me now, given the high stakes. I don't see how I settled for that, and I would
not settle for that now. But the information and the guidance he was giving Woodward
were never wrong, never. And it was only after Nixon's resignation, and after
Woodward and Bernstein's second book, The Final Days, that I felt the need for
Deep Throat's name. I got it one spring day during lunch break on a bench in MacPherson
Square. I have never told a soul, not even Katharine Graham, or Don Graham, who
succeeded his mother as publisher in 1979. They have never asked me. I have never
commented, in any way, on any name suggested to me. The fact that his identity
has remained secret all these years is mystifying, and truly extraordinary. Some
Doubting Thomases have pointed out that I only knew who Woodward told me Deep
Throat was. To be sure. But that was good enough for me then. And now.
(10)
Deborah
Davis, interviewed
by Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel Press (1992)
Bob
Woodward has consistently lied about his background ever since the first time
anybody started asking who this person is. He came from Wheaton, Illinois. His
father was a judge. He joined the Navy and became a communications officer, which
is not Naval Intelligence per se. Naval intelligence is a separate organization.
Communications officers are at the very highest level of receiving coded and top
secret information from around the world and they get it before anybody else does.
It's up to them to relay this information to the people in power.
In
Woodward's case, first he was in the Navy serving somewhere in California for
four years. At the end of his term he was in California, before that he was on
a ship I believe. He's never said what he was doing in California. He just won't
talk about it. But you remember that this was the time of the height of the anti-war
movement and there was a domestic counter-intelligence operation going on called
Operation Chaos, which was coordinating Army, Navy and FBI and CIA intelligence
on the anti-war movement, spying on leaders and so on, trying to find foreign
influence. And I believe that this is what Woodward was involved in at that time.
So
after his four years were up he was eligible to leave the Navy, having completed
his service. Instead he re-enlisted for another year and he came to Washington
and he started working in a top secret Naval unit inside the Pentagon. Actually,
they went between the Pentagon and the White House. This was during the first
years of Nixon's presidency. And I believe that at this time he started working
directly with Richard Ober, who was the deputy chief of counter-intelligence under
James Angleton. He was the one who was running Operation Chaos and I believe that
he was the one who was Deep Throat. I disagree with those people in Silent Coup,
although it hardly matters who exactly it was because I know Woodward had many
sources.
But the point
is that at this time he was getting top secret information. He was briefing the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was briefing the National Security Council and he was
briefing Alexander Haig, who was Nixon's chief of staff. He was right in the very,
very center of the Nixon White House in terms of the information that was being
conveyed and the people he knew. After that, he decided for some mysterious reason
that he wanted to be a reporter and he went to the Post and the Post has thousands
of applications a year of experienced reporters, most of whom never get in. But
instead they took this guy who couldn't write, who had never been a reporter in
his life and they said, "You have to learn how to write better so go work
on the suburban paper for a year and then we'll hire you." Now I don't know
how they decided that he was somebody they wanted to cultivate or whether somebody
had the word on him ahead of time or what. But after a year he came to the Post
and right away Ben Bradlee, the executive editor, started giving him the choice
assignments. They felt a common bond between each other because Bradlee had a
very similar back ground in the Navy himself.
Carl
Bernstein was coming from a whole different place. He was a very messed up person,
you know, had a lot of trouble keeping his job at the Post. He would always fall
asleep on the job, stay up all night and miss deadlines and he was just a mess.
If it weren't for the newspaper guild rules about not firing reporters, he would
have been fired a long time ago. But he had a sense about politics. He still does.
He had a very good sense about politics and he hated Nixon because during the
McCarthy era, when Nixon was a congressman, his family, his father and mother,
who were very left-wing, had experienced a lot of persecution during the McCarthy
era. So he associated Nixon with this. And he had his won reasons for wanting
to do a story that he thought might lead to exposing Nixon and bringing down Nixon.
It's
a very strange friendship. There was a lot of tension between Woodward and Bernstein
and there's a very strong bond between them because each of them owes the other
one the fact that they are now millionaires and can get book contracts for any
amount of money they want.
(11)
Bob Woodward,
The
Guardian (3rd June, 2005)
On
May 15, less than two weeks after Hoover's death, a lone gunman shot Alabama Governor
George C Wallace, then campaigning for president, at a shopping centre. The wounds
were serious, but Wallace survived. Wallace had a strong following in the deep
South, an increasing source of Nixon's support. Wallace's spoiler candidacy four
years earlier in 1968 could have cost Nixon the election that year, and Nixon
monitored Wallace's every move closely as the 1972 presidential contest continued.
That
evening, Nixon called Felt - not Gray, who was out of town - at home for an update.
It was the first time Felt had spoken directly with Nixon. Felt reported that
Arthur H Bremer, the would-be assassin, was in custody but in the hospital because
he had been roughed up and given a few bruises by those who subdued and captured
him after he shot Wallace.
"Well,
it's too bad they didn't really rough up the son of a bitch!" Nixon told
Felt.
Felt
was offended that the president would make such a remark. Nixon was so agitated,
attaching such urgency to the shooting, that he said he wanted full updates every
30 minutes from Felt on any new information that was being discovered in the investigation
of Bremer.
In
the following days I called Felt several times and he very carefully gave me leads
as we tried to find out more about Bremer. It turned out that he had stalked some
of the other candidates, and I went to New York to pick up the trail. This led
to several front-page stories about Bremer's travels, completing a portrait of
a madman not singling out Wallace but rather looking for any presidential candidate
to shoot. On May 18, I did a page-one article that said, "High federal officials
who have reviewed investigative reports on the Wallace shooting said yesterday
that there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Bremer was a hired killer."
It
was rather brazen of me. Though I was technically protecting my source and talked
to others besides Felt, I did not do a good job of concealing where the information
was coming from. Felt chastised me mildly. But the story that Bremer acted alone
was a story that both the White House and the FBI wanted out.
A
month later, on Saturday June 17, the FBI night supervisor called Felt at home.
Five men in business suits, pockets stuffed with $100 bills, and carrying eavesdropping
and photographic equipment, had been arrested inside the Democrats' national headquarters
at the Watergate office building at about 2.30am.
By
8.30am, Felt was in his office at the FBI, seeking more details. About the same
time, the Post's city editor woke me at home and asked me to come in to cover
an unusual burglary.
The
first paragraph of the front-page story that ran the next day in the Post read:
"Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence
Agency, were arrested at 2.30am yesterday in what authorities described as an
elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here."
The next day, Carl Bernstein and I wrote our first article together, identifying
one of the burglars, James W McCord Jr, as the salaried security coordinator for
Nixon's reelection committee. On Monday, I went to work on E Howard Hunt, whose
phone number had been found in the address books of two of the burglars with the
small notations "W House" and "WH" by his name.
This
was the moment when a source or friend in the investigative agencies of government
is invaluable. I called Felt at the FBI, reaching him through his secretary. It
would be our first talk about Watergate. He reminded me how he disliked phone
calls at the office but said the Watergate burglary case was going to "heat
up" for reasons he could not explain. He then hung up abruptly...
In
July, Carl went to Miami, home of four of the burglars, on the money trail, and
he ingeniously tracked down a local prosecutor and his chief investigator, who
had copies of $89,000 in Mexican cheques and a $25,000 cheque that had gone into
the account of Bernard L Barker, one of the burglars. We were able to establish
that the $25,000 cheque had been campaign money that had been given to Maurice
H Stans, Nixon's chief fundraiser, on a Florida golf course. The August 1 story
on this was the first to tie Nixon campaign money directly to Watergate.
I
tried to call Felt, but he wouldn't take the call. I tried his home and had no
better luck. So one night I showed up at his Fairfax home. It was a plain-vanilla,
perfectly kept suburban house. His manner made me nervous. He said no more phone
calls, no more visits to his home, nothing in the open. I did not know then that
in Felt's earliest days in the FBI, during the second world war, he was assigned
to work on the general desk of the espionage section. Felt learned a great deal
about German spying in the job, and after the war spent time keeping suspected
Soviet agents under surveillance. So at his home in Virginia that summer, Felt
said that if we were to talk it would have to be face to face, where no one could
observe us.
I
said anything would be fine with me.
We
would need a preplanned notification system - a change in the environment that
no one else would notice or attach any meaning to. I didn't know what he was talking
about.
If
you keep the drapes in your apartment closed, open them and that could signal
me, he said. I could check each day or have them checked, and if they were open
we could meet that night at a designated place. I liked to let the light in at
times, I explained.
We
needed another signal, he said, indicating that he could check my apartment regularly.
He never explained how he could do this. Feeling under some pressure, I said that
I had a red cloth flag - the kind used as a warning on long truck loads - that
a girlfriend had found on the street. She had stuck it in an empty flowerpot on
my apartment balcony. Felt and I agreed that I would move the flowerpot with the
flag, which usually was in the front near the railing, to the rear of the balcony
if I urgently needed a meeting. This would have to be important and rare, he said
sternly. The signal, he said, would mean we would meet that same night at about
2am 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. 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.
Felt
said that if he had something for me, he could get me a message. He quizzed me
about my daily routine, what came to my apartment, the mailbox, etc. The Post
was delivered outside my apartment door. I did have a subscription to the New
York Times. A number of people in my apartment building near Dupont Circle got
the Times. The copies were left in the lobby with the apartment number. Mine was
617, and it was written clearly on the outside of each paper. Felt said if there
was something important he could get to my New York Times - how, I never knew.
Page 20 would be circled, and the hands of a clock in the lower part of the page
would be drawn to indicate the time of the meeting that night, probably 2am, in
the same parking garage.
The
relationship was a compact of trust; nothing about it was to be discussed or shared
with anyone, he said.
How
he could have made a daily observation of my balcony is still a mystery to me.
At the time, before the era of intensive security, the back of the building was
not enclosed, so anyone could have driven in to observe my balcony. In addition,
my balcony and the back of the apartment complex faced on to a courtyard that
was shared with other buildings. My balcony could have been seen from dozens of
apartments or offices, as best I can tell.
(12)
Cliff Kincaid, Was
Mark Felt Really Deep Throat? (3rd June, 2005)
History
professor Joan Hoff of Montana State University, an expert on the Watergate scandal,
finds it interesting that Bob Woodward is claiming that he had a close relationship
with former FBI official Mark Felt, now identified as Deep Throat, when Felt suffers
from serious health problems, including dementia, and can’t deny it. “It’s
just like when he said he interviewed (former CIA director Bill) Casey when Casey
was comatose,” she says.
Len
Colodny, co-author of Silent Coup, about the “removal” of President
Nixon, finds the identification of Mark Felt as Deep Throat to be rather remarkable:
“A Deep Throat who can’t talk.”
The
fact is, as AIM founder Reed Irvine documented, Woodward has been known to make
things up. Woodward’s Casey “interview” is a case in point. As
Reed noted, “In his 1987 book, Veil, Woodward claimed he had interviewed
William J. Casey, the CIA director, after Casey had brain surgery and could not
speak intelligibly. Woodward didn’t know that, and he made up an interview
in which Casey is supposed to have spoken 19 intelligible words. It was clear
that this was a falsification not only because of Casey’s condition, but
because his hospital room was guarded and Woodward was never admitted to it.”
Hoff believes
the identification of Deep Throat is part of “an orchestrated publicity stunt
on the part of the Post and Woodward” because Woodward plans to publish his
own book on Felt. “Lo and behold,” says Hoff, “Felt’s family
decides he’s Deep Throat and Felt can’t say whether he is or not, and
we get the big story.”
In
fact, despite his serious health problems, Felt can still utter a few words. He
was captured on film outside his home yesterday saying that he enjoyed the publicity
and that, “I’ll arrange to write a book or something, and collect all
the money I can.” A New York Times account indicates that members of the
Felt family have been envious of the money that will be made from the Deep Throat
disclosures and that they were trying to pursue their own book deal independent
of Woodward after he rebuffed their pleas for a collaborative effort.
Felt
seems to have been a source of some kind for Woodward. But was he the source known
as Deep Throat? Hoff isn’t the only one who has some doubts.
Colodny
says that what is known about Felt “doesn’t match what Woodward wrote
in his book. He describes Deep Throat as someone he had known for a long time
and had many discussions about power in Washington and so on. There’s not
a shred of evidence that Felt is that person.”
In
the June 2 Post, Woodward describes for the first time the details of his “friendship”
with Felt. They are said to have met accidentally when Woodward, then a young
Navy Lieutenant, was delivering Navy documents to the White House in 1970. Hoff
points out that Felt, because of his severe memory problems, can’t deny any
of this and the account “is based only and exclusively on Woodward’s
word.”
But
there are other reasons to doubt that Felt is Deep Throat.
Colodny
and Hoff point to the claim in the Woodward/Bernstein book, All the President’s
Men, that Deep Throat provided the Post reporters exclusive information about
the “deliberate erasures,” as “Throat” told Woodward in November
of 1973, on the White House tapes. “There’s no reason to believe that
Felt had access to that information because it was closely held in the White House,”
says Colodny, “and Felt had left the FBI in April—six months earlier.”
Hoff agrees.
“It’s conceivable that as the second in command at the FBI, the deputy
director, he could have gotten information from somebody about this,” she
said. “But I don’t think he gave them this information. I think it was
somebody in the White House. At that point, the White House was so embattled over
the tapes and the possible subpoena [of them], there were only 3 or 4 people who
had access to those tapes.”
That
means, apparently, that either Felt is not Deep Throat or that he had his own
Deep Throat.
But
if Felt did somehow have access to that information and provided it to Woodward,
important questions are raised.
“The
guy is deputy director of the FBI,” Colodny says. “Why is he not protecting
the tapes? Why is he not arresting the people who are doing this? Why doesn’t
he go to [Watergate Judge John] Sirica’s court, which is hearing this? He’s
a sworn law enforcement officer. He knows there’s a crime being committed.
But instead of doing something about it, he goes in a garage and talks to Woodward.”
Hoff
makes the same basic point. “He is the top law enforcement officer in the
country because there’s only an acting director [of the FBI] at that point,”
says Hoff. “Why didn’t he go to Sirica or a grand jury and blow the
story open?”
If
Felt was concerned about the hostility between the FBI and President Nixon, Hoff
counters, “This is the very story that he could have killed the Nixon Administration
with. Why in God’s name would a top law enforcement officer meet in a garage
with a rookie reporter and give him this information? It makes no sense.”
Hoff
predicts that the story will rebound to the discredit of Woodward. It’s another
flashy story, she concedes, “but I think they made a mistake in choosing
Felt.”
Last
February 4, when the University of Texas in Austin opened the Bob Woodward and
Carl Bernstein Watergate papers (for which it had paid them $5 million), Hoff
participated in a symposium with Woodward and suggested that he put Deep Throat
on videotape. Hoff wrote that she told Woodward that “he should video tape
that individual as soon as possible so the public could be sure of the authenticity
of the man Woodward would ultimately reveal as Deep Throat when the person could
not deny it.”
Of
course, this should have been done years ago. The Felt family has affirmed the
Deep Throat designation but it’s now clear that they had a financial interest
in doing so as well. And the questions about the conspiracy behind the Watergate
conspiracy will be shunted aside and will remain unanswered.
(13) Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian (1st December, 2005)
In the beginning, seasoned political reporters at the Washington Post disdained the Watergate story as insignificant, implausible and unserious. But two young journalists doggedly pursued every lead, helping bring about Richard Nixon's resignation. Three decades later, Bob Woodward had come to embody the ultimate Washington insider. Over the past month, however, he has personified the stonewalling and covering up he once shattered to launch his brilliant career. His unravelling is as surprising and symptomatic a story of Bush's Washington as his making was of Nixon's.
On October 27, the night before Vice-President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, Woodward appeared on CNN. Asked about the case, he said: "I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started as a kind of gossip ... There's a lot of innocent actions in all of this ... I don't know how this is about the build-up to the war." He expressed his sympathy for those who might be indicted: " ... what distresses me is, you know, so and so might be indicted and so and so is facing ... And it is not yet proven." He concluded with invective against Patrick Fitzgerald, "a junkyard dog prosecutor".
On November 16 Woodward admitted he had been called to testify on November 3 before the prosecutor, having been given up by a source after Libby's indictment. Woodward, it turned out, was the first journalist to learn Plame's identity. "I hunkered down," he told his own newspaper. "I'm in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn't want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed." Woodward claimed he heard about Plame in an interview he conducted in June 2003 for his book Plan of Attack, which failed to contain this startling information. While two Post reporters testified before the prosecutor, Woodward hid his role as material witness. With the disclosure, the storyteller lost the plot.
Woodward advocates no ideas and is indifferent to the fate of government. His fabled access has been in the service of his technique of accumulating mountains of facts whose scale fosters an image of omniscience. As his bestsellers and wealth piled up, he lost a sense of journalism as provisional and inherently imperfect, seeing it instead as something engraved in stone. But his method made him particularly vulnerable to manipulation by cunning sources.
Woodward's 2002 book Bush At War, based partly on selected National Security Council documents leaked to him at White House instruction, was invaluable to the administration for its portrait of Bush as strong and decisive. Its omissions are as striking as its fragmentary facts, such as the absence of analysis of the disastrous operation at Tora Bora that allowed Bin Laden to escape. Plan of Attack includes intriguing shards of information about the twisting of intelligence to justify the war, but he fails to develop the material and theme.
By the publication of Plan of Attack, Woodward was "hunkered down," hiding his "secrets" from his newspaper, its readers and the prosecutor. He cryptically told one of the subpoenaed Post reporters to "keep him out of the reporting". He said there were "reasonable grounds to discredit" Joseph Wilson, the whistleblower. He asserted that a CIA assessment had determined that Plame's outing had done no damage, but the CIA said no damage assessment report had been done. But when a source outed Woodward to the prosecutor, his cover-up was revealed. Above all, the extent of his credulity is exposed. It is more than paradoxical that the reporter who investigated Nixon and worked closely with professionals in government alarmed by the abuses should exhibit so little scepticism about Bush.
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