Editor’s note: News broke Tuesday that W. Mark Felt, the former deputy director of the FBI, was Deep Throat, who fed a Washington Post reporter secret information to that led to the resignation of President Nixon. Deep Throat’s identity and motive had been one of the country’s great mysteries. The reporter recounts how the relationship came about.
Washington – In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and assigned to Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chief of naval operations, I sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House.
One evening I was dispatched with a package to the West Wing of the White House. After I had been in a waiting area for a while, a tall man with perfectly combed gray hair came in and sat down. His suit was dark, his shirt white, and his necktie subdued.
After several minutes, I introduced myself. “Lt. Bob Woodward,” I said, carefully appending a deferential “sir.” “Mark Felt,” he said.
I began telling him about myself, that I was taking graduate courses at George Washington University. He perked up immediately, saying he had gone to night law school at GW in the 1930s before joining – and this is the first time he mentioned it – the FBI.
Felt and I were like two passengers sitting next to each other on a long airline flight with nowhere to go and nothing really to do but resign ourselves to the dead time. I learned that he was an assistant director of the FBI in charge of the inspection division, an important post under Director J. Edgar Hoover, riding herd on field offices. I later learned this was called the “goon squad.”
I asked Felt for his phone number, and he gave me the direct line to his office. I believe I encountered him only one more time at the White House.
But he was going to be one of the people I consulted in depth about my future, and he seemed sympathetic to the lost-soul quality of my questions.
During a year I spent working on a small Maryland newspaper, I kept in touch with Felt through phone calls to his office or home. We were becoming friends of a sort. He was the mentor, keeping me from fool’s errands, and I kept asking for advice. One weekend, I drove out to his home in Virginia and met his wife, Audrey.
Somewhat to my astonishment, Felt was an admirer of J. Edgar Hoover. But the Nixon White House was another matter, Felt said. The political pressures were immense, he said, without being specific. I believe he called it “corrupt” and sinister. Hoover, Felt and the old guard were the wall that protected the FBI, he said.
At the time, pre-Watergate, there was little or no public knowledge of the vast pushing, shoving and outright acrimony between the Nixon White House and Hoover’s FBI. The Watergate investigations later revealed that in 1970 a young White House aide named Tom Charles Huston had come up with a plan to authorize the CIA, FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of “domestic security threats,” authorize illegal opening of mail and lift the restrictions on surreptitious entries or break-ins to gather intelligence.
There is little doubt Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis.
When I got to my new job at The Washington Post, I kept Felt on my call list and checked in with him. He was relatively free with me but 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 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.
On May 2, 1972, Felt was in his office as the No. 3 man at the FBI when an assistant director came to report that Hoover had died at his home. For practical purposes Felt was next in line to take over the bureau.
But President Nixon nominated L. Patrick Gray to be the acting director. Gray was a Nixon loyalist going back years.
On Saturday, June 17, 1972, 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 2:30 a.m.
By 8:30 a.m., Felt was in his office at the FBI, seeking more details. About the same time, The Washington 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 2:30 a.m. 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 security coordinator for Nixon’s re-election committee.
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 that the Watergate burglary case was going to “heat up” for reasons he could not explain. He then hung up abruptly.
In August, I tried to call Felt, but he wouldn’t take the call. I tried his home in Virginia and had no better luck. So one night I showed up at his home. His manner made me nervous. He said no more phone calls, no more visits to his home, nothing in the open.
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.
Felt and I agreed that I would move a flowerpot on my balcony to the rear of the balcony if I needed an urgent meeting. This would have to be important and rare, he said sternly. 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 Key Bridge in Arlington, Va.
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. 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.
Felt said that if there was something important, he could get to my New York Times, delivered every morning – 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.
It was only later after Nixon resigned that I began to wonder why Felt had talked when doing so carried substantial risks for him and the FBI. Had he been exposed early on, Felt would have been no hero.
Technically, it was illegal to talk about grand jury information or FBI files; or it could have been made to look illegal.
Felt believed he 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.
And the former World War II spy hunter liked the game. I suspect in his mind I was his agent. He beat it into my head: secrecy at all cost, no loose talk, no talk about him at all, no indication to anyone that such a secret source existed.
