Let This Be A Lesson

When news broke yesterday about Deep Throat being revealed, finally after thirty years, my "Bravo-Sierra detector went into overdrive. For years we’ve been bombarded by speculation over this person, or that person, being the informant that helped bring down a president. So, as a blogger, and a pragmatist, I was reluctant to address this issue, and now I know why. This comes from Captain’s Quarters. The link is on Ed’s site, but as Marcie did earlier today, the whole article is here. It’s necessary reading. I still maintain that there is no real Deep Throat, which is what Mr. Felt alludes to here. But I mean I don’t think Deep Throat even exists. In my opinion, Deep Throat is a made up name to encompass all the "whistle-blowers" involved in this issue. Call me a fool if you want, but both Woodward and Bernstein said they wouldn’t reveal the real identity until the person was dead. Mr. Felt isn’t dead, and there was a significant lull in the confirmation by the aforementioned authors. So, naturally, I’m suspicious.
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/004614.php
http://www.newsvirginian.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WNV/MGArticle/WNV_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031783032633&path

But I’m not the only one. Todd Foster is another one who was skeptical when this issue was dropped in his lap three years ago. The story he tells is one that will make most question Mr. Felt’s statements. Further, in my opinion, the best person to question Mr. Felt about the veracity of his claims should be G. Gordon Liddy. To my knowledge Mr. Liddy is the last person left alive and cognitive that was involved in the actual breakin of the Watergate Hotel. Mr. Liddy appeared on MSNBC last night and admitted that Mr. Felt could have been Deep Throat, given the information that passed to the press, but he can’t be sure. Mr. Liddy is a lawyer, and I understand how a lawyer thinks. A proper cross-examination by Mr. Liddy might confirm or deny Mr. Felt’s allegations.

On the trail of the secret informant
By J. TODD FOSTER
The News Virginian
Wednesday, June 1, 2005

I've been waiting three years for what happened Tuesday: That W. Mark Felt would be named "Deep Throat."

Actually, he was outed as Deep Throat by relatives and an attorney who began pitching me the story in June 2002, when I was a regular contributor to People magazine.

There's little doubt that Felt is indeed the super-secret source who helped topple a president. The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee confirmed as much Tuesday.

But there's one interview you won't be seeing: Felt himself. The former No. 2 man at the FBI suffered a stroke in the summer of 2000. By his family's own admissions, he suffers from dementia. You will not see Mark Felt going on camera and saying he was Deep Throat.

Ultimately that's why I agreed with decisions by People and the book publisher HarperCollins to kill two separate projects naming Felt, with his family's cooperation, as Deep Throat.

In the spring of 2002, I first became virtually certain that Felt was Deep Throat. As the 30th anniversary of Watergate loomed, I was one of several People reporters to do a story examining Deep Throat speculations by former Nixon White House counsel John Dean.

I tracked down a telephone listing for a W. Mark Felt near Miami. The man who answered told me he was not the former FBI deputy director - he was his son, Mark Felt Jr.

In June 2002, at a small daily newspaper in Albany, Ga., where I was considering going as an editor, I freelanced an article on Deep Throat suspects and recounted my conversation with Felt Jr.

I asked the son if his father was Deep Throat.

"I'm not going to answer that yet," he said.

But Felt Jr. told me that Woodward had visited his father several times in Santa Rosa. Junior also said he was writing a book about his father but was still waiting to finish the final chapter.

When will you publish it, I asked?

"We don't know yet. We're waiting for a visit from Bob Woodward to figure out what to do."

Felt Jr. assured me that when the time was right, I would get the story about his father.

That time came about six months later, just as I was accepting the managing editor's job at this newspaper. I pitched the story to People and the magazine's top editor jumped aboard.

The project was so secret at People that I dealt directly with the top editor, Martha Nelson, and one of her high-ranking lieutenants. Even my editors at the D.C. Bureau knew nothing of the story, which was code-named "Project Green Door." (Perhaps from another porn movie title.)

Ultimately the story died because of money. The Felt family and their attorney wanted a lot of money, and People magazine - with my blessing - backed away in what would have been a case of "checkbook journalism." Reputable news organizations don't pay a penny for news. This also was during the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal at The New York Times. The ethical meters at news organizations were tuned to full alert, or should have been.

I was still convinced that Felt was Deep Throat, so I took the story to an author friend of mine who had written several books for HarperCollins, which would not be bound by the monetary precepts of journalism. The book publisher would have no prohibitions against buying Felt's story.

HarperCollins subsidiary Regan Books agreed to the project. By then, I was immersed in my job here. I asked my author-friend, Jess Walter of Spokane, Wash., to take over and do most of the legwork. I happily agreed to give him most of the book advance.

Jess made three trips to Santa Rosa in late 2003 and sent me transcripts from his taped interviews with Deep Throat and the Felt family.

Ultimately, Jess advised me that we could not in good conscience go through with this book. The contract with the book publisher stated that our information had to be bulletproof, that we had to be able to prove Felt was Deep Throat.

It could not be done then and it cannot be done now, unless Woodward himself can produce documentation.

Even Felt himself claimed during several sections of the taped interviews that Woodward made up the source Deep Throat.

"I just thought he was making it up," the then 90-year-old Felt told my partner.
At one point during the interview, Felt referred to Deep Throat as a "small-time criminal." And added: "Deep Throat was just an imagined thing."

And of Woodward, Felt said this: "Well, he's making a lot of that up, I'm sure of that."

There were no 2 a.m. cloak-and-dagger meetings in parking garages, he said.
The problem with Felt is that three summers before, he had suffered a stroke and briefly was sent to recuperate in a convalescent home.

"He was very impaired, and I thought he was dying," his daughter, Joan, told my writing partner.

Felt soon moved into his daughter's basement. He was unhappy at the convalescent home and hard to manage by staff. He even spent all afternoon one day trying to reach the FBI, where he had retired more than 30 years earlier.

"He had dementia. And memory loss," his daughter said. "He was extremely confused. He was up in the middle of the night [at the convalescent home], knocking on people's doors, thinking that he was doing investigations for the bureau."

On Nov. 8, 2003, Felt told my writing partner when asked if he wanted to come forward: "You can tell them that I am Deep... that I was Deep Throat. The only thing is that Deep Throat is a little different than you probably have in mind. Deep Throat was not anybody real inside that was furnishing information. It was somebody confirming information."

Then Felt described his motive for coming clean then: "I guess ? I want some money for my family."

Earlier in that same interview, Felt said he didn't remember anything about Deep Throat, even saying at one point: "Well, I wasn't a Deep Throat."

Of Woodward, he said: "I don't think I ever provided information to him."
Later, Felt said: "I thought Deep Throat was another source entirely."

It was only after prodding and coaching from his daughter and the family's attorney, John O'Connor of San Francisco, that Felt even gave his lukewarm admission.

Interviewed eight days later, on Nov. 16, 2003, he adamantly denied being the most famous journalism source in history - and one of Washington's few well-kept secrets.

Asked repeatedly if he was Deep Throat, Felt said the following during a long interview: "No, I'm not. Well, the truth is I was not Deep Throat in my acts or what I did. I got a lot of credit for being Deep Throat, though. That wasn't me. I don't want to say that I ever claimed to you or anyone that I was Deep Throat. All I know is that he was just a small-time criminal. Well, I was not Deep Throat. There were a lot of other sources involved, but I was not Deep Throat. Probably he [Woodward] had some legitimate sources, but I was not one. Well, just tell them that I deny that I was Deep Throat."

Ultimately, I would have loved having my byline on the story revealing Deep Throat. And I'll be nauseated every time I think about the story that got away.

But I know that I - and the people I worked with and for - did the right thing.

So the guy is senile, or suffering from dementia, and has already told others to deny that he is Deep Throat. Is this what the press has been reduced to? Following up on hear-say and innuendoes from a man that clearly doesn’t have all of his mental faculties. Not that I’m denying his service to this nation in the FBI, or that he was good man, but this is a stretch. Granted, most of the people that could be Deep Throat would be rather old right now. But it’s obvious that there’s more to Mr. Felt than what met the media’s eyes yesterday.

And this is just more evidence of a dying, archaic medium like the MSM. I say that because had they actually checked the facts available to them, or those that rings warning bells, they’d have checked deeper to see that Mr. Felt’s claims can’t even begin to pass the smell test. Not that it really matters who it was. This issue is thirty years old. Is it really worth fretting over? No. It isn’t. We have far more pressing matters right now concerning the nation than who or who wasn’t a "shadowy" whistle-blower during the Nixon administration.

The only people that are concerned are those in the MSM that pat themselves on the backs for the Watergate story, and the ability of the media to bring down a president. But what about us? Us poor little "pajama"-clad bloggers that have brought down our fair share of prominent heads in the MSM’s own medium. The media continues to screw up left and right, and refuse to acknowledge that they’re on their death-bed compared to us. Bloggers have uncovered more scandals than the media ever has, and ours count more because these have been hidden from EVERYONE’S prying eyes. Captain Ed faced off against a Canadian court over sealed testimony, we ripped Dan Rather apart, and exposed him for what he was.

The MSM can continue to pride themselves for their journalistic felonies, and lay accolades upon one another for such acts—Dan Rather received a Peabody recently for CBS’ coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal—and we go unnoticed. Fine. So be it. Don’t come crying to us when the MSM is out of a job because more people turn to us than turn to them.

Publius II