Leak

Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat

Max Holland

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780700623426
• eBook ISBN: 9780700619733
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Through the shadowy persona of “Deep Throat,” FBI official Mark Felt became as famous as the Watergate scandal his “leaks” helped uncover. Best known through Hal Holbrook’s portrayal in the film version of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men, Felt was regarded for decades as a conscientious but highly secretive whistleblower who shunned the limelight. Yet even after he finally revealed his identity in 2005, questions about his true motivations persisted.

Max Holland has found the missing piece of that Deep Throat puzzle—one that’s been hidden in plain sight all along. He reveals for the first time in detail what truly motivated the FBI's number-two executive to become the most fabled secret source in American history. In the process, he directly challenges Felt’s own explanations while also demolishing the legend fostered by Woodward and Bernstein’s bestselling account.

Holland critiques all the theories of Felt’s motivation that have circulated over the years, including notions that Felt had been genuinely upset by White House law-breaking or had tried to defend and insulate the FBI from the machinations of President Nixon and his Watergate henchmen. And, while acknowledging that Woodward finally disowned the “principled whistleblower” image of Felt in The Secret Man, Holland shows why that famed journalist’s latest explanation still falls short of the truth.

Holland showcases the many twists and turns to Felt’s story that are not widely known, revealing not a selfless official acting out of altruistic patriotism, but rather a career bureaucrat with his own very private agenda. Drawing on new interviews and oral histories, old and just-released FBI Watergate files, papers of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, presidential tape recordings, and Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate-related papers, he sheds important new light on both Felt’s motivations and the complex and often problematic relationship between the press and government officials.

Fast-paced and scrupulously fact-checked, Leak resolves the mystery residing at the heart of Mark Felt’s actions. By doing so, it radically revises our understanding of America’s most famous presidential scandal.

CHAPTER ONE

A Forced Departure

May 1973

Heroes don’t lurk in shadows for 33 years.

—Jack McDermott, SAC of the Washington Field Office

A sensible answer about why Deep Throat leaked begins with the circumstances of his resignation from the FBI in June 1973.

According to The Secret Man, Mark Felt retired quietly and without fanfare. This bland explanation is unchanged from the original AP story that appeared in the Post and elsewhere (“FBI’s No. 2 Man to Retire”) and is consistent with Felt’s 1979 ghost-written memoir, The FBI Pyramid. That the cover story has persisted so long is striking, given the interest in deconstructing Deep Throat’s motive and the ease of ascertaining the true circumstances of his departure. It should have struck a false note with anyone who believed that Felt’s overriding motive was to protect the FBI: were that true, the last thing Felt would have done was abandon his post at a moment of unprecedented turmoil for the Bureau, and at a time when he was still publicly considered a candidate for the directorship.¹

Felt was only sixty in the spring of 1973; he had five years before mandatory retirement. More to the point, the FBI was facing its biggest crisis since the Teapot Dome scandal fifty years earlier. The still-unfolding Watergate revelations had “brought egg to [the FBI’s face] and demoralization to its ranks,” as a Post article asserted on the first anniversary of the break-in. The acting director, Patrick Gray, had just resigned, “heavily discredited for his role in the investigation and the subsequent White House cover-up,” and the stain had spread to the Bureau as a whole.²

In fact, Felt did not casually resign—he quit abruptly rather than subject himself to a leak investigation. Although parts of this story appeared in print as early as 1976, it is told here in full for the first time.³

The events that precipitated Felt’s resignation began on May 11. That morning the New York Times published a story by John M. Crewdson about the wiretapping of several reporters and some former aides to Henry Kissinger, the president’s national security adviser, over a two-year period beginning in 1969. Crewdson was not the first to disclose the wiretaps’ existence; that scoop belonged to Time magazine’s Sandy Smith, an investigative reporter known for his law-enforcement sources. In late February Smith had written that the White House ordered the FBI in 1969 to institute electronic surveillance of “six or seven reporters” suspected of receiving leaks of classified information, along with “an undisclosed number of White House aides.”⁴

But until Crewdson’s article appeared there was little detail about the wiretaps and no accurate mention of the names of those who were tapped. The stories that had been published elsewhere were full of errors, whereas Crewdson’s was right on the money. His sources included a former FBI official directly involved in funneling the results from the wiretaps to the White House (though he was not identified as such), and so Crewdson was able to name some names: William Beecher and Hedrick Smith, both New York Times reporters; Henry Brandon from the Sunday Times of London; and Morton Halperin, a former staff member of the National Security Council.⁵

The day Crewdson’s article appeared, William D. Ruckelshaus, the interim FBI director after Pat Gray, received a telephone call from a man who introduced himself as John Crewdson. The caller said that he was not ordinarily in the business of revealing an anonymous source, but he was going to make an exception. Mark Felt had supplied him with the details about the wiretaps, “Crewdson” declared. Moreover, Felt had said that he was in the running to be the next FBI director—making it seem as if the leak were a down payment for editorial support in the near future from the Times.⁶

Taken aback, Ruckelshaus asked “Crewdson” why he was identifying his source. The man replied that he was “just very concerned about the situation in the country,” Ruckelshaus told me in a 2007 interview. “He thought things were kind of falling apart and that I ought to know this.”⁷

Surprised by the reporter’s ostensible breach of confidentiality but satisfied that the information was accurate, Ruckelshaus took immediate action. The Bureau, of course, often leaked information to the media. But there was a vast difference between official or authorized leaks and Felt’s unsanctioned behavior. It “violated everything”: the Bureau’s regulations, decent conduct, perhaps even the law. Ruckelshaus was particularly incensed because he had ordered an urgent investigation, still ongoing, into the wiretaps, and believed that Crewdson’s scoop undercut him. It denied the Bureau the opportunity to begin rebuilding its credibility by telling the story first.⁸

Felt was visiting his son in California on the day the story appeared. But Ruckelshaus confronted him immediately upon his return to headquarters, on May 14. The acting director said he had “very good information that [Felt] was the source” of the leak to Crewdson. Ruckelshaus did not want to betray a supposed confidence, but at the same time he wanted to impress Felt with the quality of his information. So instead of disclosing exactly how he had come by the information, Ruckelshaus used a ruse: he claimed that a fraternity brother of his worked as an editor at the Times. This friend had supposedly been somewhat skeptical about the story when it came in and had insisted on learning the name of Crewdson’s primary source. Subsequently he had called his old frat brother (Ruckelshaus) to confirm that Felt was an FBI employee and in a position to know such information.⁹

Ruckelshaus accused Felt of undermining him at every opportunity, and at a time when he was trying to mend the Bureau’s badly tattered reputation. Felt vehemently denied the accusation. Initially he denied having any contact with Crewdson but then relented and admitted he had had a brief conversation with the reporter while out in California. But he had only tried to correct information that Crewdson already knew, Felt insisted to Ruckelshaus; at one point, Felt also suggested that William C. Sullivan, a former high-ranking official who had had a bitter falling out with Hoover, was the true culprit. The two men quarreled, and Ruckelshaus remembers thinking that not only was Felt “willing to leak, but he was willing to lie about it.” The conversation ended with Ruckelshaus saying he would decide overnight what he was going to do. In the meantime, he asked for and received Felt’s keys to the director’s office.¹⁰

When Ruckelshaus arrived in his office the next morning, he found a letter of resignation from Felt. He took this to mean that Felt believed Ruckelshaus might back down if the ante were raised, given the acting director’s inexperience and the enormous problems on his desk. To Felt’s apparent surprise, Ruckelshaus instantly accepted the resignation, completely confident that Felt was the leaker. “If he hadn’t done it,” Ruckelshaus recalls thinking, “I don’t think he would [be resigning].” Felt was allowed to stay on until June 12 to finish some projects, and it was agreed that his official records would reflect a “voluntary retirement.” The flowery letters of resignation and acceptance that were publicly released made no mention of a confrontation between the two men. Instead, the press dutifully reported that Felt wanted to take advantage of a “bonus being offered government workers who retire during June.”¹¹

I asked Crewdson about the matter in 2008, and he vigorously denied that he had called Ruckelshaus to disclose that Felt was leaking. “I mean, if [Ruckelshaus] told you that, he told you that. But that’s totally bizarre,” he said. “It’s certainly not true.” He added, “Not only would I not call the head of the FBI to tell him who my source was, I wouldn’t call the head of the FBI to lie about who my source was.” Moreover, Felt had not been Crewdson’s anonymous source. “My source was ... not even in the FBI,” Crewdson told me.¹²

Both Ruckelshaus and Crewdson have stellar reputations. Ruckelshaus was one of the few high-level Nixon appointees to come through Watergate with his reputation not only intact but enhanced (recall that he resigned from the Justice Department rather than carry out Nixon’s order to fire the first special prosecutor, Archibald Cox). And Crewdson is a highly respected journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. The contradiction between their accounts has three possible explanations. Either Ruckelshaus or Crewdson was not being truthful—or both were telling the truth as they knew it.

If the last scenario is correct, whoever gave the wiretap details to Crewdson also arranged for the call to Ruckelshaus. (Ruckelshaus had been the interim FBI director for less than a month; although he knew who Crewdson was, he would not have recognized his voice.) And whoever called Crewdson, besides being privy to the information about the wiretaps, would have had to know that Felt could be plausibly blamed for the leak. This point is crucial: knowledge of the wiretaps was very tightly held in the FBI, and only a very few persons were even remotely aware of it, much less the details. None of the records had been indexed and all had been personally controlled by William C. Sullivan, one of the Bureau’s highest-ranking officials, when the surveillance was conducted.¹³

When I asked him in 2008 if the passage of time might allow him to divulge his source, Crewdson initially responded that “it has always been my position that confidential source relationships are to be protected, even after the source in question has been dead for many years.” But he later wrote to say that he “continue[d] to respect confidential source-reporter relationships even in cases where the source was killed in a hunting accident many years ago.” That description can mean only one thing: Crewdson’s source was William Sullivan, who famously died in a 1977 hunting accident in New Hampshire. Sullivan was considered Hoover’s most likely successor until October 1971, when he was summarily fired for disloyalty and insubordination. At the time of Crewdson’s article, however, he was making an unlikely comeback, and some outside observers considered him Felt’s strongest rival for the Bureau’s directorship.¹⁴

William Sullivan framed Mark Felt: This is the thread, if pulled, that unravels the mystery of Deep Throat’s motive.

In The Wars of Watergate (1990), historian Stanley I. Kutler argued that the scandal encompassed a number of festering conflicts—institutional, political, ideological, and personal. One of the most prominent was the “War of the FBI Succession,” a phrase he first heard from an anonymous source in 1973 or 1974. More than any other single factor, the desperate, no-holds-barred war of succession explains why Mark Felt did what he did, and to a considerable extent, why the scandal played out in the media as it did. The contest to succeed Hoover was perceived as a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and it brought out the worst in the Bureau and Mark Felt.¹⁵

When Pat Gray presided over his first meeting in the Bureau’s inner sanctum in May 1972, several officials present believed they were far better qualified to run the FBI. One was John P. Mohr, the assistant to the director for administrative matters, a self-described “hard-headed Dutchman.” Although Mohr was almost completely unknown to the public, inside the Bureau he was one of the most powerful men the FBI had ever known, and many insiders considered him the most capable of the senior executives. Alex Rosen, the assistant to the director for investigative matters and a Hoover stalwart since World War II, was also not without ambition. The two were relatively open about their disenchantment over Gray’s ascension and disappointed about not gaining the opportunity to serve as director. Rather than feign loyalty while working to undermine Gray, both men quit within a month of his appointment.¹⁶

Not so with Mark Felt. He stayed at the Bureau and worked for almost a year on what might be called his own psychological warfare plan. Felt’s private counterintelligence program (or COINTELPRO, in FBI parlance) was designed to disrupt and confuse his adversaries and manipulate those in power. Pat Gray and Bill Sullivan were the intended victims. The White House, and to a lesser extent, Congress, were the targets of his manipulations, and the press was his instrument of choice.

The bulk of Felt’s effort would consist of trying to prove to the White House, through anonymous leaks to the media, that Gray was dangerously incompetent and incapable of running the Bureau. Felt was supremely confident that because of his extensive counterintelligence experience, he could keep his hand invisible. But the plan was too clever by half: by late October 1972, Nixon learned about Felt’s leaks. Despite the president’s inclination to exact swift retribution, Nixon shied away from firing Felt because he feared the consequences. Felt lasted until May 1973, when he was finally outwitted by his bitter rival and another FBI master of deception, Bill Sullivan. In the ultimate irony, an instance when Felt was not the leaker proved to be his undoing.¹⁷

The portrait of Felt that emerges when we follow this thread does not resemble any of Bob Woodward’s depictions. Felt held the news media in contempt and was neither a hig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Cast of characters
• Introduction
• 1 A Forced Departure: May 1973
• 2 The “War of the FBI Succession”: 1969–1972
• 3 Felt’s Private cointelpro: June 1972
• 4 To Leak or Not to Leak?: July 1972
• 5 Special Agent Woodward: August 1972
• 6 Retracing the Bureau’s Steps: August–October 1972
• 7 Richard Nixon’s Own “Deep Throat”: October 1972
• 8 “A Claque of Ambitious Men”: November 1972–January 1973
• 9 The Safe Choice: February 1973
• 10 Gray Self-Destructs: March–May 1973
• 11 The Making of Deep Throat: 1973–198
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography and Sources
• Index
• Back Cover