Deep Throat (Watergate)

:This article is about the source of information for Watergate; for other uses of the term, see Deep Throat.

Role in Watergate

On 17 June 1972 at 2:30AM, five men were arrested by police on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Police had arrived on the scene after being alerted by an observant security guard who had noticed that a door leading into the hotel had been taped open.

Related Topics:
17 June - 1972 - Watergate Hotel - Washington - D.C. - Democratic National Committee

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The five men were unusual: they carried between them $2,300 in hundred-dollar bills with serial numbers in sequence, some lock-picks and door-jimmies, one walkie-talkie, a receiver capable of tuning in to police frequencies, two cameras, 40 rolls of unused film, tear-gas guns, and sophisticated devices capable of tapping in to all conversation that might be held in the offices.

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At least one of the men was a former CIA employee. This person, Jim McCord, Jr., was at the time of his arrest a security man for President Nixon?s Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP). On two of the men, meanwhile, were found notebooks containing the telephone number of one E. Howard Hunt, whose name in the notebooks was accompanied by the inscriptions ?W House? and ?W.H.?

Related Topics:
CIA - Jim McCord, Jr. - E. Howard Hunt

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The scandal immediately attracted media scrutiny. A protracted period of clue-searching and trail-following then ensued, with reporters and eventually the U.S. Senate and judicial system probing to see how far up the Executive branch of government the Watergate scandal, as it had come to be known, extended.

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A pair of young Post reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, wrote up the coverage of the story over a period of two years. The scandal eventually was shown to involve a variety of legal violations and implicated large numbers of the Nixon White House and State Department. With increasing pressure from the courts and the Senate, President Nixon eventually became the first and only U.S. President to resign, in disgrace, over the affair, narrowly avoiding impeachment by the House Judiciary Committee.

Related Topics:
State Department - Impeachment - House Judiciary Committee

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Woodward and Bernstein had an advantage over their competitors in writing their stories: the trust of a highly placed individual who oversaw the federal investigation of the crimes perpetrated by the Nixon administration. Woodward had befriended this individual years earlier, and had eventually come to see him as something of a mentor. This man provided Woodward with detailed tips and hints about how the investigation was proceeding, where to look for the clues, and how to proceed with uncovering the scandal on the pages of their newspaper. This man was the legendary informant: Deep Throat.

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Secrecy was key

Woodward, in All the President's Men, first mentions Deep Throat on page 71. He describes him as "a source in the Executive Branch who had access to information at CRP as well as at the White House." The book also calls him "an incurable gossip", "in a unique position to observe the Executive Branch", and a man "whose fight had been worn out in too many battles."

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Woodward claimed that he would signal Deep Throat that he desired a meeting by moving a flowerpot with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment. When Deep Throat wanted a meeting he would make special marks on page twenty of Woodward's copy of The New York Times; he would circle the page number and draw clock hands to indicate the hour. They often met "on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn," at 2:00 in the morning.

Related Topics:
The New York Times - Garage - Key Bridge - Rosslyn

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Many were dubious of these cloak and dagger methods. Adrian Havill investigated these claims for his 1993 biography of Woodward and Bernstein and found them to be factually impossible. He noted that Woodward's apartment 617 at 1718 P Street, Northwest, in Washington faced an interior courtyard and was not visible from the street. Havill said anyone regularly checking the balcony, as Deep Throat was said to have done daily, would have been spotted. Havill also said that copies of The Times were not delivered to individual apartments but delivered in an unaddressed stack at the building's reception desk. There would have been no way to know which copy was intended for Woodward.

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Woodward, however, has since claimed that in the early 1970s the interior courtyard was an alleyway and had not yet been bricked off, and that his balcony was visible from street level to passing pedestrians. It was also visible, Woodward conjectured, to anyone from the FBI surveilling nearby embassies. Also revealed was the fact that Woodward's copy of the New York Times had his apartment number indicated on it. Former neighbor Herman Knippenberg stated that Woodward would sometimes come to his door looking for his marked copy of the Times, claiming "I like to have it in mint condition and I like to have my own copy" http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10328832.

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Further, while Woodward in his book stressed these precautions, he also admits to calling Deep Throat on the telephone at his home.

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Motives

In public statements following the disclosure of his identity, Felt's family has called him an "American hero," suggesting that he leaked information about the Watergate scandal to the Post for moral or patriotic reasons. A number of media commentators, however, have suggested that Felt bore Nixon a personal animus for having passed him over when appointing a successor to J. Edgar Hoover as Director of the FBI. Others have claimed that Felt acted mainly out of institutional loyalty to the FBI, whose independence many believed had been constrained by the Nixon administration.

Related Topics:
J. Edgar Hoover - FBI

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