Mark Felt, who has died at the age of 95, was appalled by the sleazy echoes of the pseudonym jokingly wished on him by Howard Simons, the managing editor of the Washington Post. But long after memories of Linda Lovelace’s pornographic film have vanished, Felt will live on in American political history as Deep Throat, the mysterious insider whose leaks to journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought well-deserved ruin to the Nixon presidency.
There was a neatly ironic touch about Felt’s decision in 2005 to reveal his central role in exposing the background to the 1972 burglary of the Democrat Watergate office. “Follow the money,” he enjoined the two Washington Post reporters when they briefly stumbled in their investigation into the White House conspiracy. And it was Felt’s daughter’s dire need for funds, allied to her father’s failing health and memory, that fueled the family’s decision to unmask him after 31 years of speculation.
The revelation unleashed a torrent of further information, including Woodward’s own account of how he originally established Felt as a contact in 1970. They met by chance at the White House, where Woodward, a young naval officer, was sent to deliver admiralty documents. Felt, a senior FBI agent, was also in the waiting room and they got chatting. Felt gave Woodward his office phone number, which the budding reporter later used from time to time to check odd news tips that came his way. It was evident, even at this early stage, that Felt had little love for the Nixon administration and was prepared to break the law to damage it. In 1971 he tipped off Woodward that the Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, had received a cash bribe of $2,500, a claim that could not be substantiated at the time but that turned out to be accurate when Agnew was forced to resign two years later.
There was considerable ambivalence about Felt’s attitudes. He seemed to have accepted the agency’s persistent clandestine illegalities and played an active role in them. (They were eventually exposed in 1971 after activists stole thousands of incriminating documents from one of the bureau’s field offices in Pennsylvania.) But he also harbored a visceral loathing of the Nixon administration for the unconstitutional threat he thought it posed to American society at large, and to the independence of the FBI in particular.
Felt joined the bureau in 1942 at the relatively late age of 29. He had grown up in Twin Falls, Idaho, and had a fairly tough early life during the Depression. He worked his way through the local university by doing a variety of menial jobs, from waiting in restaurants to stoking boilers, but his luck changed after he married a fellow student in 1938. He was taken on to the staff of the state’s Democratic Senator, David Clark, and the couple moved to Washington where, in addition to his work on Capitol Hill, Felt studied law in the evenings at George Washington University. He had just gained his degree when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Felt’s age may have been a factor in his decision to opt for service with the FBI; within a short time he was immersed in counter-espionage against German agents, an activity he continued into the late 1940s, with Russian agents as his new target. He was a great admirer of the FBI’s legendary boss J Edgar Hoover and fitted seamlessly into the template of sober-suited, short-haired, clean-cut professionals that Hoover established for his staff.
The admiration appeared to be mutual and Felt was assigned to increasingly important postings in San Antonio, Seattle, Houston, Salt Lake City, New Orleans and Kansas. His reputation was greatly enhanced in this last posting when he vigorously smashed the city’s notorious organized crime syndicate. He was brought back to Washington as second-in-command of agent training. Two years later he became chief of the inspection division, responsible for checking the performance of agents in the bureau’s many field offices — and widely feared as the Goon Squad.
Meanwhile, around him in the Washington headquarters, the aging Hoover’s internal manoeuvres to maintain his tight control of the organization became ever more Byzantine. In 1971, in a palace coup designed to outflank his too-ambitious associate director, William Sullivan, Hoover created a new post for Felt which in effect made him the organization’s third-ranking officer. Since Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s deputy, was seriously ill and frequently absent, it put Felt in charge of the organization’s day-to-day operations.
There followed a train of events that could have been scripted for a bad melodrama. On 2 May 1972 Hoover, aged 77, was unexpectedly found dead of a heart attack at his Washington home. Felt saw himself as the obvious successor and was stunned when the White House announced the following day that President Nixon had nominated assistant attorney-general Patrick Gray - regarded as a supine flunky of the administration - to take over. Then, with the FBI still in shock over Gray’s hostile opening moves, five men were arrested on 17 June for breaking into the offices rented by the Democratic party in the Watergate complex.
Within days the FBI had deployed 150 agents on the case and Woodward had made his first contact with Felt, who confirmed that the burglary had wider political implications than were immediately apparent. Meanwhile, within the bureau, Gray had quickly forced the resignation of several of Hoover’s closest associates, disbanded one of the key divisions which he thought hostile to himself, and made moves to reassign several other senior officials, including Robert Kunkel, agent in charge of the Washington field office. That, of course, was the office handling the Watergate investigation, and it quickly became apparent to Kunkel that Gray was helping the White House to obstruct the inquiry.
After Deep Throat’s identity had emerged, Paul Daly, a former FBI agent, broke cover to tell a newspaper in New York state that Felt had collaborated closely with Kunkel and two other senior agents to pass information to the Washington Post. This dissident group included Richard Long, who dealt with white-collar crime, and Charles Bates, responsible for all the bureau’s criminal investigations. (By the time Daly told his story, Felt’s reputed collaborators had all died). According to Daly, Felt would meet his colleagues at the end of each day to review new investigative material (there were eventually thousands of pages) and decide what could be passed on without giving clues to the source. Woodward and Bernstein later detailed the elaborate precautions that Felt had required Woodward to take before arriving at the underground garage where their discussions took place - routines apparently based on Felt’s counter-espionage years.
In a wonderfully improbable twist to the tale, Gray first ordered Bates to find the culprit and, when he predictably failed, put Felt in charge of the hunt. Felt had an inventive period as he searched for himself, successively throwing suspicion on the county prosecutor in Miami (where some of the White House’s illegal money had been laundered), on the US Attorney’s office in Washington, and even on someone in the White House.
In fact, as eventually revealed in the Oval Office tape for October 19 1972, Felt’s cover had already been blown. Bob Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, told Nixon that he had discovered that Felt was responsible for the leaks. He went on: “If we move on him he’ll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI. He has access to absolutely everything.” No action was taken.
The campaign to get rid of Gray succeeded when he was forced to admit at his Senate confirmation hearing that, at the behest of the White House, he had destroyed documents belonging to one of the Watergate conspirators. Nixon saw him off with the graceless comment, recorded on the tape for March 22 1973, that “the problem with him is that he is a little bit stupid”. But it did not help Felt achieve his ambition to run the bureau. Gray was succeeded by William Ruckelshaus, a much tougher nut who discovered that Felt had leaked details of the FBI’s illegal wiretapping to the New York Times. He forced Felt, then aged 60, to resign.
It was not to be a quiet retirement. In 1978 Felt was indicted with Edward Miller, another FBI agent, for organizing the illegal burglary of people connected with the Weather Underground, a terrorist group accused of several US bombings. The FBI men claimed that their actions had been lawful because they believed the Underground had ties to foreign powers. Their conviction and fine in 1980 brought an unprecedented public demonstration by other FBI agents on the steps of the Washington courthouse. In 1981 the two were pardoned by President Ronald Reagan with the comment that “they had served the nation with great distinction”.
Felt remained an enigma to the end. On the face of it, he conformed to the classic stereotype of the ideal FBI man, and certainly shared many of Hoover’s prejudices (he was, for example, deeply opposed to the recruitment of women agents). His colleagues saw him as tough but fair, and he also had a reputation of being all things to all men. He was, however, a notorious gossip and it may have been this that first drew him to an eager young journalist. He grew disgusted with the nature of the Nixon administration and its clear ambition to seize every available lever of power. It had already subverted the CIA and the Internal Revenue service and, with the death of Hoover, seemed determined to move in on the FBI. (The tape of March 13 1973 records Nixon saying to his White House counsel, John Dean: “Could we go after the bureau? How bad would it hurt the country?”). buy lineage 2 adena
With Hoover’s implacable bureaucratic muscle now gone, Felt and his colleagues apparently decided that the time for action had arrived. Fortunately for the bureau and for America at large, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were waiting handily in the wings. cheap ffxi gil
Felt’s wife, Audrey, died in 1984. He is survived by his son and daughter.
• William Mark Felt, FBI agent, born 17 August 1913; died 18 December 2008
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