Guessing game

It is one of the most dramatic scenes in the movie of "All the President's Men": With a Rachmaninoff piano concerto playing in the background, a frightened Woodward types his notes from this session with Felt. Woodward's dread is understandable. The No. 2 man at the FBI has told him -- now, it clearly seems, falsely -- "Everyone's life is in danger ... electronic surveillance is going on and we had better watch it. The CIA is doing it." The CIA role in Watergate was investigated, and had this occurred, it would be known today.

The report continues: "Dean talked with Senator Baker after [the] Watergate committee formed and Baker is in the bag completely, reporting back directly to [the] White House." This is absolutely false. I never spoke with Baker. And Baker certainly was not in the bag.

Felt says that the president "threatened Dean personally and said if he ever revealed the national security activities the President would insure he went to jail." This never happened, a fact that can be corroborated by Nixon's tapes.

As my appendix notes, the flow of false facts continued. At one point Felt says, "The covert activities involve the whole U.S. intelligence community and are incredible," although he refused to give Woodward any details, claiming "it is against the law." In fact, no such operation was ever directed out of the Nixon White House.

Even more absurd are Felt's claims that those involved in the Watergate coverup were "chipping in their own personal funds. And Mitchell couldn't meet his quota [so] ... they cut Mitchell loose." Absurd, too, is his claim that "these guys in the White House were out to make money and a few of them went wild trying."

Because Woodward could not quote Felt directly, none of the surprising number of false statements highlighted in my appendix made their way into the Washington Post, but apparently Woodward believed them sufficiently to include them in his book.

If Felt was not trying to manipulate the Post, it is not clear what he was doing. Surely, he had to know -- or, at least, should have known -- that much of his information was worse than speculative; it was plain wrong.

In short, the amount of bad information that Felt gave Woodward is alarming. How and why did it happen?

Woodward reports -- in the Washington Post story recently excerpted from his forthcoming book on Throat/Felt -- how he and Felt devised a system indicating that Woodward needed to talk to Felt, since Felt did not want him calling his office.

"If you keep the drapes in your apartment closed, open them and that could signal me, [Felt] said. I could check each day or have them checked, and if they were open we could meet that night at a designated place" (emphasis added). But because Woodward liked to keep his drapes open, they agreed that Woodward would place a flowerpot with a road construction flag in it on his balcony as the signal.

Clearly, Woodward suspects that Felt, who would have been extremely busy running the day-to-day activities of the FBI, was not checking his apartment balcony daily himself. Woodward writes, "How [Felt] could have made a daily observation of my balcony is still a mystery to me  The Iraqi Embassy was down the street, and I thought it possible that the FBI had surveillance or listening posts nearby. Could Felt have had the counterintelligence agents regularly report on the status of my flag and flowerpot? That seems highly unlikely, if not impossible."

I don't think it is impossible at all. To the contrary, I believe that Felt had to have one or more persons working with him. Thus, others in the FBI must have known Felt was feeding the Washington Post.

This is evident from the last reported conversation in "All the President's Men" between Deep Throat and Woodward. Felt retired from the FBI five months before this last contact, during the first week of November 1973. As a result of the conversation, Woodward (breaking his prior agreement not to quote Felt directly) uses his words in the Post story, which told of gaps of "a suspicious nature" in Nixon's secret tapes that "could lead someone to conclude that the tapes have been tampered with."

How did Felt, no longer in the FBI, get information that "one or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures"? And when reporting this story in the Washington Post, on November 8, 1973, why did Woodward quote Felt as an anonymous "White House source"? Was Woodward by this time aware that Felt had an agent inside the White House, or a mole?

There has been much discussion since the revelation of Deep Throat's identity, on television in particular, as to whether Mark Felt is a hero or villain, not to mention what his legacy will be now that we know Throat's identity. Clearly, he is history's supreme whistleblower.

Because of my own involvement in Watergate, my knowledge of how those who sought to discredit my testimony (particularly before the Nixon tapes surfaced) operate, and my knowledge of the historical record, I know that Nixon apologists will attack Felt -- and Woodward.

These attacks will be senseless. (But that has long been the operative word with Watergate.) It is time to learn from what happened, not refight battles Nixon has, for good reason, lost.

As my appendix shows, the quality of Felt's information -- at least as reported so far and as found in "All the President's Men" -- is of questionable value given the amount of misinformation. It seems it was Felt's position alone that gave Woodward, and in turn, Woodward's editor at the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, confidence in pursuing a story that other news organizations at first largely ignored. (Initially, Bradlee only knew Woodward had a source who was a high official in the Department of Justice -- and Bradlee did not learn more until after Nixon had resigned.)

To me, a true hero of Watergate is Ben Bradlee, who not only supported Woodward and Bernstein but had the trust of the Post's owner, Katharine Graham. Initially, the rest of the national media and the nation ignored the story. Although the Washington Post never "cracked the case," its keeping the story in the news within the Beltway had a great influence on the Congress, making it an important story. Had Bradlee not done so, history might have been much different.

We still need to know much more about Mark Felt's activities, not to mention his accomplices, to understand the Byzantine workings of the FBI of that era. I hope Bob Woodward will answer these questions -- about which he has knowledge -- sooner rather than later, while there is still interest in the story. For it is information that is as uniquely relevant today -- with the current White House hellbent on returning the presidency to the imperial status it occupied before Watergate.

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