A few years ago while in San Francisco, Bob Woodward made an intriguing remark. He told the San Francisco Chronicle he wouldn’t expose Deep Throat until the man died but that when he died people would begin to research the case and one thing would lead to another. Woodward said it would all lead to a “fantastic” discovery.

Now that we know that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, former #2 man at the FBI and the architect of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO scheme to thwart the lives of thousands of anti-Vietnam war dissidents, the question looms large. What “fantastic” discovery was Woodward referring to?

In early Watergate contacts, Mark Felt told Woodward that the White House “regarded the stakes in Watergate as much higher than anyone outside perceived.” Felt “made veiled references to the CIA and national security.” In All The President’s Men, Woodward expanded on the subject as follows. At the height of his investigation, Woodward met with Felt, whose hands were shaking. Woodward’s notes say Felt said “everyone’s life was in danger…. “The covert activities involve the whole US intelligence community and are incredible. (Felt) refused to give specifics because it is against the law. The cover-up has little to do with Watergate, but was mainly to protect the covert operation.” (p. 72-3, 318 All the President’s Men)

Let’s recap: Mark Felt told Woodward that all the intelligence agencies were involved in a covert project that was “incredible,” or “fantastic,” as Woodward later put it. Felt said the Watergate cover-up had little to do with Watergate, more to do with protecting the covert project.

Why does Woodward think that when we learn that Deep Throat was an FBI chief, we’ll begin to discern the nature of that “incredible” covert project? Apparently, the covert project was so large and controversial that it impinged on Felt’s role in law enforcement.

What were Felt’s motives for meeting secretly with Woodward in order to in expose Nixon’s crimes? Some say it was frustration because Felt was passed over when Nixon appointed an outsider to head the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover died, or committed suicide as Anthony Summers suggests, after Nixon tried to force Hoover out of office. As Summers wrote in his biography of Hoover, Nixon may have had abundant dirt on J. Edgar Hoover, himself (homosexual parties and payoffs from the mob), which would have given Nixon critical leverage in the end. Whether Hoover’s demise figured in Mark Felt’s “Deep Throat” move against Nixon is difficult to say. Felt described Hoover as both disciplined and tyrannical. It’s possible that after Hoover died, Felt regretted having violated so many people through break-ins, job sabotage and other crimes committed under COINTELPRO. In 1980 Felt was convicted for having ordered break-ins of anti-war Weatherman underground figures’ homes but was soon pardoned by Reagan.

Felt may have had deeper motives for exposing Watergate. What was Felt’s main contribution to Woodward and Bernstein? In addition to telling about an “incredible” covert operation involving all the intelligence agencies, Felt told the two reporters to “follow the money,” which led investigators to roughly $100,000 laundered through Mexico to help pay the Watergate burglars and buy their silence. And what did Nixon and his cronies fear would be discovered through Watergate? Some of the burglars were CIA employees, and at the time, Nixon was engaged in a struggle against CIA director Richard Helms. Woodward and Bernstein were aghast when they discovered the CIA connection to the Watergate.

As the scandal unfolded in the press, Nixon called CIA director Richard Helms into his office and warned him to help steer the FBI away from Watergate because it would lead to revelations about “the Bay of Pigs,” which Nixon aide H. R. Haldemann interpreted as referring to the JFK assassination. Helms literally began to shout when Nixon threatened that “the Bay of Pigs” story might be exposed. Thanks to the confession of former CIA officer David Atlee Phillips (see Mark Lane’s book about E. H. Hunt’s lawsuit against Lane), we now know that the CIA was involved in the assassination. The CIA faked Oswald diversions in Mexico to make Oswald look suspicious by contriving a connection to Cuba. It was a typical intelligence ploy.

Five months later, Nixon fired Richard Helms and the Watergate case began to drag Nixon down. But why did Nixon distrust Helms so deeply?

After studying Nixon and Helms during Watergate, Sen. Howard Baker said, “Nixon and Helms have so much on each other, neither of them can breathe.” Numerous studies suggest that Helms’ CIA tried to bring the Watergate case to public attention, perhaps to get revenge on Nixon for previous doings. James McCord, one of the Watergate burglars, was a former CIA officer, as was E. H. Hunt, also. As Jim Hougan and other researchers have documented, McCord volunteered information to investigators and made seemingly intentional mistakes that led Washington DC police to catch the burglars in the act. McCord repeatedly taped open the Watergate building’s doors so that security guard Frank Wells discovered the tape on two different security rounds. McCord was the CIA’s former chief of physical security yet he taped the doors in a sloppy, visible way as though trying to attract attention.

More to the point, Nixon had close ties to one military industrial faction (Du Pont, Bush and cohorts) that had long worked against a Howard Hughes-related faction on a major covert project involving exotic aviation technologies. Nixon’s favoritism may have given Richard Helms a revenge motive to work against Nixon in Watergate.

Herbert Liedtke, the man who provided half of the $100,000 hush-up money funneled through Mexico to the Watergate burglars, was the business partner of George Bush Sr. in a company now called Pennzoil. Nixon’s famous remarks about “the Texans” helping Nixon in the Watergate case has been interpreted as a reference to both Liedtke and Bush Sr. As Nixon told one of the Watergate conspirators at the time, “George Bush will do anything for us.” (see Nightmare, by Anthony Lukas)

What, exactly, was Nixon referring to in his “Bay of Pigs” remarks? Former Pentagon insider Col. Fletcher Prouty suggests that the real subject of concern may have been Gen. Ed Lansdale, an Air Force officer who worked with the CIA and was photographed in Dealey Plaza on the day JFK was shot. Prouty and some of his Pentagon colleagues who worked with Lansdale are convinced that Lansdale is the man in the black suit who was photographed as he walked past the “hobo” suspects on Dealey Plaza about an hour after the shooting. Prouty said Lansdale specialized in organizing sniper teams, and appeared to have orchestrated the shooter team that killed Kennedy. After the 1978 House Assassinations committed re-opened the JFK case, a New York Times book pointed to the mob as having organized the murder. The Times and other corporate sheets have neglected to discuss the Lansdale story.

So what is the “fantastic” aspect of the Watergate case that Woodward referred to? What is it about Felt that Woodward thinks will lead us to a major breakthrough?

Don’t ask Woodward. As managing editor of the Washington Post, he has worked too long within Graham family money circles to step forward and make an explicit statement. Katharine Graham’s family was extremely wealthy throughout her childhood and was intermarried with prominent Jewish financial families. Growing up in a variety of mansions, one of which was literally a palace in the New York countryside, Katharine adopted her parents’ Republican outlook as a teenager yet grew more liberal with the rise of fascism. Bob Woodward was raised a Republican and later worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence before he became a reporter. He hand delivered secret documents to Pentagon leaders and the White House during the Vietnam War, which may be why Mark Felt favored Woodward: Woodward wasn’t one of those anti-war people who, as Kissinger later noted, verged on civil conflict with the administration.

Owned by Katharine Graham’s family, the Washington Post has long been criticized for being a CIA-friendly sheet, if not its mouthpiece, in some cases. Some Post writers, i.e. Walter Pincus, were once CIA employees and are rumored to have directly aided the CIA while working at the Post. Katharine Graham once remarked that “governments need to keep secrets,” suggesting that she wasn’t about to air the CIA’s dirtiest laundry. For economic reasons, Post editors want to be favored by sitting administrations in order to get exclusive stories. During the current phase of “globalization” (code word for Bush’s Orwellian kind of empire) Post writers are even more reluctant to embarrass the government. Some critics have panned Woodward’s last book, Bush at War, for being little more than leaks by Bush insiders trying to cultivate close relations with the paper that sank Nixon.

In her autobiography, Katharine Graham wrote that upon hearing JFK had been shot, her mother remarked that the US is just another “goddamned banana republic.” Katharine’s decision to include the remark in her autobiography suggests that she suspected criminal conspiracy in the assassination, even though she denied the fact for most of her life. Katharine Graham’s biographer Deborah Davis wrote that after Katharine’s husband Phillip commited suicide, Richard Helms’ purported grandfather, Gates White McGarrah, steered Katharine Graham into the purchase of Newsweek magazine before others found out that it was up for sale. If biographer Davis is correct, Katharine Graham had a conflict of interest in her coverage of Richard Helms because Helms’ purported grandfather helped Katharine go from owning a metropolitan sheet to owning a national news magazine.

As Woodward suggests, those who research Mark Felt will find that one aspect of the story, does, in fact, lead to another. There may be more to the Helms-Graham relationship than is commonly known. Read the following story: http://www.newsmakingnews.com/helmslobuono.htm for a summary of how Howard Hughes and Richard Helms may not merely have worked toward the same CIA ends; they may have shared aspects of their identity. A comparison of photos on the link above shows that Hughes and Helms were look-alikes when photographed from certain perspectives. The history of the subject suggests that a double identity may have been arranged through Rockefeller and Mellon family sponsorship, presumably for oil industry and intelligence reasons.

Watergate burglars specifically targeted Hughes lawyer Larry O’Brien’s files during the burglary of Democratic National Headquarters in 1972 because O’Brien was Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Why did Nixon’s men risk arrest to learn more about Hughes lawyer O’Brien and Democratic Party strategy in 1972?

During Nixon’s failed 1960 run against John Kennedy for the presidency, an unpaid $205,000 loan by Howard Hughes to Nixon’s brother Donald embarrassed Nixon and may have cost him the election. Hughes money given to Nixon on later occasions also proved embarrassing. It was a recurrent theme during Nixon’s years in office.

Nixon may have suspected that further Hughes and Helms-CIA dirt on Nixon might be used in the 1972 campaign, hence the Watergate break-in was planned in order to go through Larry O’Brien’s files and check on the possibility. In 2003, Jeb Stuart Magruder stated that Nixon, himself, ordered the break-in. The resort to criminal means suggests that Nixon may have been afraid of something, or someone in the CIA, which is consistent with Bob Woodward’s remark that those who investigate W. Mark Felt will make unexpected discoveries. Of course, we now know that the CIA was (and still is) a hotbed of murder, narcotics trafficking, and more. But what is so “fantastic” about that? Was there a larger struggle going on within government that the public was unaware of?

Obviously, the “incredible” covert project wasn’t COINTELPRO. Although Felt objected to some aspects of COINTELPRO, Woodward’s recent article about Felt says that Felt followed FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover’s instructions on COINTELPRO largely without question. Perhaps the biggest thorn in the side of law enforcement during Felt’s FBI years was massive narcotics trafficking by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Historians have documented Air America’s heroin shipments for defense and CIA purposes, plus countless CIA and defense intelligence interventions to stop prosecutions of narcotics traffickers. US intelligence agencies have thwarted local, state, and federal prosecution of narcotic traffickers for decades by saying that narcotics cases were part of their intelligence operations. National security has been invoked to keep FBI and other officials quiet.

For example, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opposed the formation of the CIA, fearing that it would become a hotbed of corruption where intelligence officers would live richly by taking bribes. During World War II, US intelligence used Meyer Lansky’s gangsters in “Operation Underworld” and after the war, Lansky’s mob reigned supreme in US narcotics trafficking. During the Vietnam War, heroin was stuffed into the cadavers of dead GI’s by CIA defense operatives, then shipped to America for sale. In 1979 a nightmarish case of narcotics, murders and theft was investigated by the FBI: Mexican Miguel Nazar Haro, head of Mexico’s spy agency, was indicted in San Diego, but the CIA intervened to stop the case. In the Iran Contra case, Oliver North noted that George Bush Sr. was present at a meeting in which cocaine shipments by the Contras were apparently condoned. Later, Danilo Blandon, the prime seller of cocaine to Los Angeles when the Crips and the Bloods were getting into the trade, was targeted for arrest. An FBI teletype of a conversation between Blandon and his lawyer about Blandon’s guns-for-drugs enterprise reads, “CIA winked at this sort of thing.”

In other words, Mark Felt’s most honest FBI agents were forced to watch their anti-narcotics work be sabotaged by corrupt intelligence officers. A recent example of the sort is the case of Sibel Edmonds, the FBI translator who said that during the months before 9-11, she read FBI documents about possible terrorist plans to fly a civilian jet into the twin towers but when she tried to tell news media she was silenced by Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft. Sibel Edmonds says that in her FBI work, she read documents about massive narcotics trafficking abetted by US government agencies. She told reporter Amy Goodman she saw documents about “criminal investigation, and money laundering investigation, drug related investigations that actually have major information regarding 9-11 incidents.”

Daniel Hopsicker’s recent book Welcome to Terrorland shows that Bush Jr.’s subordinates worked to prevent public awareness of narcotics trafficking surrounding the 911 hijackers’ flight training in the small coastal city of Venice, Florida. Apparently, numerous heroin flights preceded the arrest of two men caught with 43 pounds of heroin in the private jet of Wally Hilliard, a businessman with Bush family and CIA ties. The heroin was seized by DEA agents at Hilliard’s small Venice, FL airport/flight school where 9-11 ringleaders Mohammed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were training, at the time. How does this relate to Deep Throat?

For decades, FBI men like Mark Felt were pushed aside and told to shut up so that “intelligence”-related narcotics shipments could proceed into the United States unhampered, for national security reasons. But which “incredible” and “fantastic” covert project did such narcotics trafficking point to?

The obvious answer, the only massive project that eclipsed Watergate on a major scale, is narcotics trafficking that secretly funds “reverse-engineered” black budget technologies, some of which are truly bizarre. Which covert project back in 1971-2 was more important than Watergate? Government whistle-blower and former head of Air Force Project Pounce, Col. Steve Wilson, told researcher Richard Boylan that "the first successful U.S. antigravity flight took place July 18, 1971 at S-4 (on Nellis Air Force base in Nevada), wherein light bending capabilities were also demonstrated to obtain total invisibilities. Present at this flight were notables such as Admiral (Bobbie Ray) Inman (former National Security Agency director), who is now head of SAIC (Science Applications International, Incorporated) in San Diego, CA, which makes the antigravity drives."

Physician Steven Greer is the head of an organization called CSETI that has videotaped testimony by 570 current and former defense, intelligence, and aviation officials who report direct experiences with “aliens” and UFO’s while on duty. Says Greer, “I have interviewed other very well placed people who have connected these black projects to the drug trade. One, a senior SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) executive directly told me of this and how there was an army of 8000 men who did nothing but import drugs under the cover of classified, need-to-know operations. He stated that of the 8000 men involved (as of 1997 when we spoke of this) that 2000 of them had been killed for sometimes minor infractions of security. He assured me that this was a major covert funding source and that it was destroying our country, but nobody is willing to take on such a lethal and powerful group to stop it.” (p. 268-9, Disclosure, by Steven Greer). Admiral Bobby Ray Inman appears to be Greer’s informant on the subject. Inman should know; he was Director of Naval Intelligence in 1974, Vice Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1976, and Deputy director of the CIA from 1980-81 under Reagan before working for SAIC.

Buttressing Inman’s story, is that of Former Army Col. Phillip Corso, who worked in Eisenhower’s White House and in the Pentagon. Corso wrote a memoir stating that a major high-level campaign to copy downed “alien technology” began as early as 1961, if not sooner. As the project developed, private industry began to gain control over the project. President Eisenhower told Brigadier General Stephen Lovekin and others that alien-related affairs and technology were being taken from his control. As Eisenhower said, “It is not going to be in the best hands.” (Lovekin’s testimony, p. 235, Disclosure, by Steven Greer) Eisenhower’s fears were echoed in his farewell statement that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Those who are new to the subject of alien technology may not know that for decades numerous top US officials have made public admissions on the subject. The list includes former presidents, astronauts, high-ranking Pentagon brass, and more. See CSETI’s publications on the subject.

If Gen. Lovekin and others are correct, a power struggle within the US government centered on one simple question: who would control the most important technology that had ever been “discovered” by humankind? (scavenged might be a better word) Who would own and control what we now know as “electrogravity” technology (antigravity)?

Other CSETI witnesses report that the Hughes Corporation did extensive research on downed alien antigravity technology. Witnesses to Hughes work on antigravity are: aerospace contractor James McCandlish, Air Force Lt. Col. John Williams, classified graphics worker Don Johnson, and a top secret scientist and engineer named “Dr. B.” (p. 265, Disclosure) In other words, Howard Hughes, who figured importantly in Watergate, was heavily involved in an “incredible” covert project.

Hughes’ role in the covert project may have been frustrated when Nixon contributor Robert Vesco escaped the United States in 1971 with $224 million in Investor's Overseas Service (IOS) money, much of which was dirty money laundered into the Bahamas to avoid paying taxes. Howard Hughes may have lost millions in the theft because, as Hughes biographers Bartlett and Steele report, many millions of Hughes’ money was laundered into the Bahamas, where it mysteriously disappeared during the same time period.

In 1971 when the first successful US antigravity flight assured that manufacture of such technology would soon follow, a shady financier named Robert Vesco met and did business with Hughes' arch competitors in the Du Pont family just before Vesco escaped abroad with the looted IOS millions. The two Du Ponts sold a company called All American Aviation to Vesco, who was then known for mob ties. Shortly afterward, Vesco, who was short on cash at the time, took millions from All American’s accounts and used it to bankroll his looting of IOS’ $224 million.

In other words, Du Pont money made the IOS looting possible. Vesco consulted with mob financier Meyer Lansky's aides, Dino and Eddie Celini, in Rome before looting IOS. In short, just before Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign and Watergate, Hughes (and Helms at the CIA) may have been betrayed, Hughes nearly bankrupted, by a Du Pont faction that was competing with a Hughes-Mellon-Rockefeller faction for control of reverse-engineered antigravity technology. Later the Hughes-Mellon-Rockefeller faction joined with Allied Chemical, the company that Katharine Graham’s father had owned a major share in.

Within months, Richard Helms’ Hughes-related CIA was maneuvering in ways that helped to expose the Watergate case, perhaps as revenge against Nixon, who had favored the Du Pont faction and Vesco over Hughes.

As a result of his big cash losses, Hughes’ finances were crippled and Hughes Aircraft was soon taken over by Du Pont–controlled General Motors. All of the reverse-engineered, antigravity technology that Hughes had been working on was apparently taken by Du Pont family interests. It was an aviation coup, of sorts, that involved the worst of organized crime.

Those who haven’t read about such subjects won’t appreciate just how “fantastic” the further implications of the Mark Felt story actually are. Would Bob Woodward actually come right out and speak about such things?

Not explicitly. Woodward is employed by a family that had a financial stake in military-industrial contracts of the sort. Katharine Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer, was the prime organizer of Allied Chemical Corporation. Meyer, who later became Herbert Hoover’s governor of the Federal Reserve Board, earned most of his fortune through Allied Chemical, which later merged with Martin-Marietta, now part of Allied-Lockheed Martin. Allied-Lockheed Martin is deeply involved in the manufacture of Cosmic Top Secret technologies used in craft like the Stealth bomber, the X-22A, the TR-3B and other craft like the reported TAW-50, the most recent gravity-manipulating craft in the United States arsenal. The famous Skunk Works is an Allied-Lockheed Martin facility.

As numerous government whistleblowers have stated, question remains as to who actually controls such technologies: the US government or a cabal of private manufacturers who have used billions in black budget narcotics profits to fund reverse-engineered technologies in order to avoid having to report the cash flows to Congress. Secrecy of the sort has allowed certain private estates to lie and steal from the US government without Congressional oversight. In other words, greed, rather than secrecy, may be the motive. Back in 1972 when W. Mark Felt helped expose Nixon in Watergate, the CIA was up to its eyebrows in criminal activities.

When antigravity “flight” was reportedly first achieved in 1971, Nixon’s second presidential campaign was being organized and Watergate would soon follow. The winner of the 1972 election would have leverage in determining who would profit by the manufacture of reverse-engineered anti-gravity technology. *Some researchers say it isn’t actually “anti-gravity” technology because it manipulates different kinds of gravity, instead. Retired naval engineer Col. Tom Bearden and others write at length about their experience with “electrogravity” technology. Over time, Bearden has become the grand old man of electrogravity theory, yet black budget physicists may have slightly different equations for electrogravity. In 1947 when Truman’s National Security Act was first implemented, black budget labs reportedly plunged into the study of reverse-engineered technology with an intensity that rivaled the Manhattan Project.

Did Bob Woodward hint at such “fantastic” subjects when he discussed Deep Throat with the San Francisco Chronicle a few years ago? He might have, but as the employee of a family whose fortune derived from Allied-Lockheed Martin, he had little room to discuss such subjects openly. The best he could possibly do while working for Katharine Graham’s son, Donald, at present, would be to vaguely hint at such subjects. Non-corporate press has taken the lead in reporting on such topics, given that corporate sheets tend to be compromised due to their dependence on defense-related advertisers and finance.

Watergate occurred at the height of the Cold War, hence Mark Felt and others who ranked high enough in the US government to know about antigravity technology assumed that it was “illegal” to talk about it. They feared that the Soviets or other challengers might misuse such technology. As CSETI witness “Dr. B” noted, military men who spoke loosely about the project were killed to keep it secret.

So how would Woodward have known enough to appreciate the “incredible,” or “fantastic” nature of the project? Woodward had two direct routes to information about aliens and antigravity technology. During Woodward’s Navy intelligence stint, he personally handed secret documents to top Pentagon Brass and the White House. According to dozens of CSETI witnesses, an abundance of information about secret labs, UFO sightings, and foreign encounters of the sort is handled by top Pentagon brass daily. Secondly, for years the Navy has had a special role in researching recovered “alien” technologies because when downed alien craft were first seized for study, the US military assumed that they were nuclear powered.

The Navy was the first service to experiment with nuclear reactors at a research station near Twin Falls, ID because the Navy wanted to use them to power submarines. For that reason, Woodward’s Navy has long had its own program of research and intelligence regarding recovered alien technology, although the Army and the Air Force tried to compete with separate programs. In short, Woodward had two possible routes to information about recovered technology: his ONI briefings to top Pentagon brass (and the White House), and the Navy’s traditionally more independent role in researching alien technology.

During his “Deep Throat” meetings with Woodward, Mark Felt probably didn’t need to explicitly say that the “incredible” covert project shared by all intelligence agencies concerned antigravity technology. All Felt had to do was make an oblique hint. Given his previous intelligence work at the highest levels in government, Woodward should have understood Felt immediately.

Even if Woodward didn’t understand the “incredible” nature of the secret project that loomed so largely behind Watergate, he has had 32 years since then to pick up on the subject. By the time Woodward spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle a few years ago, hundreds of witnesses had publicly testified about antigravity technology. Perhaps that’s why Woodward went out of his way to emphasize that a “fantastic” discovery may soon unfold, now that we can begin to analyze Mark Felt’s cryptic revelation.

However, Woodward has little reason to think most readers will go from learning about Felt, to a succession of further discoveries, culminating in a “fantastic” breakthrough. Watergate is old news. It won’t hold the public’s attention for long.

The fantastic nature of the covert project that Mark Felt spoke about requires sustained, if not combative, reporting on the scale of Watergate by major news outlets. Given the lack of investigative reporting done by the handful of conglomerates that control most US media 32 years after Watergate, it will take a major crisis to tease out such details. However, given the scale of the project, the leads should be abundant.

*A People’s Commonality Posting

Below arre excerpts of the mainstream media's somewhat sefl-congradulatory reviews, reprinted in "Truthout.org", after former FBI assistant Director Mark Felt revealed he was the legendary unnamed source for Bob Woodward in the Watergate Scandal of 1972-74, given the cover-name "Deep Throat".

Woodward fails [as far as I've seen, correct me if I'm wrong] to point out at least 2 important points:

1. his own job in the Navy was a "gatekeeper", deciding which information garnished by Naval Intelligence would or would not be sent to the White House.

2. his Navy boss, Adm. Thomas Moorer, was involved in another scandal in the early 1970's concerning Pentagon alleged spying on the White House.

[Google search for the book by Jim Hougan "Secret Agenda" for details. This is the best book I've read about the Watergate Scandal]


Woodward's apparent ommisssions lead to the question : were Adm. Moorer, Woodward, E. Howard Hunt & Felt part of a pre-planned plot to frame Nixon, Haldeman, Atty. Gen Mitchell and his other top advisors because Moorer, Felt, E. Howard Hunt & Woodward were part of the 'intelligence gathering establishment" which distrusted Nixon's White House "Plumbers Unit" [so named because they were to plug leaks Nixon feared came from the C IA, FBI, Naval Intelligence, etc]?

Hougan writes in his book "Secret Agenda" that the alleged methods by which Woodward claims he would arrange meetings with Felt were improbable, if not impossible.

A. The clock drawn in Woodward's newspaper was unlikely because the reporter lived in a high rise apartment, where all the papers were stacked at the guard's lobby desk, to be distributed to residents when they asked for them. Felt would have no way of knowing which paper Woodward would get. [Below Woodward explains the papers were numbered, but rumaging thru the stack to find Bob W's copy would take time, and surely attract attention to Felt, who was well known as second in command of the FBI. If he used another agent, this would risk destroying the confidentiality Felt seemed obsessed to maintain. Woodward admits below that he still does not know how Felt accomplished the newspaper trick. He does not explain why he has never simply asked Felt in 33 years.]

B. The flower pot moved to the ledge of Woodward's balcony was equally improbable. For most of the time Felt was informing, the reporter's balcony faced an interior courtyard, not visible from the street, which would require Felt to enter the locked apartment complex on a daily basis. [Below, Woodward asserts the rear was unlocked, and could be seen from several other buildings. This would be even more time consuming and risky for the well known #2 FBI man, than the newspaper trick, as Felt would have to check daily. If, as Bob W implies, Felt used another agent, this would again risk exposure of their contact, especially if done daily for @ 2 years - from summer/fall 1972 to Nixons' resignation in August 1974. And again, Woodward does not explain why he never asked Felt to explain how he observed his balcony for about 700 consecutive days.]

What do you think?
**
the excerpts follow:



How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat'
By Bob Woodward
The Washington Post

Thursday 02 June 2005

As a friendship - and the Watergate story - developed, source's motives remained a mystery to Woodward.

In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the US Navy and assigned to Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chief of naval operations, I sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House.

One evening I was dispatched with a package to the lower level of the West Wing of the White House, where there was a little waiting area near the Situation Room. It could be a long wait for the right person to come out and sign for the material, sometimes an hour or more, and after I had been waiting for a while a tall man with perfectly combed gray hair came in and sat down near me. His suit was dark, his shirt white and his necktie subdued. He was probably 25 to 30 years older than I and was carrying what looked like a file case or briefcase. He was very distinguished-looking and had a studied air of confidence, the posture and calm of someone used to giving orders and having them obeyed instantly.

I could tell he was watching the situation very carefully. There was nothing overbearing in his attentiveness, but his eyes were darting about in a kind of gentlemanly surveillance. After several minutes, I introduced myself. "Lieutenant Bob Woodward," I said, carefully appending a deferential "sir."

"Mark Felt," he said.

I began telling him about myself, that this was my last year in the Navy and I was bringing documents from Adm. Moorer's office. Felt was in no hurry to explain anything about himself or why he was there.

This was a time in my life of considerable anxiety, even consternation, about my future. I had graduated in 1965 from Yale, where I had a Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps scholarship that required that I go into the Navy after getting my degree. After four years of service, I had been involuntarily extended an additional year because of the Vietnam War.

During that year in Washington, I expended a great deal of energy trying to find things or people who were interesting. I had a college classmate who was going to clerk for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, and I made an effort to develop a friendship with that classmate. To quell my angst and sense of drift, I was taking graduate courses at George Washington University. One course was in Shakespeare, another in international relations.

When I mentioned the graduate work to Felt, he perked up immediately, saying he had gone to night law school at GW in the 1930s before joining - and this is the first time he mentioned it - the FBI. While in law school, he said, he had worked full time for a senator - his home-state senator from Idaho. I said that I had been doing some volunteer work at the office of my congressman, John Erlenborn, a Republican from the district in Wheaton, Ill., where I had been raised.

So we had two connections - graduate work at GW and work with elected representatives from our home states.

Felt and I were like two passengers sitting next to each other on a long airline flight with nowhere to go and nothing really to do but resign ourselves to the dead time. He showed no interest in striking up a long conversation, but I was intent on it. I finally extracted from him the information that he was an assistant director of the FBI in charge of the inspection division, an important post under Director J. Edgar Hoover. That meant he led teams of agents who went around to FBI field offices to make sure they were adhering to procedures and carrying out Hoover's orders. I later learned that this was called the "goon squad."

Here was someone at the center of the secret world I was only glimpsing in my Navy assignment, so I peppered him with questions about his job and his world. As I think back on this accidental but crucial encounter - one of the most important in my life - I see that my patter probably verged on the adolescent. Since he wasn't saying much about himself, I turned it into a career-counseling session.

I was deferential, but I must have seemed very needy. He was friendly, and his interest in me seemed somehow paternal. Still the most vivid impression I have is that of his distant but formal manner, in most ways a product of Hoover's FBI. I asked Felt for his phone number, and he gave me the direct line to his office.

I believe I encountered him only one more time at the White House. But I had set the hook. He was going to be one of the people I consulted in depth about my future, which now loomed more ominously as the date of my discharge from the Navy approached. At some point I called him, first at the FBI and then at his home in Virginia. I was a little desperate, and I'm sure I poured out my heart. I had applied to several law schools for that fall, but, at 27, I wondered if I could really stand spending three years in law school before starting real work.

Felt seemed sympathetic to the lost-soul quality of my questions. He said that after he had his law degree his first job had been with the Federal Trade Commission. His first assignment was to determine whether toilet paper with the brand name Red Cross was at an unfair competitive advantage because people thought it was endorsed or approved by the American Red Cross. The FTC was a classic federal bureaucracy - slow and leaden - and he hated it. Within a year he had applied to the FBI and been accepted. Law school opened the most doors, he seemed to be saying, but don't get caught in your own equivalent of a toilet-paper investigation.

A Two Week Tryout: Coming to The Post

In August 1970, I was formally discharged from the Navy. I had subscribed to The Washington Post, which I knew was led by a colorful, hard-charging editor named Ben Bradlee. There was a toughness and edge to the news coverage that I liked; it seemed to fit the times, to fit with a general sense of where the world was much more than law school. Maybe reporting was something I could do.

During my scramble and search for a future, I had sent a letter to The Post asking for a job as a reporter. Somehow - I don't remember exactly how - Harry Rosenfeld, the metropolitan editor, agreed to see me. He stared at me through his glasses in some bewilderment. Why, he wondered, would I want to be a reporter? I had zero - zero! - experience. Why, he said, would The Washington Post want to hire someone with no experience? But this is just crazy enough, Rosenfeld finally said, that we ought to try it. We'll give you a two-week tryout.

After two weeks, I had written perhaps a dozen stories or fragments of stories. None had been published or come close to being published. None had even been edited.

See, you don't know how to do this, Rosenfeld said, bringing my tryout to a merciful close. But I left the newsroom more enthralled than ever. Though I had failed the tryout - it was a spectacular crash - I realized I had found something that I loved. The sense of immediacy in the newspaper was overwhelming to me, and I took a job at the Montgomery Sentinel, where Rosenfeld said I could learn how to be a reporter. I told my father that law school was off and that I was taking a job, at about $115 a week, as a reporter at a weekly newspaper in Maryland.

"You're crazy," my father said, in one of the rare judgmental statements he had ever made to me.

I also called Mark Felt, who, in a gentler way, indicated that he, too, thought this was crazy. He said he thought newspapers were too shallow and too quick on the draw. Newspapers didn't do in-depth work and rarely got to the bottom of events.

Well, I said, I was elated. Maybe he could help me with stories.

He didn't answer, I recall.

During the year I spent on the Sentinel, I kept in touch with Felt through phone calls to his office and home. We were becoming friends of a sort. He was the mentor, keeping me from toilet-paper investigations, and I kept asking for advice. One weekend I drove out to his home in Virginia and met his wife, Audrey.

Somewhat to my astonishment, Felt was an admirer of J. Edgar Hoover. He appreciated his orderliness and the way he ran the bureau with rigid procedures and an iron fist. Felt said he appreciated that Hoover arrived at the office at 6:30 each morning and everyone knew what was expected. The Nixon White House was another matter, Felt said. The political pressures were immense, he said without being specific. I believe he called it "corrupt" and sinister. Hoover, Felt and the old guard were the wall that protected the FBI, he said.

In his own memoir, "The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside," which received almost no attention when it was published in 1979, five years after President Richard M. Nixon's resignation, Felt angrily called this a "White House-Justice Department cabal."

At the time, pre-Watergate, there was little or no public knowledge of the vast pushing, shoving and outright acrimony between the Nixon White House and Hoover's FBI. The Watergate investigations later revealed that in 1970 a young White House aide named Tom Charles Huston had come up with a plan to authorize the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of "domestic security threats," authorize illegal opening of mail, and lift the restrictions on surreptitious entries or break-ins to gather intelligence.

Huston warned in a top-secret memo that the plan was "clearly illegal." Nixon initially approved the plan anyway. Hoover strenuously objected, because eavesdropping, opening mail and breaking into homes and offices of domestic security threats were basically the FBI bailiwick and the bureau didn't want competition. Four days later, Nixon rescinded the Huston plan.

Felt, a much more learned man than most realized, later wrote that he considered Huston "a kind of White House gauleiter over the intelligence community." The word "gauleiter" is not in most dictionaries, but in the four-inch-thick Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language it is defined as "the leader or chief official of a political district under Nazi control."

There is little doubt Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis. During this period, he had to stop efforts by others in the bureau to "identify every member of every hippie commune" in the Los Angeles area, for example, or to open a file on every member of Students for a Democratic Society.

None of this surfaced directly in our discussions, but clearly he was a man under pressure, and the threat to the integrity and independence of the bureau was real and seemed uppermost in his mind.

On July 1, 1971 - about a year before Hoover's death and the Watergate break-in - Hoover promoted Felt to be the number three official in the FBI. Though Hoover's sidekick, Clyde Tolson, was technically the number two official, Tolson was also ill and did not come to work many days, meaning he had no operational control of the bureau. Thus, my friend became the day-to-day manager of all FBI matters as long as he kept Hoover and Tolson informed or sought Hoover's approval on policy matters.

Early Tips: Agnew, and Then Wallace

In August, a year after my failed tryout, Rosenfeld decided to hire me. I started at The Post the next month.

Though I was busy in my new job, I kept Felt on my call list and checked in with him. He was relatively free with me but insisted that he, the FBI and the Justice Department be kept out of anything I might use indirectly or pass onto others. He was stern and strict about those rules with a booming, insistent voice. I promised, and he said that it was essential that I be careful. The only way to ensure that was to tell no one that we knew each other or talked or that I knew someone in the FBI or Justice Department. No one.

In the spring, he said in utter confidence that the FBI had some information that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew had received a bribe of $2,500 in cash that Agnew had put in his desk drawer. I passed this on to Richard Cohen, the top Maryland reporter for The Post, not identifying the source at all. Cohen said, and later wrote in his book on the Agnew investigation, that he thought it was "preposterous." Another Post reporter and I spent a day chasing around Baltimore for the alleged person who supposedly knew about the bribe. We got nowhere. Two years later, the Agnew investigation revealed that the vice president had received such a bribe in his office.

About 9:45 a.m. on May 2, 1972, Felt was in his office at the FBI when an assistant director came to report that Hoover had died at his home. Felt was stunned. For practical purposes, he was next in line to take over the bureau.

Yet Felt was soon to be visited with immense disappointment. Nixon nominated L. Patrick Gray III to be the acting director. Gray was a Nixon loyalist going back years. He had resigned from the Navy in 1960 to work for candidate Nixon during the presidential contest that Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy.

As best I could tell Felt was crushed, but he put on a good face. "Had I been wiser, I would have retired," Felt wrote.

On May 15, less than two weeks after Hoover's death, a lone gunman shot Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, then campaigning for president, at a Laurel shopping center. The wounds were serious, but Wallace survived.

Wallace had a strong following in the deep South, an increasing source of Nixon's support. Wallace's spoiler candidacy four years earlier in 1968 could have cost Nixon the election that year, and Nixon monitored Wallace's every move closely as the 1972 presidential contest continued.

That evening, Nixon called Felt - not Gray, who was out of town - at home for an update. It was the first time Felt had spoken directly with Nixon. Felt reported that Arthur H. Bremer, the would-be assassin, was in custody but in the hospital because he had been roughed up and given a few bruises by those who subdued and captured him after he shot Wallace.

"Well, it's too bad they didn't really rough up the son of a bitch!" Nixon told Felt.

Felt was offended that the president would make such a remark. Nixon was so agitated and worried, attaching such urgency to the shooting, that he said he wanted full updates every 30 minutes from Felt on any new information that was being discovered in the investigation of Bremer.

In the following days I called Felt several times and he very carefully gave me leads as we tried to find out more about Bremer. It turned out that he had stalked some of the other candidates, and I went to New York to pick up the trail. This led to several front-page stories about Bremer's travels, completing a portrait of a madman not singling out Wallace but rather looking for any presidential candidate to shoot. On May 18, I did a Page One article that said, among other things, "High federal officials who have reviewed investigative reports on the Wallace shooting said yesterday that there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Bremer was a hired killer."

It was rather brazen of me. Though I was technically protecting my source and talked to others besides Felt, I did not do a good job of concealing where the information was coming from. Felt chastised me mildly. But the story that Bremer acted alone and without accomplices was a story that both the White House and the FBI wanted out.

The Story Breaks: Secrecy Is Paramount

A month later, on Saturday, June 17, the FBI night supervisor called Felt at home. Five men in business suits, pockets stuffed with $100 bills, and carrying eavesdropping and photographic equipment, had been arrested inside the Democrats' national headquarters at the Watergate office building about 2:30 a.m.

By 8:30 a.m. Felt was in his office at the FBI, seeking more details. About the same time, The Post's city editor woke me at home and asked me to come in to cover an unusual burglary.

The first paragraph of the front-page story that ran the next day in The Post read: "Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here."

The next day, Carl Bernstein and I wrote our first article together, identifying one of the burglars, James W. McCord Jr., as the salaried security coordinator for Nixon's reelection committee. On Monday, I went to work on E. Howard Hunt, whose telephone number had been found in the address books of two of the burglars with the small notations "W. House" and "W.H." by his name.

This was the moment when a source or friend in the investigative agencies of government is invaluable. I called Felt at the FBI, reaching him through his secretary. It would be our first talk about Watergate. He reminded me how he disliked phone calls at the office but said the Watergate burglary case was going to "heat up" for reasons he could not explain. He then hung up abruptly.

I was tentatively assigned to write the next day's Watergate bugging story, but I was not sure I had anything. Carl had the day off. I picked up the phone and dialed 456-1414 - the White House - and asked for Howard Hunt. There was no answer, but the operator helpfully said he might be in the office of Charles W. Colson, Nixon's special counsel. Colson's secretary said Hunt was not there this moment but might be at a public relations firm where he worked as a writer. I called and reached Hunt and asked why his name was in the address book of two of the Watergate burglars.

"Good God!" Hunt shouted before slamming down the phone. I called the president of the public relations firm, Robert F. Bennett, who is now a Republican US senator from Utah. "I guess it's no secret that Howard was with the CIA," Bennett said blandly.

It had been a secret to me, and a CIA spokesman confirmed that Hunt had been with the agency from 1949 to 1970. I called Felt again at the FBI. Colson, White House, CIA, I said. What did I have? Anyone could have someone's name in an address book. I wanted to be careful about guilt by association.

Felt sounded nervous. He said off the record - meaning I could not use the information - that Hunt was a prime suspect in the burglary at the Watergate for many reasons beyond the address books. So reporting the connections forcefully would not be unfair.

In July, Carl went to Miami, home of four of the burglars, on the money trail, and he ingeniously tracked down a local prosecutor and his chief investigator, who had copies of $89,000 in Mexican checks and a $25,000 check that had gone into the account of Bernard L. Barker, one of the burglars. We were able to establish that the $25,000 check had been campaign money that had been given to Maurice H. Stans, Nixon's chief fundraiser, on a Florida golf course. The Aug. 1 story on this was the first to tie Nixon campaign money directly to Watergate.

I tried to call Felt, but he wouldn't take the call. I tried his home in Virginia and had no better luck. So one night I showed up at his Fairfax home. It was a plain-vanilla, perfectly kept, everything-in-its-place suburban house. His manner made me nervous. He said no more phone calls, no more visits to his home, nothing in the open.

I did not know then that in Felt's earliest days in the FBI, during World War II, he had been assigned to work on the general desk of the Espionage Section. Felt learned a great deal about German spying in the job, and after the war he spent time keeping suspected Soviet agents under surveillance.

So at his home in Virginia that summer, Felt said that if we were to talk it would have to be face to face where no one could observe us.

I said anything would be fine with me.

We would need a preplanned notification system - a change in the environment that no one else would notice or attach any meaning to. I didn't know what he was talking about.

If you keep the drapes in your apartment closed, open them and that could signal me, he said. I could check each day or have them checked, and if they were open we could meet that night at a designated place. I liked to let the light in at times, I explained.

We needed another signal, he said, indicating that he could check my apartment regularly. He never explained how he could do this.

Feeling under some pressure, I said that I had a red cloth flag, less than a foot square - the kind used as warnings on long truck loads - that a girlfriend had found on the street. She had stuck it in an empty flowerpot on my apartment balcony.

Felt and I agreed that I would move the flowerpot with the flag, which usually was in the front near the railing, to the rear of the balcony if I urgently needed a meeting. This would have to be important and rare, he said sternly. The signal, he said, would mean we would meet that same night about 2 a.m. on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn.

Felt said I would have to follow strict counter-surveillance techniques. How did I get out of my apartment?

I walked out, down the hall, and took the elevator.

Which takes you to the lobby? he asked.

Yes.

Did I have back stairs to my apartment house?

Yes.

Use them when you are heading for a meeting. Do they open into an alley?

Yes.

Take the alley. Don't use your own car. Take a taxi to several blocks from a hotel where there are cabs after midnight, get dropped off and then walk to get a second cab to Rosslyn. Don't get dropped off directly at the parking garage. Walk the last several blocks. If you are being followed, don't go down to the garage. I'll understand if you don't show. All this was like a lecture. The key was taking the necessary time - one to two hours to get there. Be patient, serene. Trust the prearrangements. There was no fallback meeting place or time. If we both didn't show, there would be no meeting.

Felt said that if he had something for me, he could get me a message. He quizzed me about my daily routine, what came to my apartment, the mailbox, etc. The Post was delivered outside my apartment door. I did have a subscription to the New York Times. A number of people in my apartment building near Dupont Circle got the Times. The copies were left in the lobby with the apartment number. Mine was No. 617, and it was written clearly on the outside of each paper in marker pen. Felt said if there was something important he could get to my New York Times - how, I never knew. Page 20 would be circled, and the hands of a clock in the lower part of the page would be drawn to indicate the time of the meeting that night, probably 2 a.m., in the same Rosslyn parking garage.

The relationship was a compact of trust; nothing about it was to be discussed or shared with anyone, he said.

How he could have made a daily observation of my balcony is still a mystery to me. At the time, before the era of intensive security, the back of the building was not enclosed, so anyone could have driven in the back alley to observe my balcony. In addition, my balcony and the back of the apartment complex faced onto a courtyard or back area that was shared with a number of other apartment or office buildings in the area. My balcony could have been seen from dozens of apartments or offices, as best I can tell.

A number of embassies were located in the area. 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.

A Kinship: Felt Knew Reporters' Plight

In the course of this and other discussions, I was somewhat apologetic for plaguing him and being such a nag, but I explained that we had nowhere else to turn. Carl and I had obtained a list of everyone who worked for Nixon's reelection committee and were frequently going out into the night knocking on the doors of these people to try to interview them. I explained to Felt that we were getting lots of doors slammed in our faces. There also were lots of frightened looks. I was frustrated.

Felt said I should not worry about pushing him. He had done his time as a street agent, interviewing people. The FBI, like the press, had to rely on voluntary cooperation. Most people wanted to help the FBI, but the FBI knew about rejection. Felt perhaps tolerated my aggressiveness and pushy approach because he had been the same way himself when he was younger, once talking his way into an interview with Hoover and telling him of his ambition to become a special agent in charge of an FBI field office.

It was an unusual message, emphatically encouraging me to get in his face.

With a story as enticing, complex, competitive and fast-breaking as Watergate, there was little tendency or time to consider the motives of our sources. What was important was whether the information checked out and whether it was true. We were swimming, really living, in the fast-moving rapids. There was no time to ask why they were talking or whether they had an ax to grind.

I was thankful for any morsel or information, confirmation or assistance Felt gave me while Carl and I were attempting to understand the many-headed monster of Watergate. Because of his position virtually atop the chief investigative agency, his words and guidance had immense, at times even staggering, authority. The weight, authenticity and his restraint were more important than his design, if he had one.

It was only later after Nixon resigned that I began to wonder why Felt had talked when doing so carried substantial risks for him and the FBI. Had he been exposed early on, Felt would have been no hero. Technically, it was illegal to talk about grand jury information or FBI files - or it could have been made to look illegal.

Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable. He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and their efforts to manipulate the bureau for political reasons. The young eager-beaver patrol of White House underlings, best exemplified by John W. Dean III, was odious to him.

His reverence for Hoover and strict bureau procedure made Gray's appointment as director all the more shocking. Felt obviously concluded he was Hoover's logical successor.

And the former World War II spy hunter liked the game. I suspect in his mind I was his agent. He beat it into my head: secrecy at all cost, no loose talk, no talk about him at all, no indication to anyone that such a secret source existed.

In our book "All the President's Men," Carl and I described how we had speculated about Deep Throat and his piecemeal approach to providing information. Maybe it was to minimize his risk. Or because one or two big stories, no matter how devastating, could be blunted by the White House. Maybe it was simply to make the game more interesting. More likely, we concluded, "Deep Throat was trying to protect the office, to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost."

Each time I raised the question with Felt, he had the same answer: "I have to do this my way."



Go to Original

The Final Surprise from Deep Throat
By Jamie Wilson
The Guardian UK

Thursday 02 June 2005

The first inkling Bob Woodward had that the story was about to break came at 9.47am on Tuesday when he got a phone call at home from the offices of Vanity Fair.

"Great, send it along," he told David Friend, a senior editor at magazine, who had told the veteran reporter that Vanity Fair was about to publish an exclusive article in which Mark Felt, the former number two at the FBI in the early 1970s, admitted he was Deep Throat, Woodward's fabled Watergate source.

The next call Mr. Friend made was at 9.52am to Carl Bernstein, Woodward's reporting partner during their exposé of the biggest political scandal in US political history. He responded in the same non-committal manner: "Good, really?" "I guess they are so used to getting these calls that they don't express anything in case it gives things away," Mr. Friend told the Guardian yesterday.

The phone calls set in train a series of events, culminating in an announcement at 5.39pm on Tuesday confirming that, after more than 30 years of keeping his identity secret, Mark Felt was indeed their mythical source for the stories that brought down Richard Nixon.

As the Washington Post confessed yesterday, the newspaper had been well and truly scooped on its own exclusive. "It really landed on us," said Benjamin Bradlee, the Post's executive editor during the Watergate era. "I had no idea it was coming."

Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee had always maintained they would only reveal Deep Throat's identity after he was dead. Mr. Woodward had prepared for that event by writing a short book about what he described as their intense and sometimes troubling relationship. Simon and Schuster is now rushing the book to press. He told the Post that he had known some family members were considering going public. They had talked repeatedly of jointly writing a book to reveal the news.

Instead it was Vanity Fair that broke the story, in a cloak and dagger tale almost worthy of the original Watergate exclusives. It began with a cold call from John O'Connor, a lawyer representing Mr. Felt, saying the former FBI agent wanted to reveal his identity as Deep Throat in the pages of the magazine. "We often get these crackpots, but once I read his [Felt's] book, I thought, 'Boy, this sounds right,'" Mr. Friend said yesterday.

Mr. Friend, Vanity Fair's editor, Graydon Carter, and the magazine's lawyer - at the time the only three people on the Vanity Fair staff who knew about the story - were forced to sign confidentiality agreements not to reveal who Deep Throat was even if they never published a piece.

The magazine almost lost the story after refusing to pay for the exclusive. But when a book deal the Felts family had been negotiating fell through, they agreed to a story - written by Mr. O'Connor - appearing in the magazine for no fee.

By the time the edition went to press about 15 editors and staff were assigned to the story, codenamed WIG - a shorthand for Watergate. But the exclusive was kept from the rest of the magazine's employees, with those in the know producing secret coverlines and putting out rumours that the magazine had another exclusive about steroid abuse by a sports star. The editors decided not to check the story with the three people who really would know - Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee.

In an editorial accompanying the article, Mr. Carter wrote: "If we called Woodward ... to verify the identity of Deep Throat, he could rush into print his own article about the source's identity, well in advance of our own. Checking the story with his former partner Carl Bernstein [a Vanity Fair contributing editor] posed a similar problem."

Leonard Downie Jr, the Washington Post's executive editor, was giving a presentation at a management retreat in a hotel on the Maryland coast on Tuesday morning when his mobile phone rang. He turned it off without answering, and refused to take urgent calls on the hotel phone. Finally, according to a senior executive, "everybody's BlackBerrys lit up" and the editor raced back to the Washington newsroom, where the Post staff were bewildered.

"At first people were asking whether it was really true," Tom Wilkinson, assistant managing editor, told the Guardian yesterday. "But when Xeroxes circulated of the piece it seemed to be pretty good stuff, and I guess that cemented it."

He continued: "Woodward came in and Ben came down from upstairs ... The difficulty was Bob's concern about where this left him in terms of his word to Felt, and had the fact that he had come out released him [from his promise]. There was also the ancillary question of whether Felt was competent to make that decision."

Bernstein was also on his way to the Post office. The two reporters had initially issued a terse statement reiterating their non-disclosure stance. "Bob was really kind of helpless," Mr. Downie said, because Mr. Felt had never indicated their agreement was over.

But finally, after seeing television pictures of a grinning Mr. Felt waving to the cameras outside his sister's house in Santa Rosa, California, the Post decided to confirm the story because "Felt's family and lawyer made their decision for him and we had no choice."

Bernstein told the New York Times: "Once we could determine that indeed it was the wish of his family, and they were legitimately saying that their father and grandfather was Deep Throat, and with his consent, it seemed to us we had a new obligation, which was to be straightforward."

At Vanity Fair there was disbelief. "It was the last thing we were expecting," Mr. Friend said.