At the risk of being a total bore (I try to make this blog fun, and if there's one thing I hate it's being forced to take things seriously), I have to raise a serious question about Mark Felt. Please bear with me, even though I know it isn't funny.

I'll start with a quote from the Vanity Fair story in which it was announced that Felt was Deep Throat:

The heat was also kept on because of a continuing F.B.I. investigation, headed by the bureau's acting associate director, Mark Felt, whose teams interviewed 86 administration and CRP staffers. These sessions, however, were quickly undermined. The White House and CRP had ordered that their lawyers be present at every meeting. Felt believed that the C.I.A. deliberately gave the F.B.I. false leads. And most of the bureau's "write-ups" of the interviews were being secretly passed on to Nixon counsel John Dean—by none other than Felt's new boss, L. Patrick Gray. (Gray, the acting F.B.I. director, had taken over after J. Edgar Hoover's death, six weeks before the break-in.) Throughout this period, the Nixon camp denied any White House or CRP involvement in the Watergate affair. And after a three-month "investigation" there was no evidence to implicate any White House staffers.

The Watergate probe appeared to be at an impasse, the break-in having been explained away as a private extortion scheme that didn't extend beyond the suspects in custody. McGovern couldn't gain campaign traction with the issue, and the president was re-elected in November 1972 by an overwhelming majority.

But during that fateful summer and fall, at least one government official was determined not to let Watergate fade away. That man was Woodward's well-placed source. In an effort to keep the Watergate affair in the news, Deep Throat had been consistently confirming or denying confidential information for the reporter, which he and Bernstein would weave into their frequent stories, often on the Post's front page.

Vital information about the break-in took decades to come to light (despite the fact that it was known to the FBI at the time). I have some very serious problems with the FBI's performance, and if Felt played a part in it, I'd consider him anything but a hero even if he wasn't Deep Throat. But if the guy's goal was the removal of Nixon, and he engaged in selective leaking as a way to help accomplish that, then hiding the facts of the break-in becomes even more egregious. (It would be a violation of the Brady rule, and then some.)

The following (from Joan Hoff's Brewster Lecture in history) outlines some of my concerns.

Still, the CIA may have been interested in obtaining information from it that would be useful in the future. The prostitution ring either had been set up by Democrats to service prominent party members when they visited the nation's capital or simply represented Bailley's personal "pimping" from Oliver' office in the Watergate complex. In any case, the prostitution operation had already been shut down before the first Watergate break-in because of Bailley's arrest and indictment.

Typical of their general ineptness, the Plumbers on May 28 succeeded in planting only one bug that functioned properly, and it was m R. Spencer Oliver's office. It, nonetheless, began to reveal embarrassing sexual information because men continued to call the DNH asking for the now defunct sexual service. Upon hearing some of these taped conversations. Dean apparently became concerned that there might be information at DNH linking his future wife to some of the call-girls involved. Dean had already taken unprecedented action for a White House counsel by privately meeting with local prosecutors. In violation of normal legal procedures, he requested to see the address book being used as evidence in the Bailley criminal case to determine if the name of his future wife or her roommate was in it. Both apparently were-under their aliases. Clout and Cathy.8

The subsequent disposition of the Bailley case without a trial effectively suppressed evidence seized at his home and office including his little black book. Thus, according to Colodny and Gettlin, the prostitution operation can only be related to the Watergate break-ins and cover-up if John Dean (and Jeb Magruder acting for him) conveyed orders to Hunt and McCord. This theory, while based on highly circumstantial evidence, obtains greater credence when one remembers that the target of the second break-in on June I/also turned out to be not O'Brien's office, but the office area used by Oliver and his secretary, Ida Maxwell ("Maxie") Welles.

Between the two break-ins, the one functioning transmitter had been removed by sending a sidekick of McCord, who happened to be a Bailley look-alike, over to Democratic National Headquarters Apparently this individual simply walked through the offices and removed the illegal transmitting device and any other malfunctioning bugs that may have been planted during the first break-in. This is why no operational bugs were found in any of the DNC offices immediately before (on June 15 when the telephone company checked the phones) or after the second break-in. The burglars were not there to bug phones again or even to obtain damaging information about O'Brien or the Democrats in general, but to obtain any information that might be in Oliver's desk or that of his secretary relating to the prostitution ring This is why they went equipped primarily with camera equipment and a key to Maxie Welles's desk.9

Much to the bewilderment of the FBI and the Nixon White House, telephone repair men found bugs on two phones in the DNC headquarters later in September 1972.10 These September bugs could only have been planted either by the Democrats themselves to revive interest in Watergate before the November presidential election or else by other CIA operators who wanted to allow the prosecution of the Watergate burglars to go forward as a political espionage case unrelated to the agency's interest in gathering information from the prostitution operation. Colodny and Gettlin tend to agree with the latter explanation, but I have read the FBI reports of its September 1972 investigation and they do appear to lead to the conclusion that the transmitters were not the normal ClA-brand of bug typically used by the Plumbers.11

Because McCord and Hunt usually relied upon their former CIA contacts to buy eavesdropping equipment, the absence of CIA equipment in the bugs found at the DNC in September suggests that this was neither a belated White House nor a CIA operation. This means it had to be either a Democratic party attempt to revitalize a flagging presidential campaign by highlighting the Watergate issue of political espionage, or an as yet undocumented unilateral attempt by Hunt to obtain information about Oliver for private business reasons involving Hunt's competition with Oliver's father for control of the Robert R. Mullen company, a public relations firm in Washington, D.C.

McCord's unusually inept performance as a burglar also remains another major unanswered question about the second Watergate break-in. (For example, he had taped open doors in the basement of the Watergate complex in a way that invited discovery not once, but twice, after the first tape was removed by the night watchman.)12 There is strong circumstantial evidence indicating that both McCord and Hunt continued to work for the CIA and that McCord deliberately botched the break-in to embarrass the Nixon administration so that the president would not follow through on his threat to exert more control over the agency after he was re-elected. Another theory is that it was to protect the CIA sex ring operation, but Colodny and Gettlin have clearly shown that the CIA had not set up this particular sex service; still another is that it was to prevent the White House from undertaking any more sabotage action against the DNC because the CIA wanted an exclusive monopoly on information obtained about those using the call-girl services, regardless of whose operation it was.13

If the first scenario is true (and it is the most likely), then McCord succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.14 On the other hand, if he was simply a former CIA electronics expert who found himself over his head in the field on a black-bag job, taking orders from Magruder, Dean, Hunt, and Liddy for their own various purposes, then his role is much less important except as a disgruntled second-rate, second-story man who, during his trial, blew the whistle on the White House for petty personal reasons rather than for professional conspiratorial ones.

To say the least, if Nixon (or Mitchell) had known or even suspected that sex and not politics was involved in the Watergate break-ins, they would have thrown Dean, Magruder, and the Plumbers to the wolves. Ironically, because the administration had engaged in so many previous black-bag and bugging jobs, the president naturally assumed that political intelligence had been the object of the Watergate break-ins and that members of his White House staff were involved as they had been in other dirty tricks and illegal acts. So he engaged in an unconstitutional cover-up for which he should have been impeached.

What I'd like to know is what Felt knew, and whether he played any part in covering up the facts. Considering the haste everyone was in to nail Nixon for the coverup, very few people cared about the actual purpose of the burglary.

I'm not sure what Felt was doing, or why. But if he helped politicize and steer the focus of a criminal investigation away from the truth (say, to bolster John Dean's credibility against Nixon), he's no hero to me.

Hell, he might even be guilty of having obstructed justice. That's what people went to jail for in those days.

Hope my suspicions are wrong.