Did Deep Throat have help, supporting the theory that the most famous informant in history might have been a composite? This story says so:
At the height of the Watergate investigation more than three decades ago, three high-ranking FBI officials conspired with the agency’s deputy director to leak information about their probe to the press.
The revelation of that collaboration by a retired FBI agent in conversations in recent days with the Times Union casts W. Mark Felt — who admitted last week to being the media source known as Deep Throat — not as a disgruntled maverick, as some have suggested, but rather as the leader of a clandestine group that fought White House efforts to contain the sprawling investigation.
Paul V. Daly, 64, who joined the bureau in 1965 and went on to head field offices in Albany and North Carolina, told the Times Union last week that he learned in 1978 that Felt was Deep Throat and that he had not acted alone: At least three other FBI officials helped Felt secretly disclose information about the Watergate investigation to The Washington Post.
The FBI officials met regularly in their Washington, D.C., offices to discuss what information they would reveal to fuel media interest. Their motive, according to Daly, was to counteract the Nixon White House’s efforts to quash the FBI investigation of the Watergate burglary and related wrongdoing linked to the Oval Office.
“They wanted to protect the integrity of the FBI,” Daly said.
Read the whole thing.
Jim Henley
Woodward himself, in his memoir from the other day, writes about the window-flowerpot signal system and wondered whether Felt might “send agents”around to observe it. The first question that popped into my mind reading that passage was, “What would Felt tell the agents?”
So I think it’s at least possible that Felt ran a cabal. Militating against that is that none of the group talked for thirty years. That’s an awful lot of folks to coordinate a silence.