Brent Colton is a retired CIA operations officer now in the employ of the Creighton Corporation, a privately owned think tank that advocates various opinions on world issues, but it’s his clandestine job to solve the dirty problems for their private clients for a million dollar fee with no questions asked. When recovering stolen technology from a Vietnamese industrialist, Colton obtains evidence that he secretly partnered with a U.S. Senatorto rig the recent presidential election and elect him to the nation’s highest office.

BOB WOODWARD’S ODE TO HIS OWN SELF-IMPORTANCE!
by Terry Heath, 2005

Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward is obviously never too busy to blow his own trumpet about his accomplishments as a journalist stemming from the Watergate political scandal that took place thirty years ago and his new book, ‘The Secret Man,’ is another example of his own shameless self-promotion as he tries to cash in on retired Federal Bureau of Investigation deputy director Mark Felt’s recent claim that he was the mysterious source for information about crimes being committed by personnel of the Richard Nixon White House that became infamously known in American lexicon as ‘Deep Throat.’ Woodward and his reporter companion Carl Bernstein apparently have their legacy to protect over the cultural myth of ‘Deep Throat’ in American folklore and are doing their best to promote that image. But it’s coming off in a smug and insincere manner in the way they are describing their initial meetings with this mysterious icon they created who helped destroy the reputation of a president.

A ninety-one year old retired FBI official named W. Mark Felt, currently living with his daughter in obscurity in northern California, claimed in the June issue of Vanity Fair Magazine that he was the source of background information provided to Woodward and Bernstein during their journalistic investigation into political campaign crimes being committed by the staffers of Richard Nixon’s White House in 1972 and 1973. Felt has come out now to make this claim, despite previous decades of denials of his complicity, at the urging of his family who apparently are interested in making a quick buck from this announcement. At least that part of his revelation seems plausible. A government official, previously sworn to uphold the law, does a low-life dastardly deed by going outside normal FBI procedures to leak confidential and sometimes inaccurate information now wants to cash in on the notoriety it brings for the promise of monetary rewards from a book and movie deal. That part seems believable. The rest does not and it never did to the many students of Watergate history.

Woodward has always seemed disingenuous, if not downright misleading, when previously discussing how he was able to obtain the services of Deep Throat as a background source. In their first book ‘All the President’s Men’ Woodward says that D.T. was a contact he had developed who supposedly worked in the Executive Branch that the reporter initially described to his fellow Post employees as ‘My Friend.’ That seems to be stretching the truth if Felt was the source because the last time I checked the Federal Bureau of Investigation was an independent agency under the direction of the Attorney General that would only marginally be considered to be a part of the Executive Branch. Woodward never explained how he developed this source in that book and it is only in this new volume that he reveals that he was introduced to Felt while still a junior officer in the U.S. Navy working out of the Pentagon in 1969-1970 when he would deliver classified military reports from the top brass of the Defense Department to military personnel assigned to duty at the White House. He claims that it was while he was a military courier during that time-frame that he met Felt and they began a friendship that Woodward later renewed when he became a cub reporter for the Washington Post and seeking information on the growing political scandal taking place in the Washington Beltway known as ‘Watergate.’ So we are expected to believe that Felt, a career FBI official who was then the number two man at the bureau under Acting Director Patrick Gray following the recent death of J. Edgar Hoover, would help this young reporter he barely knew? This seems so unlikely to be found believable, unless this same FBI official had some type of political vendetta to promote against those he had crossed paths with at the Nixon White House and wanted revenge when it appeared that Tricky Dick wasn’t going to make him the permanent director. And even with this apparent retaliation as a motive can we believe the feeding of detrimental information to the Post was Mr. Felt’s doing or was he merely the front man for highly connected partisan political backers wanting to deliver such negative information to the two gullible reporters at the newspaper for their own self-serving interests so they could destroy the just re-elected president?

And what could be the actions that would make Felt believe were unethical and illegal that were being committed by the personnel of the Nixon Administration when you find out that at this same time Felt was committing crimes on his own as part of the FBI’s illegal and highly unethical COINTELPRO investigation by performing break-ins into the personal residences of American citizens supporting the radical African-American groups causing turmoil in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and was later convicted for those crimes, only to be subsequently pardoned by Ronald Reagan for his part in that matter?

So here is one question of many that have never been explained that Woodward or Felt needs to answer. How could Felt, or anyone else, get access to the various newspaper copies that were allegedly delivered to Woodward’s apartment to specify a date and time for their clandestine meetings? Couldn’t this be just a convenient literary device for the reporting duo’s first book when you find out that the first draft of ‘All the President’s Men’ never mentioned a character named ‘Deep Throat’ at all? Is Felt’s announcement and Woodward’s new book to confirm such a revelation merely an attempt to throw off the public’s suspicion of an another, more realistic source or sources of Watergate material who was behind the downfall of Richard Nixon?

Many Watergate experts have maintained that Deep Throat was a literary composite of several individuals who fed information to Woodward and Bernstein. Could Felt’s announcement at this time be a necessary diversion for still protecting the identity or identities of the real perpetrators who were out to sabotage Richard Nixon’s second term? Woodward insists in his new book that his first meeting with Felt at the White House while as a Navy courier was a random coincidence that he later used for his own advantage as an up and coming reporter. Yet what major events from history can be explained as due to random coincidence?

Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was to become the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs Chairman during the Nixon Administration, knew Woodward was cultivating contacts on his courier assignments to the White House and later stated that one of those that the Naval lieutenant would encounter was Alexander Haig, leading many to suspect that the future Secretary of State was the real source of information that led to Nixon’s downfall but Haig has always publicly denied it was him. And what of the dozens of others who have been publicly named as the source of Deep Throat and seem to be more credible as the leaker than this obscure disgruntled FBI official?

It’s not clear if Dick Nixon ever believed that Felt was the source of leaks that doomed his administration but it seems doubtful because the ex-president agreed to appear as a defense witness at the agent’s criminal trial. If Felt was Deep Throat then the irony that he and Woodward must have realized as the man they destroyed was naively attempting to help out a government colleague must have been overwhelming and satisfying.

Will we ever really know the true identity of Deep Throat? It appears doubtful, when those who allegedly really know are being deceptive and cryptic in their public admissions in the matter. Felt’s recent revelation of taking credit has altruistic motives and Woodward’s new book seems to be some Hollywood attempt to re-introduce this mythical hero for a new generation of gullible masses to believe. But in this case, the myth is being used to foist a fable that couldn’t hold up to real scrutiny.

Whomever Deep Throat really was or possibly were, it is obvious that he/they used Woodward and the Washington Post to destroy a president who had legitimately won a landslide re-election and believed he had a mandate from the American people to make fundamental changes to the structure of the federal government. This is not to defend Richard Nixon and his minions who obviously broke the law when they attempted their bungled cover-up following the break-in at Democratic Party national headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. But we will never learn Deep Throat’s real identity and the reasons behind his self-serving agenda. All we get is this false fable that furthers a false myth. As for Mr. Felt, thanks to his belated confession of being the individual who selectively destroyed a president, is it still not too late to bring him up on charges of treason anyway?

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com