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At FBI, Reflections On Felt and Loyalty
"Agents are typically very loyal to the bureau," said Glenn F. Kelly, executive director of the FBI Agents Association.
(By Pablo Martinez Monsivais -- Associated Press)
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"I think it was an attempt to see that justice was done and that the investigation was completed," Daly said. "Nobody likes leaks. But this was an extraordinary time and it called for extraordinary steps, at least in his view."
Jim Roth, who retired in 2000 after 25 years with the bureau and served as chief counsel of the New York field office, said that while some view Felt "as a traitor to the cause," others see him more charitably.
"If he went public and said this is all wrong, would he have been cashiered like Cox?" Roth asked, referring to Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor fired by Nixon in October 1973. "Would he have had an impact? It's hard to second-guess this sort of thing. . . . He may have viewed this as the only reasonable option or course of action."
FBI agents have rallied around Felt before, but in a decidedly different case. In 1980, Felt was convicted of authorizing illegal break-ins that targeted members of the radical Weather Underground group. At one hearing, more than 500 agents, clerks and friends of Felt stood on the courthouse steps to show their support for him and another senior FBI official. Former president Nixon -- who had suspected Felt as a leaker in the Watergate scandal -- nevertheless testified at the trial on his behalf, and Felt was later pardoned.
Athan Theoharis, a Marquette University professor who has written extensively on the FBI's history during the Cold War, said few should be surprised by the notion that an FBI official engaged in strategic leaks. Hoover's FBI had a history of using leaks and blackmail to manipulate the press, he said.
"Did the bureau leak before? Sure it did -- look at Martin Luther King," Theoharis said, referring to FBI efforts in the 1960s to undermine the civil rights leader. "The only thing that's atypical here is that this was directed at the president and the White House. . . . There was a legitimate concern on the part of senior FBI officials that what the White House was trying to do would result in the politicization of the FBI."
Unlike contemporaries of Felt and other FBI hands steeped in the Watergate scandal, however, some current FBI agents view the affair as a historical curiosity. One agent noted that most of his co-workers were no older than 7 or 8 at the time of Watergate.
"It doesn't resonate with them," the agent said.
Staff writer Sari Horwitz contributed to this report.
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