How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat'

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 Four days later, Nixon rescinded the Huston plan.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.