Watergate and the Two Lives of Mark Felt

Nixon was feeling more than usually paranoid. Nine days previously, The Post had run a blockbuster article by Woodward and Bernstein outlining "a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage" by the Nixon reelection effort. The article had been inspired, at least in part, by a four-hour conversation between Woodward and Felt in the underground parking garage on Oct. 8.

The tip about Felt had come to the White House via a roundabout route. According to comments by Haldeman and other Nixon aides captured on White House tapes, the original source was Sandy Smith of Time magazine, widely considered to be the best-informed reporter covering the FBI. A Time lawyer had passed the information to Assistant Attorney General Henry Peterson, who in turn passed it on to the White House, according to the tapes.

Smith, who has Alzheimer's disease, has consistently declined to talk about his Watergate sources.

The White House tapes do not directly name the lawyer who purportedly tipped off Peterson, but they provide some strong hints. The person who best fits the description provided by Haldeman and other White House aides is Washington attorney William G. Hundley, now a partner with the firm of Akin Gump. Hundley had been retained by Time to represent Smith. He was also Peterson's best friend and frequent golfing companion.

In an interview last week, Hundley denied tipping off Peterson about Felt. He said he was "very surprised" to learn this month that Felt was Deep Throat.

On the very day that Haldeman was voicing his suspicions about Felt to Nixon, Woodward was preparing to write an explosive story naming Haldeman as one of the controllers of a secret fund used to finance political espionage. The White House seized on errors in an Oct. 25 Post story as proof that the paper's reporting on Watergate was fatally flawed. Felt was furious. When he next met Woodward in the parking garage, he scolded him for sloppy reporting.

"When you move on somebody like Haldeman, you've got to be sure you're on solid ground," Felt complained. "What a royal screw-up."

Feeling the Heat

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Felt was under huge pressure to deflect White House suspicions about FBI leaks away from himself. Fortunately for Felt, the Post reporters had been talking to other sources in the bureau, including Angelo J. Lano, the Washington field office agent directly responsible for the Watergate investigation. Woodward and Bernstein were angry with Lano for allegedly providing them with bad information on the Haldeman story. They decided to get even with him by reporting him to a superior, in violation of the confidentiality understanding.

(Woodward and Bernstein provide a detailed account of this incident in "All the President's Men," without naming the agent involved. Lano's version of the incident is contained in declassified FBI files.)

In a four-page memo to Attorney General Richard D. Kleindienst, Felt came to Lano's defense, depicting him as the victim of a "vicious fabrication." He accused Woodward and Bernstein of taking Lano's comments about Haldeman "completely out of context."

Felt was feeling the heat on other fronts as well, on matters that had nothing to do with Watergate. The FBI was busy waging war against a radical group known as the Weather Underground, which had asserted responsibility for a series of bomb attacks against federal buildings. In late 1972 and early 1973, Felt approved nine black-bag jobs at homes of Weather Underground sympathizers in the New York area.

During his trial in 1980, Felt was unable to satisfactorily explain whose authority he was acting on, beyond a general instruction from Gray to hunt down the Weather Underground, "no holds barred." Convicted on a conspiracy charge, he was fined $8,500, only to be pardoned by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Prosecutors later described how agents dressed in old clothes or disguised as telephone repairmen gained access to apartments by picking the locks or paying bribes to landlords. Once inside the apartments, they rummaged through desks and closets, photographing old address books, love letters and pages from diaries, in an ultimately fruitless search for clues to the hiding places of Weather Underground fugitives.

"It's hard for me to see Felt as a hero," said Jennifer Dohrn, sister of fugitive Bernardine Dohrn and one of the targets of the New York break-ins. "At the same time he was whistle-blowing against Nixon, he was authorizing FBI agents to break into my apartment. It was outrageous."

Putting Felt to the Test

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Gray brushed aside the White House's suspicions of Felt. He could not believe that his loyal, supremely competent deputy was capable of such betrayal. As an old Navy man, he was inclined to take subordinates at their word. Felt flatly denied leaking "anything to anybody" when Gray finally confronted him with the allegations in January 1973.

Nixon's anger over FBI leaks reached a boiling point in a Feb. 16, 1973, meeting with Gray. The president told the acting FBI director that he needed to stop being "Mr. Nice Guy" and clean out "the whole damn place." The Germans had the right idea during World War II, Nixon told Gray, according to a declassified White House tape. If they went through a town, and one of their soldiers was hit by a sniper, "they'd line up the whole goddamned town and say, until you talk you're all getting shot. I really think that's what has to be done." At the very least, Felt should be made to take a lie detector test.

Gray, who is preparing his own account of his relationship with Felt, declined a request for an interview through his family. But Ed Gray said that his father ignored the president's demand: "He wasn't going to polygraph his own people. It was all about mutual trust, and a presumption of regularity."

Gray's refusal to administer a lie-detector test to Felt did not prevent Felt from ordering one for at least one subordinate suspected of leaking to the press, FBI records show. "He was a very, very tough guy," recalled Bob Gast, a supervisor in the espionage and intelligence division. "God forbid if you made any mistakes."

A complicating factor, according to Gray's former chief of staff, David Kinley, was that Gray was awaiting his Senate confirmation hearing as director of the FBI. He could not risk Felt going public with all the dirt about the FBI at such a politically sensitive time.

"By January 1973, we knew that Felt was leaking information about the internal workings of the FBI in an attempt to undermine Gray," Kinley said. "By that time, however, it was too late to do very much about it."

The confirmation hearings were a disaster. Gray acknowledged early on that he had been sharing FBI interviews of Watergate suspects with the White House. The final blow to his nomination came after he acknowledged destroying files that had come out of Hunt's safe in the Executive Office Building. He resigned on April 27.

The night before Gray's resignation, Felt telephoned Woodward at The Post to tell him what had happened. As Felt relayed the story, Ehrlichman and Dean had urged Gray to ensure the files "never see the light of day."

For a few brief hours, Felt allowed himself to think that he had a shot at the number one position. Both Kleindienst and Gray recommended that he be named acting director. But Nixon was adamantly opposed to the idea, and turned instead to William D. Ruckelshaus, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

In his autobiography, Felt notes proudly that he stood at "the top of the FBI pyramid" for 2 hours 50 minutes, the length of the interregnum between the resignation of Gray and the appointment of Ruckelshaus.

Felt and Ruckelshaus soon clashed. In his autobiography, Felt makes clear that he saw himself as the guardian of Hoover's FBI, and was "jarred by the sight of Ruckelshaus lolling in an easy chair with his feet on what I still felt was J. Edgar Hoover's desk." For his part, Ruckelshaus accused Felt of leaking information about illegal wiretaps to the New York Times.

Felt indignantly denied the charge. He in turn suspected Ruckelshaus of "playing politics" and buckling to White House demands, according to his autobiography. Ruckelshaus, now a venture capital consultant in Seattle, declines to detail the evidence against Felt, but says it was "certainly strong enough to convince me."

"I told him that I was very angry with him and suggested that he sleep on it overnight, and decide what he wanted to do," Ruckelshaus recalled. Felt resigned from the FBI the next day.

A Final Mystery

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Retirement was painful for Felt. An inveterate gossip, he loved being at the center of things. After he retired, he continued to call former subordinates with tips and speculation about the latest Watergate developments, FBI records show.

Felt also kept in touch with his reporter friends. According to Woodward's account in "All the President's Men," he met with Deep Throat one last time in November 1973, five months after Felt's retirement. By now, Washington was abuzz with talk of secret White House tape recordings that could either exonerate Nixon or force him out of office. Felt told Woodward that "one or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures."

As the search for Deep Throat turned into a Washington parlor game in the decades after Nixon's resignation, the November 1973 scoop deflected suspicions away from Felt. Several Deep Throat sleuths excluded Felt from consideration on the grounds that he could not have been informed about the erasures on the tapes, as he was long retired.

Even Nixon was fooled, according to his British biographer, Jonathan Aitken. Reassured that Felt could not have been the master leaker, he turned his attention to other candidates, including White House staff members.

In "All the President's Men," Woodward and Bernstein leave the impression that the final meeting with Deep Throat was set up in the same manner as the meetings before Felt's retirement. "In the first week of November," they write, "Woodward moved the flower pot and traveled to the underground garage."

This version of events assumes that Felt kept Woodward's apartment under daily observation long after he left the FBI, at a time when they were living on opposite sides of the Potomac.

Woodward, who has written a book about his relationship with Felt, to be published in early July, declined to explain this curiosity except to say that everything he wrote in "All the President's Men" is "accurate."

A possible explanation is suggested by Scott Armstrong, a former Senate staffer who worked with Woodward on two books, including one about Nixon's final days as president. Armstrong says it is quite likely that Felt continued to have access to inside information months after he left the FBI. But he believes that Woodward employed a literary sleight of hand to protect the identity of his source.

Armstrong says that Woodward likely did move a flowerpot around on his balcony in early November 1973. There is no reason to doubt his assertion that he traveled to an underground parking garage around the same time. But neither event was related to his meeting with Felt.

To reach the retired FBI man, Woodward probably just picked up the phone or dropped by to see him, Armstrong said.

An ironic coda to Felt's double life as loyal FBI employee and master leaker came in November 1980, when he sat across a D.C. courtroom from Nixon.

The former president had come to testify at Felt's illegal break-in trial. Interrupted by shouts of "liar" and "war criminal" from spectators, who were swiftly bundled out of the courtroom, Nixon made clear that he believed that Felt had acted properly in approving the break-ins.

A few days later, Felt received a copy of Nixon's latest book, "The Real War." On an inside page, he found the following inscription: "To Mark Felt. With appreciation for his years of service to the nation. Richard Nixon."

Research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.