Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat

1. A Forced Departure: May 1973

A Forced Departure May 1973 Heroes don’t lurk in shadows for 33 years. —Jack McDermott, SAC of the Washington Field Office c h a p t e r o n e 5 A sensible answer about why Deep Throat leaked begins with the circumstances of his resignation from the FBI in June 1973. According to The Secret Man, Mark Felt retired quietly and without fanfare. This bland explanation is unchanged from the original AP story that appeared in the Post and elsewhere (“FBI’s No. 2 Man to Retire”) and is consistent with Felt’s 1979 ghost-written memoir, The FBI Pyramid. That the cover story has persisted so long is striking, given the interest in deconstructing Deep Throat’s motive and the ease of ascertaining the true circumstances of his departure. It should have struck a false note with anyone who believed that Felt’s overriding motive was to protect the FBI: were that true, the last thing Felt would have done was abandon his post at a moment of unprecedented turmoil for the Bureau, and at a time when he was still publicly considered a candidate for the directorship.1 Felt was only sixty in the spring of 1973; he had five years before mandatory retirement. More to the point, the FBI was facing its biggest crisis since the Teapot Dome scandal fifty years earlier. The still-unfolding Watergate revelations had “brought egg to [the FBI’s face] and demoralization to its ranks,” as a Post article asserted on the first anniversary of the break-in. The acting director, Patrick Gray, had just resigned, “heavily discredited for his role in the investigation and the subsequent White House cover-up,” and the stain had spread to the Bureau as a whole.2 In fact, Felt did not casually resign—he quit abruptly rather than subject himself to a leak investigation. Although parts of this story appeared in print as early as 1976, it is told here in full for the first time.3 The events that precipitated Felt’s resignation began on May 11. That morning the New York Times published a story by John M. Crewdson chapter one 6 about the wiretapping of several reporters and some former aides to Henry Kissinger, the president’s national security adviser, over a twoyear period beginning in 1969. Crewdson was not the first to disclose the wiretaps’ existence; that scoop belonged to Time magazine’s Sandy Smith, an investigative reporter known for his law-enforcement sources. In late February Smith had written that the White House ordered the FBI in 1969 to institute electronic surveillance of “six or seven reporters” suspected of receiving leaks of classified information, along with “an undisclosed number of White House aides.”4 But until Crewdson’s article appeared there was little detail about the wiretaps and no accurate mention of the names of those who were tapped. The stories that had been published elsewhere were full of errors, whereas Crewdson’s was right on the money. His sources included a former FBI official directly involved in funneling the results from the wiretaps to the White House (though he was not identified as such), and so Crewdson was able to name some names: William Beecher and Hedrick Smith, both New York Times reporters; Henry Brandon from the Sunday Times of London; and Morton Halperin, a former staff member of the National Security Council.5 The day Crewdson’s article appeared, William D. Ruckelshaus, the interim FBI director after Pat Gray, received a telephone call from a man who introduced himself as John Crewdson. The caller said that he was not ordinarily in the business of revealing an anonymous source, but he was going to make an exception. Mark Felt had supplied him with the details about the wiretaps, “Crewdson” declared. Moreover, Felt had said that he was in the running to be the next FBI director—making it seem as if the leak were a down payment for editorial support in the near future from the Times.6 Taken aback, Ruckelshaus asked “Crewdson” why he was identifying his source. The man replied that he was “just very concerned about the situation in the country,” Ruckelshaus told me in a 2007 interview. “He thought things were kind of falling apart and that I ought to know this.”7 Surprised by the reporter’s ostensible breach of confidentiality but satisfied that the information was accurate, Ruckelshaus took immediate action. The Bureau, of course, often leaked information to the...