The answer - none of the above.
At the time of the Watergate break-in, Mark Felt was the No. 2 man at the FBI. He had expected to get the top job and was embittered when President Nixon gave the job of FBI director to L. Patrick Gray.
In a forthcoming story in Vanity Fair, Felt's lawyer, John O'Connor, writes that Felt had told him a couple of years ago he was the infamous Deep Throat, Bob Woodward's main source for the Watergate revelations.
According to G. Gordon Liddy, however, that claim was denied by Barry Sussman, the Post's editor-in-charge of the whole Watergate coverage at the time. Eight years ago, he wrote an article saying that the contribution to the investigation of Deep Throat was "minimal."
J. Todd Foster, a journalist and now editor of the Waynesboro News Virginian, wrote in his paper June 1 that he was told by Felt's family that their father was Deep Throat in June 2002, when Foster was a regular contributor to People magazine.
After several failed attempts to find a publisher, Foster got a go-ahead from People magazine, but the deal fell through, Foster wrote, because "the Felt family and their attorney wanted a lot of money, and People magazine - with my blessing - backed away in what would have been a case of 'checkbook journalism.'"
Later, Harper-Collins subsidiary Regan Books agreed to the project. Busy at his editor's job, Foster said he asked his author-friend Jess Walter of Spokane, Wash., to take over and do most of the leg work.
In late 2003, Walter made three trips to Santa Rosa, where Felt lives, and sent Foster transcripts from his taped interviews with him and the Felt family.
"Ultimately, Jess advised me that we could not in good conscience go through with this book." Foster wrote. "The contract with the book publisher stated that our information had to be bulletproof – that we had to be able to prove Felt was Deep Throat. It could not be done then and it cannot be done now, unless Woodward himself can produce documentation," Foster explained.
He added that even Felt, who had suffered a stroke back in 2000 and was mentally impaired, suffering from dementia, claimed during several sections of the taped interviews with Walter that Woodward made up the source Deep Throat.
"I just thought he was making it up," the then-90-year-old Felt told Walter.
According to Foster, at one point during the interview, Felt referred to Deep Throat as a "small-time criminal." And added: "Deep Throat was just an imagined thing."
And of Woodward, Felt said this: "Well, he's making a lot of that up, I'm sure of that." He added that there were no 2:00 a.m. cloak-and-dagger meetings in parking garages.
The problem with Felt is that three summers before, he had suffered a stroke and briefly was sent to recuperate in a convalescent home.
On Nov. 8, 2003, when asked if he wanted to come forward, Felt told Walter: "You can tell them that I am Deep – that I was Deep Throat. The only thing is that Deep Throat is a little different than you probably have in mind. Deep Throat was not anybody real inside that was furnishing information. It was somebody confirming information."
Then Foster wrote that Felt admitted his motive for coming clean was "I guess I want some money for my family."
Wrote Foster: "It was only after prodding and coaching from his daughter [who has said publicly that she hopes to make enough money from her father's revelation to pay off debts] and the family's attorney, John O'Connor of San Francisco, that Felt even gave his lukewarm admission. Interviewed eight days later, on Nov. 16, 2003, he adamantly denied being the most famous journalism source in history – and one of Washington's few well-kept secrets."
Asked repeatedly if he was Deep Throat, Felt said the following during a long interview:
"No, I'm not. ... Well, the truth is I was not Deep Throat in my acts or what I did. I got a lot of credit for being Deep Throat, though. ... That wasn't me. I don't want to say that I ever claimed to you or anyone that I was Deep Throat. All I know is that he was just a small-time criminal. ... Well, I was not Deep Throat. There were a lot of other sources involved, but I was not Deep Throat. ... Probably he [Woodward] had some legitimate sources, but I was not one. ... Well, just tell them that I deny that I was Deep Throat," Foster quoted Felt as saying.
"I think that some people are going to go back and take a thorough look at this thing and figure out that there were other people involved besides Mr. Felt, that he couldn't have known all those things that were attributed to him," Lynn Nofziger, the Director of Public Relations at the Republican National Committee during Watergate, told NewsMax in an exclusive interview.
Nofziger, who served as President Reagan's communications director, added, "I think Felt was a dishonorable man, and I think he knew he was, and that's one reason he never talked about it much all those years, and I think if he had all his marbles now he still wouldn't be talking about it."
The consensus among those who were there at the time - such as General Alexander Haig and Pat Buchanan - is that Deep Throat was a composite of a number of informants, and the use of that device was intended to add drama and sell books.
It has already been shown that Woodward's descriptions of the method used to set up meetings with the alleged Deep Throat character were not credible. Woodward claimed he placed a flag in his apartment balcony's flower pot when he wanted to signal Deep Throat that he needed to meet him. But others have noted that the flag could not have been seen from Throat's alleged vantage point, for example.
Adding to the Throat-as-composite theory is General Alexander Haig's revelation to NewsMax that former Nixon Lawyer J. Fred Buzhardt had admitted to him that he was Woodward's source, Deep Throat.
Not on the record.
According to the late Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media, Victor Lasky, veteran journalist and author, found 36 statements in a Woodward book, "The Final Days," that were denied by the attributed sources or declared false by those in the best position to know.
In his 1987 book, "Veil," for example, Woodward quoted 19 words that he said William J. Casey, the CIA director, had spoken in an interview with him not long after Mr. Casey had undergone brain surgery.
Wrote Irvine, "This was a complete fabrication. Bill Casey could never speak intelligibly after his operation, and Bob Woodward never entered his carefully guarded hospital room. Mrs. Casey accused Woodward of lying, a charge he never challenged."
According to Lisa Pease, writing in "Probe" in 1996, Adrian Havill, in his book "Deep Truth," tracked down Casey's family, friends, hospital security staff and CIA guardians and found that the visit Woodward described was impossible.
First of all, Casey was under 24-hour guard by several layers of security: CIA members, hospital security, and Casey's family.
And Woodward had already been stopped once while trying to see Casey. According to one of Havill's sources, Woodward was not merely asked to leave, as Woodward reported in his book, but was forcibly shoved into the elevator.
And Woodward's story kept shifting. Woodward told a Knight-Ridder reporter that he had gotten in by flashing his press pass. To Larry King, Woodward claimed he just "walked in." But even assuming he somehow managed to get by all of that security, Woodward would still have been the only person to claim that Casey had uttered intelligible words in those last hours.
Woodward has never retracted his "conversation."
In addition, Woodward once said that Casey sat bolt upright, which would seem highly implausible given his rapidly deteriorating state. One-time CIA Director Stansfield Turner, a friend of Woodward's since 1966, said Woodward told him he'd walked by Casey's room and Casey had waved to him. Casey's bed was positioned in such a way in the room as to make that impossible too.
Woodward has also claimed that Casey didn't speak but merely nodded when he asked him a question.
Jane Sherburne, a former assistant counsel in the Clinton White House, has testified that Woodward had put words in her mouth in his book "Shadow" about a conversation she had with Hillary Clinton concerning a Newsweek article. She testified that the "dialogue does not resemble what I recall of the conversation."
The interview was entirely off the record, Sherburne said, but Woodward called to tell her that when she saw the excerpts from his book that were to be published in The Washington Post she might think he had broken his agreement but that there was no violation because he had heard of Hillary's reaction to the Newsweek article from many other people, and so he decided to put the words in her mouth.
In short, Woodward is about as credible as Janet Cooke, the reporter who worked under him and fabricated not only stories but also her entire resume.
In the Watergate affair, the Democratic National Committee Headquarters was reportedly bugged by the White House "plumbers." And their target was DNC Chairman Larry O'Brien.
In truth, however, the so-called plumbers never bugged the phones in the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
FBI records obtained 10 years after the break-in by author Jim Hougan and cited in his blockbuster book "Secret Agenda" showed that no telephone taps were found by the bureau immediately after the Watergate burglars were caught red-handed.
According to Hougan, whose groundbreaking investigation of Watergate set the standard for all future Watergate probes, if there were any bugs, they were on the phone lines of a call girl operation working out of the Columbia Plaza Apartments across the street from the Watergate buildings.
In their book "Silent Coup," authors Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin suggest that there may well have been one telephone tap, but if there was, it was not installed by the men participating in the break-in.
In an interview with NewsMax.com, author Colodny, a widely acclaimed investigative writer, noted that "Hougan could be right – that the bug was in the Columbia Plaza setup – but the phones that were being tapped were either coming to Columbia Plaza or directly to Maxie Wells."
Ida Maxwell Wells was secretary to DNC official Spencer Oliver and she worked in a three-office complex inside the DNC headquarters. "She worked in the middle office. The one on her right side was called the Office of State Governors – and that's the phone that really got bugged," Colodny said. "The reason that it was the phone that got bugged was that it had the outside line – the line that was used to make the dates with the hookers." (see below)
In a widely circulated e-mail, Hougan writes that if Mark Felt was Deep Throat, "he betrayed the people for whom he was a source. This is so because the biggest story that anyone could have broken in the Summer of 1972 was Alfred Baldwin's decision to come forward and tell what he knew.
"An employee of James McCord's, Baldwin told the U.S. Attorney's office and the FBI that he had monitored some 250 telephone conversations from 'the Listening Post,' his room in the Howard Johnson's motel across the street from the Watergate. The significance of this information was that the public and the press believed that the Watergate break-in was a failure, and that the burglars were arrested before they could succeed in placing their bugs. Because of that, the public believed, no telephone calls were ever intercepted. Baldwin gave the lie to that, and Felt knew it. For him to have withheld that information from the 'Post' would not only have been a betrayal - it would not have made sense if Felt's alleged intention (as Throat) was to keep the story alive. (The Baldwin story was eventually broken in the Fall of 1972 by the Los Angeles Times.)"
In his account of the affair, Hougan writes of a first break-in attempt that failed, although he makes much of the fact that James McCord, who he says was really working for the CIA although officially retired from the agency, kept disappearing in the hours before the break-in was canceled, and that none of the Plumbers got inside the DNC.
Colodny sees it differently. "They got in the first time and I presume that it was then they placed the bug." Because the bug was not found by the FBI or the DNC, which "swept" their phones the day before the break-in, Colodny thinks that it was possible that Baldwin, in a clandestine visit to the DNC days before the last break-in, removed the bugs.
If you believe the accepted version of Watergate, you would get the idea that the break-in was staged in order to tap the phones and bug the office of DNC Chairman Larry O'Brien. According to the media's line, the White House wanted to get the details of Larry O'Brien's employment by Howard Hughes because of an old Nixon bugaboo about Hughes and his connections with the president's brother Donald.
Colodny explodes that myth.
"It's the accepted version that they were bugging Larry O'Brien, but what people don't know is that the information they [the White House] wanted they got in February, not in June," he told NewsMax.com.
"They audited Larry O'Brien's tax return and lo and behold, there was Howard Hughes – he was paying Larry O'Brien about $80,000 a year – about $160,000 all told went to O'Brien. There was no need to break into the DNC for that information – they had it."
Colodny cited no less than John Ehrlichman as his source for that information.
If O'Brien wasn't the Plumbers' target, who was?
Said Colodny: "The real deal is the call girl ring but they were telling Liddy it was O'Brien. Dean didn't know that Nixon had the information and had no motive to go in."
That Dean was concerned with getting the low-down on O'Brien and Hughes was obvious from memos dated January 26 and 28, 1971 he sent to H.R. Halderman regarding his vigorous efforts to get the information Ehrlichman got a few days later without telling Dean.
For years Gordon Liddy had believed the O'Brien story, but after reading Colodny's book and speaking with him, he did some digging on his own and came up with the real story of Watergate. It was a case of doing what the French would advise: "Cherche la Femme."
Here in his own words is Liddy's astonishing account of the sex scandal and the apparent real role of John Dean in Watergate.
Noting that what Mark Felt, "the number 2 man at the FBI had to have known: that the FBI at that time was investigating not one but three call girl rings in the District of Columbia," Liddy recalls:
"In that investigation they were cooperating with the United States attorney for the District of Columbia. All three of the call girl rings operated the same way - they had brochures of photographs of attractive women who were available for assignations for money. You look at the brochure and what you see is what you get.
"One of the three call girl rings was being operated from the Columbia Plaza apartments right across the street from the Watergate complex. The madam was a German National named Heidi – all this was known to the FBI – they were conducting the investigation. The FBI found a link between that particular call girl ring and the Democratic National Committee.
"The link was described by the FBI as being a female who was either a secretary or an administrative assistant." Liddy goes on to disagree with Colodny and Hougan when he says, "I would call to your attention that it was the Democrats themselves in the DNC who found the wiretap itself, and it was on the telephone of Ida Maxwell Wells, which phone she shared with her boss, R. Spencer Oliver, who was the director of the Office of Democratic State Chairmen. Across the street there was a lookout – the lookout looked right down the throat of that desk of Ida Maxwell Wells. The significance of that desk is that the FBI arrested a lawyer name Bailey and he was subsequently convicted of federal violations having to do with this prostitution ring.
"They executed a search warrant and they seized his books and in them he had listed his clients and the girls and their code names and according to an assistant United States attorney testifying under oath the code name of one of the girls was "clout," and her name was either Biner or something like that, he recalled. At the time, John Dean (and this was a John Dean operation, by the way, he recruited me for it.) had a paramour whose name was Maureen Elizabeth Kane Owen Biner, and as soon as the newspapers announced this arrest he demanded that the assistant U.S. attorney, whose name was John Rudy, bring the evidence to the White House and show it to him.
"When Dean saw it he tried to keep it. They wouldn't let him keep it so he xeroxed it. Right there he would have seen Biner's name. Now when Biner wasn't shacked up with John Dean, she was a sometime roommate of the madam of the house of prostitution – the German national Heidi, who operated under the street name of Cathy Dieter.
"How do we know, how can we prove how close the madam – now dead and can't testify – was to the woman who became John Dean's wife, Maureen Elizabeth Kane Owen Biner Dean?
"After Watergate broke, that woman published a book, 'Mo, a Woman's View of Watergate.' And in that book she published her wedding photos and identified the people in them and there as a member of the wedding party is the madam of the house of prostitution.
"Now according to the lawyer [Bailey], the Democrats called in and said that we have been using these same photographs for a long time now, can't you give us some fresh faces and they [the call girl ring] said fine, ... and they put in fresh pictures and someone included photographs allegedly of Maureen Biner, a.k.a 'Clout.' The code name 'Clout' was given her by one of the girls who was resentful of the fact that she allegedly put on airs because of her association with the counsel of the President of the United States, John Dean.
"All of this was known by the FBI, this was an FBI investigation so this had to be known by Mark Felt. One would assume that he would have told Woodward about it, but I don't know if he did. All I know is that Woodward did not publicize it."
It is important to note that after Liddy made these startling allegations he was sued by both the Deans and Maxie Wells. He won both lawsuits.
The CIA was up to its ears in Watergate. Says Colodny, "The important thing is that the whole break-in, except for Liddy, is the agency [CIA] - it was staffed by the agency."
Colodny told NewsMax.com that he thinks that Dean was being used by the CIA.
He recalled the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist was done by the same people who broke into Watergate "and they are all CIA. It was the CIA that wanted to break into the Ellsberg thing, not Nixon." And he adds, that it was the CIA that wanted to break into the DNC.
Colodny mentions the so-called Gemstone charts – charts prepared for Liddy that included plans for the Watergate break-in.
"The Gemstone charts that Liddy used were made at the CIA, and it was after those charts were made at the agency that McCord and Hunt were sent to staff it. The CIA hated Nixon - it was a gift to them that John Dean wanted to break-in to get information about the call girl ring, and the agency through Hunt, who was still CIA, they knew what the plan was."
Those involved in the Watergate break-in had different motives. Liddy thought the purpose was to gather political intelligence. Dean had personal reasons, as explained above, and was the main force behind the break-in. The CIA had its own reasons, which Hougan suggests had to do with the wealth of information on the sexual habits of top Washington and national figures believed to be contained in files in Maxie Wells' desk.
It has been revealed that one of the Plumbers, a longtime CIA operative, was carrying a key to the drawers in Wells' desk and made great efforts to hide it from the police who were arresting him and his colleagues.
Whatever their motives, none had anything to do with those the media reported as being behind the break-in.
Finally, the motives impelling Bob Woodward and his partner, Carl Bernstein, went far beyond simple journalistic enterprise. Woodward, far from being a rookie reporter, was an experienced naval intelligence officer with White House experience who had access to a number of top sources. To protect those it is obvious that he invented the Deep Throat character to represent the multiple sources he needed to safeguard.
As the son of top American communists, Bernstein, along with many leftists in the media, was inclined to despise Richard Nixon – the man who nailed their hero, the Soviet agent Alger Hiss.
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