Mark Felt
William Mark Felt Sr. (August 17, 1913 – December 18, 2008) was an American law enforcement officer who worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1942 to 1973 and was known for his role in the Watergate scandal. Felt was an FBI special agent who eventually rose to the position of Deputy Director, the Bureau's second-highest-ranking post. Felt worked in several FBI field offices prior to his promotion to the Bureau's headquarters. In 1980, he was convicted of having violated the civil rights of people thought to be associated with members of the Weather Underground, by ordering FBI agents to break into their homes and search the premises as part of an attempt to prevent bombings. He was ordered to pay a fine, but was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan during his appeal.
For the film, see Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House.
Mark Felt
In 2005, at age 91, Felt revealed to Vanity Fair magazine that during his tenure as Deputy Director of the FBI he had been the notorious anonymous source known as "Deep Throat",[1][2] who provided The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with critical information about the Watergate scandal, which ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Woodward, who had long vowed not to reveal Deep Throat's identity while the source was still alive, quickly confirmed Felt's claim. Though Felt's identity as Deep Throat was suspected, including by Nixon himself,[3] it had generally remained a secret for 30 years. Felt finally acknowledged that he was Deep Throat after being persuaded by his daughter to reveal his identity before his death.[4]
Felt published two memoirs: The FBI Pyramid in 1979 (updated in 2006) and A G-Man's Life, written with John O'Connor in 2006. In 2012, the FBI released Felt's personnel file covering the period from 1941 to 1978. The agency also released files pertaining to an extortion threat made against Felt in 1956.[5]
Early FBI years[edit]
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover often moved Bureau agents around so they would have wide experience in the field. This was typical of other agencies and corporations of the time. Felt observed that Hoover "wanted every agent to get into any field office at any time. Since he [Hoover] had never been transferred and did not have a family, he had no idea of the financial and personal hardship involved."[17]
After completing 16 weeks of training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and FBI Headquarters in Washington, Felt was assigned to Texas, spending three months each in the field offices in Houston and San Antonio. He returned to FBI Headquarters, where he was assigned to the Espionage Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division, tracking down spies and saboteurs during World War II. He worked on the Major Case Desk. His most notable counterintelligence work was on the "Peasant" case. Helmut Goldschmidt, operating under the codename "Peasant", was a German agent in custody in England. Under Felt's direction, his German masters were led to believe that "Peasant" had made his way to the United States, and thus were fed disinformation on Allied plans.[18]
The Espionage Section was abolished in May 1945 after V-E Day. After the war, Felt was assigned to the Seattle field office. After two years of general work, he spent another two as a firearms instructor and was promoted from agent to supervisor. Upon passage of the Atomic Energy Act and the creation of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, the Seattle office became responsible for completing background checks of workers at the Hanford plutonium plant near Richland, Washington. Felt oversaw those investigations.[19] In 1954 Felt returned briefly to Washington as an inspector's aide. Two months later, he was sent to New Orleans as Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge of the field office. When he was transferred to Los Angeles fifteen months later, he held the same rank there.[20]
Investigates organized crime[edit]
In 1956, Felt was transferred to Salt Lake City and promoted to Special Agent-in-Charge.[21] The Salt Lake City office included Nevada within its purview, and Felt oversaw some of the Bureau's earliest investigations into organized crime, assessing the Mob's operations in the Reno and Las Vegas casinos.[20] (It was Hoover's, and therefore the Bureau's, official position at the time that there was no such thing as the Mob.[22]) In February 1958, Felt was assigned to Kansas City, Missouri (which he dubbed "the Siberia of field offices" in his memoir),[20] where he directed further investigations of organized crime. By this time, Hoover had come to believe in organized crime, in the wake of the infamous conclave of underworld bosses in November 1957 in Apalachin, New York.[23]
Clashes with Ruckelshaus and resignation[edit]
Felt called his relationship with Ruckelshaus "stormy".[56] In his memoir, Felt describes Ruckelshaus as a "security guard sent to see that the FBI did nothing which would displease Mr. Nixon".[57]
In mid-1973, The New York Times published a series of articles about wiretaps that had been ordered by Hoover during his tenure at the FBI. Ruckelshaus believed that the information must have come from someone at the FBI.
In June 1973, Ruckelshaus received a call from someone claiming to be a New York Times reporter, telling him that Felt was the source of this information.[58] On June 21, Ruckelshaus met privately with Felt and accused him of leaking information to The New York Times, a charge that Felt adamantly denied.[50] Ruckelshaus told Felt to "sleep on it" and let him know the next day what he wanted to do. Felt resigned from the Bureau the next day, June 22, 1973, ending his 31-year career.
In a 2013 interview, Ruckelshaus noted the possibility that the original caller was a hoax. He said that he considered Felt's resignation "an admission of guilt" anyway.[58]
Ruckelshaus, who had served only as Acting Director, was replaced several weeks later by Clarence M. Kelley, who had been nominated by Nixon as FBI Director and confirmed by the Senate.
Family[edit]
His daughter, Joan, graduated from high school in 1961 in Kansas City during his assignment there, then attended the University of Kansas for two years, before transferring to Stanford in California to study drama.[88] Felt settled in Alexandria, Virginia while she was an undergraduate, for his post at the FBI Academy.[89] Prior to the Watergate scandal, Felt had become estranged from Joan. They had been close during her childhood, but after she graduated from Stanford, she had gone to Chile under a Fulbright scholarship to continue her studies. While there, she became friends with Marxist revolutionary Andrés Pascal Allende, nephew of future president Salvador Allende. When she returned home, her political views had shifted to the extreme left, putting her in conflict with her conservative father.[88]
She earned her master's degree in Spanish at Stanford,[89] and then joined a hippie community in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Felt and his wife went to visit her once and were appalled at her counterculture lifestyle and use of drugs; he was reminded of members of the militant Weather Underground that the FBI had been prosecuting. Joan's friends were equally shocked that her father was an FBI agent. Following their visit, Joan terminated most contact with her parents. As a result, and combined with the fact that she did not follow the news, she was unaware of her father's legal problems arising from the Watergate scandal.[88]
The stress of following her husband's career as well as the separation of her daughter resulted in Audrey suffering a nervous breakdown in 1954, while Felt was in Seattle. She had developed a dependence on alcohol, had been taking antidepressants for years, and had been hospitalized several times for various ailments. When Felt was put on trial in 1980, she attended the first day, but did not return, as she was unable to bear it. On July 20, 1984, she committed suicide using Felt's revolver.[88] Felt and his son Mark Jr., an officer in the United States Air Force, decided to keep this a secret and told Joan that her mother had died of a heart attack.[90] Joan did not learn the truth about her mother's suicide until 2001.[88]
Meanwhile, Joan had become an adherent of Adi Da, who had founded a new religious movement in San Francisco called Adidam, and she was living in Santa Rosa. She had borne three sons– Ludi (later Will), Rob, and Nick, the latter two from another Adidam devotee whom she never married –but her parents had only met Ludi during their visit in 1974. After Audrey's death, Felt began making yearly visits to see Joan and his grandsons, and they also came to visit him and his new girlfriend, who lived in the same apartment complex.[88] In 1990 Felt permanently moved to Santa Rosa, leaving Alexandria. He bought a house where he lived with Joan, and took care of the boys while she worked, teaching at Sonoma State University and Santa Rosa Junior College.[88] He suffered a stroke before 1999, as reported by Kessler in his book, The Bureau. According to Kessler's book, in the summer of 1999, Woodward showed up unexpectedly at the Santa Rosa home and took Felt to lunch.[91]
Joan, who was caring for her father, told Kessler that her father had greeted Woodward like an old friend. Their meeting appeared to be more of a celebration than an interview. "Woodward just showed up at the door and said he was in the area," Joan Felt was quoted as saying in Kessler's 2002 book: "He came in a white limousine, which parked at a schoolyard about ten blocks away. He walked to the house. He asked if it was okay to have a martini with my father at lunch, and I said it would be fine."[91]
Memoir[edit]
Felt published his memoir The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside in 1979. It was co-written with Hoover biographer Ralph de Toledano, though the latter's name appears only in the copyright notice. Toledano in 2005 wrote that the volume was "largely written by me since his original manuscript read like The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table". Toledano said: "Felt swore to me that he was not Deep Throat, and that he had never leaked information to the Woodward-Bernstein team or anyone else. The book was published and bombed."[92]
In his memoir, Felt strongly defended Hoover and his tenure as Director; he condemned the criticisms of the Bureau made in the 1970s by the Church Committee and civil libertarians. He also denounced the treatment of Bureau agents as criminals and said the Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act of 1974 served only to interfere with government work and helped criminals. (He opens the book with the sentence, "The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact", Justice Robert H. Jackson's comment in his dissent to Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949)).[7]
Library Journal wrote in its 1980 review that "at one time Felt was assumed to be Watergate's 'Deep Throat'; in this interesting but hardly sensational memoir, he makes it clear that that honor, if honor it be, lies elsewhere."[93] The New York Times Book Review was highly critical of the book in 1980, saying Felt "seeks to perpetuate a view of Hoover and the FBI that is no longer seriously peddled even on the backs of cereal boxes". It said the book contained "a disturbing number of factual errors".[94] Curt Gentry said in 1991 that Felt was "the keeper of the Hoover flame".[95]
Kessler said in his book that the measures Woodward took to conceal his meeting with Felt lent "credence" to the notion that Felt was Deep Throat. "There are plenty of people claiming they knew Deep Throat was actually former FBI man Mark Felt ... On May 3, 2002, PAGE SIX reported that Ronald Kessler, author of The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI, says that all the evidence points to former top FBI official W. Mark Felt."[96] Woodward confirmed that Felt was Deep Throat in 2005.
Deep Throat revealed[edit]
Vanity Fair magazine revealed that Felt was Deep Throat on May 31, 2005, when it published an article (eventually appearing in the July issue of the magazine) on its website by John D. O'Connor, an attorney acting in Felt's behalf. Felt said, "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat." After the Vanity Fair story broke, Benjamin C. Bradlee on June 1, 2005, the editor of the Washington Post during Watergate, confirmed that Felt was Deep Throat.[108] According to the Vanity Fair article, Felt was persuaded to come out by his family. They hoped to capitalize on the book deals and other lucrative opportunities which Felt would be offered in order to help pay for his grandchildren's education.[4] His family was unaware that he was Deep Throat for many years. Although Felt was suffering from dementia and had previously denied he was Deep Throat, both Woodward and Bernstein confirmed the attorney's claim. Felt's family realized the truth after his retirement, when they became aware of his close friendship with Bob Woodward.
Nixon's Chief Counsel Charles Colson, who served prison time for his actions in the Nixon White House, said Felt had violated "his oath to keep this nation's secrets".[109] A Los Angeles Times editorial argued that this argument was specious, "as if there's no difference between nuclear strategy and rounding up hush money to silence your hired burglars".[110]
Ralph de Toledano, who co-wrote Felt's 1979 memoir, said Mark Felt Jr. had approached him in 2004 to buy Toledano's half of the copyright. Toledano agreed to sell but was never paid. He attempted to rescind the deal, threatening legal action. A few days before the Vanity Fair article was released, Toledano finally received a check. He later said: "I had been gloriously and illegally deceived, and Deep Throat was, in characteristic style, back in business—which given his history of betrayal, was par for the course."[92]
After the revelation, publishers were interested in signing Felt to a book deal. Weeks later, PublicAffairs Books announced that it signed a deal with Felt. Its CEO was a Washington Post reporter and editor during the Watergate era. The new book was to include material from Felt's 1979 memoir, plus an update. The new volume was scheduled for publication in early 2006. Felt sold the movie rights to his story to Universal Pictures for development by Tom Hanks's production company, Playtone. The book and movie deals were valued at US$1 million.[111] A film based on those rights, Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, in which Felt is portrayed by Liam Neeson, was released in 2017.[112]
In mid-2005 Woodward published an account of his contacts with Felt, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat (ISBN 0-7432-8715-0).
Death[edit]
Felt died at home, in his sleep, on December 18, 2008.[116] He was 95 years old and his death was attributed to heart failure.[117]