provide for the common defense

Bill Gertz takes a long and hard look at the rising Chinese threat. "Army of the future," "Projecting Power," "Mercantilist Measures," "Bit By Bit (espionage)," "Pushing an Agenda (lobbying)," and "Taking Technology" are some of the sub-heads of this, his first installment of his piece on China.

He paints a picture of the fruits of over ten years of Chinese efforts to move from a defensive to an offensive posture. And Taiwan may merely be an initial obstacle to their "string of pearls" strategy for economic, political and military preeminence.

A related piece by the Economist on Fu Chengyu, CEO of China Naitonal Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOK) and the controversial bid to purchase Unocal. The corporate/shareholder issues are addressed in the article as well as the likely driving force behind the bid:

It is no surprise that China wants Unocal. The country is thirsty for energy to fuel its booming economy. China is already the world's second-largest oil importer, after America. More even than oil, China wants gas, of which Unocal has lots, but which currently accounts for only 3% of China's energy use.

To correct that imbalance, CNOOC's state-owned, unlisted parent company—which still owns 70.6% of the listed CNOOC—is building up to ten giant liquefied-natural-gas terminals along China's east coast. All that it needs now is the gas. Three-quarters of Unocal's gas reserves (and a quarter of its oil) are in Asia (mostly Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh) and may be double previous estimates. This, and the American firm's expertise in deep-water oil-drilling, is what CNOOC, or rather China, wants. Price, therefore, does not matter much. Chevron may raise the stakes by upping its bid, but, ultimately, “if the People's Republic of China wishes to acquire Unocal, it will,” says David Hurd of Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong.

Iranian election winner: Ahmadinejad. The former Iranian Revolutionary Guard apparently marshalled enough "support"--legitimately and allegedly otherwise--than did Rafsanjani.

Profiles of the two on the eve of elections in terms of popular appeal.

Michael Ledeen has a good summary. Including an interesting rift that has broken out:

There are also reports, from people in Tehran I have often found reliable, that a limited street war has broken out between armed guards from the Interior Ministry and people from the armed forces (probably Revolutionary Guards and the Quds forces, loyal to Ahmadinejad) and the Basij (the fanatical religious security units best known for beating, clubbing, and otherwise assaulting students, women, and anyone they don’t like at that moment). The interior-ministry guards are said to be blocking the others from voting, claiming they are preventing vote fraud.

The election results would suggest that Ahmadinejad and his supporters in the IRG "won" over the forces of Rafsanjani and the Interior Ministry. And the voters' reasons for voting for either candidate must be factored in the result as well, although the allegedly low turnout, charges of vote-rigging and lack of polling obviously makes that next to impossible. Still, enough of the hardline religious conservatives and the relatively poorer Iranians supposedly backed Ahmadinejad's "populist" and anti-Western campaign against the so-called reformers and moderates that supported the purportedly less hardline Rafsanjani.

This result certainly contravenes the often cited figure of upwards of 75% of the Iranian public that opposed the mullahs and was favorable towards the West. It also makes descriptions of election events next to impossible without an inordinate amount of scare quotes or adjectives like "purportedly" and "relatively." Little wonder that Publius Pundit announces an altogether different winner: Khamenei.

Regime Change Iran has more interesting takes.

The anticlimactic results so far:

Final Interior Ministry figures showed pre-election favorite Rafsanjani won 21.0 percent of the 29.32 million votes cast, a turnout of 63 percent. Ahmadinejad got 19.5 percent.

And as Charles Johnson points out, Reuters is at it again:

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Pragmatic cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani narrowly clinched top spot on Saturday in Iran's nail-biting presidential election, but now faces a run-off against his closest rival, hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The unexpected result left voters with a stark choice between the experienced Rafsanjani, who has pledged better ties with the West, and Tehran mayor Ahmadinejad, who appeals to the pious poor and is wary of re-opening talks with Washington.

Unfortunately, these characterizations, as well as the 63% turnout figure provided by the Iranian regime, most likely represent much of world opinion. It is yet to be seen, however, how the Iranian public itself will view their election and their new leader.

UPDATE: Charges by the third and fifth finishers that the election was rigged as reported in the New York Times, no less.

UPDATE II: Michael Ledeen sees the election as comic:

First, the numbers. The regime had made it clear that the size of the turnout would indicate its legitimacy with the public, so they had to come up with big numbers. After hours of hilarious confusion, during which the "official" numbers oscillated wildly and different vote totals were announced by the interior ministry and the Council of Guardians, the regime finally decided to claim that something like 65 percent of eligible Iranians had voted. But most clear-eyed observers with the freedom to move around the country and actually go to polling places, found very few voters. The Mujahedin Khalq, the longtime allies of Saddam Hussein who have long been a source of information on things Iranian, estimated that the real figure was about 10 percent. If you read The Scotsman, for example, you hear things like this:

...at a polling station in...an affluent suburb of northern Tehran, only 150 voters had arrived by mid-afternoon. "We have been given 1,000 ballot papers, so it seems the turn-out has been a lot lower than expected," said Mohsen Jannati, the school’s headmaster, who supervised the voting.

The lowest participation — maybe as low as 3-5 percent — was in Khuzestan Province, where there had been bombings and protests in recent weeks. But anecdotal evidence from all over the country indicated a very low turnout, as of late afternoon. Despite this, the mullahs trotted out rosy reports of big voter turnouts, and even broadcast "live" TV coverage of voters queued up, waiting patiently to make their voices heard.

The only problem was that the pictures were from past elections. One woman called up a Tehran radio station to say that she was sitting at home watching the tube, and saw herself voting. Very droll indeed.

...

As best I can tell, the real numbers are quite different from the official ones. Roughly seven million people voted under normal circumstances, between the opening bell and the official closing time. But there were approximately 29 million ballots, a difference of 22 million. Of these, about five million were produced by the late evening roundups (bringing the total of actual voters to twelve million), and the balance — 17 million — were fraudulent, mostly blank ballots filled out by the representatives of one candidate or another. This out of an eligible pool of about 51 million (remember that the voting age in Iran is 14 years).

UPDATE III: Runoff election choices "Bad and Worse":

WASHINGTON - The choice for Iranians tomorrow in the presidential runoff is between "bad and worse," according to a leader of the July 9, 1999, Tehran University uprisings, Ahmad Batebi.

In a phone interview yesterday with The New York Sun, Mr. Batebi said, "The candidates were never elected by the people, the selection of the candidates are from the supreme leader.The people of Iran had no power in choosing any of them."

...

When asked for his impression of Mr. Rafsanjani, Mr.Batebi said, "He is wanted by Interpol for his role in the murder of Kurds at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin. He appealed to young people, but he has the blood of the young people on his hands in the country."

In describing Mr. Ahmadinejad, Mr. Batebi said, "He is a founder of the Jerusalem force of the revolutionary guard. He has been nominated by the supreme leader who is concerned Rafsanjani has been too powerful." American intelligence considers the Jerusalem force as the wing of Iran's military responsible for funding and training anti-Israel terrorism.

Iran has seen dissent over elections that have rarely been seen before:

In a rare public feud in Iran, the results of last Friday's race have been challenged by three of the losers. Four newspapers were shuttered this week for printing an open letter from a cleric, Mehdi Karrubi, that accused the guardian council and the state militia, or Basij, of rigging the election in favor of a former Tehran mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Authorities last week issued a decree banning text messaging, used by everyday citizens to rally support for reformists, and have started an investigation into the defamation of presidential candidates.

And it appears that the election boycott was not only largely successful but that regime attempts to cover up the actual turnout may not succeed:

Some commentators in the West, such as a University of Michigan professor, Juan Cole, have speculated that Mr. Bush's statements before the election actually drove Iranians to the polls in protest. The interior ministry estimated the voter turnout at about 60%, while the unelected Guardian Council - the body responsible for counting the votes and vetting the candidates for office - said the figure was 70%.

Mr. Batebi discounts both figures. He said that 16 million people voted, but of the votes cast, 5 million were left blank in protest. Mr. Batebi estimates the real turnout closer to 30%, according to his friends in the interior ministry.

"We were intimidated in factories and on the streets and told we had to show we voted. Many went to the voting booths just to get their birth certificates stamped to show they voted, but they did not vote," he said.

Mr. Batebi said yesterday that many in the opposition plan to spread the truth about the election in the coming weeks. Many bureaucrats in the interior ministry, which did not formally count the votes but has access to the tallies, got their jobs through President Khatemi.

A Washington-based historian and human rights activist, Roya Boroumand, said yesterday that she, too, believed the official vote count numbers were inflated. "The indications are the regime was extremely scared about the massive boycott," she said."Intimidation and threats are part of the Islamic Republic's methodology to get people to vote. People spread the word, 'If you don't have the stamps on your ID, you will not get passports renewed easily.' This is not official on paper. But it certainly works. I know tons of people who vote because they want this on their ID."

Almost as soon as the media publicity hit over the admission by Mark Felt that he was the famed "Deep Throat," Bob Woodward once again took his cue from his source and broke a Washington Post front page Watergate headline: How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat'.

Case closed? Opinions vary. Much of the discussion has involved whether he ought to be considered a villain or a hero. Again, opinions vary, not unexpectedly along party lines. As to Felt whether Felt actually was Deep Throat, many seem to agree. Some even claim to have named him well before Felt's eleventh hour admission.

But a few are still skeptical:

The "unmasking" of Deep Throat as the FBI's former Number Two, Mark Felt, in Vanity Fair, and the confirmation of the story by The Washington Post, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein, raises more questions than it answers.

If, indeed, Felt was Deep Throat, was he a hero or a criminal?

What is more likely is that Felt was not the source for this particular "Woodstein" story, since the tape erasures were a closely-held secret in the White House at that time. SILENT COUP, Chapters 18 and 22, has more information on the subject of who, precisely, could have made such a leak.

Second important example. If Felt was Deep Throat, he did not tell Bob Woodward about the most important FBI-related Watergate story of the summer of 1972, which involved Alfred Baldwin's decision to come forward and tell the FBI (and the U.S. Attorney's office), that he had recorded 250 conversations in the DNC Watergate office prior to the June 1972 break-in. If Felt was Deep Throat, why would he have kept this very explosive Baldwin story from the ace reporter? (The Baldwin story was broken, late in the year, by the Los Angeles Times).

The greatest likelihood is that while Felt was, indeed, a source for Woodward, he was not Deep Throat, because Deep Throat was not a single individual. Rather, Deep Throat was a cover for a variety of sources, most of whom have not yet been identified by Woodward. SILENT COUP strongly implicates Alexander Haig as a major Woodward source, and tells why -- they had known each other since 1969, when Woodward was a Navy ensign and a briefer, and Haig was on the staff of the National Security Council in the white House. Jim Hougan, author of SECRET AGENDA, suggests that Woodward's most important source was Bob Bennett, currently a U.S. Senator and at that time the head of a front company for the CIA.

The crowning of Mark Felt as Deep Throat has the hallmarks of a classic deception ploy: it directs the public's attention to one person, in order to prevent people from looking at other individuals who may have even been more deeply involved.

The full story of Deep Throat has not yet been told.

And from Jim Hougan, author of Secret Agenda (as quoted in cannonfire):

All y'all,

In the last couple of hours I've gotten half-a-dozen emails, and a couple of phone-calls, about Mark Felt's belated declaration (in the upcoming *Vanity Fair*) to the effect that he's Deep Throat. I've just done an interview with Fox (James Rosen/Britt Hume), and it looks like this is the story de jour.

That said, it's possible, maybe even likely, that you have no absolutely interest in Wategate. If so, put this down as parapolitical spam, and stop reading.

Anyway, here's my take on Felt's declaration:

1. He was badgered into it by family and friends. Felt is 91 years old, and counting. A reporter who recently interviewed him found the interview an incoherent waste of time, and killed his own story.

2. Felt has always denied that he was Deep Throat until, as we're told, members of his family recently pointed out to him there might be a buck in it, and that his children and grandchildren have bills to pay.

(And there is a buck in it: Bob Loomis told me, 20 years ago, that Throat could probably get a $4-million advance from Random House for his life-story.)

3. Felt wrote a book about his career in the FBI. In it, he goes out of the way to say that he met Woodward on a single occasion. This was in Felt's FBI office, and the upshot of it was that Felt told Woodward that he would not cooperate with him in his pursuit of "Watergate."

4. After a careful study of Throat's relationship to the *Post* and to the White House, first in *Secret Agenda* and subsequently while working with Len Garment, it became clear that *no one* in or around the Nixon White Hoouse was in a position to know all of the things that Throat is alleged to have told Woodward. For example, Felt had no way of knowing about the 18-and-a-half minute gap in Rosemary Woods' tape. This strongly suggests that Throat was a composite.

5. Just as importantly, if Felt was 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.)

6. What we have here, then, is the sad spectacle of an old man being manipulated.

For the record, it seems to me that if anyone proposes to identify Deep Throat, or to identify the lead singer in the choir of sources subsumed by the identity of Throat, they must meet a very basic criterion. That is, they must demonstarate, at a minimum, that their candidate met repeatedly and secretly with Bob Woodward. (Throat is obviously Woodward's creation. I don't think Bernstein would know him from a bale of hay.)

The only person who meets that criterion, to my knowledge, is Robert Bennett. Now one of the most powerful men in the U.S. Senate, Bennett was President of the Robert R. Mullen Company in 1972-3. This was the CIA front for which Howard Hunt worked. (It was also the Washington representative of the Howard Hughes organization.) As I reported in *Secret Agenda*, Bennett's CIA case officer, Martin Lukoskie, drafted a memo to his boss, Eric Eisenstadt, reporting on his monthly debriefing of Bennett after the Watergate arrests. According to Eisenstadt, Bennett told him that he, Bennett, had "made a backdoor entry to the Washington Post through Edward Bennett Williams' office," and that he, Bennett, was feeding stories to Bob Woodward, who was "suitably grateful." (Williams was the Post's attorney, and attorney, also, for the Democratic National Committee.)

Woodward's gratefulness was manifest in the way he kept the CIA, in general, and the Robert R. Mullen Company, in particular, out of his stories. (I obtained the Lukoskie memo under the Freedom of Information Act. Eric Eisenstadt's reaction to that memo, which I also obtained under FOIA, was considered so secret that it was delivered by hand to then-CIA Director Richard Helms.

What bothers me the most about all this, and what inspires me to write this unforgiveably long email to so many about something so few care about, is the gullibility of "the press"---by which I mean Talking Heads like Jeffrey Toobin---who have bought Felt's story hook, line and sinker.

That Woodward and Bernstein have taken a no-comment stance toward Felt's story is interesting and probably predictable. On the one hand, if I'm right about Bennett being Throat, they have a serious problem where their source is concerned---not just that he was a composite, but that their relationship to him was predicated on a quid pro quo concealing the CIA's involvement in the Watergate story.

Thanks for listening (if you're still there),

Jim Hougan

I admit that I never did follow the Watergate scandal too closely. I was, however, aware of G Gordon Liddy's defiant version of events involving a breakin to find an address book for a call-girl service. That seemed to go with Deep Throat, anyway.

But now I've gotten the Watergate bug and am convinced that the story has been distorted by--what else--liberal bias in the media. After having listened to some guests on the John Batchelor Show, I followed one of his guests' links to Watergate.com.

Spurred on by a Woodward&Bernstein-like rush of investigative reporting, I did some reading up on the book Silent Coup, by Tom Shachtman & Len Colodny. The following is the result in email format that I leaked sent to my favorite media outlet. And no, it's not the WaPost or the NYTimes.

Subject: Woodward's coverup of his own involvement exposed in "Secret Coup" at watergate.com: his little-known Pentagon briefer job, knowledge of military spy rings and the ruse of Deepthroat


(Deleted)--

John Batchelor had a guest on the other night who has the website Watergate.com.

The website makes references to Len Colodny, one of the authors of Silent Coup. He makes the same case that Dean apparently did in his own book--that Deepthroat was likely Al Haig. Colodny advanced that hypothesis by locating a source that corroborated the working relationship Woodward had had with Haig before becoming a reporter. Woodward vehemently denied it in an interview with Colodny.

Lots of good stuff there. Woodward seems to have been covering up and dissembling as well as Nixon did. Also links to 3 good chapters of Silent Coup:

--The Woodward Haig Connection (Woodward's history, including his new post at the Pentagon in August 1969, briefing of Haig) Link.

--The Return of Alexander Haig (wiretapping background) Link.

--The 181/2 minute gap (Haig and others spun an accidental erasure into a crime by Nixon) Link.

--the "spy ring" involved with Kissinger's NSC for the benefit of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of which Woodward and Haig were aware and probably moreso were involved in trafficking in the intel. Link.

--more spy ring from Link:

SEVEN DAYS IN DECEMBER:
ESPIONAGE AND TREASON IN THE WHITE HOUSE

In a scenario that seems straight from the pages of a Hollywood screenplay, the events that played out during seven days in December 1971 revealed that the Pentagon had poised itself against the White House. The Pentagon's Chief Investigator W. Donald Stewart remarked: "When we broke [Yeoman Charles E.] Radford that night, that's where I got the Seven Days in May idea. I said Jesus Christ, here's the military actually spying on the President of the United States . . . this is a hanging offense."

Even Nixon himself declared that the Joint Chiefs had committed "a federal offense of the highest order." Oval Office meeting 12/21/71



There's a video of one of the Silent Coup authors, Len Colodny Link.

The video and the chapters explain how Woodward falsely denied having been an intelligence briefer to Al Haig. His little-known responsibility as a briefer to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1969-1970, where Haig worked, subsequently was confirmed to the author by the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer. The author stresses how this relationship and Haig's position was perfectly suited to provide the information Woodward would later report as coming from Deepthroat. Seems that Woodward was recruited early on in Yale and was into top secret stuff right away.

Lots of intrigue by The Times, Howard Kurtz and others trying to poo-poo the author's premise that Woodward actually worked in that capacity, had a relationship with Haig and that Deepthroat didn't just confirm stories, he supplied them often as the sole source, not as one of several sources as Woodward would often claim.

The 3 chapter exerpts cover how Woodward and Deepthroat

--collaborated to hide their previous working relationship, which involved Woodward briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)--which included Al Haig(Deepthroat, the author argues) on highly sensitive intelligence matters. The JCS apparently had a liaison in the National Security Council which was involved in a spy ring (the Moorer/Radford affair) to collect info and even "stolen documents" from Kissinger's NSC. The JCS disapproved of much of the Nixon/Kissinger foreign policy and wanted to keep tabs on them. Woodward supposedly delivered some of these intel "packages" to the JCS and briefed them on them. As you said, Rush, Woodward did it "whatever the price."

--kept the lid on information about the '69-'71 wiretap records stored in Ehrlichman's safe that implicated Haig in the electronic eavesdropping of his former colleagues. Also kept the lid on Haig's implication in the wiretapping of conversations between Daniel Ellsberg and Halperin involving the publication of the Pentagon Papers ;

--shifted blame for various FBI wiretappings of journalists and others away from the FBI (of which both Deepthroat/Haig and Woodward had to have known from their briefing days) and focused onto the Committe to Reelect the President, "Ex-CIA and Ex-FBI people," and especially onto Hunt and Liddy. And of course by extension to Nixon;

--hid the likelihood that Deepthroat was often the only source of stories, not one of several to "confirm" Woodward's stories; and that many of those tips were likely purposefully wrong or distorted;

--how the missing 181/2 minutes of tape were likely erased by mistake but were used by Deepthroat and others to purposefully make Nixon look like he had committed a crime;

--how Woodward and Deepthroat (Haig) slanted, distorted and leaked whatever it took to embarrass Nixon, weaken him in his 2nd term or bring him down for reasons mostly unrelated to preserving our nation, Constitution, etc.


Here's a good summary from page 282, "The Return of Alexander Haig" Link:

"Many people have tried to pinpoint the identity of Deep Throat in the reporters' earlier book, All the President's Men, and in pursuing Throat's identity have been led astray from the real story, that of the joint involvement of Bob Woodward, the Navy briefer-turned-reporter, and Alexander Haig, the man he often briefed at the White House, in the complex tragicomedy we have come to know as Watergate. Our philosophy in the following pages and chapters will be not to chase Deep Throat through the dramatizations in All The President's Men--the flowerpot and marked-up newspapers that Woodward and Deep Throat supposedly used to signal one another, and the darkened parking garage where Woodward claims he and his source met. Rather, we will trace the activities of Bob Woodward and Alexander Haig, and see what relevance those had to the removal of Richard Nixon from the presidency of the United States, and thereby understand why the Deep Throat cover has shielded both men for nearly two decades."

If even half of the stuff in Silent Coup is true then Woodward has pulled off quite a coverup. Little better than Nixon.


Paul Shelton

Update June 5th: Bill Kristol argued on Fox News Sunday that the media's role in uncovering Watergate was greatly overblown and referenced a July 1974 article by Edward Jay Epstein.

The natural tendency of journalists to magnify the role of the press in great scandals is perhaps best illustrated by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s autobiographical account of how they “revealed” the Watergate scandals.* The dust jacket and national advertisements, very much in the bravado spirit of the book itself, declare: “All America knows about Watergate. Here, for the first time, is the story of how we know.... In what must be the most devastating political detective story of the century, the two young Washington Post reporters whose brilliant investigative journalism smashed the Watergate scandal wide open tell the whole behind-the-scenes drama the way it happened.” In keeping with the mythic view of journalism, however, the book never describes the “behind-the-scenes” investigations which actually “smashed the Watergate scandal wide open”—namely the investigations conducted by the FBI, the federal prosecutors, the grand jury, and the Congressional committees. The work of almost all those institutions, which unearthed and developed all the actual evidence and disclosures of Watergate, is systematically ignored or minimized by Bernstein and Woodward. Instead, they simply focus on those parts of the prosecutors’ case, the grand-jury investigation, and the FBI reports that were leaked to them.

...


If Bernstein and Woodward did not in fact expose the Watergate conspiracy or the cover-up, what did they expose? The answer is that in late September they were diverted to the trail of Donald H. Segretti, a young lawyer who had been playing “dirty tricks” on various Democrats in the primaries. The quest for Segretti dominates both the largest section of their book (almost one-third) and most of their “exclusive” reports in the Post until the cover-up collapsed later that March. Unidentified sources within the government gave Bernstein and Woodward FBI “302” reports (which contain “raw”—i.e., unevaluated—interviews), phone call records, and credit-card records, all of which elaborated Segretti’s trail. Through the FBI reports and phone records, they located a number of persons whom Segretti had tried to recruit for his “dirty-tricks” campaign. The reporters assumed that this was all an integral part of Watergate, and wrote that “the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage. . . . The activities, according to information in FBI and Department of Justice files, were aimed at all the major Democratic Presidential contenders.” They further postulated that there were fifty other Segretti-type agents, all receiving information from Watergate-type bugging operations.

As it turned out, this was a detour, if not a false trail. Segretti (who served a brief prison sentence for such “dirty tricks” as sending two hundred copies of a defamatory letter to Democrats) has not in fact been connected to the Watergate conspiracy at all. Almost all his work took place in the primaries before any of the Watergate break-ins in June 1972; he was hired by Dwight Chapin in the White House and paid by Herbert Kalmbach, a lawyer for President Nixon, whereas the Watergate group was working for the Committee for the Re-election of the President and received its funds from the finance committee. No evidence has been offered by anyone, including Woodward and Bernstein, that Segretti received any information from the Watergate group, and the putative fifty other Donald Segrettis have never been found, let alone linked to Watergate. In short, neither the prosecutors, the grand jury, nor the Watergate Committee has found any evidence to support the Bernstein-Woodward thesis that Watergate was part of the Segretti operation.

The behavior of the officials who steered Bernstein and Woodward onto this circuitous course makes in itself a revealing case study. Bernstein and Woodward identify their main source only under the titillating code-name of “Deep Throat,” and indicate that “Deep Throat” confirmed their suspicion that Segretti—and political spying—were at the root of the Watergate conspiracy. But who was “Deep Throat” and what was his motivation for disclosing information to Woodward and Bernstein? The prosecutors at the Department of Justice now believe that the mysterious source was probably Mark W. Felt, Jr., who was then a deputy associate director of the FBI, because one statement the reporters attribute to “Deep Throat” could only have been made by Felt. (I personally suspect that in the best traditions of the New Journalism, “Deep Throat” is a composite character.) Whether or not the prosecutors are correct, it is clear that the arduous and time-consuming investigation by Woodward and Bernstein of Segretti was heavily based on FBI “302” reports, which must ultimately have been made available by someone in the FBI. The prosecutors suggest that there was a veritable revolt against the directorship of L. Patrick Gray, because he was “too liberal.” Specifically, he was allowing agents to wear colored shirts, grow their hair long, and was even recruiting women. More important, he had publicly reprimanded an FBI executive. According to this theory, certain FBI executives released the “302” files, not to expose the Watergate conspiracy or drive President Nixon from office, but simply to demonstrate to the President that Gray could not control the FBI, and therefore would prove a severe embarrassment to his administration. In other words, the intention was to get rid of Gray.

Such a theory would be perfectly consistent with the information: disclosing activities of the source that led Bernstein and Woodward astray.


...

Perhaps the most perplexing mystery in Bernstein and Woodward’s book is why they fail to understand the role of the institutions and investigators who were supplying them and other reporters with leaks. This blind spot, endemic to journalists, proceeds from an unwillingness to see the complexity of bureaucratic in-fighting and of politics within the government itself. If the government is considered monolithic, journalists can report its activities, in simply comprehended and coherent terms, as an adversary out of touch with popular sentiments. On the other hand, if governmental activity is viewed as the product of diverse and competing agencies, all with different bases of power and interests, journalism becomes a much more difficult affair.

In any event, the fact remains that it was not the press which exposed Watergate; it was agencies of government itself. So long as journalists maintain their usual professional blind spot toward the inner conflicts and workings of the institutions of government, they will no doubt continue to speak of Watergate in terms of the David and Goliath myth, with Bernstein and Woodward as David and the government as Goliath.

Perhaps it is actually not so much of a mystery why "fail to understand the role of the institutions and investigators who were supplying them and other reporters with leaks." Woodward and Bernstein did some good reporting, became famous, wrote several books, had a popular movie made about them and made a lot of money. Considering the important detail that the usage of the name and the character of "Deep Throat" began not in the first draft of "All the President's Men" but after the suggestion of their editor, it is likely that the story was "sexed up" for a variety of reasons. "Deep Throat" and other now-proven exaggerations and falsehoods still make for interesting reading and viewing but pushes the Woodward and Bernstein account of Watergate and its characters a little bit further towards fiction.

The CIA 2005 World Factbook is out.