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Letter to the editor

Felt's ambition worked against Nixon

The president thought Mark Felt would help him in the investigation. Instead, Felt became Deep Throat.

WASHINGTON - W. Mark Felt wanted to become FBI director. President Richard Nixon and his closest aides thought that ambition might make Felt the ideal person to sidetrack an FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary.

They couldn't have been more wrong.

Rather than helping shield Nixon, Felt, now 91, became the best-known anonymous source in history. As Deep Throat, he was a key figure in the scandal that led to Nixon's resignation.

Information was traveling from Felt, the No. 2 official at the FBI, to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, snippets from a criminal investigation that led ultimately to the president.

Woodward said Tuesday that Felt helped the newspaper at a time of tense relations between the White House and much of the FBI hierarchy.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover died shortly before the Watergate break-in. Felt hoped that he would be the next director, according to the Post, but Nixon appointed an administration insider, Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray.

Felt's ambition was no secret, as White House tape recordings from the scandal show.

Six days after the break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee, Nixon and his co-conspirators discussed ordering the FBI to shut down its probe, on grounds that it would interfere with a CIA operation.

"Mark Felt wants to cooperate because he's ambitious," chief of staff H.R. Haldeman said.

"Yeah," the president replied.

Felt had all the necessary ingredients to be Deep Throat. He had access to information as the FBI's person in charge of the Watergate investigation. He had the motive to leak to Woodward: Nixon was trying to shut down the probe. And he knew Woodward and was his source on the FBI's investigation on the shooting of presidential candidate George Wallace of Alabama.

Felt had a storied career at the bureau, one that also had its share of controversy.

A jury found him guilty in 1980 of violating civil rights by authorizing warrantless searches at homes of friends and relatives of left-wing fugitives during the early 1970s. President Ronald Reagan pardoned him and another former FBI official. Felt and his co-defendant had argued they were authorized by their boss, acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray III, to approve break-ins without obtaining warrants.

In the story that Felt was Deep Throat, Vanity Fair magazine wrote of his ascent inside the bureau run by J. Edgar Hoover: "In a move to rein in his power-seeking head of domestic intelligence, William C. Sullivan, Hoover promoted Felt to a newly created position overseeing Sullivan, vaulting Felt to prominence."

Born in Twin Falls, Idaho, he graduated from the University of Idaho, went to George Washington University Law School and joined the FBI in 1942.

[Last modified June 1, 2005, 00:39:12]