Bob Woodward and Mark Felt

Some commentators are saying that the Deep Throat “revelation” was suspiciously timed to distract attention from the Amnesty International report and from Bush’s dismal performance in his mini-press conference. Very probable when you look at the timing. This story could have come out at any time. The Signs of the Times page quoted this account of watching the news that day:

What's really amazing to me is that it isn't already obvious [to everyone] that he's delusional. Oddly enough, a few moments after he abruptly called an end to the press conference, they came on with the news flash about the identity of "Deep Throat."

On the other hand, maybe it could also be a signal sent to the Bush regime by the establishment. Certainly Bush does not want to think, and does not want other people thinking, about the conforting myth of the two young Washington Post reporters bringing down a corrupt, murderous President. Of course, the Washington Post pushed hard for the Iraq War and was firmly in the Bush camp. Could it be that they are angry at him for losing the Iraq War, for prosecuting it so badly? Will they get rid of him? Can they? Will it be the “Bush is gay and had a male prostitute in the White House” that they will trot out to do him in? Of course they are checkmated if they want to bring down Bush because Cheney is Vice-President and you would be getting more of the same if Bush resigns.

Or is the whole establishment on board with the Neocon-Likud party scheme for a collapse of the American Empire, the explosion of the Middle East and the establishment of Greater Israel? Will they stick with Bush?

There are so many candidates for a major scandal for Bush: 911, lies leading to the Iraq War, the AIPAC spy scandal, the American Gulag and war crimes charges against the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis (now there’s an axis of evil!), the looting of the Treasury, the bankrupting of the government, etc. Most of those cut too deep for the elite media, so my bet is on the Bush gay thing being promoted. That would get the U.S. public’s attention!

Bob Woodward published an amazing piece on Mark Felt in the Washington Post Thursday. It is a fairly long piece, so you get to watch how a master propagandist and intelligence agent decides what to say and what not to say.

First, a little background. Many have pointed out the obvious connections Woodward has with Naval Intelligence. He also went to Yale (a few years before Bush). Many have also pointed out how odd it was that he appeared on the Watergate story at that paper at that time. Watergate was most likely a CIA-run setup of Nixon (George Bush senior hovers around this story at crucal moments-- not a good sign). The Washington Post, as heavily connected with the secret government than perhaps any other paper, doesn’t usually go around toppling U.S. leaders, they are associated with the ones who CHOOSE the leaders. Why did they do it to Nixon. Some think it was to prevent Nixon from ending the Cold War. Remember how miserable Bush I looked when Soviet Communism collapsed. He was watching the possible death of the golden goose (defense contracts and other Military-Industrial Complex stuff). The cabal that was to become the Neocons were active at that time, led by Richard Perle and Senator Henry Jackson, who was able to end détente with the Soviet Union. They may also have feared that Nixon was gathering too much power to himelf personally, and that he was not stable or predictable enough. In any case, it was true that the establishment brought Nixon down, not the people. It doesn’t matter what we think, they will tell us what to think.

Jeff Wells wrote:

If the deeper truths of Watergate lead past the White House to the CIA, then Nixon himself is a victim, and not just of his own animus. And that muddies the morality tale. McCord got to play flawed hero during the Senate Hearings, and his and Hunt's CIA pedigree were not explored by legislators and journalists smelling the blood of an unpopular president. Former intelligence briefer Bob Woodward obligingly led the investigation away from the intelligence community, as did "Deep Throat," whether or not he really was the FBI's Mark Felt.

Nixon's cover-up - spurred by the fear that Hunt's arrest could lead to the reopening of the "Bay of Pigs thing" (his euphemism for the Kennedy assassination) - helped close the case that the story began and ended at his office.

Certainly no innocent, but not exactly guilty as charged, either. Nixon was himself, at last, a patsy.

Now Woodward in today’s Post, feinting in the direction of dark truths, hints that Nixon ordered the assassination attempt on George Wallace in 1972. George Wallace was running a racist, right-wing populist third party campaign for the presidency. His votes would have come directly from Nixon’s vote, enough to sway the election toward McGovern. But then, typically, he moves back to the quintessential establishment dismissal of a political assassin, he was a lone nut. Interestingly Woodward says now that his source for that was Felt:

Wallace had a strong following in the deep South, an increasing source of Nixon's support. Wallace's spoiler candidacy four years earlier in 1968 could have cost Nixon the election that year, and Nixon monitored Wallace's every move closely as the 1972 presidential contest continued.

That evening, Nixon called Felt -- not Gray, who was out of town -- at home for an update. It was the first time Felt had spoken directly with Nixon. Felt reported that Arthur H. Bremer, the would-be assassin, was in custody but in the hospital because he had been roughed up and given a few bruises by those who subdued and captured him after he shot Wallace.

"Well, it's too bad they didn't really rough up the son of a bitch!" Nixon told Felt.

Felt was offended that the president would make such a remark. Nixon was so agitated and worried, attaching such urgency to the shooting, that he said he wanted full updates every 30 minutes from Felt on any new information that was being discovered in the investigation of Bremer.

In the following days I called Felt several times and he very carefully gave me leads as we tried to find out more about Bremer. It turned out that he had stalked some of the other candidates, and I went to New York to pick up the trail. This led to several front-page stories about Bremer's travels, completing a portrait of a madman not singling out Wallace but rather looking for any presidential candidate to shoot. On May 18, I did a Page One article that said, among other things, "High federal officials who have reviewed investigative reports on the Wallace shooting said yesterday that there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Bremer was a hired killer."

It was rather brazen of me. Though I was technically protecting my source and talked to others besides Felt, I did not do a good job of concealing where the information was coming from. Felt chastised me mildly. But the story that Bremer acted alone and without accomplices was a story that both the White House and the FBI wanted out.

Woodward is doing his typical thing here, intimating that we are governed by people who would kill people who get in their way, while deflecting attention away from the people who have ruled us since, I don’t know, 1947 or 1963 and pinning it on the evil Nixon. That’s what Watergate did, all the establishment criminality of the FBI and CIA in the post-war period was put on Nixon and people like Bush, Rockefeller, Rumsfeld, and the like could come out looking clean and the dirty business could go on behind the scenes as usual. It also was a diversionary tactic that kept attention away from the Kennedy assassination, which, after Watergate became a “historical” topic, not a current events topic.

Woodward also now credits Felt with attempting to bring down Spiro Agnew early by leaking the information about a bribery charge to Woodward:

In the spring, he said in utter confidence that the FBI had some information that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew had received a bribe of $2,500 in cash that Agnew had put in his desk drawer. I passed this on to Richard Cohen, the top Maryland reporter for The Post, not identifying the source at all. Cohen said, and later wrote in his book on the Agnew investigation, that he thought it was "preposterous." Another Post reporter and I spent a day chasing around Baltimore for the alleged person who supposedly knew about the bribe. We got nowhere. Two years later, the Agnew investigation revealed that the vice president had received such a bribe in his office.

Getting Agnew out of the way was important if they knew they were going to bring Nixon down, then the person selected as Vice President (or the person who controlled him) would be crucial. It turned out to be Gerald Ford, but it is known that George Bush the elder was pushing hard for it then and then again when Ford picked his VP. Bush lost that one to Nelson Rockefeller. I guess some people outrank the Bushes!

As for the Watergate story itself, notice how Woodward does his deflection again here:

In July, Carl went to Miami, home of four of the burglars, on the money trail, and he ingeniously tracked down a local prosecutor and his chief investigator, who had copies of $89,000 in Mexican checks and a $25,000 check that had gone into the account of Bernard L. Barker, one of the burglars. We were able to establish that the $25,000 check had been campaign money that had been given to Maurice H. Stans, Nixon's chief fundraiser, on a Florida golf course. The Aug. 1 story on this was the first to tie Nixon campaign money directly to Watergate.

This is it in a nutshell. The scandal was built on the $25,000 check, not the $89,000 “Mexican” checks that could be traced to what Nixon called: “the Texans,” in other words, the Bush-Oil/Bay of Pigs-Cuban/CIA/Kennedy assassination faction. The scandal diverted us from that toward Nixon’s criminality (and there was a lot of that to look at!).

The Woodward article also gives a good glimpse of how an ambitious young member of the spook elite, rises by attaching himself to a powerful mentor. What is laughable is his pretending to be adrift, just another young Naval officer trying to find his place in the world:

In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and assigned to Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chief of naval operations, I sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House.

One evening I was dispatched with a package to the lower level of the West Wing of the White House, where there was a little waiting area near the Situation Room. It could be a long wait for the right person to come out and sign for the material, sometimes an hour or more, and after I had been waiting for a while a tall man with perfectly combed gray hair came in and sat down near me. His suit was dark, his shirt white and his necktie subdued. He was probably 25 to 30 years older than I and was carrying what looked like a file case or briefcase. He was very distinguished-looking and had a studied air of confidence, the posture and calm of someone used to giving orders and having them obeyed instantly.

I could tell he was watching the situation very carefully. There was nothing overbearing in his attentiveness, but his eyes were darting about in a kind of gentlemanly surveillance. After several minutes, I introduced myself. "Lieutenant Bob Woodward," I said, carefully appending a deferential "sir."

"Mark Felt," he said.

Woodward explains how he could be both adrift and highly ambitious:

This was a time in my life of considerable anxiety, even consternation, about my future. I had graduated in 1965 from Yale, where I had a Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps scholarship that required that I go into the Navy after getting my degree.

That means the Office of Naval Intelligence.

During that year in Washington, I expended a great deal of energy trying to find things or people who were interesting. I had a college classmate who was going to clerk for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, and I made an effort to develop a friendship with that classmate. To quell my angst and sense of drift, I was taking graduate courses at George Washington University. One course was in Shakespeare, another in international relations.

…Felt and I were like two passengers sitting next to each other on a long airline flight with nowhere to go and nothing really to do but resign ourselves to the dead time. He showed no interest in striking up a long conversation, but I was intent on it. I finally extracted from him the information that he was an assistant director of the FBI in charge of the inspection division, an important post under Director J. Edgar Hoover. That meant he led teams of agents who went around to FBI field offices to make sure they were adhering to procedures and carrying out Hoover's orders. I later learned that this was called the "goon squad."

Here was someone at the center of the secret world I was only glimpsing in my Navy assignment, so I peppered him with questions about his job and his world. As I think back on this accidental but crucial encounter -- one of the most important in my life -- I see that my patter probably verged on the adolescent. Since he wasn't saying much about himself, I turned it into a career-counseling session.

Well, it’s a nice story and you can read more about the courtship in the article itself. What’s amazing is that he expects us to believe this:

In August 1970, I was formally discharged from the Navy. I had subscribed to The Washington Post, which I knew was led by a colorful, hard-charging editor named Ben Bradlee. There was a toughness and edge to the news coverage that I liked; it seemed to fit the times, to fit with a general sense of where the world was much more than law school. Maybe reporting was something I could do.

During my scramble and search for a future, I had sent a letter to The Post asking for a job as a reporter. Somehow -- I don't remember exactly how -- Harry Rosenfeld, the metropolitan editor, agreed to see me. He stared at me through his glasses in some bewilderment. Why, he wondered, would I want to be a reporter? I had zero -- zero! -- experience. Why, he said, would The Washington Post want to hire someone with no experience? But this is just crazy enough, Rosenfeld finally said, that we ought to try it. We'll give you a two-week tryout.

Clearly he was placed there for a reason by Naval Intelligence.