Right Wing Nut House

Earlier today, I highlighted the possibility that Al Haig could be a second piece in the composite Deep Throat puzzle. I still believe there’s more to discover about the sourcing of the Wood/Stein stories and the outing of Mark Felt as the one and only Deep Throat just doesn’t close the books as far as I’m concerned. I may be tilting at windmills here in trying to pin something on Haig, but I thought that this would be as good a time as any to look into what has to be one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of the executive branch, the Moorer-Radford Affair and how a relationship developed between a young naval briefing officer for the Pentagon named Bob Woodward and the Assistant to the National Security Adviser, Alexander Haig.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had maintained a liaison office with the National Security Council for many years. This office kept the Chiefs informed of White House thinking on security matters as well as other items of potential interest to the military. There was nothing unusual about this as the Pentagon liaised with a number of committees and boards throughout the national security establishment.

Then Nixon was elected and things changed dramatically. Nixon’s paranoia made him suspicious of all but a handful of close aides. Couple that with Henry Kissinger’s well known desire to keep as much of the decision making power for national security in his own hands and the Joint Chiefs suddenly found themselves left out in the cold on matters vital to the military. The Viet Nam war was still raging at the time and Nixon’s back channel negotiations with the Russians and the Chinese along with his plans to draw down troop strength was done with very little input from the Chiefs.

When Admiral Moorer took over as Chairman of the JCS, he named Admiral Robert Weland as JCS liaison to the NSC. Weland reported directly to Moorer and brought along a Yeoman to assist him, one Charles Radford. Where in the past, there was little if any clandestine activity on the part of the liaison office with regards to the NSC, Welander began what became nothing less than a covert operation on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to try and pry loose the secrets Nixon so desperately wanted to keep from them.

It was at this point that a young Pentagon briefer entered the picture. Bob Woodward’s role in the affair has always been speculated on because it became clear after a while that in addition to Yeoman Radford rifling through secret papers and the like, the Chiefs were being assisted by someone else on the White House staff. This was revealed when Jack Anderson, the muckraking columnist, published excerpts from highly classified briefings about the 1971 India-Pakistan conflict in which instead of being neutral, the US was “tilting” toward Pakistan.

Nixon was angry enough to sick John Erlichman on the leakers. What Erlichman discovered astonished the President. Accompanying NSC Deputy Haig on trips, Radford would return with gobs of information purloined from Haig’s briefcase. The Nixon tapes make clear that the President, Haldeman and Erlichman all believed that Haig was complicit in the Affair but could probably never pin anything on him.

The speculation about Haig centers on where his “loyalties” lay. Many observers believe that Haig could very well have been passing information on to the JCS due to his lifelong love and commitment to the military. And what better way to keep the Chiefs informed than by using the young Bob Woodward as a conduit back to Woodward’s boss Admiral Welander? At the very least, the briefings Woodward gave Haig in the basement of the White House establishes a prior relationship.

The final act of this drama was an anti-climax. After tracing the leaks to Radford, the Yeoman confessed his role in the spy ring and implicated both Welander and Moorer. When questioned, Welander implicated Moorer and perhaps even Haig, although some believe the record was expunged when Fred Buzzardt, Nixon’s lawyer and a good friend of Haig’s “reinterviewed” Welander sans the references to the former NATO Commander.

Nixon was in a quandary. Revelations like the ones made by Radford could roil the country even more than it already was in addition to lowering the stature of a military already suffering the effects of bad press from the Viet Nam war.

So Nixon sat on the scandal. It wasn’t until several years later that the Affair came to light. And by then, the impact of disclosure was muted by Nixon’s legacy of deceit. It just didn’t seem surprising that the JCS would have to spy on the executive in order to find out information they thought they were entitled to.

Some writers have taken this incident and run wild with speculation that the military somehow orchestrated Nixon’s downfall. What Moorer-Radford makes clear is that in the end, these guys weren’t clever enough to carry something like that off. Radford’s activities were amateurish and not very effective. Whether someone else was supplying the JCS with information is unknown to this day. Nixon’s idle speculation about Haig could very well have been a product of his penchant for paranoia with Haldeman and Erlichman as his chief enablers in this regard, always agreeing with him, always egging him on to more fantastic flights of fancy as to who was against him.

But one fact is undeniable and confirmed by Admiral Welander. Bob Woodward briefed Alexander Haig many times in the basement of the White House in the years 1969-1970. And when Woodward went to work for the Washington Post shortly after his leaving the military in 1971, he already knew where to go for information about the Nixon White House.

What was said between Nixon and his Chief of Staff H.R. Halderman during the infamous 18 1/2 gap on a tape from June 20,1972? The question has tantalized historians and Watergate aficionados since the information was confirmed by Judge John Sirica on December 7, 1973. At that time, Sirica was grilling poor Rosemary Woods, Nixon’s personal secretary, about how she could have possibly accidentally erased such crucial evidence. Mrs. Woods explanation became part of Watergate lore.

Woods had been transcribing the June 20 tape when the phone rang. As she leaned over to answer it, her foot accidentally moved from the “play” function to the “reverse” function on the foot pedal controls for the tape recorder. At the same time, her hand must have accidentally pressed the “record” button on the machine.

Since experts later testified that there were between 5 and 9 separate erasures, Mr. Woods evidently got quite a few phone calls.

Of course, no one believed her. And it’s to Sirica’s credit I think, that he didn’t charge Mrs. Woods with obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, or any other serious crime. He must have realized that it wasn’t Woods who erased the tape in the first place.

If not Woods, who?

The answer to that question reveals the problem facing many Watergate buffs this morning. While Mark Felt was certainly in a position to reveal information to Wood/Stein about the FBI’s investigation, there’s very little doubt he could not have known about the tape gap. And yet, in a story dated almost a month before Mrs. Woods grilling by Judge Siraca, the intrepid Post reporters had the story of the tape gap and immediately recognized its significance.

Here’s Nixon biographer Jonathon Aiken:

This was the story in the Washington Post of November 8, 1973 saying that a crucial White House tape of June 20, 1972 featuring Nixon and his chief of staff, H R Halderman, had been “doctored” and that the problems on the tape were of a “suspicious nature”.

Deep Throat told Bob Woodward that this tape contained “deliberate erasures”. This was the sensational story of the 18-and-a-half minute gap on the tape. It remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of Watergate because it contains the probable identity of Deep Throat.

When Deep Throat leaked the information about “deliberate erasures” to Woodward at some time in the first week of November 1973 only six people in the White House, or for that matter in the world, knew about the problem of the gap in the tape. They were Richard Nixon; Rose Mary Woods (Nixon’s personal secretary); Alexander Haig (The White House chief of staff); Haig’s deputy, Major General John C Bennett and two trusted Nixon White House aides, Fred Buzhardt and Steve Bull.

I saw Haig on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country last night and the old guy gave some very strange answers. He kept insisting he had Felt pegged all along as Deep Throat. He just couldn’t get the revelation to his publisher in time to make the deadline for the publication of his second book(!) And the look on his face when others on the panel were talking bordered on triumphant.

I may be imagining this because my personal choice for one of the Deep Throats had always been Haig. As many authors that chronicled Nixon’s last days have pointed out, Haig pretty much orchestrated the entire endgame of Nixon’s resignation. One book even goes so far as to attempt to tie Haig to a coup d’etat by the military and other elements in the national security apparatus who wanted Nixon out. The book’s claims are as sensational as they are loony. But it gave an accurate portrait of Haig as someone with vast contacts in many areas of government - contacts that he could have used to disseminate a lot of information about Watergate.

Many historians have speculated that Deep Throat is a composite of at least 2 and possibly 3 different people. That’s because Wood/Steins information came from someone or a couple of someones who were privy to information from both the Department of Justice and the highest levels of the executive branch. If Deep Throat were one individual, someone with that type of access would stick out like a sore thumb. Since no one person would seem to fit the bill, I believe it likely that Alexander Haig could be another, equally important source, for Wood/Stien’s Watergate stories.

The confirmation by Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstien of Felt’s role as Deep Throat said nothing about there not being another source. Bradlee seemed to go out of his way to put an exclamation mark on the story when he said “The last secret of Watergate” had been revealed. And Woodward himself may be relieved that Felt had taken some of the attention away from other candidates. That’s because Woodward’s association with Haig may reveal more than just the General being a source for Watergate. In a subject I’ll cover in full later today, Woodward’s commanding officer while he was in the Navy was Admiral Thomas Moorer who was involved in one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of the executive branch, the so-called Moorer-Radford Affair. This incident is one of the least known and aspects of the entire Watergate matter. And Woodward, as an aide to Moorer, used to brief Alexander Haig on a regular basis.

This proves nothing, of course. But it’s interesting nonetheless. So until proven otherwise, I will continue to believe in multiple Deep Throats.

It ain’t over yet.

We’ve all heard by now that the Washington Post Watergate source Deep Throat “outed” himself yesterday in the pages of Vanity Fair magazine. What few people have examined yet is the process by which that information eventually came to light and what’s shaping up to be an interesting story on the family of Mark Felt who saw the outing of Deep Throat as a way to fame and riches.

First let me say that I sympathize with Felt’s family in that the medical bills associated with Mr. Felt’s illnesses are probably substantial. And I admire the fact that his daughter opened her home to the former FBI #2 man and evidently took good care of him.

But there are several unanswered questions that the family is going to have to deal with over the next few days and weeks. First and foremost: Was Mark Felt of sound enough mind to make the decision on his own to reveal his identity as Deep Throat?

Apparently, when Bob Woodward received word this past weekend that Vanity Fair was going with the story, this was the first question that entered his mind. Woodward had seen Felt in 1999 at which time the family first approached him about writing a book with Felt about the mystery. Questions of Felt’s mental capacity bothered Woodward up until the moment the story broke:

Woodward and others at The Post were caught by surprise. Woodward had known that family members was considering going public; in fact, they had talked repeatedly with Woodward about the possibility of jointly writing a book to reveal the news. An e-mail from Felt’s daughter over the Memorial Day weekend continued to hold out the idea that Woodward and Felt would disclose the secret together.

Throughout those contacts, Woodward was dogged by reservations about Felt’s mental condition, he said yesterday, wondering whether the source was competent to undo the long-standing pledge of anonymity that bound them.

Then there’s the question of conflict of interest on the part of the Felt family attorney John D. O’Connor. Here he was representing the family in negotiations that spanned at least two years with various publishers and media outlets trying to get money for the family in return for the scoop. Then, when O’Connor got a tentative go ahead from Vanity Fair, he was actually writing the article for publication:

Vanity Fair’s story hinted at but did not answer a key journalistic question: Was Felt, who is 91 and in ill health from a stroke, of sound enough mind to have confirmed his identity to O’Connor, or to have told Woodward that their agreement had ended?

The Vanity Fair story muddies the issue somewhat. O’Connor notes in the story that Felt told him, “I’m the guy they called Deep Throat,” but the context is lacking. For one thing, O’Connor played a dual role: He was providing the Felt family with legal advice while also writing a magazine story, which meant that Felt’s revelation may have been information provided under attorney-client privilege and therefore not subject to unilateral disclosure.

What’s more, as O’Connor makes clear in his story, the Felt family was seeking to profit from Felt’s secret identity and therefore had an incentive to pressure a clearly conflicted Felt into going public.

Did Felt’s family see the old man as some kind of gold mine? The evidence so far would seem to indicate that the answer to that question is yes.

The ancillary question is did Mr. Felt understand that and did he approve?

The family was in a unique position, one that most people would envy but few would really understand. Depending on Mr. Felt’s mental capacity, their motivations could be both mercenary and loving at the same time. Why shouldn’t their father/grandfather receive the recognition as Deep Throat while he was still alive? He certainly looks happy enough in the picture above. And while the family received no money for the Vanity Fair piece, look for the “My Story” book coming very soon to your favorite book store and watch for the mini-series next May during network sweeps.

In short, the family is going to make a financial killing.

In a few months, they may wish that they kept their mouths shut. Along with the money will come more attention more quickly than they may be able to handle. That first interview (I predict either Barbara Walters or Larry King) will be one of the most widely viewed TV programs of the year. Total strangers will come out of nowhere and ask for money, for help, for autographs. And privacy will be a distant memory.

Our mass media culture consumes people like Joan Felt and Nick Jones. They’re about to discover what happens when the confluence of celebrity and news hits the purveyors of both; cable news. With an appetite more voracious than a pack of hyenas and the scruples of my pet cat Aramas, the Three Musketeers of media mayhem will flog and flog and flog this story until the scourging scene in Gibson’s Passion of the Christ will look tame by comparison.Come Saturday, when the cable news outlets have their navel-gazing “media on media” shows, watch for the head shaking and finger wagging from the panelists about how we’re overdoing this story, how the media is in another feeding frenzy mode, and how sad all this is for Mr. Felt’s family.

Do you think that will stop the hyenas from feeding?