Mark Felt - Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House

The Real Story from the Watergate Whistleblower

It was the biggest mystery in American history. A shadowy source deep within Washington had leaked crucial information helping two journalists uncover the 1972 Watergate Scandal. Three decades later, Mark Felt would finally identify himself as the man everyone called Deep Throat. This is his story.

He tracked Nazi and Soviet spies, tackled mobsters in Kansas City and took down the bureaus most wanted list, rising to one of the FBIs top positions as the eyes and ears of the intelligence service. Drawing on his memoirs, memos and secret files, this is the account of a G-mans life and his struggle for honour in Washington.

The late Mark Felt died in December, 2008, after living the last days of his life in Santa Rosa, California, with his daughter Joan Felt and grandsons Will Felt, Rob Jones and Nick Jones. He retired in 1973 as the Associate Director of the FBI.

John OConnor is a trial litigation attorney and attorney fee consultant practising in San Francisco. He is a former federal prosecutor, and in private practice represented the government in the financial institutions crisis. He earned his law degree from the University of Michigan, where he was Associate Editor of the Michigan Law Review, and his A.B., magna cum laude, from the University of Notre Dame. He lives in Marin County, California.

Mark Felt(19132008) dedicated this book to the stalwart special agents of the modern FBI, present and former, whose skill, dedication, and integrity have served the U.S. so well for over nine decades. When permitted to do their jobs, these agents have evenly enforced our laws without regard to power or privilege, protecting both our civil liberties against unnecessary governmental incursion and our lives against criminal and terrorist assault. Mark hoped that by telling his story, those who have criticized these agents will reevaluate, and come to view them as the principled protectors of society that they are.

John OConnordedicates his work to his late father and former (194043) FBI Agent, John C. OConnor. The senior OConnor taught his son, by example, the FBI technique for picking up used cocktail glasses without compromising the latent fingerprints, always loudly announcing FBI John! when so doing. Although this was the sole FBI technique he taught his son, he always practiced the core FBI values of fairness, loyalty, and honesty, thus proving himself truly worthy of the sobriquet FBI John.

In Felt, Mark Felt and I gave Watergate a brand new, incisive perspectivefrom that of a crack FBI agent leading the investigation and definitely not, like the hundreds of other books tackling the subject, from that of a journalist or historian.

For those unfamiliar with Watergate, Deep Throat was Mark Felt, who died aged ninety-five in December 2008. He was an FBI special agent and later the Bureaus deputy director who had anonymously fed the Washington Posts Bob Woodward (working with Carl Bernstein) snippets of information, making sure they concentrated on specific issues, that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Felt knew that Nixon and his administration were lying, trying to cover-up the 1972 break-in to, and bugging of, the Watergate HQ of their political rivals, the Democratic National Committee. Nixon eventually jumped before being impeached, while sixty-nine people, many leading figures in the administration, were indicted, with forty-eight found guilty. Felt kept his role as Deep Throat a secret for nearly thirty-three years until he and I, his lawyer, revealed it in Vanity Fair magazine in 2005.

He cleverly managed to foil the obstruction of justice while avoiding any embarrassment to the FBI, but he clearly had clashing ethical concerns. To show his pivotal part in toppling Nixons White House administration, we melded (in the original book) the story of Felts moral upbringing with that of his career in the FBI. We added information in the public and private domain, from Marks own 1979 memoir to conversations with his family and friends. We provided inside knowledge of federal investigative and prosecutorial protocol. And now, for this new edition, I have included some strikingly pertinent material only recently uncovered, both by dint of hard work and serendipity.

While elucidating what we viewed as Mark Felts noble enterprise, we touched on several corollary issues that strongly resonate now more than ever. What is the proper balance between the demands of popularly elected politicians and those of civil servants sworn to perform their duties without regard to politics? How far should a journalist go, in the interest of writing an accurate story, to describe a key source who wants to remain anonymous? What ethical standards should apply to leakers who must also conform to the law? And should the same civil liberties protecting citizens from political oppression also apply to, and shackle, law enforcements anti-terrorism efforts? This final question actually applied to Mark when he was prosecuted in 1980. Hed been accused of illegally authorizing FBI agents in the early 1970s to break into the homes of suspected supporters of the terrorist group Weather Underground, which had launched a bombing campaign in Washington. Ironically, Nixon testified on Marks behalf, stating that the FBI was authorized to carry out such break-ins and, although found guilty in 1980, Mark was pardoned by President Reagan in 1981.

In the light of the issues, it is clear that this edition is even more relevant in 2017 than it was in 2006, given the political and legal crosscurrents now dominating the news. As William Faulkner famously said, The past is never dead. Its not even past. Watergate and its issues are still with us.

It was one of those events that divide history. Before dawn on the morning of June 17, 1972, five intruders wearing surgical gloves and business suits were found hiding in a small office at the Watergate, a luxury complex located along the Potomac River in Washington. The crime itself was a curiosity; there didnt seem to be much worth bugging or stealing in the office, part of a suite occupied by the Democratic National Committee. But within two days, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had linked the intruders to the White House. The investigation intensified into a war of wills between FBI agents determined to follow these links and senior officials of the Nixon administration determined to hide them. Over the next two years, the confrontation shook the U.S. government to its constitutional foundations.

As the scandal developed, the headlines grew bigger and darker. Nixons men had subverted the democratic electoral process and obstructed the criminal justice system. The Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Communications Commission, and other government offices were manipulated to punish political enemies and harass opponents. White House agents committed burglaries and conducted illegal electronic surveillance. The investigation spread from the FBI to the courts to Congress. On August 8, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon resigned in disgrace.

American politics still can be classified as either Before Watergate or After Watergate. In the end, the national nightmare led to the destruction of a presidency and criminal cases against dozens of government officials. But what survives from that era is the series of reforms that came in the aftermath. Today, Washington operates by new standards of openness and accountability. Presidents face stronger scrutiny by Congress and the press. Since Nixons time, the use of presidential power has been examined microscopically, and any scandal worth its salt has become a gate, from Iran-Contragate to Monicagate. But Watergate above all has entered the political lexicon, standing for abuses of epic proportionsand for the forces that worked against those crimes.