Deep Throat “snitch” status complicated by gray area

Somewhere between hero and goat, between patriot and traitor, there lies an ethical gray area…. Somewhere between hero and goat, between patriot and traitor, there lies an ethical gray area.

Last week, “Deep Throat,” Bob Woodward’s guiding source during The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate, was revealed to be Mark Felt, then second in command at the FBI.

Vanity Fair disclosed and the Post confirmed this information, providing fodder for columnists, commentators and pundits across the country, all of whom seemed only interested in one question: Is Mark Felt a patriot or a traitor?

The problem with that question is that few, if any, of the partisan hacks attempting to make this distinction seem to have considered Felt’s actions within their historical context.

From the right, Felt is a traitor — a snitch driven entirely by his contempt for Richard Nixon and his desire to see the administration crash and burn. From the left, Felt is a hero — he had the intestinal fortitude to follow his conscience and reveal the truth, despite the trouble he’d have no doubt faced were his colleagues to identify him as the leak.

Felt’s story can’t be adequately told outside the gray area that exists between the two extremes. As for several years during his tenure at the FBI, he lived in an ethical purgatory of sorts.

On one hand, Felt knew of all the White House’s shady dealings. He knew the truth behind the Watergate break-in, he knew the identities of the five men in control of a Republican slush fund that financed covert operations and he knew just how elaborate, expansive and shoddy the cover-up was. It was his job — his civic duty — to see to it that the right information was presented to the right people, that justice might prevail.

On the other hand, Felt, as the second-highest ranking intelligence official in the country, had a responsibility to deal with delicate matters, such as Watergate, with the utmost secrecy as part of a confidentiality agreement he entered into when he joined the FBI.

In taking his information to a Rosslyn, Va., parking garage where he dispensed it to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward on 10 or 12 occasions, Felt violated that agreement. He even had a deeply personal motive for doing so.

Nixon passed over Felt, who was in line to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI, instead appointing L. Patrick Gray following Hoover’s death. Felt won’t deny that this not only angered him, but that he saw it as Nixon’s attempt to increase the White House’s power over the bureau, threatening its autonomy and effectiveness, all in the name of paranoia.

Felt’s critics fault him for not taking his knowledge of crimes and cover-ups to the Grand Jury investigating Watergate. What they fail to mention, though, is that had it not been for the direction he gave Woodward and Bernstein in their investigation, such a grand jury might not even have been impaneled. And even when it was, its members didn’t ask questions that would have forced witnesses to give any incriminating information about the President or any of his aides.

The grand jury was corrupt. White House counsel John Dean was not only involved in the cover-up, but authorized the break-in. Gray, Felt’s immediate superior, was a friend of Nixon’s and in no rush to blow the whistle himself.

Mark Felt was out of options. It was only then that he grudgingly agreed to assist Woodward. Felt always had misgivings about leaking his information — so much so that he refused to reveal to Woodward the extent of his knowledge, at first only offering him hints and attempting to point him in the right direction; he forced Woodward and Bernstein to play by his rules. To do it “my way,” he said, was crucial to maintaining the secrecy of the operation.

The fact of the matter is that had Felt been discovered, he likely wouldn’t have lost his job so much as he would have turned up dead — the result of an elaborately orchestrated, government-sanctioned “suicide.”

Felt, now 91, has said he still feels some degree of shame for betraying the confidence and code of his post, and there’s no doubt that he’ll go down in history as one of the 20thcentury’s most controversial figures.

Once in a while, though, the rules must be broken for the sake of the greater good. It was Mark Felt’s job to see that the right people knew what he knew, that justice would ultimately prevail. In guiding Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation, Felt did just that.

To contact Matt Wein, place a red flag in the flower pot on your balcony, then go to the bottom floor of the Soldiers ‘ Sailors’ parking garage at 2 a.m. Or just e-mail him at mattwein@hotmail.com.