"The reason why Felt was rejected as a serious Deep Throat candidate concerns the information he was giving to Bob Woodward. Some of it did include evidence acquired from the FBI investigation. However, most of the important information that Deep Throat revealed came from the CIA and the White House. How did Felt get hold of this informa…
"The reason why Felt was rejected as a serious Deep Throat candidate concerns the information he was giving to Bob Woodward. Some of it did include evidence acquired from the FBI investigation. However, most of the important information that Deep Throat revealed came from the CIA and the White House. How did Felt get hold of this information?For example, one of the most important pieces of information Deep Throat gave Woodward was that Nixon’s was tapping his conversations at the White House. Woodward leaked this information to a staff member of Sam Ervin Committee. He in turn told Sam Dash and as a result Alexander P. Butterfield was questioned about the tapes. Only a very small number of people knew about the existence of these tapes. If Felt knew about these tapes he had his own Deep Throat. If this is the case, it was possibly William C. Sullivan, his former colleague at the FBI who was working for the White House during this period.
Felt, who leaked information to Time Magazine about what became known as the “Kissinger taps”, later admitted that he got this information from Sullivan (one of the first things that Sullivan had done when he was appointed by Richard Nixon was to transfer the wiretap logs to the White House). Sullivan was playing a double-game. He provided information to Nixon about the CIA role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was this information that Nixon tried to use to control Richard Helms. However, Sullivan, like Felt, was a pro-Kennedy Democrat."
""Somebody from the [Lyndon] Johnson administration told us that Johnson had a taping system," said Terry Lenzner, then assistant chief counsel for the Democrats on the committee. "So we as a matter of course we're asking every witness, 'Do you have any information about that?'"
"For example, one of the most important pieces of information Deep Throat gave Woodward was that Nixon’s was tapping his conversations at the White House. Woodward leaked this information to a staff member of Sam Ervin Committee. He in turn told Sam Dash and as a result Alexander P. Butterfield was questioned about the tapes. Only a very small number of people knew about the existence of these tapes. If Felt knew about these tapes he had his own Deep Throat. If this is the case, it was possibly William C. Sullivan, his former colleague at the FBI who was working for the White House during this period.
Felt, who leaked information to Time Magazine about what became known as the “Kissinger taps”, later admitted that he got this information from Sullivan (one of the first things that Sullivan had done when he was appointed by Richard Nixon was to transfer the wiretap logs to the White House). Sullivan was playing a double-game. He provided information to Nixon about the CIA role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was this information that Nixon tried to use to control Richard Helms. However, Sullivan, like Felt, was a pro-Kennedy Democrat."
"The sale of the Woodward-Bernstein papers to the University of Texas in 2003, and the 2005 death of Mark Felt, the former FBI official whom Woodward has identified as Deep Throat, have led researchers to ever larger doubts about the accuracy of Woodward’s reporting on Watergate, and particularly his account of his relationship with his much-heralded, and often inaccurate, Watergate source.
The first domino to fall was Woodward’s contention that Deep Throat was Felt and Felt only, and not a composite character based on numerous sources. The journalist Ed Gray demolished this myth when he completed In Nixon’s Web (2008), the posthumous memoir of his father, L. Patrick Gray III, the acting FBI director during Watergate. In this the Grays benefited from access not only to Woodward’s notes and papers at the University of Texas but also from Pat Gray’s own FBI archive (45 boxes’ worth). In Nixon’s Web exposed how Woodward’s reporting attributed information to Deep Throat that Mark Felt simply could not have known in November 1973, at the time of their last (alleged) meeting in a garage in Rosslyn, Virginia. The book also showed that Woodward’s Deep Throat file included notes from an interview he had conducted not with Mark Felt but with another source at the time, whom the Grays confirmed to be Justice Department official Don Santarelli. Pressed on such matters, Woodward dismissed them as “technical, wiring-diagram issues.”
More recently, we have learned that among those harboring deep skepticism about Woodward’s account of Deep Throat—so critical to the Washington Post’s coverage of Watergate, and to the Woodward legacy—was the man to whose memory The Last of the President’s Men is dedicated: Ben Bradlee, the executive editor who oversaw that coverage.
Rummaging through Bradlee’s papers for an authorized biography, Jeff Himmelman—himself a trusted former researcher to Woodward—came across an unpublished 1990 interview in which Bradlee had confided his misgivings about Woodward’s reliability. “Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen?” Bradlee mused about the notion that Woodward moved a flowerpot on his balcony to signal for meetings with Deep Throat. Likewise, about the purported rendezvous in the garage, Bradlee wondered: “One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings [there were] in the garage.” He added: “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”
In William Sullivan’s book he mentions John Dean requesting the FBI do a background check on a girlfriend. A clue perhaps to how Maureen Dean’s arrest records in New Orleans disappeared.
December 1972, just as the Watergate burglars trial gets underway, Bob Woodward writes a puff piece on Joe Nesline, the DC mob boss who ran with Heidi Rikan and pimp/porn parlor and brothel manager Walter “Buster” Riggin. Carl Bernstein was a frequent visitor to Buster Riggin’s porn parlor. According to an account from DC Vice cop Carl Shoffler, the US attorney was building a case against Bernstein for bouncing checks to prostitutes, but was dissuaded after a threatening phone call by Katherine Graham, The WAPO lawyer Edward Bennett Williams law firm represented Nesline. Judge John Sirica was an old friend of Williams and had connections himself to Joe Nesline. In the 1930s Sirica was the mouthpiece for high level gangster Sam Beard, an associate of Nesline’s Foggy Bottom gang.
"The reason why Felt was rejected as a serious Deep Throat candidate concerns the information he was giving to Bob Woodward. Some of it did include evidence acquired from the FBI investigation. However, most of the important information that Deep Throat revealed came from the CIA and the White House. How did Felt get hold of this information?For example, one of the most important pieces of information Deep Throat gave Woodward was that Nixon’s was tapping his conversations at the White House. Woodward leaked this information to a staff member of Sam Ervin Committee. He in turn told Sam Dash and as a result Alexander P. Butterfield was questioned about the tapes. Only a very small number of people knew about the existence of these tapes. If Felt knew about these tapes he had his own Deep Throat. If this is the case, it was possibly William C. Sullivan, his former colleague at the FBI who was working for the White House during this period.
Felt, who leaked information to Time Magazine about what became known as the “Kissinger taps”, later admitted that he got this information from Sullivan (one of the first things that Sullivan had done when he was appointed by Richard Nixon was to transfer the wiretap logs to the White House). Sullivan was playing a double-game. He provided information to Nixon about the CIA role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was this information that Nixon tried to use to control Richard Helms. However, Sullivan, like Felt, was a pro-Kennedy Democrat."
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKfeltM.htm
""Somebody from the [Lyndon] Johnson administration told us that Johnson had a taping system," said Terry Lenzner, then assistant chief counsel for the Democrats on the committee. "So we as a matter of course we're asking every witness, 'Do you have any information about that?'"
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=3447219&page=1
"For example, one of the most important pieces of information Deep Throat gave Woodward was that Nixon’s was tapping his conversations at the White House. Woodward leaked this information to a staff member of Sam Ervin Committee. He in turn told Sam Dash and as a result Alexander P. Butterfield was questioned about the tapes. Only a very small number of people knew about the existence of these tapes. If Felt knew about these tapes he had his own Deep Throat. If this is the case, it was possibly William C. Sullivan, his former colleague at the FBI who was working for the White House during this period.
Felt, who leaked information to Time Magazine about what became known as the “Kissinger taps”, later admitted that he got this information from Sullivan (one of the first things that Sullivan had done when he was appointed by Richard Nixon was to transfer the wiretap logs to the White House). Sullivan was playing a double-game. He provided information to Nixon about the CIA role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was this information that Nixon tried to use to control Richard Helms. However, Sullivan, like Felt, was a pro-Kennedy Democrat."
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKfeltM.htm
"The sale of the Woodward-Bernstein papers to the University of Texas in 2003, and the 2005 death of Mark Felt, the former FBI official whom Woodward has identified as Deep Throat, have led researchers to ever larger doubts about the accuracy of Woodward’s reporting on Watergate, and particularly his account of his relationship with his much-heralded, and often inaccurate, Watergate source.
The first domino to fall was Woodward’s contention that Deep Throat was Felt and Felt only, and not a composite character based on numerous sources. The journalist Ed Gray demolished this myth when he completed In Nixon’s Web (2008), the posthumous memoir of his father, L. Patrick Gray III, the acting FBI director during Watergate. In this the Grays benefited from access not only to Woodward’s notes and papers at the University of Texas but also from Pat Gray’s own FBI archive (45 boxes’ worth). In Nixon’s Web exposed how Woodward’s reporting attributed information to Deep Throat that Mark Felt simply could not have known in November 1973, at the time of their last (alleged) meeting in a garage in Rosslyn, Virginia. The book also showed that Woodward’s Deep Throat file included notes from an interview he had conducted not with Mark Felt but with another source at the time, whom the Grays confirmed to be Justice Department official Don Santarelli. Pressed on such matters, Woodward dismissed them as “technical, wiring-diagram issues.”
More recently, we have learned that among those harboring deep skepticism about Woodward’s account of Deep Throat—so critical to the Washington Post’s coverage of Watergate, and to the Woodward legacy—was the man to whose memory The Last of the President’s Men is dedicated: Ben Bradlee, the executive editor who oversaw that coverage.
Rummaging through Bradlee’s papers for an authorized biography, Jeff Himmelman—himself a trusted former researcher to Woodward—came across an unpublished 1990 interview in which Bradlee had confided his misgivings about Woodward’s reliability. “Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen?” Bradlee mused about the notion that Woodward moved a flowerpot on his balcony to signal for meetings with Deep Throat. Likewise, about the purported rendezvous in the garage, Bradlee wondered: “One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings [there were] in the garage.” He added: “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”
https://www.commentary.org/articles/james-rosen/bob-woodwards-sins-omission/
In William Sullivan’s book he mentions John Dean requesting the FBI do a background check on a girlfriend. A clue perhaps to how Maureen Dean’s arrest records in New Orleans disappeared.
December 1972, just as the Watergate burglars trial gets underway, Bob Woodward writes a puff piece on Joe Nesline, the DC mob boss who ran with Heidi Rikan and pimp/porn parlor and brothel manager Walter “Buster” Riggin. Carl Bernstein was a frequent visitor to Buster Riggin’s porn parlor. According to an account from DC Vice cop Carl Shoffler, the US attorney was building a case against Bernstein for bouncing checks to prostitutes, but was dissuaded after a threatening phone call by Katherine Graham, The WAPO lawyer Edward Bennett Williams law firm represented Nesline. Judge John Sirica was an old friend of Williams and had connections himself to Joe Nesline. In the 1930s Sirica was the mouthpiece for high level gangster Sam Beard, an associate of Nesline’s Foggy Bottom gang.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/01482376
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-01208r000100040005-4