| Deep Throat Candidates |
For many years I thought that there was good evidence that General Alexander Haig was Deep Throat.
However, his motive seems weak and his ego is such that he would want it to be revealed that he was Deep Throat. Therefore I have spent the last few years trying to find another candidate that had motive and opportunity to be Deep Throat.
For a while David Gergin was looking like a likely Deep Throat. His Yale roots and his access to vital information seemed to point to him. But he had limited access to important information.
Then I looked at Mark Felt, a high level FBI agent who also had access to Deep Throat information. But he also might not have had access to certain data that Deep Throat supposedly knew.
Len Garment ,an old friend of Nixon but nonetheless a liberal lawyer serving as council for Nixon, was also a candidate. But he seems too rabidly pro-Nixon, even now.
William Colby and Richard Helms at CIA both had good motives to be Deep Throat. The plumbers creation was a slap in the face to CIA, stomping on the FBI's and CIA's bureaucratic turf. But I think that one of them may have tasked a CIA person to do the dirty work for them...
Therefore Cord Meyer is my current candidate.
Below is some relevant passages referencing Deep Throat and/or Cord Meyer
p.121 - 122
First there was the case of CIA officer Cord Meyer, Jr. He came from an old family, and had a distinguished Marine career in World War II. A Japanese hand grenade had blown out one of his eyes, and since then had worn a glass eye. After gaining some recognition as a literary talent when the Atlantic published "Waves of Darkness," a short story about his war experience, Meyer became active during the late 1940s in the World Federalist movement, a leftist group proposed putting all mankind under one government. The FBI had looked into the World Federalists, and had apparently given Meyer's name to McCarthy, who in turn pressed the Bureau to investigate him further. By September 1951, Meyer was working for Frank Wisner and Tom Braden in CIA; some said he had "run" there for the "protection" of Dulles, who knew Meyer's father. But the Bureau was not put off Meyer's track by his alleged special relation to the DCI, any more than by the fact that he had spearheaded the expulsion of communists from the Federalists. On August 31, 1953, Meyer was in his office discussing with a branch chief certain lines of actions they planned to follow in Europe when the phone rang and he was requested to go see Richard Helms, then second-in-command of the Agency's clandestine operations under Wisner. Helms seemed uncomfortable as Meyer sat down opposite his desk.
"I've got a rough one," Helms said, offering him a cigarette. "They've apparently found something in your past that looks serious." The allegations in an FBI report on him were so serious, in fact, that he would have to resign immediately, without pay. The "information" included FBI allegations that someone who met Meyer in 1948 "concluded, on the basis of that contact, that you must be in the Communist Party," as well as reports that Meyer associated with persons such as journalist Theodore White a poet Richard Wilbur, who were "associated with Communist front organizations." Additionally, Meyer's wife, Mary Pinchot, had "registered as a member of the American Labor Party of New York in 1944, at which time it was reportedly under extreme left-wing or Communist domination."
As he read the allegations, Meyer's first reaction was incredulity, followed by relief and then by indignation. No old friend turned out to have been a Soviet agent, which was one of the fears he had conjured up while waiting to see the charges. But he was warned that the situation was grave, and that his reply to the charges should be "extremely complete and detailed." For the next few weeks, Meyer worked diligently on his response. He happened to know many communists, because he moved in intellectual circles and had been in with the World Federalists; he had worked to weaken communism in that organization and was now trying to do the same in the international labor movement. He listed dozens of people who could swear to his ultimate loyalty, handed his rebuttal to Houston, and waited. Finally, on Thanksgiving Day, Meyer received a call from Director Dulles; he was acquitted.
Meyer never did discover who at the FBI had been out to get him, or why. In later years, he worked closely with FBI officials on a number of occasions and came to respect and like most of them. They never raised with him the subject of his suspension, and he never asked them about it. But ultimately, he and other CIA officers thought Hoover's Bureau was to blame for the McCarthyist disaster.
p. 300- 302
Monday morning , at his regular 9 a.m. staff meeting, Helms went around the table on the break-in. Cord Meyer, sitting in for DDP Karamessines, remembered "a unanimous expression of total ignorance and surprise," but also "general concern that the public and press would suspect some Agency involvement because of Hunt's and McCord's past connection to the Agency." To prevent that from happening, Helms set out a fundamental strategy. "Stay cool, stay clean, keep away from this," Helms said. "Volunteer nothing, because it will only be used to involve us." William Colby, Helms announced, would deal with outside parties seeking cooperation from the CIA. According to Colby's own account, Helms asked him to "coordinate the Agency's efforts" in deflecting public suspicions of a CIA role in the affair.
Just such a deflection of suspicion away from the CIA was accomplished by Deep Throat, a source who began feeding leads to Post reporter Woodward, by the reporter's own account, on June 19 - only hours after Helms launched CIA's damage-control plan. Woodward's later description of Deep Throat as having "an aggregate of information flowing in and out of many stations" would seem a pointed signal to someone in Langley. Woodward also said that Deep Throat had an "extremely sensitive" position in the Executive Branch, which would perfectly fit someone at CIA, who (according to Woodward) did not like getting calls at the office. The use of an underground parking garage for clandestine meetings would seem to evidence a certain skill at "tradecraft." Furthermore, with the exception of Helms and his DDCI, CIA officers were not political appointees, and therefore their careers, unlike those of Dean and most other possible Throats, would not have automatically fallen with Nixon's own. Woodward himself would later all but confirm that Deep Throat was a spook. "As you know, I'm not going to discuss the identity of Deep Throat or any other of my confidential sources who are still alive. But let me just say that [the] suggestion that we were being used by the intelligence community was of concern to us at the time and afterward."
Could Deep Throat have perhaps been Colby? Much of the information Colby provided to the FBI in the days after the burglary was immediately leaked to the press, as Colby later admitted, though he blamed those leaks on the Bureau. Colby was a political liberal, and no great fan of the Nixon White House; as Helms' damage-control officer on Watergate, he would be perfectly positioned to leak; he was later rumored to use underground parking structures for secret meetings of a personal nature. Moreover, the final pages of Colby's 1978 book, Honorable Men, would contain a suggestive reference to Throat. Discussing how "the public must be informed of what intelligence is doing in its name," Colby cites "unofficial leaks" as one means of so informing the citizenry; sometimes material is made available to the media though "its source in the intelligence community is obscured from the people who use it." Colby then immediately raises the subject of Deep Throat, and although one might expect him to resent the role of Throat as a competitor in controlling public perceptions of Watergate, he actually characterizes Throat as a force for national good: "Deep Throat remains a secret," Colby says, ,"but the public has benefited from his information."
Woodward's clues suggest, however, that Throat was more likely another CIA officer present at the June 19 damage-control meeting. This was Cord Meyer. Woodward describes Throat as a chain-smoker and heavy drinker, which Meyer was and Colby was not. Throat was an intellectual who "knew too much literature too well," and Meyer was an award-winning literary talent. Throat's appearance bespoke "too many battles," and Meyer had a glass eye from the Battle of Iwo Jima. Meyer also reportedly bore a special grudge against Nixon because of his complicity in the McCarthyist drama which had once cost Meyer his CIA job; he was even said to have made digs at CIA secretaries who wore Nixon campaign buttons on their blouses. Meyer was practically a charter member of the Old Boys Network of Yale graduates who had gone on to work in intelligence, and Woodward, too, was a member of this club. In fact, Meyer may well have become acquainted with Woodward during the latter's 1969-1970 tenure as a Washington briefer in naval intelligence: as part of his daily rounds, Woodward sometimes addressed top people in CIA's Department of Plans, where Meyer was then the number-two man. Moreover, Throat knew all about Hunt's activities - his first tips and most of his early leads concerned Hunt - and Meyer was one of the few at the CIA who knew, even before the Watergate burglary, that Hunt was working for the White House. On March 27, 1972, for instance, when CIA's domestic contact office in Miami queried Langley about Hunt's frequent contacts with Cuban exiles, Meyer cabled back that Hunt was in Miami on White House work and that Miami Station should "cool it," i.e., not concern itself with Hunt. Meyer, it should be noted, possessed great family wealth - his father controlled a lot of real estate in Manhattan - which would explain why Throat could afford not to come forward for big bucks (the advance for his book even now, two decades later, would be colossal). But perhaps most important, Meyer had extremely intimate connections with Ben Bradlee, Woodward's boss at the Post. Indeed, they were in-laws, having both married sisters from the socially prominent Pinchot family. Meyer's interface with Bradlee could have had a close professional aspect as well, since Meyer's main duty at CIA was to penetrate and influence leftist but anticommunist organs of opinion. Among other things, Meyer's close relationship to the editor of the Post might have accounted for the special access that allowed Throat to get to Woodward's morning copy of the Post and scribble on it times for secret meetings.
In any case, while Deep Throat, whoever he was, deflected press attention from CIA, Colby deflected requests from the FBI's Alexandria office for information on the burglars.
p. 109-110
The reply to Esterline's inquiry was written by Cord Meyer, assistant deputy director of plans to Tom Karamessines, Hunt's former case officer. Meyer's message arrived in Miami on March 27 and, in the words of Senator Baker, it was "cryptic." In essence, Meyer told Esterline "not [to] ... concern himself the travels of Hunt in Miami, that Hunt was on domestic White House business of an unknown nature that the Chief of Station should `cool it.'
p. 220
Queried about this, Cord Meyer, the assistant deputy director of plans, replied that his cable, ordering the station chief to "cool it" some months before, had been predicated on the fact that the station chief had wanted to check on Hunt's activities domestically. That allegation was denied, however, by the chief of station and, indeed, there is nothing in the CIA's own correspondence to suggest that any such intention ever existed.
p. 268
Bennett's task, moreover, was to steer Woodward and the Post away from leads implicating the CIA in the scandal, whereas Deep Throat had no compunction about suggesting that the CIA was involved in the affair. (ATPM, pp. 73 and 317-18)
In my interview with him, Woodward issued a "preemptive denial" that Bennett and Throat were one - obviously, the Post reporter is concerned that the public should not come to believe that his best a most secret source was a CIA agent.
p. 270
...Woodward went on to list some of the book's [Will] most important revelations, including Liddy's report that the Gemstione charts had been prepared by the CIA. "For me," Woodward wrote, "this suggests more than anything available to date that top CIA officials must have known in advance about Liddy's illegal operations." [Bob Woodward, "Gordon Liddy Spills His Guts," Washington Post Book World, May 18, 1980.]
p. 300
Deep Throat is probably a spook - someone in the intelligence community - with sources in high places. Whether or not Woodward fudged the actual details and circumstances of his meetings with Throat, it is clear that he and his source relied upon some sort of "tradecraft" to meet covertly at odd hours in strange places, and that these meetings were arranged with the help of a secret signaling system. Precautions were taken by both men against physical and electronic surveillance, and the reporter and his source had even worked out a "dead drop" for leaving messages in the event Throat missed a meeting. This is not to say, necessarily, that Deep Throat was a James Bond figure, but, certainly, he knew the ropes.
The realization that Throat might be a spook should not come as a complete surprise. As mentioned before, Woodward's circle of acquaintances prior to his Watergate success cannot have been especially large. While it is true that he may have met some influential people at Yale...
...Deep Throat, therefore, was likely a part of the intelligence milieu, ironically, that was responsible for the Moorer-Radford affair.
...Or Throat could be part of the Old Boys' network, in which case Admiral Bobby Ray Inman must be a leading candidate. A quintessential spook, Inman satisfies some of the most obvious criteria for any Deep Throat candidate: e.g., he was in Washington throughout the period that Woodward was secretly meeting with his source, and, at some point or other, he himself became a source of Woodward's.
p. 131
... bickering between the 10 officers and the area division case officers over use of the labor agents controlled by 10 Division under Cord Meyer.
p. 636
MEYER, CORD. CIA operations officer in charge of International Organizations Division. Chief of Station, London, in 1974.
p.277
Cord Meyer, one of Richard Helms's most trusted deputies, recalled attending a small meeting at the Agency on September 15, shortly after Helms's meeting with the President. "We were surprised by what we were ordered to do, since, much as we feared an Allende presidency," Meyer wrote, "the idea of a military overthrow had not occurred to us as a feasible solution." Despite the doubts, however, the men at the top of the CIA were determined to carry out Nixon's "aberrational and hysterical decision," Meyer wrote. "The pride we might have felt at having been among the select few chosen by the President to execute a secret and important mission was more than counterbalanced by our doubts about the wisdom of this course." Meyer did not say so, but surely there were also doubts about the legality of the President's directive.
p. 343
In April 1972 this book - as yet unwritten - was enjoined; two months later, the number-two man in the Clandestine Services, Cord Meyer, Jr., visited the New York offices of Harper & Row, Inc., on another anti-book mission. The publisher had announced the forthcoming publication of a book by Alfred McCoy called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, charging the agency with a certain degree of complicity in the Southeast Asian drug traffic. Meyer asked old acquaintances among Harper & Row and asked the agency for official confirmation of its request.
p. 73
Woodward had a source in the Executive Branch who has access to information at CRP as well as at the White House.
p. 74
At first Woodward and Deep Throat had talked by telephone, but as the tensions of Watergate increased, Deep Throat's nervousness grew. He didn't want to talk on the telephone, but had said they could meet somewhere on occasion.
Deep Throat didn't want to use the phone even to set up the meetings. He suggested that Woodward open the drapes as a signal. Deep Throat could check each day; if the drapes were open, the two would meet that night. But Woodward liked to let the sun in at times, and suggested another signal.
...
When Woodward had an urgent inquiry to make, he would move the flower pot with the red flag to the rear of the balcony. During the day, Deep Throat would check to see if the pot had been moved. If it had, he and Woodward would meet at about 2:00 a.m. in a pre-designated underground parking garage. Woodward would leave his sixth-floor apartment and walk down the back stairs into an alley.
p.74-75
If Deep Throat wanted a meeting - which was rare - there was a different procedure. Each morning, Woodward would check page 20 of his New York Times, delivered to his apartment house before 7:00 A.M. If a meeting was requested, the page number would be circled and the hands of a clock indicating the time of the rendezvous would appear in a lower corner of the page. Woodward did not know how Deep Throat got to his paper.
The man's position in the Executive Branch was extremely sensitive. He had never told Woodward anything that was incorrect. It was he who had advised Woodward on June 19 that Howard Hunt was definitely involved in Watergate. During the summer, he had told Woodward that the FBI badly wanted to know where the Post was getting its information. He thought Bernstein and Woodward might be followed, and cautioned them to take care when using their telephones. The White House, he had said at the last meeting, regarded the stakes in Watergate as much higher than anyone outside perceived. Even the FBI did not understand what was happening. The source had been deliberately vague about this, however, making veiled references to the CIA and national security which Woodward did not understand.
The day after the indictments were handed down, Woodward broke all the rules about telephone contacts. Deep Throat sounded nervous, but listened as the draft of a story was read to him. It was that federal investigators had received information from Nixon campaign workers that high officials of the Committee for the Re-election of the President had been involved in the funding of the Watergate operation.
"Too soft," Deep Throat said. "You can go much stronger."
The Bookkeeper had been right about the money in Stan's safe. It had financed the Watergate bugging and "other intelligence-gathering activities," he said...
The wiretap logs had reached some of the same Mitchell aides who had disbursed the spying funds, he said.
p. 78
p. 270
The first product of this collaboration was Operation CHAOS, which emerged in August 1967 in response to intensified demands from the Johnson White House to uncover foreign influence behind domestic unrest. Authorized by CIA chief Richard Helms, conceived and justified as a defensive counterintelligence project,* it was supervised by counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton and headed by his deputy, Richard Ober, who had already begun a similar operation complete with a computerized array of files developed in connection with an investigation of the Ramparts expose of the CIA's funding of the National Student Association. (Ober has replaced the FBI's Mark Felt as a suspect for the role of Deep Throat, the secret source of the disclosures of Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein.)
8th