How might have Felt got ahold of Woodward’s paper and written inside of it? I guess he could have just entered the building and picked it up early, but seems like he’d just leave a note. Afterall, the point was not to be seen near his apartment.
Woodward said today that he had no idea how Felt got the paper, or how he noticed Woodward’s flower pot signal. Maybe the Vanity Fair article will mention it.
Woodward’s apartment was right near several big embassies so it’s presumable that there were FBI agents all up in that area, and Felt could have dispatched any of those agents to mark Woodward’s paper or look at his balcony, and the agent wouldn’t have known it had any connection to Deep Throat.
You think Felt could hve assigned some FBI flunky the job of marking up Bob Woodward’s paper with a picture of a clock that changed every time without creating the possibility of having his own cover blown?
The Kiwi connection: this account from today’s NZ Herald {an interview with one of Woodward’s neighbours at the time} may be of interest.
Interesting story. Especially this part:
“…If Woodward wanted to meet Felt he would place a pot plant with a red flag on the back of his balcony…”
Bolding, of course, mine.
An FBI flunky wouldn’t have thought it all that weird if a high-ranking official told him to do that. He would probably be thinking that he was setting up some undercover work or something.
The flunky would have just thought, “Someone here is meeting a guy in this apartment.”
At the time, the concept of “Deep Throat” as a source didn’t exist in people’s heads.
Well, of course, it would have been safe to do in the short run.
But if (as it turned out) the matter of who was behind the whole flower-pot-and-newspaper-intrigue became a three-decades-long burning issue, then you’d think (and Felt would think) that maybe at some point Felt’s flunky might step forward with his incredibly damaging piece of information, no?
Since no one ever stepped forward, I’m assuming that Felt did it without help. That or he arranged to have the help killed.
I sense the birth of a new urban legend.
Felt probably didn’t have the same flunky do it each time.
Woodward implies that Felt was really into all the secrecy and covering of tracks aspect of the information. I would assume that given his choice, Woodward would just have called him up on the phone.
Well, the nature of the signals Felt and Woodward used wasn’t public knowledge at the time (I think the public only learned about that later from Woodward and Bernstein’s book, right?), so Felt wouldn’t have been worried about that blowing his cover. I suspect when Woodward finally did reveal that information, he went to Felt and got his permission first.
Of course, when Woodward eventually did make that information public, this would have tipped off Felt’s flower pot watching and newspaper clock drawing agents (if they existed) to the fact that Felt was the annonymous source. But that doesn’t mean they would have come forward with it. They probably felt more loyalty to Felt and the FBI than to the Nixon administration or the public curiosity. Indeed, Felt probably knew this, or he wouldn’t have given Woodward permission to reveal that information (assuming that’s what happened.)
Isn’t that even more dangerous? To employ a series of flunkies, any one of whom could have exposed Felt over the last thirty-odd years, simply by recalling that he sneaked surriptitious messages onto the newspaper of Bob Woodward during Watergate at Mark Felt’s behest? If you’re suggesting that Felt did it without any possibility of the flunky knowing whose newspaper he was dealing with, that’s a very neat trick.
If Felt he had that kind of loyalty to draw on, he could have found more creative ways to use the flunky. Now we’re assuming that the circle of people who knew about Deep Throat’s identity, and kept the secret, has been vastly expanded from the four (W,B, Bradlee and DT himself) we’ve been marvelling over for their tight-lipped security.
What sort of more creative ways? And why wouldn’t he have that kind of loyalty? He was the head of the FBI’s day-to-day operations. Given the longstanding tradition of FBI autonomy fostered by Hoover, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that most FBI agents at that time felt more loyalty to Felt and the rest of the FBI’s internal leadership than to the Nixon administration.
And as far as keeping secrets, this is what FBI agents are trained to do. I don’t see why it should be particularly surprising that a few agents could keep their mouths shut about something in the face of widespread curiosity from the general public. (For that matter, it’s not surprising that journalists could keep their mouth shut about it either, since they have a compelling interest not to reveal the identities of their sources.)