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Was Deep Throat a CIA Officer? In Wedge I reviewed clues to the identity of the legendary source on whom Woodward and Bernstein claimed to rely in their Watergate probe. I considered two CIA officers, Cord Meyer and William Colby, as possible matches. Since Woodward and Bernstein have repeatedly said that they will identify Throat when he dies, and since both Colby and Meyer are dead, I believe that both men should be crossed off the list of possibles. Perhaps Edward Jay Epstein was right, after all, to argue that there was no Throat. Washington, D.C. -- June 17, 1972 The Central Intelligence Agency first heard about the Watergate break-in, according to its own records, at 5 p.m. that Sunday afternoon, when an inquiry about the arrested men was received from reporter Bob Woodward at the Washington Post. That call was soon followed by one from the FBI, advising that McCord and Hunt had been identified as former officers of CIA. By 8:45 p.m. the case had been taken to Director of Security Howard Osborn. It was one of Osborn's routine duties to inform CIA Director Richard Helms of any trouble in the extended Agency family, and that included events like suicides, break-ins, rapes, and other bad things that happened in a big city like Washington. But when Osborn called Helms at 10 p.m. that evening, the DCI knew that this episode was different; he sensed, he later said, the Watergate affair would be "big news from the moment it happened." Not only were Hunt and McCord former CIA officers, but all of the Miami Cubans had worked for the Agency during Bay of Pigs, and one of them was still a contract agent on the Agency payroll. The next 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." Only William Colby, Helms announced, would deal with outside parties seeking cooperation from 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 CIA was accomplished by Deep Throat, a source who began feeding leads to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, by the reporter's own account, only hours after Helms launched CIA's damage-control plan. Woodward's later description of Deep Throat as having "an aggregate of information flowing 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. And 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." Clues suggest that Deep Throat was a CIA officer present at the June 19 damage-control meeting. His name was Cord Meyer, and he bore a special grudge against Nixon, because of the latter's alleged complicity in the McCarthyist witch hunts, which had once almost cost Meyer his CIA job. Woodward describes Throat as a chain-smoker and heavy drinker, which Meyer was. Woodward identifies Throat as an intellectual who "knew too much literature too well"; Meyer was an award-winning literary talent. To Woodward, Throat's appearance connoted "too many battles"; Meyer had a glass eye from the Battle of Iwo Jima. Perhaps most importantly, Meyer had extremely intimate connections with Ben Bradlee, Woodward's boss at the Washington 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 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 of the copy Post and scribble on it times for secret meetings. [Home] |
Ideally,
Helms would have liked to settle the matter quietly, without publicity,
according to the 1955 agreement between CIA and Justice, which called
for the Agency to investigate its own. But that agreement applied only
to current Agency employees, and in any case the incident was already
public knowledge. All Helms could do, for the moment, was to call Gray,
disavow any knowledge of what the Agency's ex-employees were up to, and
warn: "These fellows may have some connection with Ehrlichman. You'd better
watch out."