Out of the Shadows
A secret source goes public, putting a new gloss on the running debate over reporters and their leaks
The years of guessing, second-guessing, third-guessing, and endless political parlor games finally all came to an end last week. "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat," announced W. Mark Felt, a top-ranking FBI official at the time of the Watergate scandal.
At 91, the mystery man who surreptitiously aided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein is now enfeebled by age and fading health. Long conflicted over how his actions would be seen by former FBI colleagues and recorded by history, Felt, encouraged by his family and lawyer, decided not to take his secret to the grave. The shadowy figure immortalized in the reporters' 1974 book, All the President's Men, and portrayed by whispery, smoke-shrouded Hal Holbrook in the movie of the same name chose the glossy monthly Vanity Fair for his revelation. In doing so, he denied his former Post contacts--who remained dutifully silent about their source's identity for 33 years--a final Watergate scoop and set off a frenzy of media coverage that stirred debate about the former G-man's motives then and now. Suddenly back in the spotlight, albeit briefly, were Watergate-era figures, from former Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee to former Nixon chief counsel Chuck Colson. And there was buzz about a potential million-dollar book deal for Felt, despite his failing memory, while Woodward raced to get his own Deep Throat-and-me book out in July.
But beyond all the hoopla, the self-outing of the nation's most famous anonymous source--at a time when the American press is struggling to improve its credibility--provides a fascinating, if not entirely enlightening, glimpse into the murky business of using unnamed sources, especially on high-impact stories. Reliance on such sourcing is now under heavy fire following Newsweek 's retraction of an anonymously sourced report of a Koran having been defiled at the U.S. military's detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba--a report that may have contributed to deadly protests in Afghanistan.
"A good day." A number of major news outlets, from the New York Times to USA Today --and now Newsweek --have taken steps to reduce their use of unnamed sources. But reporters are pushing back, arguing that it's difficult to gather important information during a time of war and heightened national security without turning to reliable sources who, as Felt did, insist on anonymity. "The Felt disclosure was a good day for anonymous sources," says Vernon Loeb, who covered the Pentagon and CIA for the Washington Post before becoming an investigations editor last year at the Los Angeles Times . "To only quote people by name would deprive readers of really critical information."
Investigative work without the judicious use of anonymous sources, Loeb and others argue, would be nearly impossible, especially in Washington, where the Bush administration's insistence on secrecy and staying "on message" exceeds that of any recent administration and where "on background" is set as a precondition of even innocuous briefings. Time reporter Matthew Cooper, who, with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, faces 18 months in prison for refusing to reveal a source who identified a covert CIA operative, says anonymous sources are important "in order to be able to find out what's really going on, whether it's government corruption or malfeasance." Adds Cooper: "Felt's announcement is a reminder, once again, that reporters take these confidences seriously."
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