Chance meeting that changed political history

Marilyn Davis has been parking in the underground car park at 1300 Wilson Boulevard in Rosslyn for three years but she had no idea of the building's role as a footnote to journalistic history.

This week, told that the low-ceilinged parking lot was apparently where Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward met his famous source Deep Throat to obtain information that would bring down a United States president, Davis did not appear especially overwhelmed.

"I had no idea," she smiled, as she stepped out of her car. "But it's certainly a conversation piece. I'll mention it to the others in the office."

Those mysterious, late-night meetings in the car park between Woodward and his secret source, now revealed to be a former deputy FBI director, Mark Felt, have become part of the folklore associated with the Watergate scandal and the eventual downfall of Richard Nixon.

Anyone who has either read All The President's Men, co-authored by Woodward and his investigative reporting partner Carl Bernstein, or seen the 1976 film version starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, remembers how the young reporter would set out to meet his source (played by Hal Holbrook), always taking extreme precautions to ensure he was not being followed.

"Take the alley. Don't use your own car," Woodward was told. "Take a taxi. Walk the last several blocks. If you are being followed, don't go down to the garage."

But this week, with Washington still gripped by the conclusion to one of the most compelling and enduring political and journalistic mysteries of all, it emerged that Woodward would not have developed the relationship with his famous source but for a chance encounter several years earlier.

Writing in the Post, where today he is an associate editor as well as a highly successful author, Woodward recalled that he first met the now 91-year-old in 1970 when Woodward was a lieutenant in the US Navy. In the final year of five years of service, Woodward, assigned to Admiral Thomas Moorer, head of naval operations, was often dispatched to the White House as a courier. It was his job to wait for the correct person to come out and sign for the package. Sometimes he could wait more than an hour. The night he met Felt was one such evening.

"After I had been waiting a while, a tall man with perfectly combed grey hair came in and sat down near me," wrote Woodward. "His suit was dark, his shirt white and his necktie subdued. He was probably 25 to 30 years older than I and was carrying what looked to me like a filecase or a briefcase. He was very distinguished-looking and had a studied air of confidence, the posture and calm of someone used to giving orders and having them instantly obeyed."

That evening the young Woodward, anxious about his future and unsure whether to try to apply to law school, made a deliberate, and some might say calculating, decision that would stand him in good stead for the rest of his life.

"Felt and I were like two passengers sitting next to each other on a long airline flight with nowhere to go and nothing really to do but resign ourselves to the dead time," he said. "He showed no interest in striking up a conversation but I was intent on it. I finally extracted from him the information that he was an assistant director of the FBI in charge of the inspection division, an important role under director J. Edgar Hoover."

He continued: "Here was someone at the centre of the secret world I was only glimpsing from my naval assignment, so I peppered him with questions about his job and his world. As I think back on this accidental but crucial encounter - one of the most important in my life - I see that my patter verged on the adolescent. Since he wasn't saying much about himself, I turned it into a career-counselling session."

Before their encounter was over, Woodward made sure he would not come away empty-handed. "I asked Felt for his phone number and he gave me the direct line to his office. I believe I encountered him only one more time at the White House, but I had set the hook. He was going to be one of the people I consulted in depth about my future ... At some point I called him, first at the FBI and then at his home in Virginia. I was a little desperate and I'm sure I poured my heart out."

During the following months, Woodward, who took a job on a weekly newspaper before joining the Post, deliberately cultivated Felt. He rang him often and on one occasion drove out to his home in Fairfax, Virginia, to meet him and his wife, Audrey.

On several stories, including the investigation into the gunman who shot and wounded presidential candidate George Wallace in May 1972, Woodward contacted Felt, who provided him with crucial information. The only stipulation was that the information should be used without attribution and no one should know he had a source within the FBI. Woodward obeyed and his discretion paid off.

The phone call that would change everything came at 9am on June 17, 1972. The Post's news desk informed Woodward that five men in suits carrying electronic eavesdropping equipment, their pockets stuffed with US$100 bills, had been arrested trying to break in to the office of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building close to the Potomac river. The authorities said it appeared to be an elaborate plot to bug the office and one of the men was a former CIA employee.

"The next day Carl Bernstein and I wrote our first article together, identifying one of the burglars, James McCord, as the salaried security co-ordinator for Nixon's re-election committee," wrote Woodward.

"This was the moment when a source or friend in the investigative agencies of government is invaluable. I called Felt at the FBI. It would be our first talk about Watergate. He reminded me how he disliked phone calls at the office but said the Watergate burglary case was going to heat up for reasons he could not explain. He then hung up abruptly."

In the coming weeks Woodward would speak with Felt many times, but the FBI official grew wary of talking on the phone. Instead he drew up an elaborate plan. If Woodward urgently wanted to meet him, he should signal using a plant pot, in which was stuck a red flag, on his balcony. In such a case the two would meet at 2am at the underground car park in Rosslyn, a Washington suburb across the river from Georgetown.

If, on the other hand, Felt wanted to meet Woodward, he would circle page 20 of the reporter's copy of the New York Times and draw the hands of a clock showing what time they should meet at the same garage. "Felt said if there was something important he could get to my New York Times - how, I never knew," he wrote.

Despite this lengthy account, it seems Woodward is not telling everything he knows just yet.

In the aftermath of the revelation of Deep Throat's identity by Vanity Fair magazine this week, it emerged that Woodward had been working on a book about his own relationship with Felt. Officials at Simon and Schuster, the publishing house, said Woodward and Bernstein were now rushing to collaborate on that volume and have it ready for publication within as little as a month.

It also emerged that Felt's family had been in talks with Woodward about making a joint announcement regarding his identity. Woodward turned this down, purportedly out of concern as to whether the frail Felt, in fading physical and mental health, had the "competence" to understand what he was doing.

Woodward, Bernstein and the former Post editor, Ben Bradlee, the only other person to know Deep Throat's identity, had sworn they would tell only after the source was dead. However, many believe - and some at the Post appear to agree - the newspaper that "owned" the Watergate story and which won a Pulitzer prize for its reporting, was essentially scooped by Vanity Fair. It was certainly caught flat-footed.

When the story broke on Tuesday morning (Wednesday morning, NZ time), Woodward, Bernstein and the Post's current editor Len Downie, were all out of town and had to rush to the office before finally, at 5.29pm, confirming on the newspaper's website what most had already assumed to be true.

The revelation of Deep Throat's identity and the focus once again on the ground-breaking reporting of Woodward and Bernstein has also led to questions about Woodward's career ever since.

While today he is a vastly successful author with unparalleled access to "official Washington", some have questioned whether this access has come at the price of acting as little more than a stenographer for government officials.

What seems beyond dispute at the end of a week in which the past has been dragged into the present and in which a story that started more than three decades ago has come close to conclusion, is that for Bob Woodward there can have been no more fortuitous encounter than the one he had 35 years ago in a waiting area in a lower level of the West Wing. It was a meeting that at first appeared innocuous but would have huge ramifications.

In Woodward's own words, it took place like this: "After several minutes, I introduced myself. 'Lieutenant Bob Woodward,' I said, carefully appending a deferential 'Sir'.

"'Mark Felt,' he said."

- INDEPENDENT