In search of Deep Throat

Thirty years on, on the anniversary of the infamous break-in that brought Richard Nixon down, Watergate buffs are likely to be too busy debating the various latest theories about the identity of Deep Throat to notice what thin fare they're being served.

All the usual stars and suspects are waiting for their closeups. Reporter Bob Woodward, still churning out scoops at the Washington Post, carries the years well.

As for partner Carl Bernstein, time has been less kind. Gone to fat, the bags under his eyes testify to a taste for hard living that earned him Spy magazine's "Nightlife Iron Man" award two years in a row.

We can also expect to hear from the greying lawyers and ex-prosecutors, the surviving ex-spooks and White House hatchet men.

G. Gordon Liddy, convicted Watergate burglar and the very last of Nixon's loyalists, will be his usual unrepentant self.

These days, it pays. He has built a thriving career as a radio ranter, sometimes advising callers about the best way to shoot a federal agent. ("Go for the head when they kick down your door. Modern body armour stops the heaviest rounds.")

And John Dean, the man Liddy still calls a traitor for testifying against the President they both served, also is ready for the publicity surrounding tomorrow's publication of his latest Watergate book.

It will be his third attempt to nail Deep Throat, whose revelations about the chicanery inside the White House made "Woodstein", as Nixon called his tormentors, the inspiration for an entirely new breed of journalism.

But what of the participant whose silence is assured - Deep Throat himself?

Woodward, who handled all the contacts with Nixon's enigmatic nemesis, has sworn that his shadowy source will remain secret until he gives permission or dies, whichever comes first. So, unless Woodward's recent visit to the Californian home of former FBI acting director Mark Felt has something to do with that pledge, the reporter will say only that his informant's identity is known only to himself, Bernstein and their old editor, Ben Bradlee.

That leaves the other players to finger their favoured candidates. In his earlier books, Dean named two suspects, only to withdraw the accusations when Watergate buffs pointed out the holes in his argument. And this time? Well, he says his latest effort will be a case of third time lucky.

Another theory will be unveiled at the University of Illinois, where Professor William Gaines - a former star reporter at the Chicago Tribune - assigned his class the task of cross-referencing all the records, books, transcripts, tapes and archived personnel files on Nixon's inner circle.

In a 1973 Washington Post story, the students found a reference to certain information that Woodward and Bernstein attributed to "White House sources". In All the President's Men, however, the same snippet is said to have come from Deep Throat.

"That narrowed the suspect pool from the whole executive branch to 72 top White House officials," Gaines explains. By filtering a wealth of other information through their expanding database, the class winnowed the field to just a handful of possibilities.

In their book, for example, Woodward recounts missing a rendezvous with Deep Throat, who left a note for the reporter on a high ledge in the underground garage that was their customary meeting place. Since the lanky Woodward had to stand on tip-toe to reach it, Gaines deduced that Deep Throat told his students to focus on a Nixon staffer who went to college on a basketball scholarship.

Similarly, Deep Throat is said to have been a chain-smoker whose favoured tipple was neat scotch, which narrowed the possibilities yet again. So did his nocturnal movements, leading Gaines to conclude that his quarry was an unmarried man free to keep odd hours.

As of last week, Gaines' field of candidates stood at just a handful, with Felt reportedly high on the list.

But here's a possibility, one that Gaines and his fellow sleuths fail to acknowledge: What if the hunt is based on a false premise? What if Deep Throat is a fiction?

It verges on heresy to raise such a doubt, particularly given Woodstein's revered reputation, yet inconsistencies remain.

Take Deep Throat's emergence as a key player. Nowhere is he mentioned in the original Post reporting, nor does he figure in the initial manuscript of All the President's Men. Only when the reporters' book editor demanded a sexier yarn did Deep Throat make his first appearance in a rewritten version.

Then there are the claims that stretch credulity. Woodward has said that he arranged meetings by positioning a flower pot on the balcony of his apartment. Trouble is, it would have been physically impossible for anyone at street level to see such a signal.

A similar objection concerns Deep Throat's habit of contacting Woodward by marking a specified page in the daily paper delivered to the lobby of the reporter's apartment building. Why would a man with so much to fear have taken such a risk, not once but repeatedly?

In All the President's Men, Woodward's descriptions of the parking-lot meetings are atmospheric studies of fear and paranoia, his prize contact sometimes bolting into the night at the slightest stray sound.

Yet if we are to accept that Deep Throat dropped by Woodward's home, he evidently paid no heed to the distinct possibility that Nixon's operatives might have been watching the building.

For Athan Theoharis, author of A Culture of Secrecy: The Government Versus the People's Right to Know and a professor of modern American history at Marquette University, the inconsistencies speak volumes - and do so in a number of different voices. The primary source, he believes, was most likely Felt, who took charge of the FBI after the death of J. Edgar Hoover and wanted to stop Nixon using the agency's files against the administration's enemies.

It's likely, Theoharis says, that the most celebrated snitch in history was actually "a composite source that Woodward and Bernstein developed either in the White House or the FBI or the US Attorney's office - and that they just incorporated them all under the term Deep Throat". The flower pot, the garage meetings, the scotch and heavy smoking are subterfuges to shield the truth.

Such reasoning strikes a chord with literary agent David Obst, who handled both Dean and Woodstein and scoffs at the suggestion that Deep Throat was a single, flesh-and-blood individual. "If Nixon's plumbers had covered their tracks as carefully as Woodward and Bernstein," Obst said, "the world never would have heard of Watergate."