Is "Poppy" Bush Deep Throat? The CIA connection to Watergate

Rumor has it that Deep Throat, the as-yet unnamed inside source who helped Woodward and Bernstein uncover the Watergate scandal, is ill. Woodward has promised to reveal the name when Throat dies.

At the same time, Watergate author and Woodward critic Adrian Havill (who previously argued that Throat was a composite character) has recently offered the startling conclusion that the ultimate bean-spiller was none other than George H.W. Bush, former president and father to the creature currently skulking in the White House. No publicly-available evidence indicates that the elder Bush in ill-health. He has been making appearances with Bill Clinton pursuant to tsunami relief, and looks fit. On the other hand, he is elderly.

Since the guessing game may end soon, I had best take this opportunity to try my hand at it.

First: Although the Poppy theory has problems, it tends to grow on one. The same idea had -- very fleetingly -- occurred to me some time ago, when I was sifting through the CIA connections to Watergate. I dismissed the notion because certain details do not fit.

Woodward makes much of the fact that Deep Throat was a heavy smoker; we have no indication that Bush ever smoked. As Ambassador to the United Nations, Bush lived in New York during the crucial time period of 1971-1973; Benjamin Bradlee has said that we might be able to figure out who DT was by checking which of the suspects was in Washington on the dates mentioned. Woodward glancingly refers to Throat as having worked in the Old Executive Office Building; I'm not sure if that detail ever applied to Bush. Woodward has said that Hal Holbrook's portrayal of Throat in the film version of All the President's Men came rather close to capturing the manner of the man; nothing in the Holbrook performance suggests Bush -- at least, not to my eyes.

During the one Woodward/Throat meeting in a lower-class bar, Throat allegedly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. While I can easily picture Bush using this covert meeting as an excuse to go slumming with the peasants, I can't see him practicing poor table manners.

Woodward also insists that Throat had a wide knowledge of literature. As for Bush...well, no comment.

On the other hand...

A number of people believe that Woodward emphasized the "chain smoker" description with rather too heavily. Perhaps that rather theatrical detail was a minor deception, intended to send people looking in the wrong direction.

Havill has found evidence that Bush often attended functions in D.C. during this period.

In his book, Woodward reports that could not reach a note that Throat left for him. Woodward is five foot, ten inches tall; GHWB is notably taller. The book describes Throat as somewhat gaunt -- a description applicable to Bush in that period, judging from the photos.

Deep Throat's reported behavior may give us a clue. Throat, we are told, had difficulty concealing his feelings -- and as we all know, Bush has certainly had his excitable, fidgety moments. Throat had a weakness for gossip yet tried not to confuse rumor and truth, and he did not attempt to inflate his own importance in the scheme of things. These descriptors "feel right" when applied to Bush -- at least, to the Bush of that time period.

The elder Bush has often tried to combat his "upper-class twit" image by indulging in macho activities (he's one of the few octogenarian skydivers), a factor which may explain his somewhat puerile affection for espionage tradecraft. Throat's insistence on meetings in parking garages, not to mention the elaborate signaling system he used to initiate contact with Woodward, have struck many as a little over-the-top. That sort of James Bonding would have appealed to Poppy's sense of adventure.

A side-note: The signalling system involved a flowerpot on Woodward's balcony, a device which has given rise to a mini-controversy. Since that balcony faced an inner courtyard, and since the building was secured, how could Throat keep an eye out for this signal on a daily basis? The mystery is resolved if we presume that Throat himself had an apartment in the same complex. I wonder if Bush rented a place "in town" for use during his many D.C. jaunts? The idea is not outside the realm of possibility, especially if we credit the persistent rumor that he had a mistress.

Throat and Woodward were "old friends" at the beginning of Watergate. Did Woodward and Bush meet during this period? Both Woodward and Bush went to Yale, although they attended at different times. (Bush belonged to the Skull and Bones fraternity, while Woodward was tapped for the slightly less-prestigious Book and Snake.) Other factors hint of a tie between the Washington Post reporter and our ruling family -- for example, Woodward gained unusual access to Dubya's White House. More telling still: During Poppy's reign, the president's aides once transported classified documents directly to Woodward's home. As Havill notes, the former president later wrote a very chummy letter to the nation's most famous journalist, praising his Watergate work -- an odd attitude for a politician who usually despised both the press and leaks.

In the early 1970s, both Bush and Woodward possessed still-mysterious links to the intelligence community. And that is where my real interest in the Throat enigma centers.

Oddly, the CIA connection has not figured in any of the current discussion of Bush as a possible Throat candidate. Havill makes no reference to the intelligence community's role in Watergate; he posits that Bush turned against Nixon because the latter had dropped hints that Bush would replace Agnew in 1972. A silly idea, if you ask me.

(Even so, I have no doubt that if Bush is outed as Throat, the "veep-and-switch" theory of his motive will become the official dogma.)

If we keep the intelligence community out of the picture, as so many writers insist on doing, we have no way of knowing how DT -- if Bush was he -- would know so much about Nixon's secrets. How, for example, would Poppy gain such early awareness of gaps in the Watergate tapes? How would he acquire foreknowledge of the administration's plans to subpoena the notes of the Washington Post reporters? How could he have access to current FBI reports on Watergate?

Officially, Bush had no connection to the CIA until that fine day in 1976 when Gerry Ford tapped him to run the agency. Only ninnies take the official story seriously. Although no-one alleges that "Poppy" received a regular paycheck from the Company, it is an open secret that the elder Bush -- like a number of other businessmen from prominent families -- had, prior to becoming DCI, aided the intelligence community on a number of occasions.

As for Bob Woodward: Many younger scandal buffs seem to be under the erroneous impression that his links to the intel world were first revealed in the egregious "Silent Coup," a work of revisionist right-wing propaganda that belongs in the trash heap next to Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy. Woodward's background was, in fact, first published in Jim Hougan's masterly 1983 volume "Secret Agenda." (Hougan now writes terrific spy novels under the pen name John Case.)

As the communications duty officer for the Chief of Naval Operations, Robert Weylander, Woodward handled top-secret traffic from the White House, the CIA, the DIA, and other agencies. He worked both in Washington and aboard The Wright, a special ship dubbed "the floating Pentagon." According to Hougan:

...while in the Navy, Woodward became part of an elite group and, in doing so, tapped into an astonishing grapevine of sources in the military, on Capitol Hill, in the foreign policy-making establishment and in the intelligence community. That is, during his year at the Pentagon, he was one of a handful of officers chosen by the Navy to brief the government's most important intelligence officials on events and operations around the world.

Writing more speculatively, Havill adds:

Was Bob Woodward ever a free-lance or retained Central Intelligence Agency liaison officer, informant or operative . . . ? This author got various forms of affirmative opinions from intelligence experts. It would explain his assignment to the Wright and his misleading statements to interviewers. It would make understandable his being able to get out of going to Vietnam in 1968, his extension for an additional year at the Pentagon, his being chosen to brief at the White House and his denials as well. It would also help explain his subsequent high-level friendships with leaders of the U.S. military and the CIA.

Most Throat-spotters presume that Woodward and "DT" became friends during the reporter's previous life as a young intelligence briefer.

All of which leads us to this fascinating poser: Was Throat a spook?

Or, to phrase the matter more delicately, did he interact with Woodward at the behest of any faction of the intel community?

Jim Hougan is (erroneously) believed to have fingered Alexander Haig as DT; in fact, he discusses this theory only to discount it. Hougan's actual conclusion: "Deep Throat is probably a spook -- someone in the intelligence community -- with sources in high places."

Secret Agenda tentatively makes a nod in the direction of veteran intelligence chieftain Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a suggestion which may yet prove valid. Inman, in his mid-70s, retired from SAIC about 15 months ago; I have no idea as to his current health status.

Woodward himself has given divergent hints on this score. In a 1989 Playboy interview, a writer for Playboy asked him: "Do you resent the implication by some critics that your sources on Watergate -- among them the fabled Deep Throat -- may have been people in the intelligence community?"

Woodward answered: "I resent it because it's not true." Yet he when on to add:

But let me just say that this suggestion that we were being used by the intelligence community was of concern to us at the time and afterward. When somebody first wrote the article saying about me, 'Wait a minute; this is somebody in an intelligence agency who doesn't like Nixon and is trying to get him out,' I took that seriously.

The obvious implication: While Woodward may not have considered his source an espionage professional, he did have reason to wonder if Throat operated on behalf of one sector of American intelligence.

George H.W. Bush -- linked to spook-land, though technically not employed by it -- was just the sort of fellow to provide services of that sort.

Does other evidence indicate that Throat acted as a CIA cut-out? Plenty.

Woodward's writings assiduously kept the CIA out of the Watergate mess, even though a number of the Watergate burglars had Agency backgrounds. After a phony "retirement" from the CIA, E. Howard Hunt was employed by the Robert R. Mullen Company, which provided cover for CIA operations, particularly those involving the Howard Hughes organization. For reasons never made clear, the Washington Post refused to mention Mullen's links to the CIA until the very last days of the Nixon era, when the front company was closing up shop. This, despite the fact that other sources had made the information public.

For that matter, Woodward has never discussed the oft-heard theory that former CIA man James McCord intentionally botched the Watergate burglary in order to help engineer Nixon's downfall. McCord has been known to make lawsuit noises against promulgators of that theory, so I will here note only that some very smart researchers -- including Hougan -- take the notion seriously.

Was Bob Woodward protecting the CIA?

Let's take one further look at the Mullen company. Hunt's "boss" at Mullen was a very interesting man named Robert Bennett -- who, as we shall see, is also a good Throat candidate. Bennett answered to a CIA case officer named Martin Lukowski. Lukowskie wrote a memo for the record which offers a rare glimpse into the CIA's attitude toward Watergate -- and toward Bob Woodward:

Mr Bennett said that when E. Howard Hunt was connected with the incident [the burglary], reporters from the Washington Post and he thought the "Washington Star" tried to establish a "Seven Days in May" scenario with the Agency attempting to establish control over both the Republican and Democratic Parties so as to be able to take over the country. Mr. Bennett said that he was able to convince them that course was nonsense...

The reporters for the Washington Post are, obviously, Woodward and Bernstein. This passage clearly indicates that the writers originally pursued a CIA angle (albeit a somewhat far-fetched one) and only later decided to keep references to the Agency out of their reportage.

Another CIA memo to the Deputy Director for Plans tells us:

Mr Bennett said also that he has been feeding stories to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post with the understanding that there be no attribution to Bennett.

Is Bennett Throat? He's tall, thin, and now a leading member of the Senate. I have no information as to whether he has any current health problems.

For me, the Throatstakes come down to two main candidates: Bennett and Bush.

Bennett fits the bill well -- especially if we allow ourselves to believe that Woodward allowed himself to believe that Bennett was not a CIA employee. Bennett's subsequent political career explains why he would not want anyone to know about his sojourn as Throat: Discussion of that adventure would lead to discussion of his spook days. Many voters are nervous about the idea of espionage agents becoming involved in politics.

On the other hand, I am growing fonder by the minute of the idea that Bush was tapped by someone in the Agency to act as a cut-out. Perhaps we can scry here an explanation as to why Woodward pictured Throat as literary-minded chain-smoker -- a description that calls to mind such well-known spooks as James Jesus Angleton and Cord Meyer. Woodward may have been offering hints as to the man who was running Bush.

The more important question: If Throat spoke for the CIA, where did the CIA get information about the inner workings of the Nixon White House? And why would anyone from the Agency want Nixon out?

Regarding the first question: There were rumors at the time that the Agency had literally bugged the oval office. I hope to take a closer look at those allegations in a forthcoming post.