In retrospect, Felt's memo looks like an attempt to convince Pat Gray and other senior officials at the bureau that he was on top of the leak issue. But the leak probe he had triggered in Miami was a wild goose chase. A county prosecutor could not be the type to supply inside information to Woodward and Bernstein about the FBI's Watergate probe. (In late July Bernstein had obtained information from Gerstein about the suspicious bank transactions, but nothing about the federal investigations in Washington.) No FBI leakers were ever found via the Miami inquiry Felt orchestrated.

In the week after he wrote that memo, Felt broke his own admonition about discussing the investigation with people outside the bureau. According to All the President's Men, in two phone calls with Woodward he confirmed that two top campaign aides to former Attorney General John Mitchell (Nixon's close confidant who had suddenly resigned as his campaign manager on July 1) had been in charge of the campaign money that financed the Watergate break-in, that these funds also supported "other intelligence-gathering activities" and that these same aides had seen wiretap logs from the Watergate bugging. So while the FBI officials in Miami, spurred on by Felt, were busy trying to plug the supposed leak to the Post with a going-nowhere investigation, Felt was handing page-one information to Woodward. He was not just a high-level leaker or undercover whistleblower. He was a master manipulator. (Whether Felt had accomplices within the FBI, as has been alleged recently by former FBI agent Paul Daly, remains a matter of speculation, especially since the main suspects--Kunkel, Bates and another assistant director--are dead.)

At one point (probably in the early phase of Watergate), Felt even met officially with Woodward--in what appears to have been another move to cover himself. In his 1979 memoir--in which he declared, "I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!"--Felt noted that he spoke to Woodward "on one occasion." He claimed that after Woodward requested an interview, he agreed to see him; Felt then asked his assistant, Wason Campbell, a senior-level, twenty-five-year-veteran FBI agent, to be present "to make sure what I said would not be misquoted." In this account, Woodward "was not looking for information." He "simply wanted" Felt to confirm information he and Bernstein already had obtained. "I declined to cooperate with him in this manner," Felt wrote, "and that was that." It now seems obvious that Felt (probably with Woodward's cooperation) staged this meeting to make it look as if Felt was not assisting Woodward. (Perhaps Woodward will explain this in his forthcoming book on Deep Throat.)

Today Campbell, retired since 1974, is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's and has no memory of those days. His wife, Mary, told The Nation that whenever the subject of Felt and Deep Throat came up in the post-Watergate years, her husband never indicated he believed Felt could have been this source. "I am sure that Wason never knew it," she says. "He's not that good an actor. Mark was able to keep this a secret from his assistant."

Unbeknownst to Felt, Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, began talking about him in the White House weeks after Felt wrote that September 11, 1972, memo. In a taped conversation on October 19, Nixon complained to Haldeman that Gray could not stop the media leaks. Haldeman told Nixon that Felt had been identified as the primary leaker--but they could not do anything about it. Haldeman explained: "If we move on him, he'll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that's to be known in the FBI."

Continuing the conversation, Nixon asked, "What would you do with Felt?" Haldeman replied that he had been advised by Dean that Felt could not be prosecuted. "The bastard," Nixon called him. Later that afternoon, Nixon asked, "What's the conveyor belt for Felt?" "The Post," Haldeman replied. He explained that an unnamed "legal guy" for the Post, who formerly worked at the Justice Department or FBI, had contacted an official in Nixon's Justice Department because he was "deeply concerned" about the FBI leaks to Woodward and Bernstein, and this person maintained that Felt was leaking to the Post. The Justice Department official slipped the information to Dean, who told Haldeman. The next day, Nixon told Haldeman he was most worried because Felt knew all about the incriminating clandestine operations that senior aide John Ehrlichman had supervised for the White House. The Nixon gang had in a way pegged Felt as a leaker. But years after All the President's Men was published, in 1974, and the character Deep Throat was created, Haldeman instead mistakenly fingered Fred Fielding, Dean's assistant, as Deep Throat, and Dean proposed a variety of candidates other than Felt. "It was right under our nose," Dean sighed to The Nation.

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