America Conor O'CleryThe outing of Deep Throat this week as 91-year-old Mark Felt has ignited a debate in the United States over the use of anonymous sources. Much is being made by former Nixon aides of the motives of the former FBI deputy chief.
They accuse him of acting out of pique for being passed over as head of the FBI. That misses the point. What he did was aimed at exposing a corrupt administration financing crimes, conducting a ruthless cover-up and trying to subvert the FBI.
His motives for revealing the truth were secondary to Woodward and Bernstein, as are the motives of anonymous sources to any journalists eager to expose a wrongdoing or advance public knowledge of what affects people's lives. Information is power and it is the currency of any capital city and always will be.
An official document critical of some government action that is leaked prior to publication, for example, robs the government of the initiative in spin control.
This I assume was the motivation back in 1976 for the Irish official who leaked me in advance the judgment by the European Court of Human Rights that Britain was guilty of torture in Northern Ireland, which upset London's plans for a diversionary manoeuvre on the official day of publication.
(His condition was that I did not put my name to the story to protect the source, and I asked the duty editor in The Irish Times not to say, even inside the paper, that it came from me. But he mixed things up and blurted out to everyone: "O'Clery has a great story, but I can't tell you what it is".)
Another time in London a British government official showed me over lunch a copy of a private letter Margaret Thatcher had sent to Garret FitzGerald and then said: "Oh, I shouldn't have given you that!" But he didn't ask me not to use it. It was part of the ritual.
The subsequent story blind-sided the Irish government, which was the motive of the source. Should both stories have been published? Of course.
The basic job of a reporter is to make new, relevant information public that is known to be reliable. This is what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were doing at the time of Watergate when, with the guidance of the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, underground garage-lurking Deep Throat, they began unravelling the plot to cover up the burglary of Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building, which eventually brought down Richard Nixon.
The dramatisation of their work in the film All the President's Men inspired a generation of journalists. Woodward remained at the Post, Bernstein left to pursue a freelance career and Ben Bradlee long ago stepped down as editor.
The naming of Deep Throat brought the three together once more this week in the Post newsroom, where they posed for pictures, exactly in the positions they adopted 30 years ago. It was, someone said, like seeing Simon and Garfunkel together again.
They had been the three official keepers of America's most tantalising journalistic secret. Bernstein said it was a very strange feeling having the secret out, as "for the first time it's not there to protect in your pocket any more."
But other people knew all along, it seems. Ben Bradlee's wife, Sally Quinn, wrote in yesterday's Post that she did not know who Deep Throat was, and never asked because she knew her husband wouldn't tell her. But what drove her wild was that Woodward had told his wife, Elsa, and he would taunt Quinn when they met, saying: "There are no secrets between Elsa and me."
Coincidentally on the day Deep Throat was named, a new book on Bill Clinton, The Survivor, by Washington Post reporter John Harris, disclosed that back in 1988 Clinton told aides he would be giving Ben Bradlee a Presidential Medal of Freedom. They asked why. On his desk was an article by Sally Quinn about how appalled Washington was at Clinton's behaviour over Monica Lewinsky, and the president replied: "Anyone who sleeps with that bitch deserves a medal."
Quinn yesterday pointed up some of the ways the administration can get back at journalists and how a leak can go wrong. During Lyndon Johnson's presidency, Bradlee got a White House leak that Johnson wanted to replace FBI director J Edgar Hoover and wrote it up. Johnson was so furious he held a news conference and made Hoover director for life, then said: "You can tell Ben Bradlee to go f*** himself!"
Today leaks are just as important for journalists, but American journalism has been going through a wretched period, and journalists are now ranked below lawyers in public prestige, according to a recent Harris poll, and that's saying something.
The New York Times allowed Jason Blair to get away with fabricating stories based on fictitious sources, the New Republic and USA Today were similarly disgraced by rogue reporters. Last year Dan Rather of CBS was brought down for using dubious documents to discredit George Bush and, a few weeks ago, Newsweek had to retract a story about the alleged desecration of the Koran from an unnamed government official.
The New York Times also had to apologise last year for giving too much credence to anonymous accounts of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, mainly in page one stories by Judith Miller. An agonised debate over sources and motivation inside the Times has now led to a tightening of rules, so that stories are now heavy with phrases such as "according to a source who declined to give his name because he was not authorised to speak on behalf of the bureau and who opposes administration policy".
The political climate has also changed since the days of Deep Throat. Reporters face jail for not revealing sources. When in 2003 a Bush White House official leaked the name of a CIA agent - a crime under US law - to a number of journalists, including Judith Miller, the special prosecutor appointed to find the leaker went after the reporters, and has now threatened Miller with jail for not giving the name.
She didn't even write a story after getting the leak, while Robert Novak, the conservative commentator who first outed the CIA official in his column, citing two anonymous administration sources, has mysteriously escaped any censure.
Threatening Woodward and Bernstein with prison for not betraying Deep Throat would have been unthinkable three decades ago, when reporters enjoyed more credibility with the public and the administration had more respect for the media. Ben Bradlee chided the current administration in an interview on Thursday, saying that anonymous sources can be useful to society, "and before you throw reporters in jail for keeping their sources anonymous, you'd better be careful."
The Deep Throat story this week has served to remind people that anonymous sources can be a source of good, and that it is right to always protect a source.
Woodward and Bernstein knew how damaging it would have been to journalism if they had revealed Deep Throat's name before he did himself. As for the official who gave me the torture finding back in the 1970s, I expect him to keep his identity secret at least until he is 91.