Fred Fielding, D.C. lawyer, named as Deep Throat

Who do you think is Deep Throat? ----BumbleBeeBoogie

Fred Fielding, D.C. lawyer, named as Deep Throat
Agnes Jasinski - The Daily Illini - 4/23/03
http://www.dailyillini.com/apr03/apr23/news/stories/news_story01.shtml

WASHINGTON ?- For several years there was a rumor floating around Washington, D.C. about a White House assistant who admitted he was Deep Throat on what he thought was his deathbed.

He was in the hospital after suffering a pulmonary embolism. Thinking he was going to die, he announced that he was the anonymous source that provided information on the Watergate scandal to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Surviving his hospital stay, the story goes that he did not deny being Deep Throat in the office the next day.

Now University investigative journalism professor William Gaines believes the nation no longer needs to rely on rumors. Gaines and several semesters worth of his journalism students have concluded that the man in the hospital who claimed to be Deep Throat is Fred Fielding.

"You can't deal with percentages when it comes to the word certain," Gaines said at the press conference yesterday where Deep Throat was revealed.

The press conference held at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. was followed by a presentation and dinner reception for University of Illinois alums.

Fielding, currently an attorney at Wiley, Rein & Fielding in Washington, D.C. has given several talks on ethics in government. He was a member of the Bush-Cheney transition team and appointed to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks.

Fielding was unavailable despite multiple attempts to contact him. Family members answering Fielding's home phone refused to comment.

Gaines can only speculate about Fielding's reasons for blowing the whistle on the Nixon administration. He believes Fielding was a reluctant source who was backed into a corner.

"Fielding had a fear for the future of democracy and the executive branch," Gaines said.

But he still believes that the case he has made proves that Fielding is Deep Throat - and it is not based on scotch and cigarettes.

"We're taking Woodward and Bernstein's word that their book was a work of non-fiction," Gaines said. "No one else could fill that role."

Fielding was the guess for White House staff member Bob Haldeman who died in 1999. Haldeman made a statement that Fielding knew a lot but not everything, Gaines said.

Fielding had access to FBI reports because of his close relationship to former White House special counsel John Dean. Dean spent time in prison for his own involvement in Watergate. Dean has written an e-book narrowing the list of Deep Throat's suspects to four former Nixon aides: speechwriter Raymond Price, special assistant to the president Pat Buchanan, administrative assistant Stephen Bull, and press secretary Ron Ziegler. Fielding has never made his list.

"Dean doesn't know Fielding had all of this information," Gaines said. "He knows Fielding and said it couldn't be him because he was always honest."

Dean's motivation in the hunt for Deep Throat was that he was the first to provide information to bring down Nixon, Gaines said.


Craig Chamberlain University of Illinois News Bureau

University of Illinois Journalism professor William Gaines explains some of the documentation the students and he used in the course for their investigation after he unveiled the Deep Throat's identity Tuesday at the Williamsburg Room at The Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.


Gaines told The Daily Illini the identity of Deep Throat last week before unmasking all the evidence.

As first assistant to Dean, Fielding read FBI reports that Dean failed to show the president, prepared staff members for FBI questioning and listened to conversations in Dean's office.

He was one of the few who knew of a top-secret fund that paid the men who broke into the Watergate Hotel. Woodward and Bernstein found the bookkeeper for Nixon's re-election committee who told them who was paid and how much they were paid. When the FBI interviewed her, she wrote down what she thought were the exact transactions from the fund. Dean got these reports by promising L. Patrick Gray that they would go straight to the president. They were given to Fielding instead.

Woodward called Fielding for confirmation of the transactions. Fielding confirmed, not knowing that the bookkeeper would later admit to making a mistake with the numbers.

"This was ironic because (Woodward and Bernstein) weren't following a two source rule," Gaines said. "They had one source that went around in a circle … with the wrong information."

Fielding was one of the few people connected to the White House during Watergate who never saw his name in the Washington Post. Katherine Chenow, secretary to Watergate organizers E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, did not keep Fielding as anonymous as he would have liked.

She was on vacation in London when Dean asked Fielding to bring her back to prepare her for FBI questioning. Bernstein decided to call Chenow when he found a subpoena issued by the FBI for her phone records. After Chenow hung up with Bernstein, she realized she had told him too much about Watergate and called Fielding. The conversation they had was found by Gaines' students in the National Archives.

Fielding's name was omitted in the article by Bernstein. He was referred to only as a "White House aide".

In All the President's Men, Fielding is mentioned by name as the one who brought Chenow back from London. However, this was in 1974, after Fielding had begun working at Wiley, Rein and Fielding.

Fielding was also referred to as a White House aide in a Washington Post story detailing the cleaning out of Hunt's safe. John Erlichman, Nixon's assistant, was told to get rid of potential evidence and files detailing the Watergate break-in that Hunt kept in his safe. Erlichman gave the job to Dean who asked Fielding to help him.

Fielding gave Woodward details of conversations between Dean and Ehrlichman and Dean and Gray when they were deciding what to do with the "political dynamite" that was in Hunt's safe. When compared to Dean's testimony, the quotes are almost exact. Deep Throat must have been at the scene.

The only others that could have heard these conversations are either dead or have left government while Deep Throat was still providing information.

Assuming that Deep Throat was only one person, the only plausible suspect is Fielding.

Dean admitted during Watergate testimony that Fielding knew more about the "plumber's unit" than he did. The plumber's unit was a group of White House officials who organized Watergate and were in charge of plugging leaks in the Nixon administration. They were also involved in the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's office, the psychiatrist who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

Donald Segretti was a lawyer who pleaded guilty to hiring agents to ruin Democratic campaigns. He came to Dean and asked for legal help after the FBI contacted him for questioning. Fielding met with Segretti before the interview and had access to the FBI file afterward.

Fielding was one of the first to know that Dean was going to get fired because Dean told him. Woodward knew the information that same day. After Dean was fired, Fielding was asked to help him get all of his Watergate files together. Fielding got much of his information from Dean.

But Dean was already gone when Deep Throat reported gaps in the Nixon tapes. Not all of Fielding's information came from Dean. His replacement, Leonard Garment, had Fielding lead a staff that examined the tapes. Garment wrote a book about his own Deep Throat guess, John D. Sears. Sears was a former deputy special counsel to Nixon.

Clues continued after Nixon resigned. Fielding was former president Ronald Reagan's counsel. Woodward had several insider stories at the Washington Post on the Reagan administration that included anonymous sources.

What remains a mystery is how Fielding and Woodward met. They were in the same national fraternity but at different schools. They were involved in espionage work but in different departments. Woodward was in the Navy, but Fielding was in the Army. They had a lot in common but their paths never seemed to cross.

"They were like two ships passing in the night," Gaines said.

Gaines does not expect Fielding to contact him any time soon to answer these questions. A letter Gaines sent to Fielding's law office was received on April 15. Gaines is confident, however, that Fielding could not be able to say that he is not Deep Throat.

"We're very, very sure that we've done it right," Gaines said. "We don't have to wait to find out until he's dead."

Ben Bradlee, former editor and current vice president at large of the Washington Post said before the unveiling that he will not say if Gaines and his students have solved the Deep Throat mystery.

"I'm very interested to see who he chooses," Bradlee said. "Then I'll shut up again because I've long since given up saying if someone is right or wrong."

Bradlee is one of four who knew the identity of Deep Throat from the beginning, along with Woodward,