Swallow This, Deep Throat

“Now take the case of Valerie Plame,” Blumenthal continues, his gorge declining to descend. “According to Robert Novak, two senior administration officials told him that she was a covert CIA operative. That’s true information. However, the reason why that name was given out was in order to try and intimidate and discredit Joseph Wilson, who had been on a mission for the ‰ United States government, had done the service he’d been asked to do, and performed well. He provided invaluable intelligence in his report, and the government, under Bush, wished to lie about it, to suppress him and to suppress letting the public know about it. And as a result of that, two people, according to Robert Novak, committed serious crimes against the national security of the United States. He knows who they are. He is a person who has long been used by a variety of right-wing and neo-conservative people as an outlet — often to smear people . . . This is not a case of freedom of expression protected by the First Amendment.”

Ringing as Blumenthal’s denunciation may be, it fails to impress Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, an organization devoted to defending what it sees as a journalist’s First Amendment right not to disclose sources.

“That’s an ethical decision the journalist has to make,” Dalglish says calmly. “We don’t interfere in those ethical decisions.”

Well, some might find that prospect tempting. But the Beltway information-spinning of Novak is clearly an unintended consequence of Watergate and the Mother of All Unnamed Sources, Deep Throat.

“The story behind Deep Throat is Bob Woodward,” says veteran journalist Lucian K. Truscott the Fourth, who made his name expending shoe leather in covering everything from the Vietnam War to the Stonewall uprising, and continues to this day in Iraq, from which he just returned and was about to go back to when I spoke to him in February.

“Woodward went to Yale, just like John Kerry. He was in ROTC. He went into the Navy in ‘Intelligence.’ He was a ‘briefer’ at the National Security Council in the early days of the Nixon administration, when Al Haig was deputy to Kissinger. So he would go over from the Pentagon for the 8 o’clock to talk about what the world situation was when Vietnam was going on. Those briefings at the NSC could be pretty big fish. He would be the briefcase-carrying guy, and some days they would say ‘And the part about the delta situation with our spec boats, Lieutenant Woodward?’ And he’d stand up and brief. He had excellent intelligence sources. So Deep Throat, most probably, is somebody who was in the CIA or the FBI, or somebody who was in government but actually in the CIA. You can be in the agency and never go in the CIA building. Never be on a payline that says CIA and you’re in the agency.

“Deep Throat could well have been an agency guy who was an aide in the White House or somebody in the Commerce Department. So Woodward went to him and said, ‘I’m lost on this story. Where are the boundaries?’ The guy was clearly upset with what Nixon was doing, so he said, ‘Okay, I’m not going to give you clear information, but I’ll tell you when you’re on the reservation and when you’re off.’ He was never sourced as ‘a source says.’ He might have said ‘You’re looking in the wrong direction.’ He wouldn’t say ‘It’s Mitchell’ or not. He’d say ‘Don’t look over there. Look higher.’ So he’s not a source in the way we think of today. At the time of Deep Throat, unnamed sourcing was an element almost exclusively of investigative reporting. Now any schmuck walking down the street with a pencil and a notebook is going to file a story on, say, Michael Jackson — ‘a source tells me.’ Well, that’s not investigative reporting. One of the reasons Deep Throat stayed anonymous back then was if it came out that he was ratting, they would kill him. That is an anonymous source. The distinction you ought to make is what the stakes are. Now, if somebody whispers and says ‘I know where Michael Jackson goes at night, but you can’t quote me,’ nothing’s going to happen to that guy.”

Truscott, the great-great-grandson of Jefferson, has to his dismay discovered in Iraq few reporters in pursuit of the truth. “One of the first things that occurred to me when I arrived was ‘Where is the David Halberstam of this generation? Where are the talented reporters? Where are the journalistic thinkers?’ It’s not just an opportunity, it’s a story that’s screaming for that kind of talent to be brought to bear on it. Where are these people? They’re sitting on NBC talk shows, like Tucker Carlson and those little turds. He’s one of the guys that got a guided tour and then slept in Kuwait. You may as well fly over at 15,000 feet and look down. You’d see more than he saw. There was hardly anybody there spending any time in November. I asked about other journalists, and they pointed out this very young, very attractive girl. Who was she? She was writing up reports for Oliver North!”