WATERGATE: Deep Throat': Narrowing the Field

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Nowhere do secrets have a higher mortality rate than in Washington, D.C. The capital swarms with leaking bureaucrats and a prying press corps. Incurable gossips are wall to wall. Yet one mystery has proved as snoop-resistant as it is tantalizing: the identity of "Deep Throat," the shadowy underground-garage habitué who is currently providing the same suspense in the film version of All the President's Men that he brought to the bestselling Watergate book by the Washington Post's reporting duo.

The movie and the new Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein book, The Final Days (TIME, March 29), have combined to revive the search for the tattler-patriot who served the Nixon Administration while helping to bring it down. In surreptitious pre-dawn meetings during the unraveling of Watergate, as Woodward tells it, Deep Throat often confirmed and occasionally volunteered devastating information learned in his "sensitive" Government post.

There is no shortage of suspects in the guessing game of who Deep Throat was—or of skeptics. "I would expect it was a composite," muses former Nixon Attorney James St. Clair. Onetime Nixon Aide John Ehrlichman grouses: "It would be a great day for America to finally know the identity of one of Woodward and Bernstein's sources." Reviewing The Final Days, Political Writer Richard Reeves argues in the New York Times: "I have never been convinced that Deep Throat existed. The whole thing was too much like an old newspaper tactic that I have used myself: inventing a secret source ... If there is a Deep Throat, he's worth $10 million on the hoof." Woodward declares that there is a Deep Throat who will be known some day (see box). Says Post Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee: "I know he exists." But not even Bradlee knows who he is.

Assuming Deep Throat does exist, one way to play the guessing game is to narrow the field by identifying men with access to the kind of information that Deep Throat provided Woodward. Such information ranges from Deep Throat's June 1972 tip that E. Howard Hunt Jr. was involved in the Watergate breakin, to his November 1973 disclosure that there were erasures on the White House tapes. Woodward's source also knew who controlled a special fund at the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (C.R.P.); that White House intelligence-gathering activities involved at least 50 people; that John Mitchell feared he was "ruined" ten days after the Watergate breakin; and that witnesses had perjured themselves before the Watergate grand jury.

That litany strongly suggests that Deep Throat operated in the White House, which knew about Hunt before the FBI did and about the tape erasures before the Justice Department, the courts and the special prosecutor did. Some at the White House also knew about the special $350,000 secret fund at C.R.P. eventually used as hush money for the Watergate burglars long before investigators did.

One White House official who appears to have been a generous source for The Final Days is former Counsel J. Fred Buzhardt, who emerges as a hero in the book after criticism elsewhere for hangdog loyalty long after he was aware of Nixon's involvement.