Felt's revelation fuels debate over FBI, CIA

Degree of control over agencies calls for delicate balancing

By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Staff  |  June 7, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The White House relationship with the FBI and CIA was a subject of debate in Washington even before last week, when Mark Felt, the former number two man at the FBI, revealed that he secretly helped bring down President Nixon.

Now the question is how the Deep Throat revelation could change the thinking of liberals and conservatives on the delicate matter of how much independence should be given to agencies with the power to spy.

The views of both sides stem largely from steps taken between Sept. 11, 2001, and the start of the Iraq war in March 2003.

In the eyes of many liberals, the Bush administration pressured both the FBI and CIA in ways that distorted, and perhaps even corrupted, their normal functioning. Almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, former attorney general John D. Ashcroft and his staff wrote the Patriot Act, giving the FBI new powers to spy on Americans and foreigners living in this country. Ashcroft, making himself the face of the newly aggressive effort to hunt down suspected terrorists, seemed to be jumping ahead of the FBI leadership, pulling the bureau even further than it wanted to go.

Meanwhile, the administration was expressing deep distrust of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, and many of its leading officials questioned whether the CIA was sufficiently aware of what was going on in Iraq. The administration's doubts about the CIA's basic competence, which led the Defense Department to seek ways around the established channels of intelligence, made the agency eager to justify the administration's worries about Iraq. Former CIA director George J. Tenet came off as a toadying figure, declaring ''It's a slam dunk" when Bush suggested that the CIA's evidence that Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction was unpersuasive.

Conservatives tend to view the issues the other way around. The FBI and CIA, in their view, have been trying to thwart the administration's policies, partly to assert their independence and partly because career analysts grew too cautious, too inclined to hesitate before drawing a conclusion in the lazy years between the Cold War and 9/11.

The revelation that Felt, a 30-year protégé of legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, steered The Washington Post toward damaging information about Nixon casts the whole Watergate scandal, and the historic relationship between the executive and the two agencies, in a new light.

For decades Washingtonians had imagined that someone inside Nixon's circle had become Deep Throat out of genuine fear for the country. Speculation grew as many of the suspects -- Chief of Staff Alexander Haig; speechwriter David Gergen; the Republican National Committee chairman, George H. W. Bush -- played prominent roles in later GOP administrations.

Now the Watergate story line has changed. In a turn of events straight out of Nixon's paranoid imagination, the story now reads: The FBI got Nixon.

A little history is helpful. In the latter stages of Hoover's 48-year reign, the FBI grew increasingly lawless, breaking into homes to plant bugs and tap the phones of everyone from peace activists to civil rights leaders to government officials. Felt ultimately was convicted of participating in some of the illegal break-ins and wiretaps.

Hoover stayed in power from administration to administration in part out of an implicit threat to various presidents. He was widely believed to have had files on major political figures and could harm them by revealing what he knew. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Nixon all kept Hoover in his post long past retirement age.

When Hoover died, in 1972, Nixon moved to put the FBI under his own loyalist, L. Patrick Gray. Felt and other Hooverites were outraged. About a year later, Felt began leaking information to the Post.

Felt, of course, insists that his motives were patriotic, and Nixon's offenses were real and clearly established through his own Oval Office taping system. But the political background of the struggle between successive presidents and Hoover's FBI is impossible to ignore.

Liberals today who applaud the notion of a ''professional" FBI and CIA insulated from White House influence might be reminded that having the agencies function without political controls can be a recipe for intrigue and internal warfare.

Meanwhile, conservatives who yearn to remove constitutional barriers to allow the FBI and CIA to search through mail and record phone calls more easily might be reminded that creating investigative monoliths can be a recipe for abuses of power more sweeping than any of the crimes of Richard Nixon.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.