WASHINGTON - A new book challenges some assumptions and offers new theories about Watergate, asserting for instance that President Richard M. Nixon and his aides learned about a spy in their midst from a highly unlikely source.
The book is by L. Patrick Gray III, who was acting director of the FBI from May 1972 until April 1973, when he quit after it became clear that he had been manipulated by the Nixon White House. The humiliation made him consider suicide, Gray's book says, but he did not want to be "a convenient dead target for Nixon and his rats."
Gray worked on the book for years before his death at 88 on July 6, 2005. Titled "In Nixon's Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate," it was completed by his son Ed Gray and is being published by Times Books.
The book asserts that the "smoking gun" tape recording of June 23, 1972, created a lasting misimpression. On that tape, recorded six days after the Watergate burglary, H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, tells the president that the FBI is getting too close to the truth "because Gray doesn't exactly know how to control them."
Gray wrote that Haldeman had lied. "I never tried to 'control' the FBI in this or any other investigation," he wrote, recalling that he had warned Nixon that the president's top aides were interfering with the inquiry.
The book says the White House learned early on that W. Mark Felt, an FBI official who had wanted the job that Gray got, was a news leaker. Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst advised him in 1972 to fire Felt, Gray wrote.
"Where's all this coming from?" Gray asked.
"From John Mitchell," Kleindienst replied, referring to the former attorney general who was heading the Nixon's reelection campaign.
Kleindienst said Roswell Gilpatric, then a lawyer for Time, had learned from a magazine reporter that one of his sources was Felt. Because Gilpatric disapproved of what Felt was doing, he tipped off Mitchell, the book says.
In 2005, it was revealed that Felt had been "Deep Throat," a chief source for The 
