In 1971, in a move to rein in his power-seeking head of domestic intelligence, William C. Sullivan, Hoover promoted Felt to a newly created position overseeing Sullivan, vaulting Felt to prominence.
The background of this Felt-Sullivan relationship is relevant to the issue of whether Felt was Deep Throat, IMO. Sullivan had been a CIA mole in the FBI--possibly from as early as 1961, certainly by the time of Watergate--and had been a key player in a battle between Hoover and CIA Director Richard Helms for influence in the Nixon White House. Sullivan, Tom Huston, and John Dean, among others, had conspired to get CIA to perform some legally-questionable surveillance assignments which Hoover's FBI had refused to do without White House approval. Following Hoover's death and the appointment of L. Patrick Gray as Acting FBI Director, when the FBI began investigating the Watergate burglary, the Bureau investigators soon stumbled onto the burglars' CIA background. This reportedly led to some friction between the Bureau--specifically, Felt--and the Agency:
Mark Riebling, WEDGE: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, Chapter 15
The Central Intelligence Agency first heard about the Watergate break-in, according to its own records, at 5 p.m. that Saturday afternoon, when an inquiry about the arrested men was received from reporter Bob Woodward at the Washington Post. That call was soon followed by one from the FBI, advising that McCord and Hunt had been identified as former officers of CIA. . .when Osborn called Helms at 10 p.m. that evening, the DCI knew that this episode was different; he sensed, he later said, the Watergate affair would be "big news from the moment it happened." Not only were Hunt and McCord former CIA officers, but all of the Miami Cubans had worked for the Agency during Bay of Pigs, and one of them was still a contract agent on the Agency payroll.
Ideally, Helms would have liked to settle the matter quietly, without publicity, according to the 1955 agreement between CIA and Justice, which called for the Agency to investigate its own. But that agreement applied only to current Agency employees, and in any case the incident was already public knowledge. All Helms could do, for the moment, was to call Gray, disavow any knowledge of what the Agency's ex-employees were up to, and warn: "These fellows may have some connection with Ehrlichman. You'd better watch out."
The next morning, at his regular 9 a.m. staff meeting, Helms went around the table on the break-in. Cord Meyer, sitting in for DDP Karamessines, remembered "a unanimous expression of total ignorance and surprise," but also "general concern that the public and press would suspect some Agency involvement because of Hunt's and McCord's past connection to the Agency." To prevent that from happening, Helms set out a fundamental strategy. "Stay cool, stay clean, keep away from this," Helms said. "Volunteer nothing, because it will only be used to involve us." Only William Colby, Helms announced, would deal with outside parties seeking cooperation from CIA. According to Colby's own account, Helms asked him to "coordinate the Agency's efforts" in deflecting public suspicions of a CIA role in the affair.
Just such a deflection of suspicion away from CIA was accomplished by Deep Throat [This interpretation of Deep Throat's function doesn't seem to fit with the identification of Felt as Deep Throat, if Felt was a FBI old guard loyalist as he's usually characterized, so I'm mulling over this part--Fedora], a source who began feeding leads to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, by the reporter's own account, only hours after Helms launched CIA's damage-control plan. Woodward's later description of Deep Throat as having "an aggregate of information flowing and out of many stations" would seem a pointed signal to someone in Langley; Woodward also said that Deep Throat had an "extremely sensitive" position in the Executive branch [not sure this fits Felt, either--Fedora], which would perfectly fit someone at CIA, who (according to Woodward) did not like getting calls at the office. The use of an underground parking garage for clandestine meetings would seem to evidence a certain skill at "tradecraft"; furthermore, with the exception of Helms and his DDCI, CIA officers were not political appointees, and therefore their careers, unlike those of Dean and most other possible Throats, would not have automatically fallen with Nixon's own. And Woodward himself would later all but confirm that Deep Throat was a spook: "As you know, I'm not going to discuss the identity of Deep Throat or any other of my confidential sources who are still alive. But let me just say that [the] suggestion that we were being used by the intelligence community was of concern to us at the time and afterward."
SNIP
In any case, while Deep Throat, whoever he was, deflected press attention from CIA, Colby deflected requests from the FBI's Alexandria office for information on the burglars. "The immediate problem," Colby recalled, "was how we could give the FBI facts about the activities of former CIA personnel without revealing the operational jobs they had done in the past and the people with whom they dealt. We had to be concerned with the protection of legitimate operational secrets and with ensuring that the Agency was not dragged into something it had nothing to do with while responding to quite appropriate FBI inquiries." While "pondering this problem," Colby was informed that Howard Hunt had received a red wig and miniature camera from CIA during summer 1971; Colby and Helms then determined to conceal that information from the Bureau. "Neither Helms nor I saw any need to volunteer this information to the FBI," Colby conceded, "since it did not have anything to do with the Watergate break-in a year later. Our strategy, Helms stressed, was to respond to legitimate requests by the investigators for information on the individuals involved in Watergate or any other directly related questions. But we had no obligation to rush forward with peripheral information not significant to the investigation at hand and likely to create misunderstandings and public excitement about a possible -- and nonexistent -- CIA role in the activity under investigation."
At month's end Helms affirmed that his strategy required not being overly helpful to the Bureau. Leaving aside the White House's concerns, Helms did have some real worry about FBI inquiries into Hunt, who if not acting on CIA's behalf when working for the Plumbers, nevertheless had many Agency friends and connections. These were not the things the White House wanted covered up, but Helms did not want them volunteered. "In short," Helms directed, "it is up to the FBI to lay some cards on the table. Otherwise, we are unable to be of help. In addition, we still adhere to the request that they confine themselves to the personalities already arrested or directly under suspicion and that they desist from expanding this investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations."
Unsurprisingly, that policy caused the Bureau to believe that CIA was being "less than cooperative," as Felt recalled, "with inquiries from the FBI running into a stone wall or, worse still, encountering outright deception. When CIA got a tip on June 19 that burglar Eugenio Martinez's car had been left at the Miami airport, it waited two days before informing the FBI, probably so as to "sanitize" the car of any "compromising" data about Martinez's relations with CIA. When the FBI asked to interview Martinez's CIA case officer, Robert Ritchie, they were told, first, that he had gone on an "African safari," then that he had been reassigned to Indochina and would not be available for questioning. And when the Bureau asked about a "Mr. Pennington," who had reportedly once been James McCord's supervisor, CIA furnished a summary on Cecil H. Pennington, a former employee who had no connection with McCord. The lead turned into a dead for the FBI, just as CIA had hoped; it was more than a year before the Bureau learned that the man they wanted was Lee R. Pennington, a contract agent for CIA's Security Research Staff, who on June 21 or 22, according to the later sworn testimony of a CIA security officer, had "entered Mr. McCord's office at home, destroying any indication of connections between the Agency and Mr. McCord." When confronted on such matters by Mark Felt, Colby brushed airily brushed aside the FBI man's complaints by saying that "we were trying to keep publicity away from CIA."
Big SNIP from a longer chapter with other interesting details.
WOW! I was wrong. I thought it was Byrd.
[Dean to Nixon:] "I am convinced that [Sam Ervin] has shown that he is merely a puppet for Kennedy in this whole thing. The fine hand of the Kennedys is behind this whole hearing. There is no doubt about it. . ." Perhaps, Dean offered, that notion of the fine hand of the Kennedys could be leaked and so sabotage the hearings. Dean reported that he'd been told that Bobby Kennedy had had Lyndon Johnson bugged, and that support might be found within the FBI's files for that idea that the Democrats had done just as much bugging as the Republicans, and that this information could further damage the hearings. Former FBI assistant director Wiliam Sullivan was the key to this, Dean said, but "I haven't probed Sullivan to the depths on this thing because I want to treat him at arm's length until he is safe, because he has a world of information that may be available." The president didn't understand how Sullivan knew about the bugging, and asked, "Who told what to whom again?" Dean related a wild story about information that Nixon had been bugged in 1968 having gone from Hoover to Patrick Coyle to Nelson Rockefeller to Henry Kissinger, and that maybe FBI Assistant Director Mark Felt could go public with it even if there were no records. This led Nixon into a discussion of the fate of men who go public with sordid stories, such as Whittaker Chambers in the Hiss case--and Dean had the president hooked. . .