"I believe Woodward was an officer in Naval Intelligence.
That could have put him in contact (depending on assignments) with lots of people from the various Intelligence Agencies, (ie NSA, DIA, NRO, CIA...)"
No, he wasn't.
Knight Fellowships: 1998 Knight Lecture: Bob Woodward
"QUESTION: I don’t think Mr. Colodny, the co-author who wrote "Silent Coup," would agree with that. Do you want to include out of your comments whether or not you had an intelligence background in the Navy, whether or not you were placed in this role? You seemed to come on to the scene very timely, your relationship to, no, I’m just telling–
WOODWARD: No, no, this is a fair question. There are, that book, the book, "Silent Coup," I’m intimately familiar with, which has been just discredited up and down and the allegation is that somehow when I was in the Navy I worked in Naval intelligence which I did not, which there are records of. I worked in Naval communications. I had nothing to do with that."
http://knight.stanford.edu/lectures/knight/1998/
http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr196-woodward.html
He had a crypto clearance...
"Bob's assignment was to a very special ship, called a "floating Pentagon," the U.S.S. Wright. The ship was a National Emergency Command Ship-a place where a President and cabinet could preside from in the event of a nuclear war. It had elaborate and sophisticated communications and data processing capabilities. It had a smaller replica of the war room at the Pentagon. It ran under what was called SIOP-Single Integrated Operation Plan. For example, in the event of nuclear war, the Wright was third in line to take full command if the two ahead of it, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha (SAC) and NORAD, were rendered incommunicado. Woodward-straightfacedly-told authors Colodny and Gettlin (Silent Coup) that he guessed he was picked for the ship because he had been a radio ham as a kid.
Aboard the Wright, Woodward had top secret "crypto" clearance-the same clearance researcher Harold Weisberg found had been assigned to Lee Harvey Oswald when he was himself in the Marines. Such clearance in Woodward's case gave him full access to nearly all classified materials and codes on the ship. Woodward also ran the ship's newspaper. Woodward has insisted that possessing a high security clearance is not necessarily indicative of intelligence work."
He had access, he had the most sensitive clearance, he knew some of the most powerful people....