Deep Throat

John Dean says it was Haig

Remember Deep Throat, the shadowy Nixon Administration figure who gave Washington Post Reporter Bob Woodward explosive information about the Watergate scandals at hush-hush, dead-of-night meetings in D.C. garages? Ever since Deep Throat achieved stardom in the book and movie All the President's Men, his identity has been one of Washington's most popular guessing games. Now in a new book, Lost Honor (Harper & Row), to be published in mid-November, John Dean, the former White House counsel who provided the first public details of the Watergate coverup, claims to have solved the puzzle. Deep Throat, says Dean, was none other than Alexander Haig--who was No. 2 to Henry Kissinger at the National Security Council, then White House chief of staff during Watergate, and later Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State.

Dean's case is entirely circumstantial. Its most telling point is that Haig was one of the very few who were in a position to know a fact that Deep Throat told Woodward in early November 1973: "One or more of the [White House] tapes contained deliberate erasures." Others in a position to know were Nixon, his secretary Rose Mary Woods and White House Aides Stephen Bull and the late J. Fred Buzhardt. Haig had access to all the other information that Deep Throat fed or confirmed to Woodward, Dean claims. According to Dean, Haig probably would have been available for all the meetings described by Woodward in All the President's Men, with one noteworthy exception; Haig's "character" fits that of Deep Throat; and Haig probably, though not certainly, met the Post reporter before Watergate. That would have happened in 1969 when Woodward was in the Navy serving as a courier between the Pentagon and the White House.

One principal objection to Dean's theory, which others advanced as early as 1976, is the inherent implausibility of the ultradignified and instantly recognizable Haig skulking around Washington garages undetected at 2 a.m. All the President's Men contains descriptions of Deep Throat's psychology ("a man whose fight had been worn out. . . Deep Throat never tried to inflate his knowledge or show off his importance") that scarcely seem to fit.

There are factual problems too. Deep Throat supposedly met Woodward on Oct. 9, 1972, a date when Haig was out of the country. In late February 1973, Deep Throat gave Woodward the names of two reporters whose telephones were tapped on White House orders, and added that the eavesdropping was done by an "out-of-channels vigilante squad." In fact, the tapping was done by the FBI, as Haig most certainly knew, since he had relayed the names to the FBI. Dean believes that either Woodward got the date of the October meeting wrong or it never occurred, and that Haig deliberately misled Woodward at the February meeting; but that is an act for which Deep Throat would have had no motive.

Dean makes repeated references to reporting done by TIME Correspondent Hays Gorey, who assisted him in some interviews and checking. Indeed, several other TIME correspondents extensively pursued the Haig theory before Dean began chasing it in earnest last summer. Their verdict, with which Gorey concurs: the theory is intriguing, but it remains no more than a theory. Dean has no proof.

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