Line Up the Clues, and the Identity of ‘Deep Throat’ Comes Into Focus : Watergate: Many signs lead to William Casey as the inside source who helped bring down the Nixon presidency.

I was in the White House on the day that Richard Nixon lost the battle. I was a young reporter asking and listening to lots of questions. Would he really abdicate? Would there be a coup d’etat? What was going to happen to poor Diane Sawyer, the assistant press secretary, whom everybody liked so much?

And who was Deep Throat?

Now all of these questions have been answered except the last one. I would like to propose an answer to it, too. Deep Throat would have to be somebody who had something to lose if he were to step forward. Or he would have to have died. Otherwise the temptation to go down in history--and probably make millions writing “I Was Deep Throat”--would be irresistible. The candidate whom I have in mind meets both of these tests. He had something to lose and now he is dead. So don’t expect to see him on Oprah.

Deep Throat would also have to be somebody who loved playing spy games. Remember the red flag in the flower pot that Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward would place on his balcony if he needed to meet with Deep Throat? Remember the signal Deep Throat himself would leave--a clock face on page 20 of Woodward’s home-delivered New York Times--if he needed a meeting?

Obviously, Deep Throat was also somebody to whom Woodward owed a lot. And Woodward would attempt to repay that debt someday. He wouldn’t offer money or gifts. He would offer recognition. Not recognition as Deep Throat but recognition in a different way. Woodward would write a book about his anonymous benefactor. That book would be titled “Veil.”

Woodward’s book “Veil” about the Central Intelligence Agency is his one work that doesn’t really fit with the others. It has a hero. And that hero’s name is William Casey.

When Woodward was working on the book, his friends couldn’t understand why he had chosen Casey as a protagonist. It was even said that Casey--who ran the CIA from 1981 to 1987--was conning him. Why was Woodward defending the man who had helped orchestrate the Iran-Contra double-dealing that ended in scandal? Why was this hard-to-impress reporter telling everybody how smart Casey was? What was going on in this relationship?

I propose that it was a relationship that went back much further than Casey’s stewardship of the CIA. It went back to all those dark meetings in underground garages. That was why Woodward had the temerity to beard Casey in that hospital room when he was dying. He knew Casey loved this kind of derring-do.

Casey had developed a taste for such spy games when he served with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Working out of London, he was responsible for parachuting spies behind Germany lines during the war. Toward the end of the war, he had 58 teams inside Germany. All of the OSS officers were basically amateurs, making it up as they went along and enjoying the whole boys-club adventure of it. In “Veil,” Woodward describes Casey as a man who loved “the cloak” and “a little of the dagger” too.

Casey was in a position to know the kind of information that Deep Throat revealed to the Washington Post. As Woodward writes in “Veil,” “His years of government service, 1971 to 1975, had been the scandal years.” And Casey had felt abused, which is what often motivates informers.

He was the man who told Woodward: “Follow the money.” He knew something about the Nixon money trail because he himself had gotten tripped up on that trail. It began when renegade investor Robert Vesco secretly delivered $200,000 in cash to the Nixon reelection campaign. Shortly thereafter, Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, repeatedly called the Securities and Exchange Commission and tried to quash an investigation of Vesco, who had been looting his companies. The person on the other end of those phone calls was William Casey, then head of the SEC. Soon Casey himself was being investigated and he resented it.

Then there was the ITT affair. The SEC leadership decided to ignore an ITT fraud charge that the SEC staff wanted to pursue. Again Casey was drawn into a Nixon Administration scandal. He was even accused of perjury but was never indicted.

Casey left the SEC in 1973 to become undersecretary of state for economic affairs. According to Bob Haldeman’s diaries, Casey was in and out of the White House during this time because Nixon wanted him to wage war on the State Department bureaucracy.

Casey knew how the Nixon Administration worked--especially how it worked when it came to money--and so was in a position to coach a young reporter.

(Woodward, asked this week whether Casey was indeed Deep Throat, said “This is an endless game. I’m not going to get involved. Have at it.”)

There was a time several years ago when Woodward told friends that Deep Throat was going to come forward. But then the Throat changed his mind. That would have been about the time that Bill Casey started managing Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. In such a sensitive position, he must have felt that now was not the time to reveal that he had brought down a Republican President. Why not wait? There would be plenty of time to step forward and go down in history later on, wouldn’t there?

Woodward may have even gone to the hospital that night to ask if Deep Throat wanted to unmask himself before he died. But Casey was too sick to answer him.