The Devil in Deep Throat

It has been speculated that at least part of Mark Felt's motivation in his role as Deep Throat was revenge on Richard Nixon for not appointing him to replace J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director. But Nixon may have had his own reason for doing so.

Three weeks after the Watergate break-in -- while Nixon was pressing for the postponement of an investigation until after the election, and the mainstream press was still referring to the incident as a "caper" and a "third-rate burglary" -- conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell completed a lengthy article for my magazine, The Realist, documenting the conspiracy and delineating the players, from the burglars all the way up to FBI director L. Patrick Gray, Attorney General John Mitchell and the president himself.

Brussell wrote about the murder of Ruben Salazar, a Los Angeles Times reporter, at the first Chicano-sponsored antiwar protest. Salazar had been working on an expose of law enforcement, which would reveal secret alliances among the CIA, the Army, the FBI, California's attorney general and local police authorities.

L.A. District Attorney Robert Meyer received a phone call from L. Patrick Gray -- who had recently become acting head of the FBI after Hoover's death -- telling him to stop the investigation. Meyer did quit, saying it was like the "kiss of death" to work with these people.

Brussell called Meyer, asking if he would help with her research. She wanted to find out why the Justice Department in Washington was stopping a D.A. in Los Angeles from investigating the killing of a reporter. A month later, Meyer was found dead in a parking lot in Pasadena. And now L. Patrick Gray was involved in an even bigger cover-up.

The Watergate break-in was masterminded by E. Howard Hunt, who had worked for the CIA for 21 years. A year before Watergate, he proposed a "bag job" -- a surreptitious entry -- into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who had refused to cooperate with FBI agents investigating one of his patients, Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. It was the function of the White House "plumbers" to "plug" such leaks.

The burglars, led by G. Gordon Liddy, scattered pills around the office to make it look like a junkie had been responsible. The police assured Dr. Fielding that the break-in was made in search of drugs, even though he found Ellsberg's records removed from their folder. An innocent black man, Elmer Davis, was arrested, convicted and sent to prison, while Liddy remained silent.

Mae Brussell corresponded with Davis, and after he finished serving Liddy's time behind bars, he ended up living with Mae. It was a romance made in Conspiracy Heaven.