Identity of 'Deep Throat' Remains Elusive

July 24, 2000 -- Who was “Deep Throat,” that unnamed source who famously helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the biggest political scandal in American history?

More than a quarter-century after that scandal forced President Nixon’s 1974 resignation, the Deep Throat mystery is still a mystery. But former Nixon White House insider Leonard Garment now says he may have the answer.

In his newly published book In Search of Deep Throat: The Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time (Basic Books), Garment argues Deep Throat was the former White House operative John Sears, a man Garment would later call a protégé.

“It is my conviction that Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s mysterious source … was John Sears,” he writes.

Garment’s analysis, though, provides no definitive answer, and the author admits it. What’s more, Garment’s claim is denied by Sears.

‘No Smoking Gun’

After many, many re-readings of All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s book describing how they uncovered the Watergate scandal, Garment concluded the voice of Deep Throat was unmistakably that of Sears.

But his book provides no factual evidence directly linking the supposedly cigar-smoking, heavy-drinking Deep Throat to Sears.

The evidence is “circumstantial,” says the author, who acknowledges “the absence of a smoking gun or a confession …”

What’s more, Garment’s theory is confronted with an uncomfortable detail: Sears was a former official as the Watergate scandal unfolded, not a person inside the executive branch, as Woodward and Bernstein described Deep Throat in All the President’s Men.

Sears, for his part, “categorically” denies he was Deep Throat and says he proposed to Basic Books to take a polygraph test to prove it.

“Neither the author nor his publisher were willing to accept this offer. Such a test would confirm, among other things, that I contributed nothing of a substantive nature to the Woodward and Bernstein articles, and, in fact, never laid eyes on either one of them until after the Watergate Investigation ended,” Sears wrote in a press release Monday.

Only four people supposedly know Deep Throat’s true identity: Woodward, Bernstein, former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, and Deep Throat himself. And they’re not telling. Woodward has said they would not disclose Deep Throat’s identity until he dies.

A Sensitive Matter

The matter, of course, is an extremely sensitive one.

Deep Throat helped bring down a president considered great by many conservatives, causing wide-ranging, long-lasting repercussions for American government.

It was Deep Throat who led Woodward and Bernstein to realize that hundreds of thousands of dollars kept by Nixon’s re-election committee financed much more than a bungled burglary at the Watergate complex — it funded “other intelligence gathering activities,” the source was quoted as saying in All the President’s Men.

Those activities, it would later be revealed, included burglary, wire-tapping, violations of campaign financing laws, the attempted use of government agencies to harm political opponents, and a major coverup.

Many of the possible Deep Throat suspects — men such as former assistant to the president and Chief of Staff Al Haig, and current Sen. Robert F. Bennett, R-Utah — are current or former high-ranking government or private-sector officials well-respected by conservatives.

Two Sources in One?

Garment was a Nixon insider who helped engineer the president’s election campaign in 1968 and became special consultant to Nixon on domestic policy from 1969 to 1974. He says he knew personally all of the people who credibly could have been Deep Throat.

Sears also had worked in the 1968 campaign and then briefly in the White House, leaving before the scandal began to break.

Though Sears denies he was Deep Throat — who was one of a number of unidentified sources used by Woodward — Garment says Sears admits to being another source, a “former administration official” described in All the President’s Men as giving information to Bernstein.

Garment contends Sears was a source used unwittingly by both Woodward and Bernstein.

This was possible, he writes, because the two reporters would not identify their sources to each other. “As [All the President’s Men] reported, the two reporters, not surprisingly, crossed one another’s tracks from time to time, as each of them made a separate approach to the same source.”

Garment lists a number of factors he says seem to point to Sears as Deep Throat.

For instance, Woodward described Deep Throat as an old friend in All the President’s Men. Also, that book said Deep Throat was an “incurable gossip,” smoked too much, and “could be rowdy, drink too much, overreach.”

Deep Throat had revealed knowledge of the Nixon administration’s dirty operations, suggesting a high-level inside connection, writes Garment.

But lacking a “smoking gun,” the author falls back on intuition, rooted in his familiarity with Sears, who worked under Garment at a law firm after both left office.

Reading All the President’s Men, “for the thousandth time,” writes Garment in a key passage, “once again I heard the voice of Deep Throat — and realized that it was identical to the voice of Bernstein’s former administration official.”

A Former Official

But Garment’s theory runs up against a major stumbling block.

All the President’s Men appeared to describe Deep Throat as a current Nixon administration official:

“Woodward had a source in the Executive Branch,” said the book.

Sears, however, had left the Nixon administration before Woodward and Bernstein began investigating the botched burglary at the Democratic Party’s national headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington in 1972 — making him a former official.

Garment argues the “linguistic conventions of journalism are fairly loose,” such that “the sentence could mean merely that Woodward had a source who was in the executive branch at some point, or who performed work for the executive branch without being employed there full time.”

Garment says Woodward showed such flexibility in his use of language on two occasions in his latest book, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate.

“What Woodward wrote had a concrete basis in reality, but it might not always be the basis that a natural reading of the language would suggest,” Garment says.

And, Garment writes, Sears maintained close connections to people in the Nixon White House, even acting as an occasional adviser to the president.

Garment, who admits he has an obsession with the mystery, concedes “we cannot know Deep Throat’s identity with certainty unless or until one of the four holders of the secret … chooses to reveal it.”

But he says, “For me, the search for Deep Throat has ended. I do not think I will wonder about him anymore.”