Miller Presents Award to 'Deep Throat'

W. Mark Felt appeared on CBS' "Face The Nation" in Washington in 1976.


By LINDA DEUTSCH
AP Special Correspondent

October 15, 2005, 7:31 PM EDT

FULLERTON, Calif. -- Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who was jailed for protecting a confidential source, presented an award Saturday to perhaps the most famous confidential source -- the man known as "Deep Throat."

The award presented by the California First Amendment Coalition was accepted by the grandson of former FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt because the 92-year-old could not make the trip.

Miller lauded Felt as a courageous man who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the secrets of the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Nixon.

"Without Mark Felt there would have been none of the revelations that showed what began as a third-rate burglary was really a story of corruption and malfeasance," Miller said. Woodward and Bernstein refused to identify "Deep Throat" until after Felt revealed it himself this year.

In remarks dealing with her own case, Miller said that she still would be behind bars if her source, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, had not personally contacted her in prison and given her permission to testify.

"I am free today only because of a federal prosecutor's agreement to limit his questions to me and because my once confidential source wrote me a letter and called me in jail to say he really, really wanted me to testify," Miller said.

Her lawyer Floyd Abrams, the keynote speaker at the conference at California State University, Fullerton, said Libby had earlier signed a waiver form but Abrams and Miller had suspicions that such forms could be challenged as being coerced.

A journalist should decide to break a confidence only when "the journalist is satisfied that this is a deeply personal decision by the source," Abrams said.

The New York Times on Saturday posted a story on its Web site detailing the accounts of what happened in the case of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame and how it led to Miller spending 85 days behind bars.

Miller never wrote a story about Plame, but she was jailed for civil contempt of court for refusing to testify before the grand jury investigating the Bush administration's disclosure of Plame's identity.

A newspaper column by Robert Novak that identified Plame on July 14, 2003, triggered a criminal investigation that could still result in charges against government officials.

In her remarks Saturday, Miller urged the adoption of a federal shield law to provide reporters protection from being forced to reveal confidential sources.

"I hope that other journalists will not have to make the choice that I did," she said.

Felt's grandson, Nick Jones, said he sees his grandfather as a figure comparable to Batman, "One of those crimefighters that come and go in the night."

"It's not about what he is underneath, but what he did," Jones said.
Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

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DEEP THROAT REVEALED


Former FBI official W. Mark Felt, left, and The Post's Bob Woodward.(Ken Feil/The Washington Post; Howard Moore/AP)
By Bob Woodward
A Chance Encounter, a Date With HistoryAs a friendship -- and the Watergate story -- developed, W. Mark Felt remained a mystery to Bob Woodward. More than three decades later, Woodward tells how he met Felt, and how an inside source helped develop a young reporter and bring down a president.