August 1972: Ground Rules for ‘Deep Throat’ Meetings Set

The Rosslyn parking garage where Woodward and Felt meet. [Source: Washington Post]Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward visits his FBI source, top bureau official W. Mark Felt (see May 31, 2005), at Felt’s suburban Virginia home. Felt instructs Woodward that if he is to continue funneling information to Woodward as his “deep background” source, ground rules need to be set. Felt brings his early FBI experience as a Nazi tracker to bear. No more phone calls and no more visits, Felt says. Woodward needs an unobtrusive way to contact Felt to arrange a meeting; Felt suggests that Woodward use a flowerpot with a small red flag currently on his apartment balcony. Moving the flowerpot from the front of the balcony to the rear will alert Felt that Woodward wants a meeting. The meetings will take place at 2 a.m. on the bottom level of an underground parking garage in Rosslyn, Virginia. Woodward is to employ countersurveillance techniques for these meetings—taking the stairs instead of the elevators, taking taxicabs instead of his personal car, switching cabs, walking the last few blocks to the garage. If Felt wants a meeting, he will, by methods he never explains, indicate this by marking Woodward’s morning copy of the New York Times. Woodward is never to divulge anything of Felt’s contacts or their relationship to anyone, Felt insists. “I had never heard of such extreme precautions,” Woodward recalls in 2005. “It was extraordinary.” Woodward realizes that Felt is an extraordinary source taking extraordinary risks, and agrees to the procedures. [Woodward, 2005, pp. 61-66]