Letters
From JIM HOUGAN, Washington, USA.
(NB this letter was written between the reviews of Hougan’s book Secret Agenda which appeared in Lobsters 8 and 9)
After reading No 8 I thought I’d share the following with you in re: Secret Agenda and, on another topic, Frank Terpil.
Throat
Secret Agenda is deliberately ambiguous on the subject of Deep Throat’s identity. Basically, I conclude that if Throat was a prominent member of the Nixon Administration, well-known to the public at the time of the Watergate affair, then he can only have been General Alexander Haig. But there is no reason to assume that.
Throat could just as easily have been a comparative unknown – in which case, he was almost certainly someone whom Post reporter Bob Woodward met during his 65-70 tour of duty in the Navy. As Secret Agenda relates, that tour of duty saw Woodward joining an elite unit of the US Navy briefing officers, while at the same time presiding over the ultrasecret code-room of the Chief of Naval Operations (then Admiral Thomas Moorer) at the Pentagon. The extraordinary sensitivity of this post, according to others who have held it, made Woodward a member of “an old boys’ network” whose influence in Washington is said to be profound. (others in the group include Senator Richard Lugar and Admiral Bobby Ray Inman.)
In Secret Agenda I suggest that Admiral Inman, later Deputy Director of the CIA, should be a leading candidate for Deep Throat. Without going further into my reasons for asserting that – this letter promises to be too long already – Admiral Inman’s reaction to that report is of more than passing interest.
Within a day or two of the book’s publication, Inman’s staff called Random House to deny he was Throat, and to insist that it was defamatory to suggest that he should even be considered a candidate for that role. According to Inman’s staff, the admiral said that he was not in Washington during the Watergate affair – but had, instead, been posted in Hawaii throughout the affair’s duration.
It seemed then, that I had fucked up – and never more so than when Inman personally called the “Today Show” to repeat his denial and to complain that I had not checked my facts. The denial was broadcast to millions, and I wondered where I had gone wrong. Rechecking, I found that my source in re Inman’s whereabouts was the “Flag Matters Office” at the Pentagon. According to that Office, Inman was transferred to Washington D.C in the summer of 1971; he began his service at the Pentagon in June 1972; and he was posted to Hawaii in December 1973.
All The President’s Men by Bernstein and Woodward shows that the first Watergate-related conversation between Woodward and Throat occurred in mid-June 1972 – precisely when Inman moved to Washington’s Fort McNair at the Pentagon; and that the last conversation between the two men occurred during the first week in November 1973 – a few weeks before Inman’s departure for Honolulu. What we have, then, is an exact concordance between Throat’s whisperings to Woodward and Inman’s tenure at the Pentagon during the Watergate affair. Which, of course, need not prove anything – unless one takes into consideration the alacrity with which Inman chose to deny the rather soft allegation of his candidacy for Deep Throat honours .. and, not least of all, the falsity of the evidence that Inman offered in support of that denial.
I telephoned Inman earlier this year to ask why he said what he did. His answer was that, upon learning of my suggestion that he might be Deep Throat, he had telephoned Bob Woodward to discuss the matter with him. According to Inman, he and Woodward agreed that he was not Deep Throat (1)
As for the admiral’s false assertion about his tropical presence in Hawaii for the duration of the Watergate affair, Inman confessed that he has been “mistaken”.
But his denial had been broadcast throughout the country, and I can only assume that it was believed. After all, one would think that the former Director of Naval Intelligence and the National Security Agency would know with some precision where he was when this country was undergoing its greatest political crisis of this century. Indeed, to think otherwise is ludicrous. And isn’t it interesting to learn that Admiral Inman found it necessary to discuss the identity of Deep Throat with Bob Woodward – and then to conclude, apparently with a sigh of relief, that it was not he?
How the admiral reconciles all this, I have no idea. If he has told the truth as he knows it then he would seem to be a fool (which I doubt that he is). And if he has lied, then he has done so with a clumsiness that one can only wonder about the irony of his having chosen a career in intelligence”.
My own conclusion about all this is that Inman panicked when Secret Agenda was published. I think that he was a very important source of Bob Woodward’s throughout the critical first year of the Watergate affair. I suspect that he met Woodward in an underground garage on at least one occasion – and that this formed the basis of the literary character whom Woodward chose to call “Deep Throat”.
In the light of the still unresolved “Moorer-Radford Affair”, which saw Naval Officers at the Pentagon spying on Henry Kissinger and the White House, it would be interesting to know if Admiral Inman was Deep Throat – and, if he was, did he assume that role with or without the blessing of the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer.
Terpil
I haven’t read the Magill stories about “Korkala, Terpil and Ireland” but I do know something of the matters discussed.
I met Frank Terpil a year before he became a fugitive. He was an admirer of Spooks (Hougan’s previous book – eds.) and kidded about his own omission from its pages. I apologised to him for omitting from the rogue’s gallery, and offered to make it up to him by conducting a series of tape-recorded interviews. This was done over a period of several months, on weekends, at his house in Mclean.
Later, when Frank flew the coop and became a fugitive, he took to calling me on Sunday mornings from Damascus or Beirut – to chat mostly, and to ask how things were going with his case. In the course of one of these conversations I persuaded him to let me make a documentary film about him.
Whereupon a great many coded Telexes began to be sent until, finally, the “glass samples” (me, the executive producer and the director) arrived in Damascus. I introduced Frank to David Fanning and Anthony Thomas, and we began to plan for a film of an hour’s length. After four or five days in Syria, we returned to London and the States to make final arrangements for filming in Beirut. It was on or about the Fourth of July that we returned to the Middle East, and introduced the camera crew to Terpil in Beirut.
A lot happened while we were there. We were staying in West Beirut at the Royal Garden Hotel. The Parti Populaire Syrien threatened to kill us – they thought we were CIA or Mossad – but, more to the point, Marilyn and Donna Korkala arrived out of the blue.
Donna Korkala seemed to begin nagging her husband even before she’d stepped onto the tarmac at the airport. Within minutes she’d convinced her husband to bow out of the film, and henpecked him into begging us not to use the film footage that we had shot of his reunion with his wife at Beirut International.
A few days later Marilyn Terpil arrived – sending Terpil into a panic because, of course, Marilyn was a woman scorned. Frank had fallen in love (while on bail in the States) with an erstwhile cosmetician named Ruth – with whom he was living in Beirut. Marilyn knew of the liaison and was determined to break either it or her husband up.
What began as a spy-thriller, in other words, quickly degenerated into a domestic comedy (“against the background of the war-torn Middle East”). I kept waiting for John Cleese to show up and do the commentary.
It was a few months later, as we were editing what became “Confession of a Dangerous Man”, that Donna Korkala arranged through Marie McCarthy to have her husband interviewed by Mike Wallace for the “Sixty Minutes” show. (I don’t know anything about McCarthy’s involvement with the UN; my understanding is that she had been a baby-sitter for a relative of Mike Wallace’s – but perhaps that’s incorrect.) Terpil later told me that Donna was paid $10,000 for her role in arranging the interview; he was upset because he didn’t receive any of that money, despite the fact that the alleged payment was contingent upon Terpil’s appearance. (Korkala was rather less notorious than Terpil, and so the latter seems to have had a greater “market value” to the media.) Because Korkala insisted that his family needed the money, Terpil says that he agreed to be interviewed by Wallace.
Which, in effect, scooped us – though the ever-apologetic Terpil was of the opinion that it didn’t matter much since he refused to say anything substantive in response to Wallace’s questions. And, indeed, the “Sixty Minutes” is embarrassing for that reason . Terpil is almost completely non-committal, while Korkala is by turns brushed off and patronised.
I’m proud of the fact that “Confessions of a Dangerous Man” received a national Emmy as the best investigative documentary of 1982.
Which is nice …. but why am I telling you all this? I suppose it’s to add a bit of perspective to the purplish account that Marie McCarthy and Gordon Thomas have provided. The idea that Korkala wanted to “discuss the case with the American people outside the confines of a courtroom” is a hoot. Korkala was nagged into peddling himself to the media for money – it was as simple as that (and probably just as complicated).
That Korkala and Terpil were subsequently kidnapped is a fact. Korkala was snatched by Syrian Intelligence officials (one of whom is listed in his telephone address book). It happened at the Summerland resort just south of Beirut, where Gary was working at a job teaching rich Lebanese kids to wind-surf. Frank was picked up a few hours later by the same men. At the time he was getting ready to open an Italian restaurant near the American embassy.
Anyway, both men were taken to Damascus, imprisoned and interrogated. According to an account that Frank later gave me, the Syrians wanted him and Korkala to sign confessions saying that their indictments were a hoax, and that they were actually in the employ of the CIA – having been sent to the Middle East to spy on the various factions there. Frank later told me that Korkala signed a document to that effect, while Frank himself continued to do so. Korkala, then, was released (and was arrested shortly thereafter on a visit to Spain.) Terpil languished for months in what he claims was “a dungeon”. He felt that if he signed the confession, he’d be killed by the same people who had previously been protecting him.
When he was released he’d lost 50 pounds, had hair down to his shoulders, and beard. He called me from Beirut to say that he’d lost his tan. A few days later, the Israelis invaded, Frank donned a kaffiyeh, and was evacuated in the guise of a PLO fighter under the watchful eyes of the US marines.
As to the authenticity of Korkala’s address-book, I have little doubt. The circumstances under which it was found are plausible: worried friends went to his apartment after he’d disappeared, and there it was. And contrary to what the Irish Special Branch has to say, the names in the book are quite interesting. If I recall rightly, there is a Turkish gentleman named Bayrak who is listed, and, also, a Damascene named Badr Faris. Is there not also a Mr Short?
As for Marie McCarthy, I think the best question to ask about her is not about her. That is: who is Gerritt and what does Gerritt do? So, too, you should know that the Wilner House Hotel in Beirut is (or was) no ordinary lodging, but a hangout (according to Terpil) for the PLO and the PLA.