Through the Wire

Contributors: Linda Moss, Steve Donohue.

Kinley: 'Deep Throat' Felt's No Hero

When former FBI official W. Mark Felt came out of the shadows last week to reveal his identity as Deep Throat — the Washington Post's Watergate source, kept secret for more than three decades — David Kinley wasn't surprised.

“It fits a pattern of his behavior while he was there at the bureau,” Kinley recalled last week after Vanity Fair magazine exposed Felt with his cooperation, forcing Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein finally to confirm Felt as the man who helped drive President Nixon from office in 1974.

Today, Kinley runs Sun Country Cable, a small operator near San Francisco. Three decades ago, 31-year-old Kinley, with a degree from Harvard Law School and a promising political career, was chief of staff to acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray, who had been named to the position after the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972.

Felt was effectively the FBI's second-highest official when Gray took over. “I worked fairly closely with [Felt] because we both reported to the same guy, Pat Gray, for about a year,” Kinley said.

Kinley — who suspected Felt was Deep Throat all along — concluded that Felt cooperated with the Post because Nixon refused to name him as Hoover's successor after nearly 30 years working his way up the FBI chain of command.

“Felt was a 31-year career guy. He had been groomed by Hoover,” Kinley said. “He felt he was entitled to it and when he didn't get it, he did everything he could, in feeding information to the press, to undermine Gray.”

Felt has been cast as a hero, a noble public servant who saw criminality in the Oval Office and exposed it.

Kinley took strong issue with those who would lionize Felt, now 91 and living with his daughter not far from Kinley's Bay area office.

“Felt — far from being a national hero, which is an absurd distortion of the truth — had his own political motives and this wasn't the only thing that he was doing to undermine the administration,” Kinley said.

When Gray took command of the FBI, he directed Kinley to improve the bureau's recruitment of women and minorities, a big change from the Hoover era that bred resentment among the late director's loyalists. “[Gray] went in there on a mission to really shake things up,” Kinley said. “It created a lot of unhappiness.”

Gray became acting FBI director the same month as the Watergate break-in, but was never confirmed. He had to quit a year later, when it was disclosed he had destroyed evidence related to the investigation and had been feeding FBI field reports to White House counsel John Dean.

His FBI career over, Kinley moved to the Federal Communications Commission as chief of the Cable Television Bureau.

“The minute I found out about that, I told [Gray] he had to resign right away,” Kinley said. “I didn't know that and when I found that out during the early part of Gray's confirmation hearings when he told me about that, I was stunned. I couldn't believe he had done that.”

Gray and Kinley have not spoken since that time. Nor has Kinley had any contact with Felt. Kinley argued that Felt did not have to go to the Post to ensure that justice would be served.

“If he were seriously interested in getting to the truth of it, there were other ways he could have done it without breaking his oath and undermining the investigation process,” Kinley said. “For people to say, 'This guy is a national hero because he was determined to have the truth come out,' completely overlooks what his motives were.”

Kinley's problem with Felt was not based on blind loyalty to Nixon, shown to this day by people like conservative writer and TV personality Patrick Buchanan.

“I think Nixon should have gone to jail,” Kinley said. “I didn't support the idea of a pardon.”

Kinley reviewed the FBI's Watergate files but not until after the Post had run many damaging disclosures, so Kinley himself couldn't have been Deep Throat.

But until Felt's disclosure, some thought Kinley might have been the man famous for saying “follow the money” to Woodward in a parking garage in the middle of the night.

“My sister sent me an e-mail last night. She said she had a bet since 1977 with her husband that I didn't know about that I was [Deep Throat],” Kinley laughed.

Nice DirecTV Plug, Especially As Freebie

Home Box Office's party for the second-season premiere of Entourage drew a large crowd last week at Lincoln Center in New York, including the young stars of the witty Hollywood send-up — like Kevin Dillon, Adrian Grenier, Jeremy Piven and Jerry Ferrara.

HBO screened the first two new Entourage episodes, and DirecTV Inc. got a nice plug during the first installment, when the boys get back to L.A. after making an indie film back East and need their TV service reinstalled.

A DirecTV van, with its “Reinvent TV” logo in the forefront, gets prominent screen time. But the decision to incorporate DirecTV into the show was the writers' creative choice, according to HBO, as the premium service doesn't accept any paid product placements.

Also getting screen time was HBO chairman Chris Albrecht's daughter Kate, who has a small role in Entourage. She plays Christy, an assistant to Shauna, Debi Mazar's tough, potty-mouthed publicist character.

Some Reasons Why ESPN Needs Ombud

ESPN hired veteran Washington Post editor and columnist George Solomon last week as its first ever ombudsman — a position that the Post and other major newspapers have created in recent years to shine a light on ethics dilemmas and questionable stories. Why would ESPN need an ombudsman after 25 years? Here are a few calls Solomon might have had on his plate if he had joined the crew in Bristol earlier.

SportsCenter beer shilling: Anchor Dan Patrick broke new ground in 1999 when he appeared in Coors Light commercials with quarterback John Elway.

Cross-promotion priorities: ESPN often makes coverage of its X Games competition each summer the lead story on Sports Center, and awesome skateboarding tricks beat out amazing baseball catches in ESPN's “Plays of the Week.” Also, making a brawl inside a boxing ring play of the week is one thing, but picking a fight between basketball players as a “Play of the Week,” as ESPN did last fall, is another.

Ignoring the competition: Sports fans turn to ESPN throughout the day to get score updates from the ticker running on the bottom of the screen, but the chances of getting updates on sports that the channel doesn't have rights to, such CBS and NBC weekend golf coverage, are slim. After all, why risk sending the viewer to another channel?