(HAS TRIMS) By William Neikirk Chicago Tribune (KRT) WASHINGTON_Attempting to solve one of America’s greatest political mysteries, student investigators at the University of Illinois have concluded that former White House lawyer Fred Fielding is Deep Throat, the secret source who broke the Watergate scandal wide open. Some of the students and their teacher, William Gaines, named Fielding as their choice for Deep Throat in a news conference Tuesday at the Watergate Hotel, site of the famed break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee nearly 31 years ago. Fielding and Bob Woodward, who first reported the Watergate story with fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, did not respond to telephone inquiries. In the past, Gaines said, Fielding has denied he was Deep Throat, the nickname Woodward gave to the anonymous source who provided damaging details of the break-in by Republican operatives and the Nixon administration’s efforts to cover it up, along with its campaign of “dirty tricks” against political opponents. In their project, which lasted four years, the students from the university’s Urbana-Champaign campus and Gaines cited six specific instances of closely held inside information that Fielding knew and Deep Throat provided. These included the involvement of Nixon White House operative Howard Hunt in the burglary and Nixon aide John Ehrlichman’s instructions to White House counsel John Dean to throw a briefcase containing incriminating information about political tricks into the Potomac River. They also said that Fielding was in a position to provide eight other revelations, including phone taps on reporters, Nixon campaign official G. Gordon Liddy’s burning of his hand with a candle, and problems with Nixon’s White House tapes. He said Fielding also was a likely Woodward source on earlier stories about the shooting of former Alabama Gov. George Wallace. The scandal touched off investigations that ultimately led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and became the subject of a book and movie, “All the President’s Men.” Deep Throat’s identity has been the subject of a political guessing game that has lasted since then. Woodward has said he will name his source only when Deep Throat dies. Using 16,000 pages of FBI documents and other Watergate records, Gaines and his students said that Fielding knew about or likely would have known about many of the key Watergate revelations that Woodward and Bernstein, made in their news stories that won them a Pulitzer Prize. They ruled out six other possible candidates for Deep Throat, saying that the others could not known everything that Fielding did as first assistant to Dean. “If it wasn’t Fielding, I don’t see how it could have been anybody else,” Gaines said. Like Deep Throat, he said, Fielding was known to drink Scotch whisky and smoke _ Marlboros, according to Gaines, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for the Chicago Tribune. Fielding, who served as White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan, was provided with a detailed package listing the evidence that the journalism project had gathered naming him as Deep Throat. He has not responded, Gaines said. Gaines said he was certain that Fielding was Deep Throat. A year ago, some of the students on a network television show, NBC’s “Dateline,” had speculated that former Nixon White House speechwriter Pat Buchanan was Deep Throat based on preliminary evidence. But Gaines said that he had never made that conclusion, and ruled out Buchanan, who was a presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000. Calling Fielding a hero, Gaines said the lawyer’s apparent motive in leaking information was to protect Nixon from “incompetent” aides who had ill-served him and because he had a fear about what the scandal meant for the executive branch and “the future of democracy.” One example of details that point to Fielding as the source was the case of a bookkeeper for Nixon’s re-election committee who, after being interviewed by the FBI, told Woodward and Bernstein the names of campaign officials who obtained money from a secret fund to finance the Watergate burglars. The bookkeeper and Deep Throat both said that campaign aides Jeb Magruder and Herbert Porter had received at least $50,000 from the fund, Gaines said. In their probe, the students discovered an FBI investigative summary of an interview with the bookkeeper providing these details. This summary had been sent by then-FBI Director Patrick Gray to Dean’s office, where Fielding read it, according to testimony Fielding gave later. The FBI report said Magruder received $50,000, Porter $100,000 and Liddy $89,000. But it turned out the bookkeeper had made a mistake, and that Magruder had actually only received $20,000. From this, the students and Gaines concluded that Fielding had leaked the bookkeeper’s error from the FBI summary. Another instance involved removing files from Hunt’s safe in the White House, since the FBI was inquiring about Hunt’s connection to the burglars after the break-in. Ehrlichman assigned Dean the task, and Fielding assisted him. The files contained “politically sensitive” documents about how Hunt was using his White House office to investigate Nixon’s political enemies and create fraudulent documents that would be leaked to the press. Dean said Ehrlichman told him to “deep six” the files by dropping them into the Potomac River on the way home. This information was leaked to Woodward by Deep Throat, who knew the exact date of the conversation. Ehrlichman denied he made the statement to Dean. Dean gave these files to FBI Director Gray, with the understanding that they were “not to see the light of day.” Deep Throat leaked this precise phrase to Woodward for a story, and Gray confirmed in later testimony that Dean had used the same words, Gaines said. As any good reporter would do, Gaines said, Woodward went to great lengths to protect the name of his source, including omitting his name from some of his accounts about the scandal, such as when he was involved in a meeting. As for Woodward’s statement that he won’t name Deep Throat until his source dies, Gaines said, “He won’t be around to be questioned. We don’t know how Bob Woodward is going to reveal this. Does he get up at the funeral and make an announcement or slip it into the obit?” ___ ‘copy 2003, Chicago Tribune. 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