Anil Ambani's letter to his employees

Anil Ambani's letter to his employees [ TUESDAY, JUNE 21, 2005 11:02:14 AM] My Dear Colleagues, Last Saturday, I took the most difficult emotional decision of my life – to step down as Vice-Chairman and Managing Director of RIL. It was a decision which signaled the culmination of an incredible personal and professional journey which began way back in 1982 when my father, the legendary Dhirubhai Ambani, granted me the privilege of working at the Reliance textiles plant in Naroda. On December 18, I reported for duty as a young management trainee. For the next four years, I worked on the shop floor, and stayed at the employees’ hostel... In 1986, DHA suffered a stroke, which brought me back to Mumbai -- to assume much wider responsibilities at Reliance. Mukesh and I, then aged 28 and 26, now had the task of standing shoulder to shoulder with our father in steering the Reliance ship. The two of us struck a partnership that is impossible to forget.... For me, as for many of you, Reliance was everything -- the centre of my universe, the cradle of my corporate life, the great nursery of my learning.... I lived, breathed and dreamt the Reliance dream every waking minute of my life. When I was single, I was often asked when I was going to marry. My answer: “I am already married -- to Reliance!” It is to Tina’s eternal credit that she has gracefully accepted to be my second wife all these years! Naturally, I leave this great organisation, and all of you, with a deep and abiding sense of personal loss. Life, for me, will never be the same again. But evolution and change are, perhaps, an inevitable part of our karma... Over the years, I had the opportunity of working closely with so many of you. Without your support, affection and guidance, I would not be where I am today. Without your hard work, dedication and commitment, RIL would not be where it is today – at the very top of India’s corporate pyramid, the centre-piece of our national economic renaissance. I want to thank each one of you personally for what you have so generously given -- to Reliance as an organization and me as an individual. The story of Reliance is, in some ways, the story of one man – our visionary founder Dhirubhai Ambani – and his boundless passion. We are all extraordinarily blessed to have had the chance of working under his epochal leadership. But as I look back, I feel every bit as proud of the role that Mukesh, I and all of you played in translating DHA’s dreams into reality. In different ways, we were all co-creators of wealth and value. The journey we undertook together was momentous. In 1982, the market capitalization of Reliance Industries was a little over Rs 240 crore. Today, it stands at over Rs 88,000 crore. More than three million shareholders have benefited in the process. I am confident that under Mukesh’s outstanding leadership, and supported by your hard work, dedication and professionalism, Reliance Industries will continue to grow and flourish, and scale ever greater heights. As I look to the future, I am committed to carrying forward DHA’s legacy in creating a strong, global Indian enterprise. I am also committed to the highest standards of corporate governance. The world, DHA would often say, is a series of orbits, stacked up in a hierarchy. The challenge for all of us is to break out of our present orbits and aspire for higher ones. I see the current juncture as one such change of orbit for both Mukesh and I. Going ahead, there can no greater tribute to DHA’s legacy than for both of us to excel and move to yet higher orbits. I wish you all the very best for the future, and seek your continued goodwill and blessings as I embark on a new journey in life. Finally, I look forward to an entirely new dimension in our relationship -- that of all of you as valuable and loyal customers of Reliance Infocomm, Reliance Energy and Reliance Capital! Yours Faithfully, Anil D. Ambani ada@adaforindia.com

A Long Shadow - Deep Throat

A Long Shadow
Understanding Deep Throat: Why a source took on a president then, and how Nixon's fall shapes us even now.

By Evan Thomas

Newsweek

(c) Mark Godfrey / The Image Works Kay Graham, Bernstein, Woodward, Simons and Bradlee discuss The Washington Post's Watergate coverage

June 13 issue - Three decades on, many, if not most, Americans know about Watergate from the movie "All the President's Men." Boiled down to its melodramatic essentials, the film is a timeless quest story. It shows two young seekers—newspaper reporters handsome enough to be Robert Redford, cool enough to be Dustin Hoffman, guided by a wizard in a cave (Deep Throat in a garage)—toppling the Evil Empire (Richard Nixon's White House). The filmmaker, the late Alan Pakula, deftly used lighting to enhance the feel of a Manichaean struggle. The newsroom where the reporters work is always bright, open, a place of truth. Almost everything else is dark, shadowy—nests of liars and prevaricators.

How long ago, and how romantic, the story seems. Reporters are not exactly heroes these days. Anonymous sources like Deep Throat are in disrepute, and many large news organizations, including NEWSWEEK, are under fire for their mistakes. What happened to the days when reporters were searching for truth, instead of gabbling on talk shows?

"All the President's Men" was a great morality tale, and true enough about The Washington Post reporters and editors it portrayed. But it was only a movie. It does not tell the whole story, or even the real story, of the Watergate scandal, and it gives a misleading picture of the real stakes involved.

The larger truth about Watergate—the essential "backstory," if you will—became clearer last week, when the actual Deep Throat stepped out of the shadows and, with a nudge or two from his family, revealed himself: W. Mark Felt, 91, a frail old man, smiling and blinking for the flashbulbs. His identity and rank at the time of Watergate—No. 2 man at the FBI—shed new light on the true nature of the scandal and its lasting effects. Felt's motives were the subject of instant and intense debate (Felt himself suffers from dementia), but they were almost certainly mixed, in ways that are important to understanding the story.

The real story, like real life, is murkier, more mundane, more ambiguous than the movie version. But it is also more telling and relevant to today's headlines. It is not primarily a story about the press or the search for truth. Rather, Watergate was at heart a power struggle. Truth and justice played a part, but only a part. It was largely a behind-the-scenes contest for control. At times high-minded, at other times brutal and raw, the forces vying for control shifted the center of gravity in the nation's capital in profound and lasting ways. Only now, 35 years later, is the pendulum beginning to swing back.

The loss in Vietnam and the crime of Watergate gave a bad name to "national security" and "executive privilege," noble phrases Nixon frequently invoked to justify his illegal acts. The scandals had the effect of undermining executive authority—of dismantling what the historian and JFK adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called "the Imperial Presidency." Power was, in effect, turned over from its traditional and most forceful executors—the White House, the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies—to the people and organizations that are supposed to function as a check on power: the courts, the press, congressional watchdog committees. The 1970s saw a rise of a new counterestablishment—populated largely by reporters and lawyers—all conjoined and interlocked in one giant scandal machine that, at times, seemed bent on bringing down anyone in an official position of authority for any peccadillo, no matter how minor or distant.

The impact on government was, for better and for worse, predictable. True, there were no more J. Edgar Hoovers running secret sinister empires. On the other hand, bureaucrats became timorous, or, in the lingo of government, "risk averse." They were afraid that if they took any chances, they'd have to hire a lawyer or read about themselves in an article by Bob Woodward.

But pendulums do swing, especially when they get a hard shove. Ever since 9/11, President George W. Bush has been trying to push back, and with some success. To much of the electorate, the lines have been drawn. Increasingly the press and Congress—or anyone who questions authority—are cast as the bad guys, as unpatriotic or irresponsible. Bush wants to restore the executive power that Nixon squandered. His critics think he has already overreached. His supporters cheer him for trying to save the country and for rolling back the antiauthoritarian excesses that were the legacies of the 1960s, of Vietnam and Watergate.

How did we get from there to here—and maybe back again? The story begins with Richard Nixon, cunning, bright, able and, as time went on, ever more paranoid. The young Nixon was a southern California striver. Insecure about his degrees from Whittier College and Duke Law, he had tried to make it in New York, but the fancy firms rejected him, sending him back west. It was in politics, however, not in law, that Nixon found his metier. Elected to Congress in 1946, he arrived in Washington in 1947, the same year as Jack Kennedy. Ambitious, shrewd and gifted at exploiting voters' fears (from communism to race), Nixon was a Republican in a Democratic town; the last GOP president, Herbert Hoover, had been defeated four elections before, and Truman was about to win a fifth. Even as Nixon rapidly moved up to the Senate and then to the vice presidency under Eisenhower, Nixon never shook the feeling that Washington was hostile territory. His heartbreakingly close loss to Kennedy in 1960 (outpolled by just 118,574 votes out of more than 68 million cast) only fed Nixon's resentments and conspiratorial world view.

And so, as he moved into the White House in 1969, Nixon returned to a capital, and a government, he believed hated him. To the new president, the federal bureaucracy was the enemy, the bastard progeny of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society, stuffed full of pointy-headed Democrats. He wanted to get control of the government, to consolidate power in the White House. He was extremely aggressive about tracking down his enemies (by wiretap if necessary) and purging the disloyal.

There was one agency that presidents had learned to handle very, very carefully, however, and that was the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For decades, its director, J. Edgar Hoover, had maintained his independence through a crude device: blackmail. He kept secret files on the private lives of powerful senators and cabinet officers and presidents, and he made sure they knew it. When Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy started grumbling about getting rid of Hoover during his brother's administration, Hoover let the Kennedys know that he had files on the president consorting with a Mafia moll and a call girl rumored to be an East German spy. That was the end of the get-rid-of-Hoover talk among the Kennedy brothers.

Nixon also wanted to get rid of Hoover, who had been FBI director for more than four decades when Nixon finally became president. Nixon never could bring himself to fire Hoover ("He's got files on everybody, goddamn it," Nixon reportedly said). The aging director died in office in May 1972. But the instant Hoover was gone, Nixon moved to install his own man, L. Patrick Gray, as head of the bureau.

This did not sit well with the FBI's No. 2 man, Mark Felt. In his memoirs, Felt says he deserved the FBI's top job. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK, Felt's fellow G-men of that era recall Felt as an old-school Hoover loyalist, a white-shirt, snap-brim-hat stickler for discipline. "He was disdainful of journalists," recalled Cartha (Deke) DeLoach, 84, a former high-ranking FBI official. But FBI historian Curt Gentry, who interviewed Felt, quoted FBI hands as saying that Felt had "a touch of the chameleon. Talking with Roy Cohn, he seemed like an archconservative; with Robert Kennedy, an enlightened liberal."

What drove Felt to break ranks and become the most famous anonymous source in history? Was it his disappointment at being passed over? That may have been part of it, but not all. There was a larger power struggle unfolding as Watergate moved up from Nixon's "plumbers" to hush money to the mechanics of cover-up: the White House at one point wanted the CIA to block the FBI's investigation of illegal payments.

By all accounts, including his own memoir, Felt was furious at such meddling with the bureau. Two days after the initial crime—a mysterious June 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel—Felt received a call from a Washington Post reporter named Bob Woodward. Felt had been a friend of Woodward's, the Post reporter revealed last week after the Deep Throat story broke. Two years earlier, as a young Naval Intelligence officer running an errand to the White House, Woodward had bumped into Felt, also cooling his heels outside an executive office, and struck up a conversation. (The fact that Woodward had been in uniform, calling Felt "sir" and asking career advice, rather than asking questions as a scruffy reporter, no doubt helped warm the relationship.) After Woodward became a Post reporter, the two men stayed in touch, and Felt even fed Woodward a few tips.

But Felt was nervous when Woodward called looking for information about the Watergate break-in, and he soon stopped returning the reporter's calls. The persistent Woodward went to his house. Felt was even more anxious. But he didn't cut Woodward off. As an old German-spy hunter from World War II, Felt knew a few counterespionage tricks. Felt and Woodward worked out an elaborate system of signals to arrange meetings, usually after 2 a.m., in a parking garage across the river in Rosslyn, Va. In his notebooks, Woodward began referring to his source as "M.F." (My Friend).

After Deep Throat was revealed by Vanity Fair magazine, a debate broke out on talking-head shows and the Internet about whether to call Felt a hero. Many conservatives, including a few old Nixon hands, branded him a "snake" and a "traitor." Others, particularly on the left, observed that Felt had shown considerable courage—and then never tried to cash in, at least until now. Defenders of the FBI pointed out that Felt (and, before he died, J. Edgar Hoover himself) had resisted a Nixon White House plot—the Huston Plan—to illegally snoop on student radicals and other "subversives." But the G-men may not have had the purest of motives. The fact is that the bureau had run plenty of "black-bag jobs" (warrantless entries); indeed Felt was later convicted (and pardoned by Ronald Reagan) for authorizing illegal break-ins of suspected radicals (Nixon provided testimony supporting Felt). Most scholars of the period agree that Hoover's real reason for opposing the Huston Plan was that he didn't want the White House intruding on his monopoly on illegal spying.

The argument that Felt resisted Nixon because he did not want the bureau to become "politicized" is shaky, or at least hypocritical. After all, Hoover routinely blackmailed politicians. And Judge Laurence Silberman, who, as acting attorney general in the Ford administration, was one of the few non-Hooverites ever to see Hoover's secret files, told NEWSWEEK that every president except Truman and Eisenhower used, or tried to use, the bureau against his political enemies.

If Felt was offended by Nixon's heavy hand on the FBI, what could he have done about it? Not go to his boss or Attorney General John Mitchell, both Nixon stooges. He might have gone to a congressional oversight committee—but that would have invited scrutiny into whatever Hoover had been up to all those years.

So he became Deep Throat instead. Years later, the straitlaced Felt apparently told his family that he never liked that name, borrowed from the pornographic movie (the code name for Woodward's source was coined by the Post's late managing editor Howard Simons as a kind of in-house joke). According to the Vanity Fair article by Felt's family lawyer John O'Connor, "I'm the Guy They Call Deep Throat," Felt agonized over his secret role in Watergate for decades. In his 1979 memoir of his days in the FBI, "The FBI Pyramid," Felt had written that leaking was wrong. Only in his old age did his family convince him that he had been a hero, and even then he seemed to have had doubts. The family brought in a freelance writer, Jess Walter, to try to help him tell his story. According to New York publisher Judith Regan, who saw Walter's manuscript, Felt, addled by dementia, was unable to recall any details. Felt did acknowledge he was Deep Throat on most days—but on other days he would deny it.

Yet there is no doubt that Felt was Deep Throat and played a key role in unseating Richard Nixon. In the first couple of months after the Watergate break-in, The Washington Post, virtually alone among news organizations, pursued the story while administration spokesmen scorned the Post with denials, abuse and not-so-veiled threats. During this trying period, Deep Throat's guidance and confirmation of essential details was "vital," former Post executive editor Ben Bradlee told NEWSWEEK.

Nixon himself suspected that Felt was leaking to the press. On the White House tapes, he can be heard inquiring about Felt and deriding him with an anti-Semitic remark (assuming, without any evidence, that Felt was Jewish). Why didn't the White House insist on firing Felt? Possibly, Nixon was still afraid of those secret files collected by Hoover—but now kept in Felt's office.

Watergate did not just spell the end of the Nixon presidency. It started a chain reaction of investigations and prosecutions that eventually exposed all manner of secret wrongdoing by the FBI and the CIA: black-bag jobs, illegal mail opening and CIA plots to assassinate foreign leaders. The effect of these investigations by the press, the courts and congressional committees was profound. Battered by failure in Vietnam and the exposure of the CIA's "crown jewels" (its most hidden and "deniable" covert operations), the military and the intelligence community became deeply demoralized in the late 1970s. From the highest levels to the lowliest commands, the watchword was caution.

When unarmed Islamic militants poured into the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979, the Marine guards fired a few cans of tear gas—but otherwise held back and let the "students" seize the embassy. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wanted to avoid military action. A 444-day hostage crisis ensued. (According to what may be an urban legend, the Soviet intelligence services took a more draconian approach to ending hostage crises. Standard procedure, or so the story goes, was to kidnap one of the kidnappers and send a severed body part to the others.)

The Reagan presidency saw a renewed buildup of the military and an "unleashing" of the CIA, as well as stirring rhetoric about renewed American pride. But Reagan, or his minions, overreached. Working out of the national-security staff of the White House, Lt. Col. Oliver North ran a scheme to sell arms to Iranians in order to free some American hostages, and to use the proceeds to illegally fund freedom fighters in Nicaragua (violating a congressional ban). The plot imploded and Reagan narrowly missed facing impeachment charges. For top CIA officials, who were prosecuted, the message was clear: Do not take risks. Safer to keep your head down.

At the same time at the Pentagon, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Colin Powell was preaching the Powell Doctrine, which roughly held that the military should never intervene without overwhelming force, public approval, the certainty of victory and an exit strategy, i.e., almost never. Powell actually resisted invading Iraq in the first gulf war and had to be pressured by the then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

President Bill Clinton and his cabinet officers often felt thwarted by the balky military and intelligence services. "What good is it to have the greatest military in the world if you can't use it?" a frustrated Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once demanded when the Pentagon was resisting action in the Balkans. The record shows that Clinton would from time to time ask the military or the CIA why it couldn't do more to get rid of Osama bin Laden. But each time, excuses were made (armed intervention would require too many troops, too much airlift, assassinations were illegal, etc.).

In the spring of 2001, George W. Bush at least once expressed frustration at the lack of effective options against Al Qaeda. "I'm tired of swatting at flies," he said. "I'm tired of playing defense. I want to play offense. I want to take the fight to the terrorists." But the White House national-security bureaucracy was just getting around to meeting on how the president's wishes might be accomplished when terrorists started flying into buildings.

After 9/11, the Bush administration was all-out. Bush said he did not want to blow up a few tents with cruise missiles; he wanted "boots on the ground." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was infuriated by the Pentagon's slowness to get troops into Afghanistan (the military, following the CIA by a couple of weeks, arrived in mid-October). But the sleeping giant was awake, and starting to stir. Since then, the posture of the military and the intelligence community has been "forward leaning," as Rumsfeld likes to phrase it.

But will the Bush administration lean too far? And is risk aversion really a thing of the past? The answers to both questions are uncertain. The intelligence failure over WMD in Iraq, and the administration hype to compensate for it, was not encouraging. Nor is the ongoing scandal of the treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and perhaps in secret prisons in undisclosed locations elsewhere. At the same time, investigators who have examined the national-security establishment's performance since 9/11 have seen signs of the old inertia, the fear that a wrong move could land an unlucky bureaucrat in the hot seat of a congressional investigating committee.

There is no doubt that Bush wishes to expand executive power, to restore it to pre-Watergate days. Vice President Cheney has been particularly outspoken about guarding the prerogatives of the executive. At press conferences (most recently last week), Bush has shown a kind of casual disdain for Congress and the press, his two main foes in the Washington power game.

Bush, as even his wife, Laura, will admit, can get too cocky at times. Will cockiness become arrogance and lead to the sort of sins of pride that doomed Nixon and nearly tripped up Reagan? It seems unlikely: Bush is not at all paranoid (like Nixon) and he is more hands-on (and less vulnerable to an Ollie North) than Reagan.

And, perhaps most important, Bush lives in a different world than his predecessors—a world Deep Throat helped create. Official Washington is a glass-walled hothouse changed forever by the speed and openness of technology and the residual impact of Watergate. Though the Great Scandal Machine that almost took Clinton down is idling, and the ardor of its operatives has cooled, it can always be restarted and re-energized with some old-fashioned digging and a few clicks of the computer. The Bush administration may demand deference and long for a return to a vanished Washington in which reporters looked the other way when FDR was in his wheelchair or evaded Congress to send arms to Britain, but after Watergate, even a restored Imperial Presidency would be in constant danger of crumbling.

Last week NEWSWEEK asked Bob Woodward whether, if Bush did overreach like Nixon, a new Deep Throat would materialize in the shadows. "I believe so," said Woodward. "And I think they know in the Bush administration that it's always a real possibility." But what if Bush's New Centurions do succumb to the age-old temptation to abuse power? "Who knows?" mused Woodward. "I hope we've all learned the lessons of Watergate."

With Andrew Murr and Eleanor Clift

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8101507/site/newsweek/

We are all equal citizens of one State’

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Analysis

For the record

‘We are all equal citizens of one State’

While praising Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah for his secular ideals, L K Advani, during his recent trip to Pakistan, referred to Jinnah’s presidential address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan at Karachi on August 11, 1947. This is the full text of Jinnah’s historic speech:

Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen, I cordially thank you, with the utmost sincerity, for the honour you have conferred upon me — the greatest honour that is possible for this sovereign Assembly to confer — by electing me as your first president. I also thank those leaders who have spoken in appreciation of my services and their personal references to me. I sincerely hope that with your support and your co-operation we shall make this Constituent Assembly an example to the world. The Constituent Assembly has got two main functions to perform. The first is the very onerous and responsible task of framing our future Constitution of Pakistan and the second of functioning as a full and complete sovereign body as the Federal Legislature of Pakistan. We have to do the best we can in adopting a provisional Constitution for the Federal Legislature of Pakistan. You know that not only we ourselves are wondering but, I think, the whole world is wondering at this unprecedented cyclonic revolution which has brought about the plan of creating and establishing two independent sovereign dominions in this sub-continent. As it is, it has been unprecedented; there is no parallel in the history of the world. This mighty sub-continent with all kinds of inhabitants has been brought under a plan which is titanic, unknown, unparalleled. And what is very important with regard to it is that we have achieved it peacefully and by means of an evolution of the greatest possible character. Dealing with our first function in this Assembly, I cannot make any well-considered pronouncement at this moment, but I shall say a few things as they occur to me. The first and the foremost thing that I would like to emphasise is this — remember that you are now a sovereign legislative body and you have got all the powers. It, therefore, places on you the gravest responsibility as to how you should take your decisions. The first observation that I would like to make is this: You will no doubt agree with me that the first duty of a government is to maintain law and order, so that the life, property and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by the State. The second thing that occurs to me is this: One of the biggest curses from which India is suffering — I do not say that other countries are free from it, but, I think, our condition is much worse — is bribery and corruption. That really is a poison. We must put that down with an iron hand and I hope that you will take adequate measures as soon as it is possible for this Assembly to do so. Black-marketing is another curse. Well, I know that black-marketeers are frequently caught and punished. Judicial sentences are passed or sometimes fines only are imposed. Now you have to tackle this monster which today is a colossal crime against society, in our distressed conditions, when we constantly face shortage of food and other essential commodities of life. A citizen who does black-marketing commits, I think, a greater crime than the biggest and most grievous of crimes. These black-marketeers are really knowing, intelligent and ordinarily responsible people, and when they indulge in black-marketing, I think they ought to be very severely punished, because they undermine the entire system of control and regulation of foodstuffs and essential commodities, and cause wholesale starvation and want and even death. The next thing that strikes me is this: Here again it is a legacy which has been passed on to us. Alongwith many other things, good and bad, has arrived this great evil — the evil of nepotism and jobbery. This evil must be crushed relentlessly. I want to make it quite clear that I shall never tolerate any kind of jobbery, nepotism or any influence directly or indirectly brought to bear upon me. Whenever I will find that such a practice is in vogue or is continuing anywhere, low or high, I shall certainly not countenance it. I know there are people who do not quite agree with the division of India and the partition of the Punjab and Bengal. Much has been said against it, but now that it has been accepted, it is the duty of everyone of us to loyally abide by it and honorably act according to the agreement which is now final and binding on all. But you must remember, as I have said, that this mighty revolution that has taken place is unprecedented. One can quite understand the feeling that exists between the two communities wherever one community is in majority and the other is in minority. But the question is, whether it was possible or practicable to act otherwise than what has been done. A division had to take place. On both sides, in Hindustan and Pakistan, there are sections of people who may not agree with it, who may not like it, but in my judgment there was no other solution and I am sure future history will record its verdict in favour of it. And what is more it will be proved by actual experience as we go on that was the only solution of India’s constitutional problem. Any idea of a united India could never have worked and in my judgment it would have led us to terrific disaster. May be that view is correct; may be it is not; that remains to be seen. All the same, in this division it was impossible to avoid the question of minorities being in one dominion or the other. Now that was unavoidable. There is no other solution. Now what shall we do? Now, if we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor. If you will work in co-operation, forgetting the past, burying the hatchet, you are bound to succeed. If you change your past and work together in a spirit that everyone of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make. I cannot emphasise it too much. We should begin to work in that spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community — because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalees, Madrasis, and so on — will vanish. Indeed if you ask me this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India attaining freedom and independence, and but for this we would have been free people long ago. No power can hold another nation, and specially a nation of 400 million souls in subjection; nobody could have conquered you, and even if it had happened, nobody could have continued its hold on you for any length of time but for this. Therefore, we must learn a lesson from this. You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State. As you know, history shows that in England conditions, some time ago, were much worse than those prevailing in India today. The Roman Catholics and the Protestants persecuted each other. Even now there are some States in existence where there are discriminations made and bars imposed against a particular class. Thank God, we are not starting in those days. We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State. The people of England in course of time had to face the realities of the situation and had to discharge the responsibilities and burdens placed upon them by the government of their country and they went through that fire step by step. Today, you might say with justice that Roman Catholics and Protestants do not exist; what exists now is that every man is a citizen, an equal citizen of Great Britain and they are all members of the nation. Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State. Well, gentlemen, I do not wish to take up any more of your time and thank you again for the honour you have done to me. I shall always be guided by the principles of justice and fairplay without any, as is put in the political language, prejudice or ill-will, in other words, partiality or favoritism. My guiding principle will be justice and complete impartiality, and I am sure that with your support and co-operation, I can look forward to Pakistan becoming one of the greatest nations of the world.

Deep Throat

Deep Throat

---

'Secrecy at all costs, no talk about me ...'

Earlier this week, one of the 20th-century's best-kept secrets was revealed when former FBI boss Mark Felt admitted to being Deep Throat, the source behind Watergate. Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter who exposed the scandal, reveals for the first time the story of the clandestine friendship that brought down a president

Friday June 3, 2005
The Guardian

In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the US Navy and assigned to Admiral Thomas H Moorer, the chief of naval operations, I sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House. One evening I was dispatched with a package to the lower level of the West Wing of the White House, where there was a little waiting area near the Situation Room. It could be a long wait for the right person to come out and sign for the material, and after I had been waiting for a while a tall man with perfectly combed grey hair came in and sat down near me. His suit was dark, his shirt white and his necktie subdued. He was probably 25 to 30 years older than me and was carrying what looked like a file case or briefcase. He was very distinguished looking and had a studied air of confidence, the posture and calm of someone used to giving orders and having them obeyed instantly.

I could tell he was watching the situation very carefully. There was nothing overbearing in his attentiveness, but his eyes were darting about in a kind of gentlemanly surveillance. After several minutes, I introduced myself. "Lieutenant Bob Woodward," I said, carefully appending a deferential "sir".

"Mark Felt," he said.

I began telling him about myself, that this was my last year in the navy and I was bringing documents from Admiral Moorer's office. Felt was in no hurry to explain anything about himself or why he was there.

This was a time in my life of considerable anxiety about my future. I had graduated in 1965 from Yale, where I had a naval scholarship that required that I go into the navy after getting my degree. After four years of service, I had been involuntarily extended an additional year because of the Vietnam war.

During that year in Washington, I expended a great deal of energy trying to find things or people who were interesting. I had a college classmate who was going to clerk for Chief Justice Warren E Burger, and I made an effort to develop a friendship with that classmate. To quell my angst and sense of drift, I was taking graduate courses at George Washington University.

When I mentioned the graduate work to Felt, he perked up immediately, saying he had gone to night law school at GW in the 1930s before joining - and this is the first time he mentioned it - the FBI. While in law school, he said, he had worked full time for his home-state senator from Idaho. I said that I had been doing some volunteer work at the office of my congressman, John Erlenborn, a Republican from the district in Wheaton, Illinois, where I had been raised.

Felt and I were like two passengers sitting next to each other on a long airline flight with nowhere to go and nothing really to do but resign ourselves to the dead time. He showed no interest in striking up a long conversation, but I was intent on it. I finally extracted from him the information that he was an assistant director of the FBI in charge of the inspection division, an important post under director J Edgar Hoover. That meant he led teams of agents who went around to FBI field offices to make sure they were adhering to procedures and carrying out Hoover's orders. I later learned that this was called the "goon squad".

I peppered Felt with questions about his job and his world. As I think back on this accidental but crucial encounter - one of the most important in my life - I see that my patter probably verged on the adolescent. Since he wasn't saying much about himself, I turned it into a career-counselling session. I was deferential, but I must have seemed very needy. He was friendly, and his interest in me seemed paternal. Still, the most vivid impression I have is that of his distant but formal manner. I asked Felt for his phone number, and he gave me the direct line to his office.

I believe I encountered him only one more time at the White House. But I had set the hook. He was going to be one of the people I consulted in depth about my future, which now loomed ominously, as the date of my discharge from the navy approached. At some point I called him, first at the FBI and then at his home in Virginia. I was a little desperate, and I'm sure I poured out my heart. I had applied to law school for that fall, but, at 27, I wondered if I could stand spending three years in law school before starting real work.

Felt seemed sympathetic to the lost-soul quality of my questions. He said that after he had his law degree, his first job had been with the Federal Trade Commission. His first assignment was to determine whether toilet paper with the brand name Red Cross was at an unfair competitive advantage because people thought it was endorsed or approved by the American Red Cross. The FTC was a classic federal bureaucracy - slow and leaden - and he hated it. Within a year he had applied to the FBI and been accepted. Law school opened the most doors, he seemed to be saying, but don't get caught in your own equivalent of a toilet-paper investigation.

* * *

In August 1970, I was formally discharged from the navy. I had subscribed to the Washington Post, which I knew was led by a colourful, hard-charging editor named Ben Bradlee. There was a toughness and edge to the news coverage that I liked; it seemed to fit the times, to fit with a general sense of where the world was much more than law school did. Maybe reporting was something I could do.

During my scramble and search for a future, I had sent a letter to the Post asking for a job. Somehow, Harry Rosenfeld, the metropolitan editor, agreed to see me. He stared at me through his glasses in some bewilderment. Why, he wondered, would I want to be a reporter? I had zero - zero! - experience. Why, he said, would the Washington Post want to hire someone with no experience? But this is just crazy enough, Rosenfeld finally said, that we ought to try it. We'll give you a two-week tryout.

After two weeks, I had written perhaps a dozen stories or fragments of stories. None had been published or come close to being published. None had even been edited. See, you don't know how to do this, Rosenfeld said, bringing my tryout to a merciful close. But I left the newsroom more enthralled than ever - I realised I had found something that I loved. I took a job at the Montgomery Sentinel, where Rosenfeld said I could learn how to be a reporter. I told my father that law school was off and that I was taking a job, at about $115 a week, as a reporter at a weekly newspaper in Maryland.

"You're crazy," my father said, in one of the rare judgmental statements he had ever made to me. I also called Felt, who, in a gentler way, indicated that he, too, thought this was crazy. He said he thought newspapers were too shallow; they didn't do in-depth work and rarely got to the bottom of events.

Well, I said, I was elated. Maybe he could help me with stories.

He didn't answer, I recall.

During the year I spent on the Sentinel, I kept in touch with Felt. We were becoming friends of a sort. He was the mentor, keeping me from toilet-paper investigations, and I kept asking for advice. One weekend I drove out to his home in Virginia and met his wife, Audrey.

Somewhat to my astonishment, Felt was an admirer of Hoover. He appreciated his orderliness and the way he ran the bureau with rigid procedures and an iron fist. Felt said he appreciated that Hoover arrived at the office at 6.30 each morning and everyone knew what was expected. The Nixon White House was another matter, Felt said. The political pressures were immense without being specific. I believe he called it "corrupt" and sinister. Hoover, Felt and the old guard were the wall that protected the FBI, he said.

At the time, pre-Watergate, there was little or no public knowledge of the acrimony between the Nixon White House and Hoover's FBI. The Watergate investigations later revealed that in 1970, a young White House aide, Tom Charles Huston, had come up with a plan to authorise the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of "domestic security threats", authorise illegal opening of mail and lift the restrictions on surreptitious entries or break-ins to gather intelligence.

Huston warned in a top-secret memo that the plan was "clearly illegal". Nixon initially approved the plan anyway. Hoover strenuously objected, because eavesdropping, opening mail and breaking into the homes and offices of domestic security threats were basically the FBI bailiwick and the bureau didn't want competition. Four days later, Nixon rescinded the Huston plan.

During this period, Felt had to stop efforts by others in the bureau to "identify every member of every hippie commune" in the Los Angeles area, or to open a file on every member of Students for a Democratic Society. None of this surfaced directly in our discussions, but clearly he was a man under pressure, and the threat to the integrity and independence of the bureau was real and seemed uppermost in his mind.

On July 1 1971 - about a year before Hoover's death and the Watergate break-in - Hoover promoted Felt to number-three official in the FBI. Though Hoover's sidekick, Clyde Tolson, was technically the number-two official, Tolson was ill and did not come to work many days, meaning he had no operational control of the bureau. Thus, my friend became the day-to-day manager of all FBI matters, as long as he kept Hoover and Tolson informed, or sought Hoover's approval on policy matters.

* *

In August, a year after my failed tryout, Rosenfeld hired me. I started at the Post the next month.

Though I was busy in my new job, I kept Felt on my call list and checked in with him. He was relatively free with me but insisted that he, the FBI and the justice department be kept out of anything I might use indirectly or pass on to others. He was stern and strict about those rules with a booming, insistent voice. I promised, and he said that it was essential that I be careful. The only way to ensure that was to tell no one that we knew each other or talked or that I knew someone in the FBI or justice department. No one.

About 9.45am on May 2 1972, Felt was in his office at the FBI when an assistant director came to report that Hoover had died. Felt was stunned. For practical purposes, he was next in line to take over the bureau. Yet Felt was soon to be visited with immense disappointment. Nixon nominated L Patrick Gray III to be acting director. Gray was a Nixon loyalist going back years. He had resigned from the navy in 1960 to work for candidate Nixon during the presidential contest that Nixon lost to John F Kennedy.

As best I could tell, Felt was crushed, but he put on a good face. "Had I been wiser, I would have retired," Felt wrote.

On May 15, less than two weeks after Hoover's death, a lone gunman shot Alabama Governor George C Wallace, then campaigning for president, at a shopping centre. The wounds were serious, but Wallace survived. Wallace had a strong following in the deep South, an increasing source of Nixon's support. Wallace's spoiler candidacy four years earlier in 1968 could have cost Nixon the election that year, and Nixon monitored Wallace's every move closely as the 1972 presidential contest continued.

That evening, Nixon called Felt - not Gray, who was out of town - at home for an update. It was the first time Felt had spoken directly with Nixon. Felt reported that Arthur H Bremer, the would-be assassin, was in custody but in the hospital because he had been roughed up and given a few bruises by those who subdued and captured him after he shot Wallace.

"Well, it's too bad they didn't really rough up the son of a bitch!" Nixon told Felt.

Felt was offended that the president would make such a remark. Nixon was so agitated, attaching such urgency to the shooting, that he said he wanted full updates every 30 minutes from Felt on any new information that was being discovered in the investigation of Bremer.

In the following days I called Felt several times and he very carefully gave me leads as we tried to find out more about Bremer. It turned out that he had stalked some of the other candidates, and I went to New York to pick up the trail. This led to several front-page stories about Bremer's travels, completing a portrait of a madman not singling out Wallace but rather looking for any presidential candidate to shoot. On May 18, I did a page-one article that said, "High federal officials who have reviewed investigative reports on the Wallace shooting said yesterday that there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Bremer was a hired killer."

It was rather brazen of me. Though I was technically protecting my source and talked to others besides Felt, I did not do a good job of concealing where the information was coming from. Felt chastised me mildly. But the story that Bremer acted alone was a story that both the White House and the FBI wanted out.

* *

A month later, on Saturday June 17, the FBI night supervisor called Felt at home. Five men in business suits, pockets stuffed with $100 bills, and carrying eavesdropping and photographic equipment, had been arrested inside the Democrats' national headquarters at the Watergate office building at about 2.30am.

By 8.30am, Felt was in his office at the FBI, seeking more details. About the same time, the Post's city editor woke me at home and asked me to come in to cover an unusual burglary.

The first paragraph of the front-page story that ran the next day in the Post read: "Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2.30am yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here." The next day, Carl Bernstein and I wrote our first article together, identifying one of the burglars, James W McCord Jr, as the salaried security coordinator for Nixon's reelection committee. On Monday, I went to work on E Howard Hunt, whose phone number had been found in the address books of two of the burglars with the small notations "W House" and "WH" by his name.

This was the moment when a source or friend in the investigative agencies of government is invaluable. I called Felt at the FBI, reaching him through his secretary. It would be our first talk about Watergate. He reminded me how he disliked phone calls at the office but said the Watergate burglary case was going to "heat up" for reasons he could not explain. He then hung up abruptly.

I was tentatively assigned to write the next day's Watergate bugging story, but I was not sure I had anything. Carl had the day off. I picked up the phone and dialled 456-1414 - the White House - and asked for Howard Hunt. There was no answer, but the operator helpfully said he might be in the office of Charles W Colson, Nixon's special counsel. Colson's secretary said Hunt was not there but might be at a PR firm where he worked as a writer. I called and reached Hunt and asked why his name was in the address book of two of the Watergate burglars.

"Good God!" Hunt shouted before slamming down the phone. I called the president of the PR firm, Robert F Bennett, who is now a Republican US senator from Utah. "I guess it's no secret that Howard was with the CIA," Bennett said blandly.

It had been a secret to me, and a CIA spokesman confirmed that Hunt had been with the agency from 1949 to 1970. I called Felt again at the FBI. Colson, White House, CIA, I said. What did I have? Anyone could have someone's name in an address book. Felt sounded nervous. He said - off the record, meaning I could not use the information - that Hunt was a prime suspect in the burglary at the Watergate for many reasons beyond the address books. So reporting the connections forcefully would not be unfair.

In July, Carl went to Miami, home of four of the burglars, on the money trail, and he ingeniously tracked down a local prosecutor and his chief investigator, who had copies of $89,000 in Mexican cheques and a $25,000 cheque that had gone into the account of Bernard L Barker, one of the burglars. We were able to establish that the $25,000 cheque had been campaign money that had been given to Maurice H Stans, Nixon's chief fundraiser, on a Florida golf course. The August 1 story on this was the first to tie Nixon campaign money directly to Watergate.

I tried to call Felt, but he wouldn't take the call. I tried his home and had no better luck. So one night I showed up at his Fairfax home. It was a plain-vanilla, perfectly kept suburban house. His manner made me nervous. He said no more phone calls, no more visits to his home, nothing in the open. I did not know then that in Felt's earliest days in the FBI, during the second world war, he was assigned to work on the general desk of the espionage section. Felt learned a great deal about German spying in the job, and after the war spent time keeping suspected Soviet agents under surveillance. So at his home in Virginia that summer, Felt said that if we were to talk it would have to be face to face, where no one could observe us.

I said anything would be fine with me.

We would need a preplanned notification system - a change in the environment that no one else would notice or attach any meaning to. I didn't know what he was talking about.

If you keep the drapes in your apartment closed, open them and that could signal me, he said. I could check each day or have them checked, and if they were open we could meet that night at a designated place. I liked to let the light in at times, I explained.

We needed another signal, he said, indicating that he could check my apartment regularly. He never explained how he could do this. Feeling under some pressure, I said that I had a red cloth flag - the kind used as a warning on long truck loads - that a girlfriend had found on the street. She had stuck it in an empty flowerpot on my apartment balcony. Felt and I agreed that I would move the flowerpot with the flag, which usually was in the front near the railing, to the rear of the balcony if I urgently needed a meeting. This would have to be important and rare, he said sternly. The signal, he said, would mean we would meet that same night at about 2am on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn.

Felt said I would have to follow strict countersurveillance techniques. How did I get out of my apartment?

I walked out, down the hall, and took the elevator.

Which takes you to the lobby? he asked.

Yes.

Did I have back stairs to my apartment house?

Yes.

Use them when you are heading for a meeting. Do they open into an alley?

Yes.

Take the alley. Don't use your own car. Take a taxi to several blocks from a hotel where there are cabs after midnight, get dropped off and then walk to get a second cab to Rosslyn. Don't get dropped off directly at the parking garage. Walk the last several blocks. If you are being followed, don't go down to the garage. I'll understand if you don't show. The key was taking the necessary time - one to two hours to get there. Be patient, serene. Trust the pre-arrangements. There was no fallback meeting place or time. If we both didn't show, there would be no meeting.

Felt said that if he had something for me, he could get me a message. He quizzed me about my daily routine, what came to my apartment, the mailbox, etc. The Post was delivered outside my apartment door. I did have a subscription to the New York Times. A number of people in my apartment building near Dupont Circle got the Times. The copies were left in the lobby with the apartment number. Mine was 617, and it was written clearly on the outside of each paper. Felt said if there was something important he could get to my New York Times - how, I never knew. Page 20 would be circled, and the hands of a clock in the lower part of the page would be drawn to indicate the time of the meeting that night, probably 2am, in the same parking garage.

The relationship was a compact of trust; nothing about it was to be discussed or shared with anyone, he said.

How he could have made a daily observation of my balcony is still a mystery to me. At the time, before the era of intensive security, the back of the building was not enclosed, so anyone could have driven in to observe my balcony. In addition, my balcony and the back of the apartment complex faced on to a courtyard that was shared with other buildings. My balcony could have been seen from dozens of apartments or offices, as best I can tell.

A number of embassies were located in the area. The Iraqi embassy was down the street, and I thought it possible that the FBI had surveillance or listening posts nearby. Could Felt have had the counterintelligence agents regularly report on the status of my flag and flowerpot? That seems highly unlikely, if not impossible.

* *

In the course of this and other discussions, I was somewhat apologetic for plaguing him, but I explained that we had nowhere else to turn. Carl and I had obtained a list of everyone who worked for Nixon's re-election committee and were frequently going out into the night knocking on their doors to try to interview them. I explained to Felt that we were getting lots of doors slammed in our faces. There also were lots of frightened looks. I was frustrated.

Felt said I should not worry about pushing him. He had done his time as a street agent, interviewing people. The FBI, like the press, relied on voluntary cooperation. Most people wanted to help the FBI, but the FBI knew about rejection. Felt perhaps tolerated my pushiness because he had been the same way himself, once talking his way into an interview with Hoover and telling him of his ambition to become a special agent in charge of an FBI field office.

With a story as enticing, complex, competitive and fast-breaking as Watergate, there was little tendency or time to consider the motives of our sources. What was important was whether the information checked out and was true. We were swimming, really living, in the fast-moving rapids. There was no time to ask why they were talking or whether they had an axe to grind.

It was only later, after Nixon resigned, that I began to wonder why Felt had talked when doing so carried substantial risks for him and the FBI. Had he been exposed early on, Felt would have been no hero. Technically, it was illegal to talk about grand jury information or FBI files - or it could have been made to look illegal.

Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon answerable. He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and its efforts to manipulate the bureau for political reasons. His reverence for Hoover and strict bureau procedure made Gray's appointment as director all the more shocking. Felt obviously concluded he was Hoover's logical successor. And the former second-world-war spy hunter liked the game. I suspect, in his mind, I was his agent. He beat it into my head: secrecy at all cost, no loose talk, no talk about him, no indication to anyone that such a secret source existed.

In our book All the President's Men, Carl and I described how we had speculated about Deep Throat and his piecemeal approach to providing information. Maybe it was to minimise his risk. Or because one or two big stories, no matter how devastating, could be blunted by the White House. Maybe it was simply to make the game more interesting. More likely, we concluded: "Deep Throat was trying to protect the office, to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost."

Each time I raised the question with Felt, he had the same answer: "I have to do this my way."