Deep Throat has died. Mark Felt, a former FBI official, ‘slipped away’ in his sleep last night. In 2005 he admitted that he was ‘the guy they used to call Deep Throat’: the man who gave reporters from the Washington Post the inside information about President Nixon’s abuse of presidential powers which led to his resignation in August 1974.
Mr Felt, it is reported, struggled for years with the feeling that he had betrayed the FBI with his leak, and was called a traitor by many for ‘betraying’ his Commander-in-Chief. For others, he was a hero, blowing the whistle on corruption at the highest level.
Leaks and whistle-blowing are not limited to the continental USA – and the English Civil War might be said to have begun because of an abuse of executive authority. The penultimate case in the exhibition – the section on Freedom of Speech and Belief – has several British 20th-century examples: Compton Mackenzie’s memories of the secret service during World War I, Peter Wright’s Spycatcher (a Danish edition), and Spies for Peace’s uncovering of post-nuclear attack military government.
Freedom of Information and the Human Rights Act has changed the balance of power somewhat in the UK. But there are other ideas out there, some vastly more radical, some possibly unworkable. Open Source Government, for example, is based on the idea of radical transparency.
In the current absence of such neo-liberal, technocratic utopias, we can thank people like Mr Felt – and wonder if, locally, we are lacking the same responsible, but acutely scrutinising Fourth Estate that broke the Watergate scandal.
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