Was Watergate Reporter Bob Woodward in Naval Intelligence? It's Complicated.

How did so many people come to believe that Woodward had been in Naval Intelligence if it wasn’t true? If it was true, why would Woodward lie about it?

Image Credit: Nixon Library

In 2023, Tucker Carlson made a rather crazy sounding claim that Bob Woodward, the longtime Washington Post reporter of Woodward-and-Bernstein fame, was a CIA asset.

“Soon after leaving the Navy for reasons that have never been clear, Woodward was hired by the most powerful news outlet in Washington and assigned the biggest news story in the country,” Carlson explained a few months before his ouster at Fox News. “And just to make it crystal clear what was actually happening, Woodward’s main source for the Watergate series was Deputy Director of the FBI Mark Felt [believed to be the source known as ‘Deep Throat’].”

The Wrap was not impressed and dismissed Carlson’s monologue as another deep-state conspiracy theory.

Carlson’s statement above is true. Woodward did work in the Navy. He did abruptly become a reporter, though he had no reporting experience ( and quickly broke arguably the biggest news story in modern history). And Mark Felt, an associate director of the FBI, was Deep Throat.

Still, Carlson’s story was too thin to warrant such an allegation, especially against a legendary journalist like Bob Woodward.

But what I found interesting was that The Wrap didn’t even mention that Bob Woodward had worked in Naval Intelligence prior to joining the Post. Or had he?

I bring all this up because I’ve long believed: 1) that Woodward had worked in Naval Intelligence; 2) that this was common knowledge. But I might be mistaken.

Recently on Twitter I alluded to the CIA’s long history of recruiting journalists to serve as state assets, which Carl Bernstein (Woodward’s partner at the Post) dished about in a 1977 Rolling Stone article.

When someone pointed out that he believed one of the members of the Woodward-Bernstein team had worked for the CIA, I began to correct him by pointing out that Woodward had worked in Naval Intelligence. But I decided to confirm this point before tweeting, just in case (you can’t be too careful).

To my surprise, you’ll find surprisingly little information about Woodward’s Naval career online.

On Woodward’s Wikipedia Page, you’ll find no mention of any work in Naval Intelligence. I’m not the first person apparently surprised by this.

Nearly twenty years ago, a DailyKos reporter writing about Woodward complained that “Wikipedia leaves out that he was working for Naval Intelligence (something Woodward has openly written about).”

This made me think that I was right all along, a feeling reinforced when I noticed Woodward’s name appears on a Wikipedia page for People of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Most importantly, I discovered this 2016 Commentary magazine article written by James Rosen that profiles Woodward and offers “the inside story of how this former naval intelligence officer achieved his unique stature in journalism and publishing.”

Okay, then, you say. It’s official. Woodward was in Naval Intelligence!

Not so fast. First, I wondered why Wiki would omit a detail like this. More importantly, after doing a bit more digging, I discovered that in at least one interview Woodward had expressly denied having worked for Naval Intelligence.

Here is a snippet of the discussion, which took place in 2003 at the US Naval Institute.

Proceedings: What impact did your service in the Navy have on your later professional career?

Woodward: I was in NROTC in college. So when I graduated in ’65, I went into the Navy. I was supposed to serve four years, but they made it five because it was extended during the Vietnam War. I served on the USS Wright [CC-2], which was a kind of floating Pentagon, a command and communications ship, which they have wisely decommissioned.

Proceedings: So you were in intelligence then?

Woodward: No, I was in communications. I never had any intelligence work at all. Then I went to the Fox (DLG-33), where I was a communications officer in WestPac [Western Pacific]. We acted as a radar-picket ship off the coast of Vietnam. That was in ’67 or ’68, I guess… (emphasis added)

Why does any of this matter? I’m not sure it does. It might be nothing. But I find it curious. Even the interviewer at the US Naval Institute believed Woodward had been in Naval Intelligence.

How did so many people come to believe that Woodward had been in Naval Intelligence if it wasn’t true? If it was true, why would Woodward lie about it?

I’m not saying what Tucker Carlson alleged—that Woodward was a CIA asset—was true. But there seems to be more to this story than meets the eye.