The presidential campaign was cranking up at the time I received Cohen’s letter, and the Washington bureau was engaged in its quadrennial ritual of dissecting the candidates. I had been assigned to profile Senator James Abelard, a Pennsylvania Republican and a dark horse for the nomination. Because I was still new to Washington, I told the bureau chief I would like a partner and proposed my friend George Dirk. He was a good investigator, and it was a way of tossing him a bone. Marcus wasn’t pleased—Dirk wasn’t on his first team—but he agreed.

I wandered over to Dirk’s messy cubicle a half hour after I received Rupert Cohen’s letter. I wanted to share the news of my mysterious CIA correspondent. That is one of the characteristic traits of reporters—our inability to keep secrets for very long. It’s why so many people in my business think Deep Throat doesn’t really exist. If he were a single real person—rather than a composite—the secret would have been blown long ago.

Dirk was a presence, even when banished to the far corner of the bureau. He was a large man with a shock of white hair. As I approached he had his feet up on the desk and was talking conspiratorially with someone on the telephone. Dirk had many of these informants around town. Congressional aides, disgraced former officials, other reporters with information to trade that they couldn’t get into their own publications, people with various axes to grind. Nobody knew who these sources were, but I had always suspected they must be mirror images of Dirk: people who felt, for one reason or another, that their careers had been sidetracked by malign powers and were determined to exact revenge. It was a network of the embittered. When Dirk saw me coming, he quickly said into the phone, “Gotta go, call you back,” and gave me a guilty grin.

“I need to talk to you, Dirk,” I said as humbly as I could. “Let’s get a drink tonight after work.”

“You must be joking. Nobody has a drink after work. Maybe they still do that in Paris, but here in our nation’s capital it’s not done. Surely you meant to say: Dirk, let’s go to the health club. Or, Dirk, let’s go have a papaya-juice cocktail at that swell new vegetarian restaurant.”

But I prevailed on him. It was the middle of the afternoon, but that didn’t matter. Neither of us had to file that night. We headed for Dirk’s favorite spot, a dank, smoky hideaway called the Club Down Under that was in the basement of our building. Its proximity to the bureau added to Dirk’s sense of illicit pleasure, and there was little risk of discovery—it was so dark that Bob Marcus could be sitting at the next table and you wouldn’t know it.