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Charles Colson has sharply criticized Mark Felt, the former No. 2 official at the FBI, for leaking classified material to The Washington Post during the Watergate scandal. Colson was special counsel to President Nixon and served a prison term for leaking FBI files. Colson became a committed Christian during the scandal and later founded Prison Fellowship, a ministry to prisoners and their families. Stan Guthrie, Christianity Today's senior associate news editor, interviewed Colson, a CT columnist, about his comments about Felt, as well as his new book, with Harold Fickett, The Good Life.

On CNN and the Today Show and elsewhere you've said that Mark Felt's actions as "Deep Throat" were not honorable. Why?

Because he was basically leaking FBI files, which ironically is what I went to prison for. He was handing out FBI files, which are held in the greatest secrecy, in a clandestine operation with Woodward and Bernstein. That's the most secure thing in the United States government, because the FBI, for goodness sakes, has files on half of the American people. And if they indiscriminately pass this out, for whatever they deem to be a worthy purpose, you've broken down the whole system.

I gave one FBI file on Daniel Ellsberg to a newspaper reporter. So I don't think it's honorable to do what Felt did. I think he had an honorable solution, which he chose not to use.

You basically believe he should have just gone to the President and then, if necessary, held a press conference.

What he could have done is gone first to the director of the FBI and say, "There's criminal activity going on in the White House, and these guys are obstructing justice." If the director of the FBI wouldn't go with him to the President, then if Mark Felt had called me, I could tell you, guarantee you, I would have gotten him in to see the President because, I would have been afraid that if [we] didn't, the FBI would bring down the President. And the President would have done something immediately, not out of moral compunction but out of self-interest, because you can't have the No. 2 official in the FBI believing there is obstruction of justice in the White House.

Many others have voiced disagreement with you about this, saying Felt brought down a corrupt White House and should be applauded. Doesn't that argument have some merit?

That's the curse of relativism. That's the era we live in that is so dangerous. That is saying, "I could sit there and make a judgment about what is right even when the law says something else." This is not a case of civil disobedience like Martin Luther King in the Birmingham jail, in which he appeals to a higher law saying that the law at the time was unjust and therefore he couldn't obey it. That was a principled position. He was correct. But that's not the case of Mark Felt. Mark Felt had an obligation to report obstruction of justice to the officials and to a grand jury, if necessary—not to leak it to reporters.

What do you think about the role of journalists in our society in uncovering government corruption?

I think it's what the press has always done and does well. And I, in this case, don't fault the press. If Mark Felt was willing to give them this kind of information, they were justified in printing it. I do think we have to be careful with anonymous sources. That's another question, because anonymous sources can be trying to settle a score, which may or may not have been the case with Mark Felt. That part is unknown at the moment. What really motivated him was his belief that the Nixon presidency was corrupt.

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June (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49