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In late September, veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, the man who uncovered the Watergate scandal with his reporting partner Carl Bernstein, spoke at a Miami University of Ohio event that I attended. At the end of the evening, as Woodward asked for the last question from the audience, he first said “Normally I get the question ‘Who is Deep Throat?’ I’m glad that’s all done.”

Earlier this year that Woodward’s famous confidential source finally identified himself as W. Mark Felt, the former No. 2 man at the FBI. In his university speech, Woodward hailed Felt as a courageous man, risking his position to become the secret whistleblower who revealed to Woodward the rot at the core of the Nixon presidency.

Now audiences may well be asking Woodward about a new secret source in Washington – a source who is not a courageous whistleblower like Felt, but instead one trying to do the Bush administration’s dirty work.

Woodward now finds himself as a significant figure in the Valerie Plame affair, the scandal in which senior administration sources illegally revealed Plame’s classified CIA identity to a number of Washington reporters.

Only recently, as special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was about to indict Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on perjury charges in late October for outing Plame’s identity to the New York Times reporter Judith Miller and others, did Woodward think to tell his editor that another White House source had talked to him about Plame in June at least 7-to-10 days before Scooter Libby first contacted reporters.

Like Judith Miller, Woodward never actually wrote a story about the Plame affair. Yet both of them spoke to senior White House officials who revealed the identity of Plame. Valerie Plame is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who in July 2003 angered the Bush administration by publicly debunking the administration’s contention that Iraq was obtaining uranium from Africa to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Woodward testified under oath about this source on Nov. 14. On Nov. 21, Woodward appeared in CNN’s Larry King Live to defend his image in his first TV interview since giving testimony. King asked Woodward the all-important question: why did he wait 17 months tell his boss, Washington Post Executive Editor Len Downie, about the administration source who mentioned Plame to him?

Woodward’s response indicates that he was certainly protecting his own rear-end (Post ombudsman Deborah Howell says he “kept it to himself for fear of being subpoenaed”), and his source’s as well. “I was focused on getting a book done,” Woodward replied, and then offered a second reason: “You know, the significance of this is yet to be determined.”

The two answers fail on the test of Woodward’s actions, though. He certainly wasn’t too busy to be visiting a host of media outlets for a book tour in the summer of 2005 to promote his latest, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat. And, while he contends that the significance of the Plame scandal is yet to be determined, he was more than willing to give his opinion on the matter at stops on NPR’s Fresh Air, CNN’s Larry King Live, CBS’s The Early Show, CNN’s Reliable Sources, and NBC’s Meet the Press.

Woodward dismissed the illegal outing of the CIA agent as just “politics” on CNN and told Terry Gross on NPR that the investigation’s results would ultimately be “laughable.” “It is such a complex case with players on issues that are not the kind of, you know, `We’re publishing the truth so the public can learn that a president is a criminal,’ for instance,” Woodward said.

Yet, criminality at the high end of the administration is just where Fitzgerald’s investigation is going, particularly when the chief of staff to the vice president has been indicted, and other senior sources who mentioned Plame to the press have yet to be identified.

Woodward has now offered his apologies for not telling his editor about the leak and speaking negatively about the investigation. But he still doesn’t seem to understand his – and the Washington press’—role in this scandal. They were the suckers, played by a savvy administration who almost succeeded in having them casually out a CIA agent (columnist Robert Novak was the reporter who finally took the bait and revealed Plame’s identity) and then keep it covered up in order to preserve confidential relationships with their administration sources.

Larry King suggested to Woodward that by relying on secret sources “it’s obvious you can also be used.” But superstar investigative reporter Woodward seems shockingly oblivious to the fact that the current administration – if successful at nothing else – is superb at staying on its message.

Woodward’s plodding methodology, talking to the president on the record and testing it against other administration background sources until, as he told Larry King, “everyone in the end…pretty much gets their point of view out” doesn’t work if you’re getting the same information—or disinformation—from the administration’s echo chamber.