JOE RUBIN has reported for ABC's Nightline and PBS's Frontline World, including an exposé of the Otpor (Resistance) student movement against Slobodan Milosevic, a profile of Cuba through the prism of vintage car mechanics, and a hunt for Serbian war criminals Ratko Mladic and Radavan Karadzic. A Knight Fellow and Pew Fellow, he has also written for the New York Times, Mother Jones, and CMJ Music Magazine, and reported for National Public Radio. Rubin produced EXPOSÉ's 2-part season premiere,"Think Like a Terrorist" and is the producer of both parts of "In a Small Town."

PRODUCER'S NOTES on "NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT"
By Joe Rubin

When Scott Higham told me that he and his reporting partner Robert O'Harrow were going to meet a key source for their series on homeland security contracting at a Rosslyn Virginia hotel, I asked if I could tag along with a camera. As we parked in the hotel garage, there was an unexpected revelation. O'Harrow turned to Higham and said, "You know I think this is it. I've never been here before but this is where Woodward met Deep Throat." A quick conversation with a bellhop and a call to the Post's research desk confirmed it. This is where Bob Woodward met Deep Throat, the critical secret source who helped Woodward and Carl Bernstein expose the Watergate cover up.

Before the cameras were rolling, when I first met O'Harrow and Higham, we sat for a couple of hours in a Washington Post conference room and talked about their wide ranging series that has uncovered what amounts to billions of dollars of fraud waste and abuse in homeland security contracting. What most impressed me about their series is the range of it. Everyone from powerful congressmen, to multinational corporations, to a woman in San Diego who paid herself two million dollars for a few months of event planning, are part of their systematic exposé. As we sat chatting, I felt the weight of history. Hanging in that conference room behind Higham and O'Harrow was an original press plate from a Washington Post front page thirty years ago. "NIXON RESIGNS," it said, (albeit backwards because the press plates are always reversed.)

In 2005 -- after more than thirty years -- Mark Felt, the former deputy director of the FBI, ended perhaps the best kept secret of the 20th century and revealed that he was "Deep Throat." Both O'Harrow and Higham are history buffs and I could tell they got a kick out of being in the "Deep Throat garage." It also made them reflective about all the confidential sources who made their homeland security series possible. Standing in front of an iron gate, Higham said, "I constantly invoke Bob and Carl's name when people are reluctant to talk to us and they're in very sensitive positions. I say, 'Look, we kept the identity of Deep Throat secret for thirty years, we can protect you. And, we'll go to jail to protect you, and I'll stay in jail, and I'll never give your name up.' And I'm really serious about that. It's a promise that we make and that we keep no matter what."