A trove of newly-released documents from President Nixon’s White House shows that he was strongly urged to give the leadership of the FBI to a senior official at the bureau, Mark Felt, who was later exposed as the “Deep Throat” source whose damaging leaks fueled the Watergate scandal that eventually consumed Nixon’s presidency.

That disclosure was among 10,000 pages of files released by the National Archives through the Nixon Presidential Library, which recently came under government control after spending decades in the hands of Nixon’s political allies.

The papers, some of which underwent lengthy declassification reviews, also show that King Hussein of Jordan asked America to attack Syrian forces during the Palestinian Arab challenge to his rule in 1970, a crisis known as “Black September.”

On September 21, 1970, the American ambassador in Amman, L. Dean Brown, cabled the White House to report that he received a 3 a.m. phone call from the king, passing an urgent message for Nixon to help defend Jordan.

“I request immediate physical intervention both air and land … to safeguard sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence of Jordan,” Hussein said. He asked for “immediate air strikes” to repel a “massive” invasion from Syria. An American military intervention was put in motion but never took place.

The document release, which included a memorandum about American views on Israel’s nuclear program, was timed to coincide with the start yesterday of Arab-Israeli peace talks in Maryland, the director of the Nixon Library, Timothy Naftali, said, according to a report on the Web site of CNN.