WASHINGTON – “Deep Throat,” the secret source whose insider guidance was vital to The Washington Post’s groundbreaking coverage of the Watergate scandal, was a pillar of the FBI named W. Mark Felt, The Post confirmed Tuesday.
As the No. 2 man at the bureau during a period when the FBI was battling for its independence against the administration of President Nixon, Felt had the means to help uncover the web of internal spies, secret surveillance, dirty tricks and coverups that led to Nixon’s unprecedented resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, and to prison sentences for some of Nixon’s highest-ranking aides.
| Born: 1913, Twin Falls, Idaho.
Title: Assistant FBI director during the Watergate scandal Age: 91 Education: Graduated from the University of Idaho, went to George Washington University Law School and joined the FBI in 1942. Career: Felt had a storied career at the bureau, one that also had its share of controversy. A jury found him guilty in 1980 of violating civil rights by authorizing warrantless searches at homes of friends and relatives of left-wing fugitives during the early 1970s. President Reagan pardoned him, along with another former FBI official convicted in the case. Felt and his co-defendant had argued they were authorized by then acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray to approve break-ins without first going to court for a warrant. Personal: In failing health and living in retirement in Santa Rosa, Calif. Quote: His denial in 1999 that he was “Deep Throat”: “I would have done better. I would have been more effective. Deep Throat didn’t exactly bring the White House crashing down, did he?” |
Felt’s identity as Washington’s most celebrated secret source has been an object of speculation for more than 30 years until Tuesday, when his role was revealed in a Vanity Fair magazine article.
But Felt’s repeated denials, and the stalwart silence of the reporters he aided – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – kept the cloak of mystery drawn up around “Deep Throat.”
He was the romantic truth-teller, actively supplying confirmation and context for some of The Post’s most explosive Watergate stories, half-hidden in the shadows of a Washington parking garage. This image was rendered indelibly by the dramatic bestselling memoir Woodward and Bernstein published in 1974, “All the President’s Men” and later in a blockbuster movie by the same name, in which actor Hal Holbrook played “Deep Throat.”
“Mark Felt at that time was a dashing gray-haired figure,” Woodward said, and his experience as an anti-Nazi spyhunter early in his career at the FBI had endowed him with a whole bag of counterintelligence tricks. Felt dreamed up the signal by which Woodward would summon him to a meeting (a flower-pot innocuously displayed on the reporter’s balcony) and also hatched the counter-sign by which Felt could contact Woodward (a clock face inked on page 20 of Woodward’s daily New York Times).
“He knew he was taking a monumental risk,” said Woodward, now an assistant managing editor of The Post, which owns The Herald.
Woodward’s source became such a key part of the discussion among top editors that then-managing editor Howard Simons gave him a nickname, “Deep Throat,” a blend of the rules of engagement Felt had with Woodward – “deep background” – and the title of a notorious pornographic movie. (Felt was never referred to in The Post as “Deep Throat.”)
When the book and then the movie were released, Woodward said, Felt was shocked to have his place in history tagged with such a tawdry title.
Felt, 91 and enfeebled by a stroke, lives in Santa Rosa, Calif., his memory dimmed. For decades, Woodward, Bernstein and Benjamin Bradlee, The Post’s executive editor during the Watergate coverage, maintained that they would not disclose his identity until after his death.
Tuesday, Vanity Fair released an article by a California attorney named John O’Connor, who was enlisted by Felt’s daughter, Joan Felt, to help coax her father into admitting his role in history. O’Connor’s article quoted a number of Felt’s friends and family members saying that he had shared his secret with them, and went on to say that Felt told the author, “I’m the guy they used to call ‘Deep Throat.’”
After consulting with Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee, “the newspaper decided that the newspaper had been released from its obligation by Mark Felt’s family and by his lawyer, through the publication of this piece,” the executive editor of The Post, Leonard Downie Jr., said Tuesday. “They revealed him as the source. We confirmed it.”
Richard Ben-Veniste, a top attorney in the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, said Felt’s acknowledgement of his role showed that “the importance of whistle-blowers shouldn’t be underestimated, particularly when there are excesses by the executive branch of government – which in this case went all the way to the executive office.”
But Charles Colson, a senior Nixon adviser who served seven months in prison for obstruction of justice in connection with Watergate abuses, declared that he was “personally shocked.”
“When any president has to worry whether the deputy director of the FBI is sneaking around in dark corridors peddling information in the middle of the night, he’s in trouble,” Colson said.
Speaking Tuesday night on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan labeled Felt a “traitor” for having worked with reporters on stories that did severe damage to the administration.
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