Post Confirms Deep Throat

In today's Washington post, they confirm that W. Mark Felt was indeed Deep Throat. It is a rather good article that unravels the mystery, but yet leaves many questions still unanswered.

FBI's No. 2 Was 'Deep Throat'

By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 1, 2005; Page A01

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 yesterday.

As the bureau's second- and third-ranking official during a period when the FBI was battling for its independence against the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, Felt had the means and the motive 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.

Felt's identity as Washington's most celebrated secret source had been an object of speculation for more than 30 years until yesterday, when his role was revealed by his family in a Vanity Fair magazine article. Even Nixon was caught on tape speculating that Felt was "an informer" as early as February 1973, at a time when Deep Throat was supplying confirmation and context for some of The Post's most explosive Watergate stories.

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. In place of a name and a face, the source acquired a magic and a mystique.

He was the romantic truth teller half hidden in the shadows of a Washington area parking garage. This image was rendered indelibly by the dramatic best-selling memoir Woodward and Bernstein published in 1974, "All the President's Men." Two years later, in a blockbuster movie of the same name, actor Hal Holbrook breathed whispery urgency into the suspenseful late-night encounters between Woodward and his source.

For many Americans under 40, this is the most potent distillation of the complicated brew that was Watergate. Students who lack the time or interest to follow each element of the scandal's slow unraveling in comprehensive history books can quickly digest the vivid relationship of a nervous elder guiding a relentless reporter.

As dramatic as those portrayals were, they hewed closely to the truth, Woodward said.

"Mark Felt at that time was a dashing gray-haired figure," Woodward recalled, and his experience as an anti-Nazi spy hunter 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 flowerpot innocuously displayed on the reporter's balcony) and also hatched the countersign 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 whose catalogue of prizewinning and best-selling work has been built on the sort of confidential relationships he maintained with Deep Throat.

(Full Story)

For the full chronology of the Nixon scandal, see this link