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 FBI during a period when it was battling for its independence against the administration of President 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 Tuesday, when his role was revealed 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 actively supplying confirmation and context for some of the Post’s most explosive Watergate stories.
But Felt’s repeated denials, and the stern silence of the reporters he aided – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – kept the cloak of mystery drawn up around Deep Throat.
He was the truth-teller half- hidden in the shadows of a Washington parking garage, an image rendered in the dramatic bestselling memoir Woodward and Bernstein published in 1974, “All the President’s Men.” Two years later, in the movie of the same name, trench-coat-wearing actor Hal Holbrook played Felt.
Today’s students, who otherwise wilt at the scandal’s slow unraveling, can quickly digest the vivid relationship of a nervous insider 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 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 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. Felt also knew that Nixon’s administration was willing to use wiretaps and break-ins to hunt down leakers, and was appropriately cautious.
Indeed, the mystery came to obscure the many other elements that went into the Watergate story – other sources, other investigators, high-impact Senate hearings, a shocking trove of secret White House tape recordings and the decisive intervention of a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court.
“Felt’s role in all this can be overstated,” said Bernstein, who went on after Watergate to a career of books, magazine articles and television investigations. “When we wrote the book, we didn’t think his role would achieve such mythical dimensions. You see there that Felt/ Deep Throat largely confirmed information we had already gotten from other sources.”
Felt, 91 years old and enfeebled by a stroke, lives in California, 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.
“We’ve kept that secret because we keep our word,” Woodward said.
The secrecy held through some amazing twists of fate. In 1980, Felt and another senior FBI veteran were convicted of conspiring a decade earlier to violate the civil rights of domestic dissidents in the Weather Underground movement; President Reagan then issued a pardon.
Tuesday, however, Vanity Fair released an article by a California lawyer named John D. 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 – under the shield of attorney-client privilege – “I’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat.”
O’Connor wrote that he was released from his obligation of secrecy by Mark Felt and Joan Felt. He also reported that the Felt family was not paid for cooperating with the Vanity Fair article, though they do hope the revelation will “make at least enough money to pay some bills,” as Joan Felt is quoted in the magazine.
Bradlee said he was amazed that the mystery had lasted through the decades. “What would you think the odds were that this town could keep that secret for this long?” he said.
Perhaps the most insightful argument was mustered in the Atlantic magazine by journalist Jim Mann in 1992.
“He could well have been Mark Felt,” Mann wrote cautiously in a piece that laid bare the institutional reasons why FBI loyalists came to fear and resent Nixon’s presidency.
Felt fended off the searchlight each time it swung in his direction. “I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!” he wrote in his 1979 memoir, “The FBI Pyramid.”
After Hoover died, Felt wanted the top FBI job, he later wrote. He also wanted his beloved bureau to maintain its independence. And so his motivations were complex when Woodward called seeking clues to the strange case of a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex.
Wounded that he was passed over for the top job, furious at Nixon’s choice of an outsider, Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray, determined that the White House not be allowed to steer and stall the FBI’s Watergate investigation, Mark Felt slipped into the role of an informer that would forever alter his life.
“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.
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.
