Deep Throat was the pseudonym given to Mark Felt, the secret informant who provided key details about the involvement of U.S. president Richard Nixon's administration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal to reporter Bob Woodward in 1972, which was later shared with Carl Bernstein. At the time, Felt was Deputy Director of the FBI, and Woodward and Bernstein were reporters for The Washington Post.
In 2005, 31 years after Nixon's resignation and 11 years after Nixon's death, Felt revealed through an attorney that he was Deep Throat. By then, Felt was suffering from dementia and had previously denied being Deep Throat, but Woodward and Bernstein then confirmed the attorney's claim. Although Felt’s identity remained unknown to the public for over 30 years, White House tape recordings released in 1996 reveal that Nixon had been privately informed that Felt was the source as early as October 1972.
Background Deep Throat was first introduced to the public in the February 1974 book All the President's Men by The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. According to the authors, Deep Throat was a key source of information behind a series of articles that introduced the misdeeds of the Nixon administration to the general public. The scandal eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon, as well as to prison terms for White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, Egil Krogh, White House Counsel Charles Colson, former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell, former White House Counsel John Dean, and presidential adviser John Ehrlichman. The film based on the book was released two years later; nominated for eight Academy Awards, it won four.
In his notes, Woodward referred to his source as "X" or "MF" for "my friend", but due to the deep background status of his information, Washington Post managing editor Howard Simons dubbed him "Deep Throat" in an allusion to the 1972 adult film of the same name. For more than 30 years, Deep Throat's identity was one of the biggest mysteries of American politics and journalism and the source of much public curiosity and speculation. Woodward and Bernstein insisted that they would not reveal his identity until he died or consented to reveal it. J. Anthony Lukas speculated that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt in his book Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (1976), based on three New York Times Sunday Magazine articles, but he was widely criticized. According to an article in Slate on April 28, 2003, Woodward had denied that Deep Throat was part of the "intelligence community" in a 1989 Playboy interview with Lukas.Noah, Timothy. "Was Fred Fielding Deep Throat?", Slate, April 28, 2003.
On May 31, 2005, Vanity Fair revealed that Felt was Deep Throat in an article on its website by John D. O'Connor, an attorney acting on Felt's behalf. Felt reportedly said, "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat." After the Vanity Fair story broke, Woodward, Bernstein, and Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Posts executive editor during Watergate, confirmed Felt's identity as Deep Throat.Woodward, Bob. The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat, Simon & Schuster, 2005. L. Patrick Gray, former acting Director of the FBI and Felt's overseer, disputed Felt's claim in his book In Nixon's Web, co-written with his son Ed. Gray and others have argued that Deep Throat was a compilation of sources characterized as one person to improve sales of the book and movie. Woodward and Bernstein, however, defended Felt's claims and detailed their relationship with him in Woodward's book The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat.
Role in the Watergate scandal
On June 17, 1972, police arrested five men inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C. In their possession were $2,300 (equivalent to $ today), plastic gloves to prevent fingerprints, burglary tools, a walkie-talkie and radio scanner capable of listening to police frequencies, cameras with 40 rolls of film, tear gas guns, multiple electronic devices which they intended to plant in the Democratic Committee offices, and notebooks containing the telephone number of White House official E. Howard Hunt. One of the men was James W. McCord Jr., a former Central Intelligence Agency employee and a security man for Nixon's Committee for the Re-Election of the President, later notoriously mocked with the acronym "CREEP".
Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward pursued the story for two years. The scandal eventually implicated many members of Nixon's White House, culminating in Nixon becoming the first United States president to resign. Woodward and Bernstein wrote in All the President's Men that key information in their investigation had come from an anonymous informant whom they dubbed "Deep Throat".
Methods of communication Woodward, in All the President's Men, first mentions "Deep Throat" on page 71. Earlier in the book, he reports calling "an old friend and sometimes source who worked for the federal government and did not like to be called at his office". Later, he describes him as "a source in the Executive Branch who had access to information at CRP as well as at the White House". The book also calls him "an incurable gossip" and states "in a unique position to observe the Executive Branch", and as a man "whose fight had been worn out in too many battles".
Woodward claimed that he would signal to "Deep Throat" that he desired a meeting by moving a flowerpot with a small red flag on the balcony of his high-rise apartment. On occasions when "Deep Throat" wanted a meeting, he would make special marks on page 20 of Woodward's copy of The New York Times; he would circle the page number and draw clock hands to indicate the hour. They often met "on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn", at 2:00 a.m. The garage is located at 1401 Wilson Boulevard and has a historical marker that was erected in 2011. In 2014, the garage was scheduled to be demolished, though the county decided to save the historical marker, and the landowner promised to design a memorial commemorating the Watergate scandal. , the garage had not been demolished.
Many were skeptical of these cloak and dagger methods. Adrian Havill investigated these claims for his 1993 biography of Woodward and Bernstein and found them to be factually impossible. He noted that Woodward's apartment 617 at 1718 P Street, Northwest, in Washington faced an interior courtyard and was not visible from the street. Havill said that anyone regularly checking the balcony, as "Deep Throat" was said to have done daily, would have been spotted. Havill also said that copies of The New York Times were not delivered to individual apartments but delivered in an unaddressed stack to the building's reception desk. There would have been no way to know which copy was intended for Woodward. Woodward, however, has stated that in the early 1970s the interior courtyard was an alleyway and had not yet been bricked off and that his balcony was visible from street level to passing pedestrians. It was also visible, Woodward conjectured, to anyone from the FBI in surveillance of nearby embassies. Also revealed was the fact that Woodward's copy of The New York Times had his apartment number indicated on it. Former neighbor Herman Knippenberg stated that Woodward would sometimes come to his door looking for his marked copy of the Times, claiming, "I like to have it in mint condition and I like to have my own copy."
Further, while Woodward stressed these precautions in his book, he also admits to having called "Deep Throat" on the telephone at his home. Felt's wife recalls answering Woodward's telephone calls for Felt.
Controversy over motives In public statements following the disclosure of his identity, Felt's family called him an "American hero", stating that he leaked information about the Watergate scandal to The Washington Post for moral and patriotic reasons. Other commentators, however, have speculated that Felt may have had more personal reasons for leaking information to Woodward.
In his book The Secret Man, Woodward describes Felt as a loyalist to and admirer of J. Edgar Hoover. After Hoover's death, Felt became angry and disgusted when L. Patrick Gray, a career naval officer and lawyer from the Civil Division of the Department of Justice, who had no law enforcement experience, was appointed as Director of the FBI over Felt, a 30-year veteran of the FBI. Felt was particularly unhappy with Gray's management style at the FBI, which was markedly different from Hoover's. Felt aided Woodward and Bernstein because he knew Woodward personally, having met him years before when Woodward was in the navy. Over the course of their acquaintance, Woodward would often call Felt for advice. Instead of seeking out prosecutors at the Justice Department, or the House Judiciary Committee charged with investigating presidential wrongdoing, Felt was methodically solicited by Woodward to guide their investigation while keeping his own identity and involvement safely concealed.
Some conservatives who worked for Nixon, such as Pat Buchanan and G. Gordon Liddy, castigated Felt and asserted their belief that Nixon was unfairly hounded from office,Morgan, Dan (June 1, 2005). "Contemporaries Have Mixed Views", The Washington Post, May 31, 2005. often claiming it a "witch hunt".
Speculation concerning Mark Felt
Speculation within the White House Although Deep Throat's identity was unconfirmed for over 30 years, there were suspicions that Felt was indeed the reporters' mysterious source long before the public acknowledgment in 2005. In 2012's Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, Max Holland reports that Felt leaked information to The Washington Post and Time. Time correspondent Sandy Smith told Times lawyer, Roswell Gilpatric, a partner of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Gilpatric then passed the information to Henry E. Petersen, the Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice. In turn, Petersen revealed the information to White House Counsel John W. Dean, who finally reported it to President Richard Nixon. Nixon also learned of Felt’s role at the Post through a separate, parallel channel: a lawyer with inside knowledge of the Post’s operations informed Petersen independently of the TIME/Sandy Smith chain, though this source’s identity has never been established.
Nixon did not publicly acknowledge learning Deep Throat's identity. Nixon claimed that if he had done so, Felt would have revealed information that would damage the FBI, as well as other powerful people and institutions. In the "smoking gun" tape, Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, stated that Felt "knows everything there is to know in the FBI." Haldeman implied that Nixon's motives for not outing Felt were not entirely altruistic, especially because Nixon himself may have been damaged by Felt's revelations.
Speculation in the press and the public