The identity of Deep Throat has been the biggest journalistic secret of the last thirty years.
It has finally come out who the mysterious Deep Throat informant of the Watergate scandal is. Apparently, those who know DT’s real identity — Bernstein, Woodward and their editor at The Washington Post Ben Bradlee — swore never to reveal it during DT’s lifetime. (Apparently, Mr. Bradlee did not even reveal the name to the late Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Post.)
While the revelation is front-page news in The N ew York Times , The Washington Post and other papers today, the publication that uncovered the secret is Vanity Fair. The details are in the July issue and on its website.
Mr. Throat is none other than the number two man at the FBI at the time, W. Mark Felt. Just a month before the break-in, he was passed over by President Nixon to replace the lifelong head of the agency, J. Edgar Hoover. (The agency was started back in 1908, but Hoover became its chief in 1924 and remained in that capacity until his death in 1972.) It is said Mr Hoover had so much dirt on prominent politicians, including presidents, that as he got up in years, they were afraid to replace him.
So there must have been some bitterness on Mr. Felt’s part that he was passed over for the key position. President Nixon chose L. Patrick Gray, one of Nixon’s loyal supporters.
After the break-in, political dynamite arrived daily on Mr. Felt’s desk: he had 1, 500 pages of reports of the FBI investigation of Watergate, the investigation that Nixon wanted to use the CIA to stop, on bogus claims of national security. So Felt had both the weapon and the motive to bring President Nixon down in flames. And he did so by tipping Watergate secrets to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
Mr Felt, now 91, has confirmed the story. Even more persuasively, Bob Woodward confirmed it on
The Washington Post website. (Apparently six years ago, Woodward visited Mr. Felt possibly as a gesture of goodwill to the aging “ultimate insider,” who helped launched Woodward’s career. Significantly, Woodward cautiously parked his limo some distance from the house, as Woodward had no clear connection to the retired FBI official. Woodward was not reporting upon any FBI matters at the time.)
Even highly-placed Washingtonians were as in the dark as the public about the real Deep Throat. In fact, one of Nixon’s attorneys Leonard Garment published a book in 2000 In Search of Deep Throat. In that book, he hypothesized incorrectly that DT was John Sears, a young Republican party political strategist 1n 1972.
Some insiders guessed the truth, according to The Washington Post. James Mann, a reporter with Woodward, wrote an Atlantic Monthly article in 1992 that named Felt as a likely candidate. Read that article: it is almost clairvoyant in its accuracy. Mann portrays Felt and other FBI long-timers as fighting Nixon’s efforts to muzzle the FBI or to use it for his own political purposes. (For example, the President’s counsel, John Dean, had been put in place to observe crucial FBI interviews in the developing Watergatre investigation.)