Post's Bob Woodward Confirms That Felt Was Indeed Deep Throat

According to a story on the website of the Washington Post, Watergate reporter Bob Woodward has confirmed the claims of former FBI official W. Mark Felt’s that he was the anonymous "Deep Throat" who leaked secrets to Woodward about the Watergate coverup. In Tuesday’s Post article, Woodward is quoted as saying that Felt helped him by providing details of President Nixon’s innermost secretive operations to him and his partner, Carl Bernstein, at a time when relations between the FBI and the Nixon White House were tense and uncertain. Felt, now 91 years old, was second in command at the FBI in the early 1970s when the Watergate scandal broke. He regularly met with Woodward and Bernstein in the shadows of a parking garage to provide them with information that helped them write expose articles about Nixon’s administration—articles that eventually brought down the Nixon presidency.

Although people have postulated theories for three decades about who Deep Throat was, the informant’s actual identity was never determined for certain. Many names have been suggested, including Assistant Attorney General Henry Peterson, Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Zeigler, speechwriter Pat Buchanan, and deputy White House counsel Fred Fielding. Even John Dean, the White House counsel at the time who warned Nixon of "a cancer growing on the Presidency," was named as possibly being the informant. Others felt that perhaps Deep Throat wasn’t a single person at all, but rather an entity composed from multiple sources of information. In 1999, when someone brought up Felt’s name as a possibility, he denied that he was the man. At the time, he was quoted as saying that if he had indeed been Deep Throat, he "would have done better," adding that "I would have been more effective. Deep Throat didn’t exactly bring the White House crashing down, did he?"

Woodward and Bernstein said in recent years that documents naming the identity of Deep Throat would be kept secure at an undisclosed location in Wshington, D.C. until the death of their informant, and Felt kept the secret so tightly guarded that even his family had no idea. But now that Felt has revealed the role he played in ending the Nixon presidency, his family is proud of his actions and announced it to the world in a statement read by Felt’s grandson, Nick Jones. "The family believes my grandfather, Mark Felt Sr., is a great American hero who went well above and beyond the call of duty at much risk to himself, to save his country from a horrible injustice," the statement said. "We all sincerely hope the country will see him this way as well." Jones said his grandfather believes "the men and women of the FBI who have put their lives at risk for more than 50 years to keep this country safe deserve recognition more than he." He concluded the statement by passing along a personal commentary from his grandfather. "On behalf of the Felt family, we hope you see him as worthy of honor and respect as we do," Jones said. "My grandfather is pleased he is being honored for his role as Deep Throat with his friend Bob Woodward. As he recently told my mother, ‘I guess people used to think Deep Throat was a criminal, but now they think he was a hero.’"