WATERGATE

Inside Watergate's Final Chapter

After 33 years of secrecy, the identity of Deep Throat is at last revealed. But questions persist over his motivations and how valuable a source he really was in the scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon.

By Johanna McGeary

He's a confused old man now with an ordinary name, but he will live forever in American history as Deep Throat. The real W. Mark Felt, the FBI bureaucrat unveiled by Vanity Fair magazine as the country's most famous anonymous source, will always be obscured by that mythic shadowman who whispered secrets to a young Washington Post reporter in an underground garage, bringing the presidency of Richard M. Nixon to its eventual downfall.

In the public memory, Watergate is generally summed up like this: the Washington Post and its inseparable reporting team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought down President Nixon by unraveling the Administration's cover-up of political espionage in a thrilling journalistic chase led by the ghostly figure known as Deep Throat.

Felt's revelation stunned Washington, including (and perhaps especially) the three other men who had protected his secret for so long. For years, the Post reporters and their boss, Ben Bradlee, who was executive editor of the Post during the Watergate era, had vowed never to expose Felt before his death, and Woodward and Bernstein argued against confirming his identity even after the Vanity Fair story came out. Even now, there are a handful of people, especially among Nixon loyalists convinced the President was wrongfully hounded from power by a vengeful press, who refuse to accept that Felt and Deep Throat are one and the same. "I thought Deep Throat was essentially a composite character" folding in a number of informers, "and I still think it is," says G. Gordon Liddy, the tough-guy White House operative who went to jail for, among other dirty tricks, helping to plan the break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington by five men who were caught in the act, carrying eavesdropping equipment.

Felt, for his part, had good reason to speak up now, according to Vanity Fair: mortality and money. At 91, wrote author John O'Connor, a lawyer for the family, Felt, who had a stroke in 2001, is frail and suffers from confusion and memory loss. Although he had admitted his secret identity to friends and family in recent years, he was still reluctant to disclose it to the public, fearing that others, especially his coworkers at the FBI, would judge it dishonorable. But his family argued that posterity would regard Felt as a "true patriot" who "did the right thing" and now deserves the credit.

And the money. The Felt family saw how Woodward and Bernstein had cashed in on the Deep Throat mystery in the book and the movie. Felt's daughter Joan, a mother of two, told her father, "[W]e could make at least enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I've run up for the kids' education." Felt's ability to produce a memoir at this point is in question, but he seemed eager to try when he cheerfully told reporters besieging his daughter's California house, where he lives, "I'll arrange to write a book or something and get all the money I can." Caught by surprise at the sudden exposure of a secret he had obviously hoped to publish once Deep Throat was dead, Woodward is rushing to print next month with a slender volume recounting his relationship with Felt.

In a perceptive 1992 article in Atlantic Monthly, former Post reporter James Mann speculated that Felt or another top FBI official was the one who had leaked to Woodward as a way to protect his beloved FBI from Nixon's efforts to use the agency for political purposes. Deep Throat, wrote Mann, probably resented the appointment of outsider and Nixon loyalist L. Patrick Gray to replace FBI Director Hoover, who had died six weeks before the Watergate break-in, and wanted to blunt White House efforts to suppress the FBI investigation of the burglary. Of course, the FBI under Hoover had its problems with operations outside the normal bounds of law enforcement. In 1980, Felt was convicted of approving "black-bag jobs," illegal searches of homes of relatives and friends of fugitive American radicals. (Felt was pardoned by Ronald Reagan in 1981.) Mann speculated that Felt became Deep Throat for revenge as well: he thought himself ready and able to replace Hoover as FBI director and resented being passed over.

When you go back to the Post's coverage, instead of the movie myth of Watergate, a more complex picture emerges of what Deep Throat brought to the case—and what he didn't. A review of Post stories and Woodward and Bernstein's book points to a handful of instances in which Deep Throat's leaks advanced the story in specific ways. Generally, other sources provided the details while Deep Throat distantly guided the hunt. He corroborated information, tipped the duo where to dig, steered them off side paths, and encouraged them to keep pushing the story hard, especially in the early days when Watergate was an inside-the-Beltway tale that might have petered out under the White House campaign to cover things up.

But the myths of Watergate look a bit different now that we have a name and a biography to attach to Deep Throat. The real man had scores to settle as a thwarted bureaucrat as well as principles to defend. He is at once a narrative hook for a complicated story of political intrigue and a marketable commodity in this age of celebrity. Yet to look at his record is to realize a deeper truth about Watergate: it was less about one character than about the process working the way it should. And as everyone has long accepted, it wasn't the dirty tricks that destroyed the Nixon Administration; it was the White House's sustained attempt to cover them up. That unraveled mainly through official investigations begun at the trial of the Watergate break-in conspirators and pursued in a Senate hearing room.

As for Felt, at least he knows that Deep Throat will not go down in history as just a shadow in a trench coat. As the Washington Post itself put it, "It's nice to be able to honor him by his real name while he still lives." —from TIME, June 13, 2005

Questions

1. What motivated W. Mark Felt to come forward now to reveal that he was the anonymous source known as Deep Throat?

2. What reasons have been suggested to explain why Felt provided inside information to journalists?