Deep Throat

Deep Throat is the pseudonym given to the secret informant who provided information to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post in 1972 about the involvement of United States President Richard Nixon's administration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal. Thirty-one years after Nixon's resignation and eleven years after his death, Deep Throat was revealed to be former Federal Bureau of Investigation Associate Director Mark Felt.

Identity
Deep Throat was first introduced to the public in the 1974 book All the President's Men, written by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film two years later. According to the authors, Deep Throat was a key source of information behind a series of articles on a scandal which played a leading role in introducing the misdeeds of the Nixon administration to the general public. The scandal would eventually lead to the resignation of President Nixon as well as prison terms for White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, Egil Krogh, White House Counsel Charles Colson and John Dean, and presidential adviser John Ehrlichman.

Howard Simons, the managing editor of the Post during Watergate, dubbed the secret informant "Deep Throat" as an allusion to the notorious pornographic movie which was a cause of controversy at the time.

For more than 30 years, the identity of Deep Throat was one of the biggest mysteries of American politics and journalism and the source of much public curiosity and speculation. Woodward and Bernstein insisted they would not reveal his identity until he died or consented to have his identity revealed.

On May 31, 2005, Vanity Fair magazine revealed that William Mark Felt, Sr. was Deep Throat, when it published an article (eventually appearing in the July issue) on its website by John D. O'Connor, an attorney acting on Felt's behalf, in which 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 Post's executive editor during Watergate, confirmed Felt's claim to be Deep Throat. L. Patrick Gray, former acting Director of the FBI and Felt's boss, disputes Felt's claim to be the sole source in Gray's book, In Nixon's Web, written with his son Ed Gray. Instead, Gray and others have continued to argue that Deep Throat was a compilation of sources combined into one character in order to improve sales of the book and movie. Woodward and Bernstein, however, defended Felt's claims and detailed their relationship with Felt in Woodward's book The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat.

Role in Watergate
On June 17, 1972 at 2:31 AM local time, five men were arrested by police on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel building in Washington, D.C., inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Police had arrived on the scene after being alerted by Frank Wills, a security guard, who noticed that a door leading into the hotel had been taped open.

The situation was unusual because the five burglars had $2,300 in hundred-dollar bills with serial numbers in sequence, some lock-picks and door-jimmys, a walkie-talkie, a radio scanner capable of listening to police frequencies, two cameras, 40 rolls of unused film, tear-gas guns, and sophisticated electronic devices capable of recording all conversations that might be held in the offices.

At least one of the men was a former Central Intelligence Agency employee. This person, Jim McCord, Jr., was, at the time of his arrest, a security man for President Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President (also known by its acronym, "CREEP", among Nixon's political opponents). Notebooks were found on two of the men containing the telephone number of E. Howard Hunt, whose name in the notebooks was accompanied by the inscriptions "W House" and "W.H."

The scandal immediately attracted some media scrutiny. A protracted period of clue-searching and trail-following then ensued, with reporters, and eventually the United States Senate and the judicial system probing to see how far up the Executive branch of government the Watergate scandal, as it had come to be known, extended.

A pair of young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, wrote the coverage of the story over a period of two years. The scandal eventually was shown to involve a variety of legal violations and it implicated many members of the Nixon White House. With increasing pressure from the courts and the Senate, Nixon eventually became the first U.S. President to resign, thereby avoiding impeachment by the House of Representatives.

Woodward and Bernstein's stories contained information that was remarkably similar to the information uncovered by FBI investigators. This was a journalistic advantage not enjoyed by any other journalists at the time. In their later book, All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein claimed this information came from a single anonymous informant dubbed "Deep Throat". It was later revealed, and confirmed by Woodward and Bernstein, that Deep Throat was FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt.

Woodward had befriended Felt years earlier, and had consulted with him on stories before the Watergate scandal. Woodward, Bernstein, and others credit the information provided by Deep Throat with being instrumental in ensuring the success of the investigation into the Watergate Scandal.

Methods of communication with Deep Throat
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", "in a unique position to observe the Executive Branch," and a man "whose fight had been worn out in too many battles".

Woodward claimed that he would signal "Deep Throat" that he desired a meeting by placing a flowerpot with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment. When Deep Throat wanted a meeting he would make special marks on page twenty 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.

Many were dubious 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 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 Times were not delivered to individual apartments but delivered in an un-addressed stack at 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 in his book stressed these precautions, he also admits to calling "Deep Throat" on the telephone at his home.

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 and admirer of J. Edgar Hoover. After Hoover's death, Felt became angry and disgusted when L. Patrick Gray, career naval officer and lawyer from the Civil Division of the Department of Justice with no prior law enforcement experience, was appointed Director of the F.B.I. over Felt, a 30-year veteran of the Bureau. Felt was particularly unhappy with Gray's management style of the F.B.I., which was markedly different from Hoover's. Felt selected Woodward and Bernstein because he knew they were assigned to investigate the burglary. Instead of seeking out prosecutors at the Justice Department, or the House Judiciary Committee charged with investigating presidential wrongdoing, he methodically leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein 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.

Deep Throat revealed
Although confirmation of Deep Throat's identity remained elusive for over 30 years, there were suspicions that Felt was indeed the reporters' elusive source long before the public acknowledgement in 2005.
 * Richard Nixon himself believed that Felt might be Deep Throat but did not try to out him. His stated rationale for this was that if he had done so, Felt would have publicly revealed information damaging to the FBI, and to other powerful people and institutions. Nixon at the time stated Felt "knows everything there is to know in the FBI." Nixon's motives in not outing Felt may not have been entirely altruistic since Nixon would also have been damaged by the potential revelations of Felt.
 * Carl Bernstein did not even share Deep Throat's identity with his immediate family, which included his wife Nora Ephron. (As he said on NBC's Today Show on June 2, 2005, "I was never dumb enough to tell [Ephron]." He said, "...which was very smart because I would have told the whole world by now.") Ephron became obsessed with figuring out the secret and eventually correctly concluded that he was Mark Felt. (It had previously been revealed that Deep Throat was definitely a male.) In 1999, a 19-year-old college freshman, Chase Culeman-Beckman, claimed to have been told by Bernstein's son that Mark Felt was really Deep Throat. According to Culeman-Beckman, Jacob Bernstein had said that he was "100 percent sure that Deep Throat was Mark Felt. He's someone in the FBI." Jacob had reportedly said this approximately 11 years prior, when he and Culeman-Beckman were classmates. Ephron explained that their son overheard her "speculations," and Carl Bernstein himself also immediately stepped forward to reject the claim, but many did not believe these claims.
 * The Gemstone Files, attributed to Bruce Porter Roberts, point to Felt as Deep Throat.
 * James Mann, who had worked at the Post at the time of Watergate and was close to the investigation, brought a great deal of evidence together in a 1992 article in The Atlantic Monthly that fingered Felt and convinced many. He argued that the information that Deep Throat gave Woodward could only have come from FBI files. Felt was also embittered at having been passed over for Director of the FBI and believed that the FBI in general was hostile to the Nixon Administration. In previous unrelated articles, Woodward had made clear he had a highly placed source at the FBI, and there is some evidence he was friends with Felt.
 * Woodward has kept in close touch with Felt over the years, even showing up unexpectedly at his house in 1999, after Felt's dementia began, and at the home of Felt's daughter, Joan, in Santa Rosa, California, as well. Some suspected at that time that Woodward might be asking Felt if he could reveal him to be Deep Throat, though Felt, when asked directly by others, had consistently denied being "Deep Throat".
 * In 2002, Timothy Noah called Felt "the best guess going about the identity of Deep Throat."
 * In 1976, Assistant Attorney General John Stanley Pottinger had convened a grand jury to investigate a series of potentially illegal break ins that Felt had authorized against various dissident groups. Felt was testifying before the jury when a juror asked him, out of the blue, "Are you Deep Throat?"  Pottinger reports that Felt "went white with fear."  Pottinger explained to Felt that he was under oath and would have to answer truthfully, but since Pottinger felt the question was outside the purview of the investigation, he offered to withdraw it if Felt wished.

In February 2005, Nixon's former White House Counsel, news columnist John Dean, reported that Woodward had recently informed Bradlee that "Deep Throat" was ailing and close to death, and that Bradlee had written Deep Throat's obituary. Both Woodward and the then-current editor of The Washington Post, Leonard Downie, denied these claims. Felt was something of a suspect, especially after the mysterious meeting that occurred between Woodward and Felt in the summer of 1999. But others had received more attention over the years, such as Pat Buchanan, Henry Kissinger, then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, General Haig, and, before it was revealed that "Deep Throat" was definitely not female, Diane Sawyer.

On May 31, 2005, Vanity Fair magazine reported that William Mark Felt, then aged 91, claimed to be the man once known as "Deep Throat". Later that day, Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee released a statement through The Washington Post confirming that the story was true.

On June 2, 2005, the Washington Post ran a lengthy front-page by Woodward in which he detailed his friendship with Felt in the years before Watergate. Woodward wrote that he first met Felt by chance in 1970, when Woodward was a Navy lieutenant in his mid-twenties who was dispatched to deliver a package to the White House's West Wing. Felt arrived soon after, for a separate appointment, and sat next to Woodward in the waiting room. Woodward struck up a conversation, eventually learning of Felt's position in the upper echelon of the FBI. Woodward, who was about to get out of the Navy at the time and was unsure about his future direction in life, became determined to use Felt as a mentor and career advisor, and so he got Felt's phone number and kept in touch with him.

After deciding to try a career as a reporter, Woodward eventually joined the Washington Post in August, 1971. Felt, who Woodward writes, had long had a dim view of the Nixon Administration, began passing pieces of information to Woodward, although he insisted that Woodward keep the FBI and Justice Department out of anything he wrote based on the information. The first time Woodward used information from Felt in a Washington Post story was in mid-May 1972, a month before the Watergate burglary, when Woodward was reporting on the man who had attempted to assassinate Presidential candidate George C. Wallace of Alabama; Nixon had put Felt in charge of investigating the would-be assassin. A month later, just days after the Watergate break-in, Woodward would call Felt at his office, marking the first time Woodward spoke with Felt about Watergate.

Commenting on Felt's motivations for serving as his "Deep Throat" source, Woodward wrote, "Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable. He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and their efforts to manipulate the Bureau for political reasons."

In 1980, Felt himself was convicted of ordering illegal break-ins at the homes of Weathermen suspects, and their families. Richard Nixon testified on his behalf. President Ronald Reagan pardoned Felt, and the conviction was subsequently expunged from the record.

Composite character theory
Prior to Felt's revelation that "I was the guy they called Deep Throat" and Woodward's confirmation, part of the reason historians and other scholars had so much difficulty in identifying the real Deep Throat is because no single person seemed to truly fit the character described in All the President's Men. This had caused some scholars and commentators to come to the conclusion that Deep Throat could not possibly be a single person, and must be a composite of several sources.

From a literary business perspective, this theory was further supported by the agent who originally marketed the draft for All the President's Men, who stated that the initial typescript of the book contained absolutely no reference to Deep Throat. That led to speculation that Woodward and Bernstein played at condensing history in the same way Hollywood scriptwriters do: the writer sees that the real life hero doing the Great Deed had a dozen helpers, boils them down to a single person, and gives him a fictional name.

This theory was originally thought to be put to rest by Felt claiming to be Deep Throat. However, recent studies of FBI investigative files, Woodward's released notes on his meetings with Deep Throat, and the conversations attributed to Deep Throat in All the President's Men, have revealed that Felt could not possibly have told Woodward all of the information attributed to Deep Throat.

Specifically, in his examination of Woodward's notes on Deep Throat, Ed Gray quotes the notes, quoting Deep Throat, as saying "Mitchell conducted his own invest[igation] for ten days and 'was going crazy---we had guys assigned to him to help.' w."[sic]

Gray points out that if that source "...was Mark Felt, his "we" could only mean the FBI. But there certainly were no FBI agents assigned to an internal CREEP investigation of its own employees immediately after the break-in, the results of which were precisely what Mitchell and CREEP wanted to keep away from the FBI. If there had been FBI agents "assigned to help" who "found all sorts of new things," not only would the Watergate case have been broken during those first ten days, but the FBI's files would be filled with FD-302s of the resultant interviews. There are none."

Gray also cites a conversation he had with Donald Santarelli, an official with the Department of Justice during the Watergate era, in which Gray described the contents of some notes of Woodward's that were attributed to Deep Throat. In response, Santarelli reportedly told Gray, "This definitely was me. Bob would call me regularly and would ask me stuff like this." He further states that "Deep Throat is still a composite... It wasn't just Mark Felt."

Fred Fielding
Another leading candidate was White House Associate Counsel Fred F. Fielding. In April 2003 Fielding was presented as a potential candidate as a result of a detailed review of source material by William Gaines and his journalism students, as part of a class at the University of Illinois journalism school. Fielding was the assistant to John Dean and as such had access to the files relating to the affair. Gaines felt that statements by Woodward ruled out Deep Throat's being in the FBI and that Deep Throat often had information before the FBI did. H.R. Haldeman himself suspected Fielding as being Deep Throat.

Dean had been one of the most dedicated hunters of Deep Throat. Both he and Leonard Garment dismissed Fielding as a possibility, reporting that he had been cleared by Woodward in 1980 when Fielding was applying for an important position in the Ronald Reagan administration. However this assertion, which comes from Fielding, has not been corroborated.

One reason that many experts believed that Deep Throat was Fielding and not Felt was due to Woodward's apparent denial in an interview that "Deep Throat" worked in the intelligence community:


 * LUKAS: Do you resent the implication by some critics that your sources on Watergate-among them the fabled Deep Throat-may have been people in the intelligence community?


 * WOODWARD: I resent it because it's untrue.

In retrospect, it appears that Woodward was only excluding the foreign intelligence agencies with that statement, and not the FBI. Alternatively, Woodward considered the FBI to be a law enforcement and not an intelligence agency.

Other credible candidates
Any candidate who died before the Felt admission ceased to fit Woodward's criteria at that time, since Woodward had stated that he was free to reveal his identity when "Deep Throat" died.
 * John Ehrlichman: Nixon advisor. Died in 1999.
 * Ron Ziegler: press secretary. Died in 2003.
 * William E. Colby: head of the CIA. Died in 1996.
 * Charles W. Bates: FBI executive whom Mann mentioned but considered less likely than Felt.
 * William C. Sullivan: former head of the FBI intelligence operations, fired by J. Edgar Hoover in 1971. Died in 1977.
 * L. Patrick Gray: acting FBI director who lived only four blocks away from Woodward, accused by a CBS documentary. Died in 2005.
 * Robert Kunkel: FBI Washington Bureau Chief whom Mann considered less likely than Felt, as he moved to St. Louis partway through the investigation.
 * Cord Meyer: CIA agent suggested in Mark Riebling's Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA. However, Woodward stated that "Deep Throat" was not part of the intelligence community. Died in 2001.
 * Raymond Price: Nixon speech writer.
 * Stephen Bull: administrative assistant.
 * Secret Service technicians: Richard Cohen argued it was whoever in the Secret Service maintained Nixon's secret taping devices.

Less credible candidates

 * William Rehnquist: Late Chief Justice of the United States, had a position in the Department of Justice early in the Nixon administration, working for Attorney General John N. Mitchell. More than five months before the Watergate break-in, he was appointed to the Supreme Court and it would have been almost impossible for him to have had access to much of the information attributed to "Deep Throat." In February 2005, Dean reported that "Deep Throat" was ailing, and Rehnquist was known to be suffering from cancer, which caused his death later that year. The report caused a resurgence of speculation that Rehnquist was "Deep Throat." However, Woodward later stated that the notion that "Deep Throat" was ailing had been a misunderstanding.
 * Henry Kissinger: Nixon's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, was out of the country on some of the dates Woodward reported to have met with "Deep Throat."
 * George H. W. Bush: Was nominated in February 2005 by Adrian Havill-author of a 1993 biography of Woodward and Bernstein, Deep Truth (ISBN 1-55972-172-3)-following the unveiling of Woodward's notes at the University of Texas. Havill had argued in his biography that "Deep Throat" was a composite figure, but stated in a letter to Poynter Online that based on more recent events and research, he now believed "Deep Throat" was George H. W. Bush.
 * General Alexander Haig: Authors Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin speculated in their 1991 book Silent Coup: The Removal of a President that Haig may have been "Deep Throat." Died in 2010.
 * Diane Sawyer: Was hired by White House press secretary Ron Ziegler to serve in the Richard Nixon Administration. On his deathbed, Nixon supporter Baruch Korff falsely claimed that Sawyer was Deep Throat.
 * Ben Stein: A Nixon speech writer and the son of Nixon economic advisor Herbert Stein; later an actor, political commentator, and game show host.
 * Gerald R. Ford: Suggestion that Ford may have been Deep Throat as he was next in line for the presidency.
 * Pat Buchanan: Served as special assistant to the President, was nominated as a potential candidate by Dean in his June 2002 book Unmasking Deep Throat. Buchanan repeatedly denied the claim, stating in a Time magazine article on the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in that "The last time I cooperated with The Washington Post...was in 1952, when I was a paper boy delivering the damn thing in Northwest Washington." Buchanan was very interested in the mystery, however, and had a number of theories. He was most sympathetic to the idea of a composite Deep Throat.
 * Richard Nixon himself: There was some suggestion that Nixon had used back-channels to communicate with Woodward in a bizarre attempt to showcase his persecution by the media which backfired horrifically. This theory was largely discredited.
 * J. Fred Buzhardt: White House counsel to President Nixon.

Fictional portrayals

 * Hal Holbrook portrayed Deep Throat in the film version of All the President's Men where he uttered the catchphrase follow the money.
 * The 1999 comedy movie Dick parodied the events of the Watergate scandal, suggesting that "Deep Throat" was actually two ditzy teenage girls.
 * In Metal Gear Solid an informant who shares the same alias as "Deep Throat" guides Solid Snake through part of the game using his Codec Device. It is hinted that it's the same "Deep Throat" involved in Watergate, however it turns out to be Gray Fox.
 * The X-Files featured an informant who used the name "Deep Throat" to leak information to Agent Mulder in early episodes in a manner similar to the meetings described by Woodward. It is never specifically mentioned whether he was intended to be the same Deep Throat from Watergate.
 * In a 1989 episode of the War of the Worlds television series, the character Quinn (John Colicos), an alien stranded on Earth since the events of the 1953 film of the same name, claimed to have been the actual Deep Throat.
 * In Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Perry White, Lois Lane, and Clark Kent meet with an informant named "Sore Throat", an obvious reference to Deep Throat.
 * The Fairly OddParents film Channel Chasers shows Timmy's parents meeting with Tootie disguised in a hat and coat to cover her face and body. She gives them information revealing that Vicky is evil, under the alias Deep Toot.
 * Hey Arnold!: The Movie had Helga disguising herself and secretly aiding Arnold in trying to save the town, giving herself the alias of "Deep Voice".
 * In The Simpsons episode "Sideshow Bob Roberts", Waylon Smithers played a similar role to Deep Throat when covertly helping the Simpsons children find a way to dethrone the newly-made mayor of Springfield, Sideshow Bob (even paraphrasing one of Deep Throat's statements).
 * In Terry Pratchett's The Truth Gaspode uses the pseudonym 'Deep Bone'.
 * In season one of Alias, Will Tippin informally refers to his suspected CIA informant as Deep Throat.
 * In season three episode one of NewsRadio, radio station owner Jimmy James is asked at a news conference, where he is announcing his candidacy for US President, about being a lobbyist in Washington with close ties to the Nixon White House prior to and during the Watergate affair. To which he replies that he was Deep Throat and when doubted challenged the real Deep Throat to come forward, when no one comes forward he says, "sha, I didn't think so."
 * In the Family Guy episode "Deep Throats", Kermit the Frog uses a similar role to provide evidence of Mayor Adam West's corruption to Brian and Stewie.
 * In an episode of Welcome Back, Kotter, school principal Mr. Woodman takes the name when leaking a scandal concerning the Buchanan High School cafeteria to the school newspaper (for whom the Sweathogs were acting as reporters).

In Popular Culture
Deep Throat also refers to a sexual act. It is currently unverified if this innuendo was made knowingly or not.