Real Crime/Paranormal/Conspiracy Theories Book III

Deep Throat -- Watergate Part I

Deep Throat is the pseudonymgiven to the secret informant who provided information in 1972 to BobWoodward, who shared it with Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernsteinwere reporters for The Washington Post, and Deep Throat provided keydetails about the involvement of U.S. president Richard Nixon'sadministration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal. In2005, 31 years after Nixon's resignation and 11 years after Nixon'sdeath, a family attorney stated that former Federal Bureau ofInvestigation (FBI) Associate Director Mark Felt was Deep Throat. Bythen, Felt was suffering from dementia and had previously deniedbeing Deep Throat, but Woodward and Bernstein then confirmed theattorney's claim.

Background

Deep Throat was first introduced to thepublic in the February 1974 book All the President's Men by TheWashington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Accordingto the authors, Deep Throat was a key source of information behind aseries of articles that introduced the misdeeds of the Nixonadministration to the general public. The scandal eventually led tothe resignation of President Nixon, as well as to prison terms forWhite House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, EgilKrogh, White House Counsel Charles Colson, former United StatesAttorney General John N. Mitchell, former White House Counsel JohnDean, and presidential adviser John Ehrlichman. The film based on thebook was released two years later; nominated for eight AcademyAwards, it won four.

Howard Simons was the managing editorof the Post during Watergate. He dubbed the secret informant "DeepThroat", alluding to both the deep background status of hisinformation and the widely publicized 1972 pornographic film DeepThroat. For more than 30 years, Deep Throat's identity was one ofthe biggest mysteries of American politics and journalism and thesource of much public curiosity and speculation. Woodward andBernstein insisted that they would not reveal his identity until hedied or consented to reveal it. J. Anthony Lukas speculated that DeepThroat was W. Mark Felt in his book Nightmare: The Underside of theNixon Years (1976), based on three New York Times Sunday Magazinearticles, but he was widely criticized. According to an article inSlate on April 28, 2003, Woodward had denied that Deep Throat waspart of the "intelligence community" in a 1989Playboy interview with Lukas.

On May 31, 2005, Vanity Fair revealedthat 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." Afterthe Vanity Fair story broke, Woodward, Bernstein, and Benjamin C.Bradlee, the Post's executive editor during Watergate, confirmedFelt's identity as Deep Throat. L. Patrick Gray, former actingDirector of the FBI and Felt's overseer, disputed Felt's claim in hisbook In Nixon's Web, co-written with his son Ed. Gray and others haveargued that Deep Throat was a compilation of sources characterized asone person to improve sales of the book and movie. Woodward andBernstein, however, defended Felt's claims and detailed theirrelationship with him in Woodward's book The Secret Man: The Story ofWatergate's Deep Throat.

Role in the Watergate scandal

On June 17, 1972, police arrested fivemen inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee in theWatergate Complex in Washington, D.C. In their possession were $2,300(equivalent to $14,200 today), plastic gloves to hide fingerprints,burglary tools, a walkie-talkie and radio scanner capable oflistening to police frequencies, cameras with 40 rolls of film, teargas guns, multiple electronic devices which they intended to plant inthe Democratic Committee offices, and notebooks containing thetelephone number of White House official E. Howard Hunt. One of themen was James W. McCord Jr.; a former Central Intelligence Agencyemployee and a security man for Nixon's Committee to Re-elect thePresident, popularly known as "CREEP".