Deep Throat (Watergate)

• 1. Introduction

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  Deep Throat is the name later given to Richard Nixon's most damaging leak. Nobody used that name yet on the 17th of June 1972, when police arrested five men inside the Democratic National Committee's offices in the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C. Officers found $2,300 in cash on the group, along with plastic gloves meant to hide fingerprints. There were burglary tools, a walkie-talkie, and a radio scanner tuned to police frequencies. Cameras loaded with 40 rolls of film, tear gas guns, and electronic listening devices meant for the Democratic offices turned up too. A notebook in their possession held the phone number of White House official E. Howard Hunt. One of the five, James W. McCord Jr, was a former Central Intelligence Agency employee working security for Nixon's Committee for the Re-Election of the President, an outfit later mocked with the acronym CREEP.

  Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters for The Washington Post, spent the next two years chasing the story behind that break-in. Their reporting climbed into the upper ranks of Nixon's White House. Nixon became the first American president to resign. Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman went to prison, along with G. Gordon Liddy and Egil Krogh. So did White House Counsel Charles Colson, Attorney General John N. Mitchell, White House Counsel John Dean, and adviser John Ehrlichman.

  Woodward and Bernstein credited a single anonymous source with much of what they uncovered, a source they nicknamed Deep Throat. For more than 30 years, almost nobody outside a small circle knew who that person truly was. How did someone that highly placed feed information to a reporter for years without being caught? Why take that risk in the first place? And when the truth about his identity finally came out, why did some people still refuse to believe it?

• 2. Nights At The Parking Garage

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  Page 71 of All the President's Men is where Woodward finally gives his source a name: Deep Throat. Earlier in the book, he only mentions calling an old friend and sometimes source who worked for the federal government. That source, Woodward writes, did not like to be called at his office. The book later describes him as a source in the Executive Branch with access to information at CRP as well as the White House. It calls him an incurable gossip, a man in a unique position to observe the Executive Branch, and one whose fight had been worn out in too many battles.

  To request a meeting, Woodward would move a flowerpot with a red flag on his apartment balcony. When Deep Throat wanted to meet instead, he marked page 20 of Woodward's copy of The New York Times. He circled the page number and drew clock hands to show the hour. Their meetings took place on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn, always around 2 a.m. That garage stands at 1401 Wilson Boulevard, where a historical marker was installed in 2011. By 2014 the site was slated for demolition. The county chose to save the marker anyway, and the landowner promised a memorial to the scandal.

  Adrian Havill tested these claims for his 1993 biography of Woodward and Bernstein. He concluded they were factually impossible. Woodward's apartment, number 617 at 1718 P Street Northwest, faced an interior courtyard, not the street, Havill wrote. Anyone checking a balcony daily, as Deep Throat supposedly did, would have been spotted. Havill also noted that copies of The New York Times arrived at the building in one unaddressed stack. They went to the reception desk, with no way to single out Woodward's copy. Woodward pushed back. He said the courtyard had still been an open alleyway in the early 1970s, visible from the street. It may even have been visible to FBI agents watching nearby embassies, he said. Woodward's own copy of the Times, it turned out, carried his apartment number printed on it. Former neighbor Herman Knippenberg recalled Woodward showing up at his door hunting for that marked copy. 'I like to have it in mint condition and I like to have my own copy,' Woodward told him. Woodward also admitted, elsewhere in the book, to phoning Deep Throat at home. Felt's wife later recalled answering those calls for her husband.

  Despite the demolition order, the garage at 1401 Wilson Boulevard was still standing years later, its fate still undecided.

• 3. A Question Of Loyalty

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  Howard Simons, the Post's managing editor during Watergate, was among the editors who settled on the nickname Deep Throat. It played on two things at once: the term deep background, used for anonymous sourcing, and the widely publicized 1972 pornographic film of the same name.

  Felt's own family, once his identity became public, called him an American hero who leaked for moral and patriotic reasons. Other commentators weren't so sure, suspecting more personal motives were at work. In his book The Secret Man, Woodward describes Felt as a loyalist and admirer of J. Edgar Hoover. After Hoover died, L. Patrick Gray, a career naval officer and lawyer with no law enforcement background, was named FBI Director over Felt. Felt, by then a 30-year veteran of the Bureau, was furious. He also chafed at Gray's management style, which differed sharply from Hoover's.

  Felt's connection to Woodward went back years, to when Woodward was still in the navy. The two had simply gotten to know each other, and Woodward would later call him for advice on unrelated matters. Rather than take his concerns to prosecutors at the Justice Department or to the House Judiciary Committee investigating the president, Felt fed Woodward information while keeping his own name hidden. Some Nixon loyalists were unmoved by any of this. Pat Buchanan and G. Gordon Liddy both attacked Felt publicly, insisting Nixon had been the victim of what they called a witch hunt.

• 4. What Nixon Already Knew

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  White House tape recordings, not released until 1996, show that Nixon had already been told Felt was the leak. That information reached him as early as October 1972, according to those tapes, decades before the public found out. In his 2012 book Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, Max Holland traces one route the information took. Time correspondent Sandy Smith told the magazine's lawyer, Roswell Gilpatric, a partner at Cravath, Swaine and Moore. Gilpatric passed word to Henry E. Petersen, the Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department's Criminal Division. Petersen told White House Counsel John W. Dean, who finally reported it to Nixon himself. A second, separate channel reached Nixon too. A lawyer with inside knowledge of the Post's operations told Petersen independently of the Time chain, though that source's identity has never been established.

  Nixon never acknowledged in public that he knew. He reasoned that saying so would prompt Felt to release information damaging to the FBI and to other powerful people. On the so-called smoking gun tape, Haldeman told Nixon that Felt 'knows everything there is to know in the FBI.' Haldeman's own comments suggested that Nixon's silence on the matter wasn't purely a matter of principle.

• 5. Thirty Years Of Guessing

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  By the mid-1970s, one fact about Deep Throat had leaked out for certain: he was a man. George V. Higgins wrote in 1975 that 'Mark Felt knows more reporters than most reporters do, and there are some who think he had a Washington Post alias borrowed from a dirty movie.' Woodward and Bernstein, though, stayed tight-lipped. Before Felt's name became public, only Woodward, Bernstein, Bradlee, and journalist Elsa Walsh knew who Deep Throat really was. After actor Robert Redford died, Woodward said he had let Redford in on the secret too, while the film adaptation was being made.

  Writer Nora Ephron became fixated on solving the puzzle herself and eventually landed on the right answer: Mark Felt. In 1999, a 19-year-old college student named Chase Culeman-Beckman said that Bernstein's own son, Jacob, had told him Felt was Deep Throat. Culeman-Beckman called himself '100 percent sure' and described the source as 'someone in the FBI.' Jacob had reportedly made the claim about 11 years earlier, when the two were classmates. Ephron later explained that Jacob had simply overheard her own guesswork. Carl Bernstein stepped forward at once to reject the story, as he had with other leaks over the years.

  James Mann, who had worked at the Post during Watergate and stayed close to the story, laid out a detailed case in a 1992 article for The Atlantic Monthly. He recalled that Woodward had referred to a high-placed FBI source even before Watergate broke. Mann argued that the specific information Deep Throat gave Woodward could only have come from files inside the FBI itself.

  In 1999, after Felt's dementia had set in, Woodward showed up unannounced at the Santa Rosa, California home where Felt was living with his daughter, Joan. Some who heard about the visit wondered whether Woodward had gone there to get Felt to confirm the secret himself. Asked directly, Felt kept denying it. In 2002, journalist Timothy Noah called Felt 'the best guess going about the identity of Deep Throat.' The closest Felt ever came to confirming it under oath happened decades earlier. In 1976, Felt was testifying before a grand jury about illegal break-ins he had authorized against dissident groups. The jury had been convened by Assistant Attorney General John Stanley Pottinger. Suddenly, a juror asked him, 'Were you Deep Throat?' Felt, according to Pottinger, 'went white with fear.' Pottinger reminded him he was under oath, but offered to withdraw the question since it fell outside the scope of the investigation.

  Author Ronald Kessler got a fuller account of that Santa Rosa visit from Joan Felt herself, in an interview for his book The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI. Joan gave Kessler that account in an interview conducted in August 2001. She said Woodward arrived by white limousine, which he parked at a schoolyard some ten blocks away. He then walked the rest of the way to the house. 'He asked if it was okay to have a martini with my father at lunch, and I said it would be fine,' she recalled in Kessler's book, published in 2002. Felt denied to Kessler that he was Deep Throat, but Kessler wrote that the lengths Woodward went to in concealing the visit lent 'credence' to the idea that he was.

  In February 2005, news columnist and former White House Counsel John Dean reported that Woodward had told Bradlee that Deep Throat was ailing. Bradlee, Dean said, had already written an obituary for him. Woodward and the Post's then-editor, Leonard Downie, both denied it. Felt drew suspicion especially after that 1999 meeting became known. For years, though, other names drew even more attention: Pat Buchanan, Henry Kissinger, then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist, General Alexander Haig, and, before it was confirmed that Deep Throat was a man, television journalist Diane Sawyer.

  Of the alternate names, White House Associate Counsel Fred F. Fielding drew the most sustained investigation. In April 2003, journalism professor William Gaines and his students at the University of Illinois built a detailed case for Fielding. As an assistant to John Dean, Fielding had access to the same files. Gaines believed Woodward's own statements ruled out an FBI source, and that Deep Throat often had information before the FBI itself did. H. R. Haldeman had independently suspected Fielding too. Dean, one of the most dedicated Deep Throat hunters, dismissed Fielding along with writer Leonard Garment, saying Woodward had cleared him back in 1980. Much of the case against Fielding rested on his supposed ties to the intelligence community. In one exchange, Lukas asked Woodward directly whether his sources came from that world. Woodward answered, 'I resent it because it's untrue.'

• 6. Not One Man, But Many

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  No single person, on paper, seemed to match the character Woodward and Bernstein described in All the President's Men. That mismatch led some scholars to a different theory altogether: that Deep Throat wasn't one person but a composite of several sources. Woodward and Bernstein always denied it.

  David Obst, the literary agent who had originally sold the book, gave the theory some weight. He said the manuscript's initial typescript contained no reference to Deep Throat at all. Obst came to believe Woodward and Bernstein invented the character for dramatic effect. The claim fed speculation that the authors had condensed real events into one figure.

  Ed Gray, son of former acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, pressed the case further in his book In Nixon's Web. He examined Woodward's interview notes, held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. There, he said, he found 'convincing evidence that Deep Throat was indeed a fabrication.' The file held notes on four interviews, attributed variously to Felt, to someone labeled 'X', and to 'my friend'. A fifth interview, dated the 24th of March 1973, carried no attribution at all. Gray said he had first come across the page back in 2006, after Woodward released interview files belonging to people who weren't Deep Throat. He then contacted Stephen Mielke, the archivist who oversees the Woodward-Bernstein collection. Mielke found a carbon copy with a note in Woodward's own handwriting. That note attributed the March interview to Donald Santarelli, a Justice Department official during Watergate. Santarelli himself later confirmed the meeting had taken place. The other notes labeled 'X', Gray argued, contained details that Felt could not have known.

  Woodward answered that the March notes obviously weren't from a Felt interview, since Felt was named twice within the quoted material itself. He said he had never claimed to have met Deep Throat on that date. According to Woodward, Mielke concluded the page had simply been misfiled under Felt's name for lack of any other source to credit.

• 7. The Confession

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  On the 31st of May 2005, Vanity Fair published an article naming Felt, then 91 years old, as Deep Throat. The piece, written by attorney John D. O'Connor on Felt's behalf, quoted him saying, 'I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat.' Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee confirmed it the same day in a statement released through the Post.

  Two days later, on the 2nd of June 2005, the Post ran a long front-page column. In it, Woodward laid out the friendship for the first time. He wrote that he had first met Felt purely by chance in 1970, when Woodward was a Navy lieutenant in his mid-20s. Woodward had been sent to deliver a package to the White House's West Wing. There, he found himself seated next to Felt in a waiting room, where Felt had a separate appointment of his own. Woodward, uncertain about his future and about to leave the Navy, decided on the spot to try to use Felt as a mentor. He asked for Felt's phone number and stayed in touch.

  Woodward joined The Washington Post in August 1971. Felt already held a dim view of the Nixon administration. He began passing Woodward pieces of information, on the condition that Woodward never mention the FBI or the Justice Department as a source. The first time Woodward used anything from Felt in a story came in mid-May 1972, a month before the Watergate break-in. He was reporting on Arthur Bremer's attempt to assassinate presidential candidate George C. Wallace, an investigation Nixon had put Felt in charge of. A month after that, just days after the break-in itself, Woodward called Felt at his office. It was the first time the two of them discussed Watergate.

  Woodward later summed up what he believed drove Felt: '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.'

• 8. Deep Throat In Fiction

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  Hal Holbrook played Deep Throat in the 1976 film adaptation of All the President's Men, delivering the line 'Follow the money,' a phrase that never actually appears in the book. Liam Neeson later took on the role of Felt himself in the 2017 film Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House.

  In the 1998 video game Metal Gear Solid, a character called Grey Fox uses the codename 'Deepthroat' as a nod to the scandal. He uses it while advising the hero, Solid Snake. The 1999 comedy film Dick reimagined Deep Throat as two teenage girls who worked as Nixon's dog walkers. In The X-Files, FBI agent Fox Mulder uses methods borrowed from Woodward to reach his own anonymous informant, nicknamed Deep Throat. The show never confirms whether it's meant to be the same figure from Watergate. In the television series Wednesday, actor Jenna Ortega's title character remarks, 'Seems like our wannabe Deep Throat is already here.'

  In Dazed and Confused, one character jokingly calls another Deep Throat after comparing two friends to Woodward and Bernstein. NewsRadio had Stephen Root's character announce, during a fictional 1996 presidential campaign, that he himself was Deep Throat. On Arthur, a disguised informant called 'Deep Float' turns out to be a character named Brain. The Fairly OddParents gave the joke to a character using the alias 'Deep Toot.' American Dad had Roger the Alien adopt the Deep Throat persona outright. On Will and Grace, Karen claims she was the one who leaked to Woodward and Bernstein. Novelist Terry Pratchett borrowed the idea for The Truth, in which a dog named Gaspode calls himself 'Deep Bone' while serving as an anonymous source. American Horror Story went furthest of all, revealing First Lady Mamie Eisenhower as Deep Throat. In the show, she fabricates the Watergate story to discredit Nixon before he can reveal the truth about aliens to the world.