On the 31st of May 2005, the world learned that the most famous anonymous source in American history was W. Mark Felt, the former Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For thirty-three years, the identity of Deep Throat had been the subject of intense speculation, conspiracy theories, and public fascination, yet Felt had consistently denied being the man who helped bring down a presidency. The revelation came through a Vanity Fair article written by John D. O'Connor, an attorney acting on Felt's behalf, who stated that Felt, then aged ninety-one and suffering from dementia, was the man Woodward and Bernstein had relied upon. This disclosure ended a decades-long mystery that had captivated journalists, historians, and the general public, transforming a shadowy figure into a specific individual with a complex history and a controversial legacy. The confirmation was immediate and definitive, with Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and Benjamin C. Bradlee, the executive editor of The Washington Post during the scandal, all issuing statements to verify Felt's identity. The timing was significant, as it occurred thirty-one years after President Richard Nixon's resignation and eleven years after Nixon's death, finally allowing the full story of the Watergate scandal to be told with the name of its key insider known to the public.
The Night The Burglary Happened
The story of Deep Throat begins on the 17th of June 1972, when five men were arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C. These men were in possession of $2,300, plastic gloves to prevent fingerprints, burglary tools, a walkie-talkie, and a radio scanner capable of listening to police frequencies. They also carried cameras with forty rolls of film, tear gas guns, and multiple electronic devices intended to be planted in the Democratic Committee offices, along with notebooks containing the telephone number of White House official E. Howard Hunt. One of the arrested men was James W. McCord Jr., a former Central Intelligence Agency employee and a security man for Nixon's Committee for the Re-Election of the President, later notoriously mocked with the acronym CREEP. This event set in motion a chain of investigations that would eventually implicate many members of Nixon's White House, culminating in Nixon becoming the first United States president to resign. The scandal led to prison terms for White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, Egil Krogh, White House Counsel Charles Colson, former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell, former White House Counsel John Dean, and presidential adviser John Ehrlichman. The initial arrest was just the beginning of a two-year pursuit by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who would eventually uncover the depth of the administration's involvement.
Woodward and Felt met in a specific underground garage located at 1401 Wilson Boulevard in Rosslyn, Virginia, often at 2:00 a.m. on the bottom level just over the Key Bridge. They met there six times between October 1972 and November 1973, using the garage as an anonymous secure location to discuss the Watergate scandal. Felt provided Woodward with information that exposed the Nixon Administration's obstruction of the FBI's Watergate investigation. The methods of communication were elaborate and theatrical, designed to maintain secrecy. Woodward claimed that he would signal to Deep Throat that he desired a meeting by moving 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 20 of Woodward's copy of The New York Times, circling the page number and drawing clock hands to indicate the hour. These cloak and dagger methods were later scrutinized by Adrian Havill, who investigated the claims for his 1993 biography of Woodward and Bernstein and found them to be factually impossible. Havill noted that Woodward's apartment 617 at 1718 P Street, Northwest, in Washington faced an interior courtyard and was not visible from the street, making it unlikely that anyone regularly checking the balcony would not be spotted. Despite these criticisms, Woodward maintained 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. The garage itself has since been the subject of preservation efforts, with a historical marker erected in 2011, and the landowner promising to design a memorial commemorating the Watergate scandal.
The Personal Connection
Woodward first met Felt by chance in 1970 when Woodward was a Navy lieutenant in his mid-twenties. Woodward was dispatched to deliver a package to the White House's West Wing, and Felt arrived soon after for a separate appointment and sat next to Woodward in the waiting room. Woodward struck up a conversation and eventually learned of Felt's position in the upper echelon of the FBI. Woodward, who was about to exit 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. Therefore, he asked for 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 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 Arthur Bremer, who had attempted to assassinate presidential candidate George C. Wallace. Nixon had put Felt in charge of investigating the would-be assassin. A month later, just days after the Watergate break-in, Woodward called Felt at his office, which marked the first time Woodward spoke with Felt about Watergate. Felt's wife recalls answering Woodward's telephone calls for Felt, and Felt aided Woodward and Bernstein because he knew Woodward personally, having met him years before when Woodward was in the navy. Over the course of their acquaintance, Woodward would often call Felt for advice, and Felt methodically guided their investigation while keeping his own identity and involvement safely concealed.
The Motive Behind The Leak
Felt's motivations for serving as Deep Throat were complex and rooted in a deep-seated resentment toward the Nixon administration. 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. Felt was a loyalist to and admirer of J. Edgar Hoover, and after Hoover's death, he became angry and disgusted when L. Patrick Gray, a career naval officer and lawyer from the Civil Division of the Department of Justice, who had no law enforcement experience, was appointed as Director of the FBI over Felt, a thirty-year veteran of the FBI. Felt was particularly unhappy with Gray's management style at the FBI, which was markedly different from Hoover's. 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, often claiming it a witch hunt. The controversy over Felt's motives continued long after his identity was revealed, with some arguing that he had personal reasons for leaking information to Woodward, while others maintained that he was an American hero who acted for moral and patriotic reasons. The debate over his motives remains a central part of the legacy of Deep Throat, with Felt's family calling him an American hero and others speculating that he may have had more personal reasons for his actions.
The Years Of Speculation
For over thirty 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. Before Felt was revealed to be Deep Throat, only Woodward, Bernstein, Elsa Walsh and Ben Bradlee knew of his identity. After the death of Robert Redford, Woodward claimed that he had let Redford in on the secret during development of the film adaptation of All the President's Men. Writer Nora Ephron became obsessed with figuring out the secret of Deep Throat's identity and eventually correctly concluded that he was Mark Felt. In 1999, a nineteen-year-old college student, Chase Culeman-Beckman, claimed that Bernstein's son, Jacob, told him Mark Felt was Deep Throat. According to Culeman-Beckman, Jacob Bernstein had said that he was, one hundred percent sure that Deep Throat was Mark Felt. He's someone in the FBI. Jacob reportedly made this claim approximately eleven years prior, when he and Culeman-Beckman were classmates. Ephron explained that Jacob overheard her speculations, and Carl Bernstein himself also immediately stepped forward to reject the claim, as he and Woodward did for many others. James Mann, who had worked at the Post at the time of the Watergate scandal and was close to the investigation, brought a great deal of evidence together in a 1992 article in The Atlantic Monthly. Mann recalled that before the Watergate scandal, Woodward had made references to a high-placed source he had in the FBI. Mann 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 made clear he had a highly placed source at the FBI, and there is some evidence he was friends with Felt. Woodward kept in close touch with Felt over the years, even showing up unexpectedly at the house where he was staying with his daughter, Joan, in Santa Rosa, California in 1999 after Felt's dementia began. Some suspected at that time that Woodward might have asked Felt to reveal his identity, 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 Felt authorized against various dissident groups. Felt was testifying before the jury when a juror asked him, out of the blue, Were 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. However, since Pottinger felt the question was outside the purview of the investigation, he offered to withdraw it if Felt wished.
The Legacy And The Culture
The story of Deep Throat has permeated popular culture, with Hal Holbrook portraying Deep Throat in the film adaptation of All the President's Men in 1976, in which he uttered the catchphrase Follow the money, which was not referred to in the book. The character has been referenced in numerous other media, including the video game Metal Gear Solid in 1998, where the character Grey Fox uses the codename Deepthroat to provide advice to the main character Solid Snake. In the comedy film Dick in 1999, Deep Throat is revealed as being two teenage Washingtonian girls who worked as Nixon's dog walkers. The spy thriller film Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House in 2017 featured Liam Neeson portraying Mark Felt. The character has also appeared in the coming-of-age supernatural comedy horror television series Wednesday in 2022, where Jenna Ortega portrays the character Wednesday Addams and makes the remark Seems like our wannabe Deep Throat is already here. The influence of Deep Throat extends to other works, such as The X-Files, where Fox Mulder uses some of the same techniques as Woodward to communicate with a government informant nicknamed Deep Throat, though it is left unclear if this character is supposed to be the same as the Watergate informant. The legacy of Deep Throat continues to be a subject of fascination, with the historical marker in front of the parking garage in Rosslyn, Virginia, erected in 2008 by Arlington County, Virginia, commemorating the meetings between Woodward and Felt. The garage, located at 1401 Wilson Boulevard, was scheduled to be demolished in 2014, though the county decided to save the historical marker, and the landowner promised to design a memorial commemorating the Watergate scandal. The story of Deep Throat remains one of the most significant chapters in American journalism and political history, with the identity of the source finally revealed in 2005, thirty-three years after the initial events of the Watergate scandal.