FBI's No. 2 Was 'Deep Throat' Politics on the Site Mark Felt Ends 30-Year Mystery of the Post's Watergate Source Updated 2:45 P.M

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MOST VIEWED ARTICLES FBI's No. 2 Was 'Deep Throat' Politics On the Site Mark Felt Ends 30-Year Mystery of The Post's Watergate Source Updated 2:45 p.m. ET By David Von Drehle Washington Post Staff Writer • A Senator's Shame Wednesday, June 1, 2005; Page A01 • Possible Court Nominees Pose a Quandary for Bush Deep Throat, the secret source whose insider guidance was vital to The Washington Post's groundbreaking coverage of the Watergate scandal, was a pillar of the FBI named W. Mark • Unease Over Iraq Becoming an Issue for 2006 Felt, The Post confirmed yesterday. • The Talk Shows As the bureau's second- and third-ranking official during a period when the FBI was battling • Public Broadcasting for its independence against the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, Felt had the Targeted By House means and the motive to help uncover the web of internal spies, secret surveillance, dirty tricks and coverups that led to Nixon's unprecedented resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, and to prison sentences for some of Nixon's highest-ranking aides.

RSS NEWS FEEDS Felt's identity as Washington's most celebrated secret source had been an object Top News of speculation for more than 30 years until Politics yesterday, when his role was revealed by his What is RSS? | All RSS family in a Vanity Fair magazine article. Feeds Even Nixon was caught on tape speculating that Felt was "an informer" as early as TODAY IN SLATE February 1973, at a time when Deep Throat Business & Tech was supplying confirmation and context for Dispatches From some of The Post's most explosive the Paris Air Watergate stories. Show Carl Bernstein joins Bob Woodward, his When I get my first view of But Felt's repeated denials, and the stalwart Watergate reporting partner, in the Post the Airbus A380 in flight, I silence of the reporters he aided -- Bob newsroom yesterday. (By Katherine Frey For feel like I'm watching a whale Woodward and Carl Bernstein -- kept the The Washington Post) ... More cloak of mystery drawn up around Deep PHOTOS Throat. In place of a name and a face, the Deep Throat Revealed source acquired a magic and a mystique. W. Mark Felt, former assistant director of the He was the romantic truth teller half hidden FBI during the Nixon in the shadows of a Washington area Admminstration was parking garage. This image was rendered identified as "Deep indelibly by the dramatic best-selling Throat" Tuesday. "Deep Throat" was the memoir Woodward and Bernstein published confidential source used by Washington in 1974, "All the President's Men." Two Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl FEATURED ADVERTISER LINKS years later, in a blockbuster movie of the Bernstein during the Watergate scandal. • Unlimited Calls to US & Canada $24.99/month same name, actor Hal Holbrook breathed • NASCAR Tickets on Sale Now whispery urgency into the suspenseful late- • Lawyers: Birth Defects, Faulty Defibrillators. night encounters between Woodward and • New Secret To Surviving A Heart Attack his source. • Feel and look years younger...starting right now... For many Americans under 40, this is the • $160,000 Mortgage for Under $785/Month! most potent distillation of the complicated • Check out circuitcity.com today for great deals! brew that was Watergate. Students who lack • For College Grads, Win an iPod the time or interest to follow each element • Find Loans at LendingTree.com of the scandal's slow unraveling in • Free Sona Laser Hair Removal Consultation comprehensive history books can quickly digest the vivid relationship of a nervous elder guiding a relentless reporter.

As dramatic as those portrayals were, they hewed closely to the truth, Woodward said.

"Mark Felt at that time was a dashing gray- haired figure," Woodward recalled, and his experience as an anti-Nazi spy hunter early in his career at the FBI had endowed him with a whole bag of counterintelligence tricks. Felt dreamed up the signal by which Woodward would summon him to a meeting REVISITING WATERGATE (a flowerpot innocuously displayed on the reporter's balcony) and also hatched the Watergate Chronology Key events from the 1968 countersign by which Felt could contact election to President countersign by which Felt could contact election to President Woodward (a clock face inked on Page 20 Nixon's resignation in of Woodward's daily New York Times). 1974. Sights & Sounds The best photos from "He knew he was taking a monumental The Washington Post and other risk," said Woodward, now an assistant photographers of the period, audio managing editor of The Post whose excerpts from the Nixon tapes and TV catalogue of prizewinning and best-selling coverage from the era. work has been built on the sort of 2002 Special Report confidential relationships he maintained Review: 'All the President's Men' Gary with Deep Throat. Arnold's review of the 1976 film that chronicled the Watergate scandal. Felt also knew, by firsthand experience, that Nixon's administration was willing to use POLITICS TRIVIA wiretaps and break-ins to hunt down leakers, so no amount of caution was too Friday's Trivia great in his mind. Woodward rode multiple taxis, sometimes in the wrong direction, and Which of the following cities was NOT at often walked long distances to reach the one time the capital of the United States middle-of-the-night meetings. government? Baltimore For once, real life was as rich as the Boston Hollywood imagination. But yesterday New York Woodward and Bernstein expressed a concern that the Deep Throat story has, over Trenton the years, come to obscure the many other elements that went into exposing the Check Your Answer Watergate story: other sources, other investigators, high-impact Senate hearings, a FREE E-MAIL NEWSLETTERS shocking trove of secret White House tape recordings and the decisive intervention of a Daily Politics News & Analysis unanimous U.S. Supreme Court. See a Sample | Sign Up Now Federal Insider By tethering the myth to a real and See a Sample | Sign Up Now imperfect human being, Americans may be Breaking News Alerts able to get a clearer picture of Watergate in See a Sample | Sign Up Now the future, they said. "Felt's role in all this can be overstated," said Bernstein, who went on after Watergate to a career of books, magazine articles and television investigations. "When we wrote the book, we didn't think his role would achieve such mythical dimensions. You see there that Felt/Deep Throat largely confirmed information we had already gotten from other sources."

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