Deep Throat Was the FBI's Number Two, and He Stayed Anonymous for 33 Years

When the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward needed to confirm or push back on a Watergate detail in 1972 and 1973, he would, by his account, signal a meeting by repositioning a flowerpot on his sixth-floor balcony. The source — known to Woodward only as Deep Throat — would then meet him in an Arlington parking garage in the small hours of the morning. Woodward and Bernstein never named him. Editor Ben Bradlee was told the identity but never disclosed it. The Post held the secret for thirty-three years.

Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, the Associate Director of the FBI from May 1972 to June 1973. As number two in the bureau under L. Patrick Gray, Felt had access to every FBI Watergate finding before it left the building. Other FBI agents, reading Woodward's stories, were noticeably surprised at how closely the Post's coverage tracked their own internal memoranda; Ronald Kessler later wrote that the agents recognized whole paragraphs lifted nearly verbatim. Felt had been passed over for the FBI directorship after J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972, and his motives, as he later described them, were a mix of genuine concern about the Nixon administration's interference with the Bureau and personal resentment.

The identity finally came out in May 2005. Felt, 91 and in declining health, had told his daughter Joan in the 1990s; she eventually persuaded him to confirm the story for Vanity Fair. "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat," he told the magazine. Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee confirmed within hours. Felt died on December 18, 2008. His own legal record was complicated: in 1980 he had been convicted of authorizing illegal break-ins of homes belonging to associates of the Weather Underground while running domestic counterintelligence at the FBI. President Reagan pardoned him in March 1981.