Former FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt with his daughter Joan Felt (left) and grandson Nick Jones (right), look on from his home in Santa Rosa, California, yesterday. - REUTERS
SANTA ROSA, California (AP):
THE WASHINGTON Post said yesterday that a former FBI official, W. Mark Felt, was the confidential source known as 'Deep Throat' who provided the newspaper information that led to President Richard Nixon's impeachment investigation and eventual resignation.
The paper made its announcement on its website after Felt, 91 and living in California, talked to a lawyer who wrote a magazine article for Vanity Fair.
"The No. 2 guy from the FBI, that was a pretty good source," said Ben Bradlee, who had been the key editor at the Post in the Watergate era.
"I knew the paper was on the right track" in its investigative stories, Bradlee said, citing the "quality of the source."
Felt, the second-in-command at the FBI in the early 1970s, kept his secret even from his family for almost three decades before confiding he was Post reporter Bob Woodward's source on the Watergate scandal, according to a Vanity Fair article published yesterday.
"I'm the guy they used to call 'Deep Throat'," he was quoted as telling lawyer John D. O'Connor, author of the magazine article.
Felt, who lives in Santa Rosa, is said to be in poor mental and physical health because of a stroke. His family did not immediately make him available for comment, asking the news media to respect his privacy "in view of his age and health."
Woodward, fellow reporter Carl Bernstein, and Bradlee, their former boss at the Post, had long maintained they would never go public with the identity of Deep Throat until after his death.
Felt's family members said the account was true.
"The family believes that my grandfather, Mark Felt Sr., is a great American hero who went well above and beyond the call of duty at much risk to himself to save his country from a horrible injustice," a family statement read by grandson Nick Jones said. "We all sincerely hope the country will see him this way as well."
The existence of Deep Throat, nicknamed for an X-rated movie of the early 1970s, was revealed in Woodward and Bernstein's best-selling book All the President's Men.
A hit movie starring Robert Redford as Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein and Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat was made in 1976. In the film, Holbrook's shadowy, cigarette-smoking character would meet Redford in dark parking garages and provide clues about the scandal.
