FBI Leaker ‘Deep Throat’ Is Dead At 95

From a bereaved Associated Press:

Mark Felt, Watergate’s `Deep Throat,’ dies at 95

By LOUISE CHU, Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO – W. Mark Felt, the former FBI second-in-command who revealed himself as "Deep Throat" 30 years after he tipped off reporters to the Watergate scandal that toppled a president, has died. He was 95.

Felt died Thursday in Santa Rosa after suffering from congestive heart failure for several months, said family friend John D. O’Connor, who wrote the 2005 Vanity Fair article uncovering Felt’s secret.

The shadowy central figure in one of the most gripping political dramas of the 20th century, Felt insisted his alter ego be kept secret when he leaked damaging information about President Richard Nixon and his aides to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.

While some — including Nixon and his aides — speculated that Felt was the source who connected the White House to the June 1972 break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, he steadfastly denied the accusations until finally coming forward in May 2005…

It was by chance that Felt came to play a pivotal role in the drama.

Back in 1970, Woodward struck up a conversation with Felt while both were waiting in a White House hallway. Felt apparently took a liking to the young Woodward, then a Navy courier, and Woodward kept the relationship going, treating Felt as a mentor as he tried to figure out the ways of Washington.

Later, while Woodward and partner Carl Bernstein relied on various unnamed sources in reporting on Watergate, the man their editor dubbed "Deep Throat" helped to keep them on track and confirm vital information. The Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its Watergate coverage…

In a memoir published in April 2006, Felt said he saw himself as a "Lone Ranger" who could help derail a White House cover-up.

Felt wrote that he was upset by the slow pace of the FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in and believed the press could pressure the administration to cooperate.

"From the start, it was clear that senior administration officials were up to their necks in this mess, and that they would stop at nothing to sabotage our investigation," Felt wrote in his memoir.

Some critics said Felt, a J. Edgar Hoover loyalist, was bitter at being passed over when Nixon appointed an FBI outsider and confidante, L. Patrick Gray, to lead the FBI after Hoover’s death. Gray was later implicated in Watergate abuses.

"We had no idea of his motivations, and even now some of his motivations are unclear," Bernstein said.

Felt wrote that he wasn’t motivated by anger. "It is true that I would have welcomed an appointment as FBI director when Hoover died. It is not true that I was jealous of Gray," he wrote…

Ironically, while providing crucial information to the Post, Felt also was assigned to ferret out the newspaper’s source. The investigation never went anywhere, but plenty of people, including those in the White House at the time, guessed that Felt, who was leading the investigation into Watergate, may have been acting as a double agent.

The Watergate tapes captured White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman telling Nixon that Felt was the source, but they were afraid to stop him.

Nixon asks: "Somebody in the FBI?"

Haldeman: "Yes, sir. Mark Felt … If we move on him, he’ll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI."

Felt left the FBI in 1973 for the lecture circuit. Five years later he was indicted on charges of authorizing FBI break-ins at homes associated with suspected bombers from the 1960s radical group the Weather Underground. President Ronald Reagan pardoned Felt in 1981 while the case was on appeal — a move applauded by Nixon…

It’s hard to admire a man who leaked what he leaked to get back at Mr. Nixon for not putting him in charge of the FBI. And who lied about it for decades afterwards.

As the article notes, President Nixon knew that Mr. Felt was supplying the information to the media, and especially his old friend Bob Woodward, almost from the gitgo.

Nixon and Halderman considered transferring Felt out of the FBI, but didn’t want the additional scandal.

Still, it is seldom remembered by the hagiographers that Messrs Woodward and Bernstein were mere amanuenses to the bitterly disgruntled Mr. Felt.

Which should be remembered when they claim expertise on all matters based on their Watergate “investigation.”

Anyway, Mr. Felt was the real CRE[E]P of the Watergate era.