Felt: Shadowy source

Washington, Dec. 19: W. Mark Felt Sr., the associate director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal who, better known as “Deep Throat”, became the most famous anonymous source in American history, died yesterday. He was 95.

Felt died at 12:45pm at a hospice near his home in Santa Rosa, California, where he had been living since August.

Felt “was fine this morning” and was “joking with his caregiver”, according to his daughter, Joan Felt. She said in a phone interview that her father ate a big breakfast before remarking that he was tired and going to sleep. “He slipped away,” she said.

As the second-highest official in the FBI under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover and interim director L. Patrick Gray, Felt detested the Nixon administration’s attempt to subvert the bureau’s investigation into the complex of crimes and cover-ups known as the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

He secretly guided Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward as he and his colleague Carl Bernstein pursued the story of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office buildings and later revelations of the Nixon administration’s campaign of spying and sabotage against its perceived political enemies.

Felt insisted on remaining completely anonymous, or on “deep background”. A Post editor dubbed him “Deep Throat”, a bit of wordplay based on the title of a pornographic movie of the time. The source’s existence, but not his identity, became known in Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book, All the President’s Men, and in the subsequent movie version, in which actor Hal Holbrook played the charismatic but shadowy source.

Felt, a dashing figure with a full head of silver hair, an authoritative bearing and a reputation as a tough taskmaster, adamantly denied over the years he was Deep Throat, even though Nixon suspected him from the start.

“It was not I and it is not I,” Felt told Washingtonian magazine in 1974. Five times, Nixon ordered Gray to fire Felt, but Gray, convinced by Felt’s denials, never did.

Felt, a master of bureaucratic infighting and misdirection, seized upon a Post story that had not used him as a source. In a bold stroke, he denounced it in an internal memo and ordered an investigation into the leak.

“Expedite,” he commanded. The next day, in a notation on another memo that passed over his desk, he pointed to a prosecutor as the source of the leak.

“I was impressed. My guy knew his stuff,” Woodward wrote in Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat. “The memo was an effective cover for him, the very best counterintelligence tradecraft. Not only had he initiated the leak inquiry, but Felt appeared to have discovered the leaker.”

It wasn’t until May 30, 2005, that Felt’s family revealed his identity in an article for Vanity Fair magazine. The article, written by San Francisco lawyer John D. ’Connor, did not make clear why Felt, who was suffering from dementia, admitted his identity after more than 30 years. Woodward confirmed the revelation, and the secret was finally out.

Without Felt, there might not have been a Watergate — shorthand for the revealed abuses of presidential powers in the Nixon White House. Americans might never have seen a President as a criminal conspirator, or reporters as cultural heroes, or anonymous sources like Felt as a necessary if undesired tool in the pursuit of truth.

Few could imagine such a straight-arrow career employee, known for enforcing the FBI’s strict rules of behaviour and demeanour, playing such a dangerous game. Although Deep Throat was a hero to the counterculture, civil rights advocates and Nixon’s opponents, Felt was no friend to the political Left. In 1980, he was convicted of approving illegal “black bag” break-ins against the families of Weather Underground radicals.

No one knows exactly what prompted Felt to leak the information from the Watergate probe to the press. He was passed over for the post of FBI director after Hoover’s 1972 death, a crushing career disappointment. But by the time he told ’Connor “I’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat,” he was enfeebled by a stroke and his memory of the era had almost vanished because of Alzheimer’s disease.