081213 Mark Felt ('Deep Throat' During Watergate) Dies at 95

(Bloomberg) -- W. Mark Felt, who remained anonymous for more than three decades as the source known as "Deep Throat" in the 1972 Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon's presidency, has died. He was 95.

Felt died at his home in Santa Rosa, California, yesterday, the Press Democrat newspaper reported, citing Felt's grandson Nick Jones.

Felt provided tips and information that guided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they wrote stories stemming from the bungled burglary of the Democratic Party National Committee headquarters in 1972. President Nixon ultimately resigned as a consequence of the White House role in the scandal and in the cover-up that followed.

The identity of Felt, a former associate director at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, remained a secret until May 2005, when Woodward and Bernstein confirmed revelations published in an article in the July issue of Vanity Fair.

"Because of his position virtually atop the chief investigative agency, his words and guidance had immense, at times even staggering, authority," Woodward said in an article in the Washington Post on June 2, 2005.

The story of "Deep Throat," a name borrowed from the title of a 1972 pornographic film, assumed legendary status as academics and history buffs clamored to unlock the enigma that played a role in Nixon's resignation in 1974.

As early as October 1972, Nixon himself voiced suspicion that Felt might be leaking information to the press and that Attorney General Richard Kleindienst pressured FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray to fire his deputy. Felt denied his role repeatedly and stayed at the FBI until his retirement in June 1973.

Secret Preserved

"The thing that stuns me is that the goddamn secret has lasted this long," Ben Bradlee, who oversaw almost 400 stories on Watergate when he was the Washington Post's executive editor, said after the May 2005 revelations. Although he knew the paper's source was a high-ranking government official, Bradlee didn't find out Felt's name until Nixon resigned.

Felt was one of many people rumored to be "Deep Throat." Others included Alexander Haig, Nixon's White House chief of staff; former National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger; Fred Fielding, assistant to White House Counsel John Dean; and George H.W. Bush, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time.

Speculation also surrounded former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, whose poor health coincided with unfounded reports that "Deep Throat" was gravely ill.

William Mark Felt was born Aug. 17, 1913, in Twin Falls, Idaho. The son of a building contractor, he was educated at the University of Idaho, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1935 before heading to Washington. There he worked for U.S. Senator James Pope, a Democrat and lawyer from Idaho who served only one term.

Marriage

In 1938, Felt married Audrey Robinson, whom he had met at university and who was working at the Bureau of Internal Revenue in Washington.

After Pope lost office, Felt worked for his successor, David Clark, and studied law at George Washington University in the evenings. He graduated in 1940 with a law degree and was admitted to the bar the following year.

Felt's next job was at the Federal Trade Commission, though he found the work tedious after interviewing hundreds of people in a case on toilet-paper brands. He applied to the FBI in 1941 and began work there in January 1942.

Entering the bureau headed by J. Edgar Hoover, Felt completed training in Virginia and Washington before receiving his first posting in Texas as a field officer for six months.

Returning to Washington, he was assigned to the espionage desk of the domestic-intelligence unit during World War II. There he learned the cloak-and- dagger methods of counter- surveillance that Woodward later used to avoid detection before secret meetings with Felt.

Manhattan Project

After the war, Felt spent time in Seattle and was promoted to supervisor, overseeing security clearances for workers at the Hanford plutonium plant. The facility had been part of the Manhattan Project dedicated to the development of nuclear weapons during World War II.

Felt's postings then included New Orleans, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Kansas City. He returned to Washington in 1962 to help supervise officer training and became assistant director two years later, directing internal investigations.

In 1971, Felt was promoted to deputy associate director and was asked to restrict the spying that William Sullivan, head of FBI domestic intelligence, was conducting for the White House in secret. After Hoover's death the following year, Gray was appointed by Nixon to head the bureau, prompting the resignation of Clyde Tolson, Hoover's right-hand man.

"As best I could tell, Felt was crushed, but he put on a good face," Woodward said in the Washington Post.

Watergate

Felt became associate director, the No. 2 job at the FBI, and assumed effective control as Gray was increasingly absent from headquarters and suffered from ill health.

"Deep Throat" earned his place in U.S. history in 1972 when five men broke into the Watergate Hotel in Washington on the night of June 16 to fix wiretaps in the Democratic National Committee's headquarters. The burglars were arrested by police, who were notified by security guard Frank Wills.

The break-in aroused suspicion when the name of Howard Hunt, who had worked for the White House, appeared in the notebook of one of the burglars, James McCord, a security chief on the Committee to Re-elect the President and a former Central Intelligence Agency employee.

Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein embarked on their investigation after attending McCord's arraignment and maintained public interest in the story as the White House connection gained in substance.

Woodward Contact

Woodward, who was in the Navy when he first met Felt to deliver some documents to the White House in 1970, delved into Hunt's history with the CIA. Bernstein located a local prosecutor in Miami who had evidence of payments made to one of the burglars, Bernard Barker. Those funds were tied to campaign money earmarked for Nixon's re-election effort.

After Woodward visited Felt at his Virginia home to make sense of the information he had, he was told that they would have to meet in secret and avoid any contact by phone.

They agreed to signal each other in one of two ways whenever a meeting was urgent: Woodward was to place an empty flowerpot with a red flag on his apartment balcony; and Felt would arrange to have Woodward's copy of the New York Times marked with a circle on page 20 and the hands of a clock at the bottom to indicate a rendezvous time.

Felt's Motives

They would then meet on the same night at about 2 a.m. in an underground garage in Rosslyn, Virginia.

Felt's motives were never clear to those whose destinies he helped forge. While some accused him of displaying resentment at being passed over in the FBI's top job after Hoover's death, others saw him as a hero who tried to prevent the White House from manipulating the FBI politically.

"Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable," Woodward said in the Washington Post.

Pat Buchanan, a speechwriter for Nixon and a former Republican presidential candidate, saw Felt as a traitor.

Felt "did it for malicious motives because he had been passed over," Buchanan told Cable News Network after the revelations were published. "I think Deep Throat is a snake."

Bernstein warned against overstating the role of "Deep Throat" in the Watergate affair when Felt's identity was revealed.

'The Plumbers'

"Felt/Deep Throat largely confirmed information we had already gotten from other sources," he said.

In any case, "Deep Throat" helped set an investigative process in motion. The burglars were convicted in January 1973 and McCord, to avert a 30-year prison sentence, revealed the role of the committee in the burglary.

Hunt and Gordon Liddy, both of whom worked in the White House's special- investigations unit known as "the Plumbers," had supervised the break-in at the behest of the committee. Nixon's role in the affair was examined and questioned throughout the investigation.

After a Senate inquiry during which White House Counsel Dean testified against Nixon, secret tape recordings of Oval Office conversations were revealed. Special prosecutor Archibald Cox refused to drop his subpoena of the tapes, leading to his dismissal and worsening Nixon's predicament.

The Supreme Court ultimately ordered the release of the recordings, and seven Nixon aides were indicted.

'Smoking Gun'

Nixon's fate was finally sealed by a taped conversation of him and H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, the chief of staff at the White House who would later go to prison for his role in the affair, talking about how to foil the FBI's investigation of Watergate.

That discussion on June 23 later became known as the "smoking gun" that fast-tracked Nixon's resignation on Aug. 9, 1974. Nixon, who departed under threat of impeachment, was later pardoned by U.S. President Gerald Ford.

In 1978, Felt, Gray and Edward Miller were indicted on constitutional- violation charges connected with FBI searches without warrants. The bureau had endorsed break-ins at selected homes of people linked to the Weather Underground movement, a radical left-wing organization that carried out bombings on targets such as the Capitol and the Pentagon.

Reagan Pardon

The trial in 1980, at which Nixon appeared as a witness for the defense, ended in a conviction for Felt, who received a fine of $5,000. President Ronald Reagan pardoned Felt and Miller on March 26, 1981. Gray's case didn't go to trial.

Felt's memoirs, "The FBI Pyramid From the Inside" (Putnam), were published in 1979 and included a denial of his "Deep Throat" identity.

The movie "All the President's Men" that same year, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, was based on the Watergate investigation. Hal Holbrook played the role of "Deep Throat," who in the film advised Woodward's character to "follow the money." In an April 2006 interview on CNN's "Larry King Live," Felt said he didn't recall ever saying that. On the same program, Woodward attributed the words to the film's screenwriter.

Felt is survived by daughter Joan and son Mark, both of whom encouraged their father to go public with his true identity before his death. Felt's wife died in 1984.

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