Deep Throat was the code name which Bob Woodward gave to his secret informer who revealed, suggested or confirmed the Watergate secrets and the ever deepening involvement of President Richard Nixon. The name Deep Throat was borrowed from a very popular (and debated) film for adults in the 70’s, but which was also – according to Woodward himself, and confirmed by the then director of the Washington Post, Bill Bradlee, a play on words of the phrase ‘deep background’ which, in American journalistic political slang means a source which must not, for any reason, be recognized; not even defining it as FBI source, or more simply, Government source. If we want to make a comparison with the affairs of today, a ‘deep background source’ is that which the journalist of the New York Times, Judith Miller, refuses to reveal and for which, she is serving three months imprisonment in the Alexandria Penitentiary of Virginia.
According to Bob Woodward, Deep Throat, during the entire Watergate case, was extremely nervous and feared, more than once, that his real identity would be discovered. Today, we know exactly why: Deep Throat was none other than W. Mark Felt, at that time, Number Two of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the legendary internal Secret Service, created and directed, for more than forty years, by Edgar J. Hoover.
To understand the tie between Woodward and Felt, it is necessary to go back several years. Before becoming a famous reporter (Watergate won the Pulitzer for him and gave him international acclaim), Bob Woodward, in that summer of 1969, was serving his country as a lieutenant in the US Navy. He was assigned to the Pentagon as a watch-officer, the man who had to monitor the communications of the Teletype system for the commander of the naval operations, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who subsequently became the Joint Chief of Staff, Number One of the US armed forces.
Woodward’s task was classified ‘top secret’, giving him free access to the so-called SPECAT (Special Category), through which ‘messages of a highly delicate nature’ passed. Furthermore, he was also allowed access to the ‘Top Secret Crypto’, the cryptographic information of the codes of communication. According to what Woodward himself narrates in his last book –‘The Secret Man’, the story of Watergate’s Deep Throat, published after Felt had admitted to being Deep Throat – in reality, apart from his rather high-flown writing style, the work at the Pentagon did not allow him “any special access to questions or documents of intelligence, which were, in fact, circulated on different and separate channels of communication.
That work, however, gave him the possibility of frequenting ‘places of power’ very often. And when, one evening, it was necessary to deliver an ‘urgent’ envelope to the White House, Woodward, as often happened, volunteered. It was there, in a room of the White House where world-changing decisions are made, while waiting to be received, that Navy Lieutenant Robert Upshur Woodward made the acquaintance of a man who was to change his live. Mark Felt, Number Two of the FBI, introduced himself simply by name and surname, having no interest, whatsoever, (narrates Woodward in his book) of entering into conversation with that ‘little Lieutenant’ of the US Navy. It was only thanks to the insistence and brazen-face of the future reporter of the Post that in that long wait – Felt probably had to meet someone very high up, since he was compelled to wait so long – he was able to prise some information about the man who was sitting next to him. The ice was broken when Woodward started to talk about his university career at the ‘George Washington’, the same college of the United States’ capital where Felt had frequented the Law School, in the 30’s.
In any event, Woodward was able to extract a telephone number and a promise of a further meeting to have, as he puts it, ‘some advice’ on his future career, which he hoped would be far removed from the military. From that evening on, Woodward began to call Felt very frequently until, finally, a sort of friendship was created, almost a father-son, or tutor-student relationship which, only a few years later was to yield its fruit: in the form of the biggest journalistic scoop of American history.

On Friday, 15th September of 197l, Bob Woodward becomes a reporter on the Washington Post. One year previously, he had abysmally failed a trial-period of one week on that prestigious newspaper – the chief editor (and also Felt, who was becoming, more and more, his mentor) had advised him to give up journalism. However, Woodward was stubborn and had found a job on a very small newspaper in Maryland, (The Montgomery County Sentinel ), where he had acquired a little ‘limelight’ with mini-local scoops and, on a couple of occasions, had even managed to snatch a story from under the nose of the Washington Post, which had shown him the door.
The same editor-in-chief of the metropolitan newspaper, who had advised him to change jobs, realized that he had made a big mistake and one year from the first Interview, he presented him to the director of the Washington Post, Bill Bradlee, who decided to hire him.
On exactly the same day as his interview with the famous editor-in-chief of the Washington Post, one of Nixon’s advisors at the White House, Howard Hunt, had lead a ‘burglary team’ into the offices of the psychiatrist, Daniel Ellsberg, the man who had given the ‘Pentagon Papers’ to the New York Times: the Pentagon reports on the war in Vietnam were, until Watergate, the biggest journalistic scoop of the epoch.
On the 2nd of March, 1972, Edgar J. Hoover – undisputed boss of the FBI and, for years, the most powerful man of the America of the 1900’s – dies, leaving a gap which was enormously difficult to fill. When Felt, who was one of Hoover’s most trusted men, demonstrated by his promotion to the highest level of the Bureau, received the news, he was certain that he would be Hoover’s successor. But he was greatly mistaken.
For some time already, President Nixon had been dubious of the FBI and decided that this was the moment to install his own man at the head of the internal intelligence. The choice fell to Patrick Gray, an assistant general attorney, Vice-Minister of Justice, who had already handled certain administration mischief and also, had had differences of opinion with various FBI agents, which had annoyed Hoover himself, on more than one occasion.
It was a tremendous shock for Felt although he always managed to hide it extremely well in public. But perhaps Nixon’s decision was not unrelated to his ‘collaboration’ as Deep Throat at the Watergate. Notwithstanding the letdown, Felt rolled up his sleeves and got down to work – even if, formally, he was still only Number Two – The Operative Chief of the FBI; In fact, Gray was too busy visiting the ‘field offices’ in an effort to understand how the delicate machine of the FBI worked. He was anything but a ‘special agent’ and did not enjoy great popularity among the men he was supposed to lead.
On that 17th of June in 1972, just six weeks from Hoover’s death, when the five ‘thieves’ broke into the Watergate offices, Gray was out-of-town. The night supervisor realized that the report was important – after all, it had to do with the offices of the Democratic Party – so, at seven in the morning, he decided to ‘phone Felt at home: “Five men in business suits with their pockets full of $100 bills, who had earphones, photographic and electronic spying material were arrested inside the general quarters of the Democratic Party, at Watergate, at 2:30 am”.
“What the hell were they doing?” Felt asked, immediately sensing trouble. “It’s a complicated business”, replied the supervisor, “I think it’s better if we meet in your office”.
When Felt heard that the five men had surgical gloves, had $2300 in cash, that they were in prison but refused to talk, that they did not want a lawyer, but that an ‘elegant’ lawyer had mysteriously appeared when the men were being booked, he said: “This story has very strong political implications, the press are going to have a busy day”. Two hours after the supervisor had reported to Felt, the chief-editor on duty of the Post called Bob Woodward at home. It was 9.00 in the morning on the 17th of June, 1972.
Woodward was not the only reporter to be woken up for an ‘emergency’ that morning. The editor-in-chief had smelt a story and besides Woodward – chosen because, like all greenhorns, he had thrown himself into the job, doing a round of all the police districts and hospitals, ( to be remembered that he had been with the Post for only 9 months) – another 7 reporters were put on the story of the strange burglary at the Watergate; among these was Carl Bernstein, who was to become Woodward’s alter ego to the point of forming the most famous couple of investigative reporters in world journalism.
The first job that Woodward had that morning was to go to the courtroom where the five ‘thieves’ had been taken to hear the charges and discuss the eventual bail conditions. With some surprise, Woodward noticed that an excellent lawyer, Douglas Caddy, had presented himself in court, had listened to the proceeding with extreme attention, but denied, at first, to be the lawyer of the five: “I am only hear to observe”, he said, more than once, even if, in the end, he admitted to knowing one of the five, “once, at a social event in Washington”. Caddy’s behaviour roused Woodward’s suspicions. He was even more amazed when the attorney, Earl Silbert, explained to the judge that the five had given false names and that the ‘burglary’ – which had, apparently, born no profit – had been carried out in a ‘highly professional way with a clearly clandestine intent”.
When Judge A. Belsen asked the five what they did for a living, one answered for all, while the others nodded: “the anti-communists”. Belsen asked the one who had spoken and appeared to be the boss – James McCord – to step nearer and Belsen repeated his question: “What’s your occupation?” “Security Consultant”. “Where?”Whispering, McCord said that he had just been pensioned from a ‘government service’. Woodward got closer and was able to hear clearly the reply to the umpteenth request for an explanation. “ From what government agency?”, the judge asked, “the CIA”, McCord replied, coldly.
“Five men, one of whom claims to be an ex-employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested yesterday at 2:30 in the morning in what the authorities define as an elaborate conspiracy to install spy microphones in the offices of the National Democratic Committee”. The first article on Watergate which the readers of the Washington Post read on the morning of the 18th of June, began this way. It was signed by Alfred E Lewis, while the names of Woodward and Bernstein appeared as collaborators, together with the names of the other six reporters who were put on the story the first day. The Watergate of the ‘Post’ had begun.

Even today, it is not clear what pushed the powerful men of the White House to a spying operation of this kind. In the beginning of that summer of 1972, less than five months from the elections which would have had a landslide victory over the democratic candidate, George McGovern (one of the surest victories of the bi-centennial American history). President Nixon had been given a 19 point advantage, an absolute and total safety margin to have a guaranteed re-election.
That operation, already uselessly risky in itself, aborted due to a banal hitch (caused, however, by lack of attention or simple amateurism of the five ‘thieves’) would have, immediately, cost Nixon a very high price, if in the first months after the Watergate ‘burglary’, the affair had not been so successfully shelved. Even after 33 years, no-one really knows what the ‘thieves’ were actually looking for. The only thing that is certain is that they were trying to repair a ‘bug’ which they had installed in a telephone 3 weeks previously, that they were searching through documents and that they were photographing some.
Watergate began for a question of money – even if Woodward specifies that the famous phrase attributed to Deep Throat, “follow the money” was never pronounced, but the scope was certainly not “to get rich quick”: Nixon himself remarked at the moment of his resignation, shortly before boarding the helicopter which was to take him definitively far from the White House: “no man and no woman came into this administration and went away with something more than they had when they arrived”. He was right. Watergate was, above all, a story of useless arrogance and power and a desire to hold on to power at any cost. The great surprise for the American public was that many, too many, were disposed to sacrifice their principles and fundamental values for this motivation. Who didn’t give up his values and principles was ‘Deep Throat Felt’. He was far from being a saint – difficult to be one, being a ‘disciple’ of Hoover -but who, like the founder of the FBI, had his particular sense of the State and could not tolerate ‘the dirty tricks’ of the White House.
The ‘thieves’ seemed like characters of a novelist’s imagination. They worked under the orders of G. Gordon Liddy, an ex-agent of the FBI who, at that time, worked at the White House as a counsel on the committee for the re-election of the President. Liddy was better known under the name of the ‘Creep’. An unfortunate name which means ‘creepy’ or ‘crawly’ in English, something which is slippery and in American slang signifies a ‘disgusting person’ (to use a euphemism). Liddy had in mind a spying operation in grand style, which would utilize prostitutes, telephone bugging, physical aggression and even kidnapping. And for this ‘operation’ he had asked one million dollars, even though, in the end, he only got $250,000.
His right-hand man was Howard Hunt, the CIA pensioner who, ten years previously, had taken part in the failed landing at the Bay of Pigs and when he was arrested at the Watergate, he had already written 42 spy novels, which were not exactly memorable.
Three of the band (Eugenio R. Martinez, Virgilio R. Gonzales, Bernard L. Baker) were part of the Cuban exiles Community in Miami and they too, had taken part in that failed invasion (and who knows in what other operations on the border-line of legality). The whole gang was known as The Cubans, even if one of them, Frank Sturgis, was not Cuban, at all. The fifth was James W. McCord, a technician of the CIA for twenty years and occupied with the safety of the ‘Creep’.
The investigators very quickly picked up the ties between the Watergate ‘thieves’ and the Committee for the re-election of Nixon, and the FBI easily traced the origin of the $100 bills found in the Cubans’ pockets; they had come from the $89,000 deposited in the bank account of one of the ‘thieves’, through a Mexican connection. Very, very slowly it came out that behind this group were implicated almost the entire executive which governed America at the beginning of the 70’s, the years of the war in Vietnam.
For the FBI and Felt, it was rather easy – and always more and more disturbing – to trace things from the bottom up to Nixon, notwithstanding that the President, in a speech made on the 15th August, 1973, addressed the nation (one year exactly before his resignation) with the words, “I knew nothing of the burglary at the Watergate. I have never taken part in, or known about, any cover-up activity. I have never authorized, nor encouraged subordinates to perpetrate illegal actions or to use improper tactics during the election campaigns. This is the pure and simple truth”. A ‘pure and simple truth’ which was finally unmasked by two courageous and fortunate reporters and by someone whom we now know was Number Two of the FBI; who together – the reporters in broad daylight and Deep Throat from the shadows of an underground garage, demonstrate to America and the world that Nixon had told the nation a pack of lies.
The first time that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward wrote an article together was on Sunday, the 18th of July. Both divorced and without children, the two reporters were the only ones of the group assigned to Watergate to go into work on that Sunday. From that day, apart from rare exceptions, they always wrote as a twosome.
When the two realized that the story was a much bigger thing than they had originally thought, Woodward thought of his only important source and decided to call Mark Felt. At first, Felt was distant and cold, but finally Woodward was able to get the confirmation of what Eugene Bachinski – the best criminal reporter on the Post had said – that in the address books of two of the ‘thieves’, there was the telephone number of a certain Howard Hunt, followed by the initials “W.H” or “W. House”. It didn’t take much to understand that it meant the White House. Felt also confirmed that Hunt was an ex-agent of the CIA. That telephone call lead to an extraordinary collaboration between a journalist and a ‘secret source’ – a collaboration which was to bring about the ruin of President Nixon.
To safeguard his identity, Felt established the most rigid rules. Woodward should never call him by telephone and their meetings should take place in a parking lot at night, preferably around 2.00 am.
The plan was simple: if Woodward wanted to meet Deep Throat, he had to send a signal from his own house; the reporter chose a red flag, the sort used for road works, which his girl-friend had picked up in the street.
The flag was to be placed in an empty flower vase on the back balcony of Woodward’s apartment, should he require an urgent meeting that same night – the place of the meeting was to be the last level of the underground parking area at Key Bridge in Rosslyn, Virginia. If, instead, it was the Number Two of the FBI who wanted to meet Woodward, he would make a circular sign containing the hour at the bottom of page 20 of the New York Times which Woodward received at home every morning. The appointment would always be in the same garage.
In his last book Woodward writes that he has never understood, and at this point, he probably never will, how Felt was able – one who could not afford to trust anyone - to check his balcony each day and even open the newspaper which Woodward received daily on his doorstep, and write on page 20 the agreed signal.
There is one who could give him an explanation, if he has a mind, and that is Felt himself, whose memoirs on the Watergate case are being published shortly.The fact is that those meetings in the underground car park, brilliantly performed in the film “All the President’s Men” (with Robert Redford playing Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein and Hal Holbrook in the part of Deep Throat) became essential to further the journalistic and criminal investigations to the point of requesting the impeachment of Nixon, who could avoid it only by resigning.

From the first day of the investigations, the FBI had started to trace all the possible connections between the strange burglary at the Watergate and the employees at every level of the Committee for the re-election of Nixon, and the White House. Already on the 18th June, the head of the President’s staff, Bob Haldeman – who was to become one of the most prominent figures of Watergate, had to face the problem of the tie, by then publicly known (thanks to a dispatch from the Associated Press) between McCord and the Creep and the second-in-command of the Presidential Electoral Campaign, Jed Stuart Magruder. The evening of the burglary, Alexander P. Butterfield, a low-ranking employee of the White House had innocently revealed to an FBI agent that Hunt had worked, months before, at the White House, on ‘highly sensitive and confidential documents’. As Haldeman already knew, Hunt had been consultant – at $100 per day, excellent money for those days – for Charles W. Colson, special advisor at the White House. However, the principal worry of Haldeman and Magruder was that the FBI connect the burglary at the Watergate with the name of G. Gordon Liddy. The ‘President’s Men’ could never have imagined that Felt and his men, often without Gray’s knowledge had understood everything and had guessed the correct connections very early in the affair.
The role of Liddy had been clear to Felt since the 28th June, only 11 days after the burglary at the Watergate. Not even Bernstein and Woodward had known. They only discovered it when the FBI files were made public in 1992.
The meetings between the reporter and Deep Throat continued with highs and lows, with certain appointments cancelled at the last moment, with a flow of information always more precious for the Washington Post journalists and always more dangerous for Nixon and his entourage.
A remarkable sequence: On the 1st of August, 1972, Bernstein and Woodward write that a cheque for $25,000 from the Nixon electoral campaign has finished in the bank account of one of the Watergate ‘thieves’; on the 29th September, 1972, the Post writes that John Mitchell, when he was still the Attorney General, controlled a secret fund of the Republicans to finance operations of intelligence against the Democrats; on the 10th October, the FBI establish that the Watergate burglary is only the tip of the iceberg of a massive spy and political sabotage campaign, conducted on the part of the committee for the re-election of Nixon, in other words by the ‘Creep’.
On the 11th of November, 1972, Nixon is re-elected with a great majority, but the mechanism which has been set in motion by Woodward and Felt does not stop, not even before the ever-growing power of the White House. The meetings of Woodward and Felt produce amazing results: on the 13th January, 1973, the two principal advisors of Nixon, Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and the Minister of Justice, Richard Kleindienst resign, due to the scandal which had, by that time, penetrated the most important offices of the White House. The Advisor to the White House is fired and the 18th May, 1973 sees the beginning of the work of the Senate Commission on the Watergate investigation, which is televised live; on the 13th June, 1973, John Dean confesses to the investigators that he had discussed the cover-up’ of Watergate with President Nixon, at least 35 times; on the 13th of July, Alexander Butterfield, ex-presidential secretary, reveals in a Congress hearing that since 1971, Nixon had registered all the conversations and telephone calls which had taken place in the Oval Room.
The revelation of the existence of the tapes is a terrible blow for Nixon. He tries to save the situation by ordering that all the tape-recording system of the White house be dismantled, but on the 23rd July, his long battle with the Senate begins, following his refusal to render the tapes to the Commission of Enquiry. Between October and November, 1973, Nixon tries every possible avenue of escape. He fires, without ceremony, the Special Attorney of the Watergate investigation; the new Minister of Justice, Richardson resigns, and the Vice-Minister, William Ruckelshaus also resigns; on the 17th November, Nixon appears on television and proclaims his honesty to the nation for the umpteenth time.
On the 7th December, the White House is not able to explain a gap of eighteen and a half minutes in one of the tapes requested by the Senate.
Nixon’s Chief of Staff, Alexander Haig – for years suspected of being Deep Throat – tries to spread the theory that some ‘sinister force’ has destroyed part of the tape. The rest is history: in 1974, while the scoop of the Washington Post and the meetings between Woodward and Felt go ahead peacefully, the White House delivers 1200 pages of transcript of the recorded tapes. The Commission of Enquires demands the originals and the struggle concludes on the 24th July when the Supreme Court orders Nixon to hand over all of the tapes. It is the end for the President. On the 27th July, the procedures for impeachment begin for obstruction of justice and on the 8th of August, Nixon resigns.

Since the, for thirty-one years, the secret of the real identity of Deep Throat remained, notwithstanding dozens of inquiries, books, documents and articles. Many thought that they had understood who it was. Over the years, the most popular names have been, the already mentioned Haig, Attorney Silbert, Dean’s substitute, Fred F. Fielding, but also H. Kissinger and President Bush senior were named.
As irony will have it, the only ones who understood that it was Felt were Nixon and his men, starting with a suspicion and slowly becoming a certainty; so much so, that in the famous Nixon tapes, there are two in which the Number Two of the FBI is indicated as being Deep Throat.
In the first of the two tapes (19th October, 1972), the Chief of Staff of the White House, Bob Haldeman speaks about Felt: “Sir, we know who’s talked”. “Someone of the FBI?”. “Yes, Sir. Mark Felt”. In the second tape (28th February, 1973). Nixon and John Dean are talking about Felt and how the public would react knowing that an FBI man had betrayed the President: “We don’t want informers – that son of a b…… has talked; I don’t want him around here anymore”.
“I’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat”. To betray the best-kept secret of history, which Woodward and Bernstein had decided to reveal only after the death of their precious source was, on the 31st of last May, the ‘source’ itself.
Mark Felt had forestalled the two reporters and his laugh had been the longest for all the American journalists. Why? Because ‘Felt-Deep Throat’ had not spoken publicly, but he had revealed his identity to a lawyer, John D. O’Connor, who had written an exclusive story for the June edition of ‘Vanity Fair’: a very good monthly magazine, but which does not have the resources of the great dailies or the power of the television networks.
The scoop of the year begins in a most unusual way; in a typically suburban house in Santa Rosa, a pleasant little Californian town, fifty miles north of San Francisco.
Here, with his daughter Joan, living his peaceful pensioner existence (since he left the FBI in 1973) is Mark Felt and still, in 1999, denying to be Deep Throat until one day the rumour spreads around Santa Rose that Bob Woodward had been an ‘unexpected guest’ at lunch with the Felts and that several people had seen the limousine of the famous journalist parked at some distance from the house of the ex-second-in-command of the FBI.
The first person to be firmly convinced that Felt was Deep Throat was James Mann, an ex-colleague of Woodward on the Washington Post. In 1992, in a long article for the Atlantic Monthly, Mann had put together ‘too many coincidences’; maintaining that, contrary to what many people had said – that is, that Deep Throat should be sort among the intimate friends of Nixon – the source could only be someone from the FBI: because the information that was passed-on had come from the secret files of the Bureau and, at that time, there was very bad blood between Nixon and the FBI.
In 2002, the name of Felt again makes headlines. Timothy Noah digs up the accusations of the Slate columns; the story again surfaces of Carl Bernstein’s son who tells his adolescent friends in a summer camp that, “Deep Throat is Felt”.
It is only at this point – according to the account of Vanity Fair – that Yvette La Garde, a dear friend of Felt, tells Joan his daughter, that the ex-number two of the FBI had revealed to be the ‘informer of the Washington Post’. Joan takes this news badly and reproaches her father for having given the opportunity to Woodward to get rich on his information, saying that he should think of the studies and future of his grandchildren. In other words, invites him to declare the truth publicly and hopefully, at the same time, to earn a decent sum of money from it all.
The rest is history of today, with the polemics which followed the revelation, the accusations of those who label Felt as a traitor and those who defend him, sustaining that an FBI agent has the moral duty to safeguard the Institution against a corrupt White House.
No-one has yet explained how it was possible for Felt to maintain the secret of his identity until he and his family decided to disclose it.