Deep Throat (Watergate)

Woodward, in All the President's Men, first mentions "Deep Throat" on page 71. Earlier in the book, he reports calling "an old friend and sometimes source who worked for the federal government and did not like to be called at his office". Later, he describes him as "a source in the Executive Branch who had access to information at CRP as well as at the White House". The book also calls him "an incurable gossip" and states "in a unique position to observe the Executive Branch", and as a man "whose fight had been worn out in too many battles".

Woodward claimed that he would signal to "Deep Throat" that he desired a meeting by moving a flowerpot with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment. When "Deep Throat" wanted a meeting, he would make special marks on page 20 of Woodward's copy of The New York Times; he would circle the page number and draw clock hands to indicate the hour. They often met "on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn", at 2:00 a.m. The garage is located at 1401 Wilson Boulevard and has a historical marker that was erected in 2011. In 2014, the garage was scheduled to be demolished, though the county decided to save the historical marker, and the landowner promised to design a memorial commemorating the Watergate scandal.[5] As of 2022, the garage had not been demolished.[6]

Many were skeptical of these cloak and dagger methods. Adrian Havill investigated these claims for his 1993 biography of Woodward and Bernstein and found them to be factually impossible. He noted that Woodward's apartment 617 at 1718 P Street, Northwest, in Washington faced an interior courtyard and was not visible from the street. Havill said that anyone regularly checking the balcony, as "Deep Throat" was said to have done daily, would have been spotted. Havill also said that copies of The New York Times were not delivered to individual apartments but delivered in an unaddressed stack to the building's reception desk. There would have been no way to know which copy was intended for Woodward. Woodward, however, has stated that in the early 1970s the interior courtyard was an alleyway and had not yet been bricked off and that his balcony was visible from street level to passing pedestrians. It was also visible, Woodward conjectured, to anyone from the FBI in surveillance of nearby embassies. Also revealed was the fact that Woodward's copy of The New York Times had his apartment number indicated on it. Former neighbor Herman Knippenberg stated that Woodward would sometimes come to his door looking for his marked copy of the Times, claiming, "I like to have it in mint condition and I like to have my own copy."[7]

Further, while Woodward stressed these precautions in his book, he also admits to having called "Deep Throat" on the telephone at his home. Felt's wife recalls answering Woodward's telephone calls for Felt.[8]

In public statements following the disclosure of his identity, Felt's family called him an "American hero", stating that he leaked information about the Watergate scandal to The Washington Post for moral and patriotic reasons. Other commentators, however, have speculated that Felt may have had more personal reasons for leaking information to Woodward.

In his book The Secret Man, Woodward describes Felt as a loyalist to and admirer of J. Edgar Hoover. After Hoover's death, Felt became angry and disgusted when L. Patrick Gray, a career naval officer and lawyer from the Civil Division of the Department of Justice, had no law enforcement experience and was appointed as Director of the FBI over Felt, a 30-year veteran of the FBI. Felt was particularly unhappy with Gray's management style at the FBI, which was markedly different from Hoover's. Felt aided Woodward and Bernstein because he knew Woodward personally, having met him years before when Woodward was in the navy. Over the course of their acquaintance, Woodward would often call Felt for advice. Instead of seeking out prosecutors at the Justice Department, or the House Judiciary Committee charged with investigating presidential wrongdoing, Felt was methodically solicited by Woodward to guide their investigation while keeping his own identity and involvement safely concealed.

Some conservatives who worked for Nixon, such as Pat Buchanan and G. Gordon Liddy, castigated Felt and asserted their belief that Nixon was unfairly hounded from office,[9] often claiming it a "witch hunt".[10]

Although Deep Throat's identity was unconfirmed for over 30 years, there were suspicions that Felt was indeed the reporters' mysterious source long before the public acknowledgment in 2005. In 2012's Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, Max Holland reports that Felt leaked information to The Washington Post and Time. While the Post reporters did not reveal their source, Time correspondent Sandy Smith told Time's lawyer, Roswell Gilpatric, a partner of Cravath, Swaine & Moore.[11] Gilpatric then passed the information to Henry E. Peterson, the Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Criminal Justice. In turn, Peterson revealed the information to White House Counsel John W. Dean,[12] who finally reported it to President Richard Nixon.[11]

Nixon did not publicly acknowledge learning Deep Throat's identity. Nixon claimed that if he had done so, Felt would have publicly revealed information that would damage the FBI, as well as other powerful people and institutions. In the "smoking gun" tape, Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, stated that Felt "knows everything there is to know in the FBI."[13] Haldeman implied that Nixon's motives for not outing Felt were not entirely altruistic, especially because Nixon himself may have been damaged by Felt's revelations.

It had previously been revealed publicly that Deep Throat was definitely a man. Using this and other widespread clues, real or perceived, some members of the press and the public came to suspect Felt of being Deep Throat. For instance, George V. Higgins wrote in 1975: "Mark Felt knows more reporters than most reporters do, and there are some who think he had a Washington Post alias borrowed from a dirty movie."[14] However, Woodward and Bernstein were tight-lipped concerning their informant's identity. Carl Bernstein did not even share Deep Throat's identity with his immediate family, including his wife, writer Nora Ephron. On NBC's Today Show on June 2, 2005, he said "I was never dumb enough to tell her...which was very smart because I would have told the whole world by now." Ephron became obsessed with figuring out the secret of Deep Throat's identity and eventually correctly concluded that he was Mark Felt.[15]

In 1999, a 19-year-old college student, Chase Culeman-Beckman, claimed that Bernstein's son, Jacob, told her Mark Felt was Deep Throat. According to Culeman-Beckman, Jacob Bernstein had said that he was, "100 percent sure that Deep Throat was Mark Felt. He's someone in the FBI."[16] Jacob reportedly made this claim approximately 11 years prior, when he and Culeman-Beckman were classmates. Ephron explained that Jacob overheard her "speculations"; Carl Bernstein himself also immediately stepped forward to reject the claim, as he and Woodward did for many others.[16] James Mann, who had worked at the Post at the time of Watergate scandal and was close to the investigation, brought a great deal of evidence together in a 1992 article in The Atlantic Monthly.[17] Mann recalled that before the Watergate scandal, Woodward had made references to a high-placed source he had in the FBI. Mann argued that the information that Deep Throat gave Woodward could only have come from FBI files. Felt was also embittered at having been passed over for director of the FBI and believed that the FBI, in general, was hostile to the Nixon administration. In previous unrelated articles, Woodward made clear he had a highly placed source at the FBI, and there is some evidence he was friends with Felt.[18]

Woodward kept in close touch with Felt over the years, even showing up unexpectedly at the house where he was staying with his daughter, Joan, in Santa Rosa, California in 1999 after Felt's dementia began. Some suspected at that time that Woodward might have asked Felt to reveal his identity, though Felt, when asked directly by others, had consistently denied being Deep Throat. In 2002, Timothy Noah called Felt "the best guess going about the identity of Deep Throat".[19] In 1976, Assistant Attorney General John Stanley Pottinger had convened a grand jury to investigate a series of potentially illegal break-ins Felt authorized against various dissident groups. Felt was testifying before the jury when a juror asked him, out of the blue, "Were you Deep Throat?"[20] Pottinger reports that Felt, "went white with fear".[20] Pottinger explained to Felt that he was under oath and would have to answer truthfully. However, since Pottinger felt the question was outside the purview of the investigation, he offered to withdraw it if Felt wished.

Author Ronald Kessler interviews W. Mark Felt

According to author Ronald Kessler's book The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI, Felt's daughter Joan, who was caring for her father, told Kessler in an interview for his book in August 2001 that back in the summer of 1999, Woodward showed up unexpectedly at their Santa Rosa home and took Felt to lunch.[21] Joan told Kessler that she recalled her father greeting Woodward like an old friend. Their meeting appeared to be more of a celebration than an interview. "Woodward just showed up at the door and said he was in the area," Joan Felt was quoted as saying in Kessler's book, which was published in 2002. "He came in a white limousine, which parked at a schoolyard about ten blocks away. He walked to the house. He asked if it was okay to have a martini with my father at lunch, and I said it would be fine."[21]

Kessler said in his book that while Felt denied to him that he was Deep Throat, the measures Woodward took to conceal his meeting with Felt lent "credence" to the notion that Felt was Deep Throat. Woodward confirmed that Felt was Deep Throat in 2005. "There are plenty of people claiming they knew Deep Throat was actually former FBI man Mark Felt ..." the New York Post reported. "On May 3, 2002, PAGE SIX reported that Ronald Kessler, author of The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI, says that all the evidence points to former top FBI official W. Mark Felt."[22]

In February 2005, Nixon's former White House Counsel, news columnist John Dean, reported that Woodward had recently informed Bradlee that "Deep Throat" was ailing and Bradlee had written Deep Throat's obituary. Both Woodward and the then-current editor of The Washington Post, Leonard Downie, denied these claims. Felt was a suspect for Deep Throat, especially after the mysterious meeting that occurred between Woodward and Felt in the summer of 1999. But others had received more attention over the years, such as Pat Buchanan, Henry Kissinger, then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist, General Alexander Haig, and, before "Deep Throat" was confirmed a man, Diane Sawyer.

On May 31, 2005, Vanity Fair reported that Felt, then aged 91, claimed to be the man once known as "Deep Throat".[23] Later that day, Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee released a statement through The Washington Post confirming that the story was true. On June 2, 2005, The Washington Post ran a lengthy front-page column by Woodward in which he detailed his friendship with Felt in the years before Watergate.[24] Woodward wrote that he first met Felt by chance in 1970 when Woodward was a Navy lieutenant in his mid-20s. Woodward was dispatched to deliver a package to the White House's West Wing. Felt arrived soon after for a separate appointment and sat next to Woodward in the waiting room. Woodward struck up a conversation and eventually learned of Felt's position in the upper echelon of the FBI. Woodward, who was about to exit the Navy at the time and was unsure about his future direction in life, became determined to use Felt as a mentor and career advisor. Therefore, he asked for Felt's phone number and kept in touch with him.

After deciding to try a career as a reporter, Woodward eventually joined The Washington Post in August 1971. Felt, who had long had a dim view of the Nixon administration, began passing pieces of information to Woodward, although he insisted that Woodward keep the FBI and Justice Department out of anything he wrote based on the information. The first time Woodward used information from Felt in a Washington Post story was in mid-May 1972, a month before the Watergate burglary, when Woodward was reporting on Arthur Bremer, who had attempted to assassinate presidential candidate George C. Wallace. Nixon had put Felt in charge of investigating the would-be assassin. A month later, just days after the Watergate break-in, Woodward called Felt at his office, which marked the first time Woodward spoke with Felt about Watergate.

Commenting on Felt's motivations for serving as Deep Throat, Woodward wrote, "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. He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and their efforts to manipulate the Bureau for political reasons."[24]

In 1980, Felt himself was convicted of ordering illegal break-ins at the homes of Weathermen suspects and their families. Richard Nixon testified on his behalf. President Ronald Reagan pardoned Felt and the conviction was subsequently expunged from the record.

Another leading candidate was White House Associate Counsel Fred F. Fielding. In April 2003 Fielding was presented as a potential candidate as a result of a detailed review of source material by William Gaines and his journalism students, as part of a class at the University of Illinois journalism school.[28][29] Fielding was the assistant to John Dean and as such had access to the files relating to the affair. Gaines believed that statements by Woodward ruled out Deep Throat's being in the FBI and that Deep Throat often had information before the FBI did. H. R. Haldeman himself suspected Fielding as being Deep Throat.

Dean had been one of the most dedicated hunters of Deep Throat. Both he and Leonard Garment dismissed Fielding as a possibility, reporting that he had been cleared by Woodward in 1980 when Fielding was applying for an important position in the Reagan administration. However, this assertion, which comes from Fielding, has not been corroborated.

One reason that many experts believed that Deep Throat was Fielding and not Felt was due to Woodward's apparent denial in an interview that "Deep Throat" worked in the intelligence community:

LUKAS: Do you resent the implication by some critics that your sources on Watergate – among them the fabled Deep Throat – may have been people in the intelligence community?

WOODWARD: I resent it because it's untrue.[30]

Any candidate who died before the Felt admission ceased to fit Woodward's criteria at that time since Woodward had stated that he was free to reveal Deep Throat's identity once the person had died.

• John Ehrlichman: Nixon advisor. Died in 1999.
• Ron Ziegler: press secretary. Died in 2003.
• William E. Colby: head of the CIA. Died in 1996.
• Charles W. Bates: FBI executive whom Mann mentioned but considered less likely than Felt.
• William C. Sullivan: former head of the FBI intelligence operations, fired by J. Edgar Hoover in 1971. Died in 1977.
• L. Patrick Gray: acting FBI director who lived only four blocks away from Woodward, accused by a CBS documentary. Died in 2005.
• Robert Kunkel: FBI Washington Bureau Chief whom Mann considered less likely than Felt, as he moved to St. Louis partway through the investigation.
• Cord Meyer: CIA agent suggested in Mark Riebling's Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA.[31] However, Woodward stated that "Deep Throat" was not part of the intelligence community. Died in 2001.
• Raymond Price: Nixon speechwriter.
• Secret Service technicians: Richard Cohen argued it was whoever in the Secret Service maintained Nixon's secret taping devices.
• Richard Ober, the chief of the CIA's domestic spying program called Operation CHAOS.[32]

• William Rehnquist: Late Chief Justice of the United States, had a position in the Department of Justice early in the Nixon administration, working for Attorney General John N. Mitchell. More than five months before the Watergate break-in, he was appointed to the Supreme Court and it would have been almost impossible for him to have had access to much of the information attributed to "Deep Throat". In February 2005, Dean reported that "Deep Throat" was ailing, and Rehnquist was known to be suffering from cancer, which caused his death later that year. The report caused a resurgence of speculation that Rehnquist was "Deep Throat". However, Woodward later stated that the notion that "Deep Throat" was ailing had been a misunderstanding.
• Henry Kissinger: Nixon's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, was out of the country on some of the dates Woodward reported to have met with "Deep Throat".
• George H. W. Bush: Was nominated in February 2005 by Adrian Havill – author of a 1993 biography of Woodward and Bernstein, Deep Truth (ISBN 1-55972-172-3) – following the unveiling of Woodward's notes at the University of Texas. Havill had argued in his biography that "Deep Throat" was a composite figure, but stated in a letter to Poynter Online that based on more recent events and research, he now believed "Deep Throat" was George H. W. Bush.
• General Alexander Haig: Authors Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin speculated in their 1991 book Silent Coup: The Removal of a President that Haig may have been "Deep Throat". Died in 2010.
• Diane Sawyer: Was hired by White House press secretary Ron Ziegler to serve in the Richard Nixon Administration. On his deathbed, Nixon supporter Baruch Korff wrongly claimed that Sawyer was Deep Throat.
• Ben Stein: A Nixon speechwriter and the son of Nixon economic advisor Herbert Stein; later an actor, political commentator, and game show host.
• Gerald R. Ford: Suggestion that Ford may have been Deep Throat as he was next in line for the presidency.
• Pat Buchanan: Served as special assistant to the President, was nominated as a potential candidate by Dean in his June 2002 book Unmasking Deep Throat. Buchanan repeatedly denied the claim, stating in a Time magazine article on the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in that "The last time I cooperated with The Washington Post...was in 1952, when I was a paperboy delivering the damn thing in Northwest Washington." Buchanan was very interested in the mystery, however, and had a number of theories. He was most sympathetic to the idea of a composite Deep Throat.
• Richard Nixon himself: There was some suggestion that Nixon had used back-channels to communicate with Woodward in a bizarre attempt to showcase his persecution by the media which backfired horrifically. This theory was largely discredited.
• J. Fred Buzhardt: White House counsel to President Nixon.
• G. Gordon Liddy: Member of the White House Plumbers. Largely dismissed.

• 3Sol used the name Deep Throat to lure Tyler Steele to his attempted assassination in Big Finish's Torchwood: Aliens Among Us 1.

• Hal Holbrook portrayed Deep Throat in the film adaptation of All the President's Men (1976), in which he uttered the catchphrase, "Follow the money".
• In the comedy film Dick (1999), Deep Throat is revealed as being two teenage Washingtonian girls, portrayed by Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, who worked as Nixon's dog walkers.
• In the Nickelodeon animated film Hey Arnold!: The Movie (2002), Helga Pataki takes on a similar role under the guise of Deep Voice. She is a shadowy character who aids Arnold and Gerald in trying to save the neighborhood from the evil developer Alphonse Perrier du von Scheck through a series of anonymous phone calls and cryptic advice. At the end of the film, her identity is revealed, and she finally confesses her love to Arnold and successfully saves the neighborhood.
• In C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004), a mockumentary set in an alternate universe where the Confederate States are able to not only win the American Civil War but also annex the United States in its entirety, extend slavery to the north and retain the practice permanently. On the online timeline of the film (containing aspects of the story not mentioned in the movie), it is revealed that C.S.A.'s Richard Nixon became Confederate President at the same time his real-life counterpart became American President and resigned at the same time due to the same scandal. The person who leaks Watergate in the C.S.A. world is apparently a different person though and is called "Dark Throat". The website (written in character as if it was from the alternate universe) states that the identity of Dark Throat has not yet been revealed. The most popular theory is that one of the White House slaves over heard Nixon and took revenge on his or her enslavement by leaking the information to turn Nixon in. The website notes that if that was indeed the case, the secrecy over Dark Throat is for his or her protection as the Confederate States punishes slaves who turn against their masters with the death penalty.[33]
• In the spy thriller film Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House (2017), Liam Neeson portrays Mark Felt.

• In the video game Metal Gear Solid (1998), the cyborg ninja informant Gray Fox goes by the name Deep Throat until revealing his identity to be Frank Jaeger.
  • Similarly, in the sequel, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001), the name is briefly assumed by Olga Gurlukovich, until the protagonist Raiden realizes her connection to Gray Fox of the previous game, at which point she uses the less explicit name "Mr. X", instead.

• In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel The Truth (2000), in a reference to or parody of Deep Throat, the talking dog Gaspode takes on the role of Deep Bone, acting as an informant to the novel's protagonist William de Worde regarding the attempted framing of Patrician Vetinari.
• In Michael Connelly's 2020 novel Fair Warning, journalist Jack McEvoy, who considers Woodward and Bernstein his role models, uses the pseudonym for an anonymous informant while investigating an old rape case.

• In the 1976 Welcome Back, Kotter episode "Sweatgate Scandal", Principal Mike Woodman reveals himself to be Deep Throat when James Buchanan High School's cafeteria's liver is stolen.
• In the 1990 Murphy Brown episode, "Frank's Appendectomy", as part of a practical joke, Murphy is led to believe that a man Frank had been consorting with was the real Deep Throat.
• In the 1993 Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman episode, "Honeymoon in Metropolis", Perry White has a government contact called Sore Throat.[34]
• In the 1994 The Simpsons episode "Sideshow Bob Roberts", Waylon Smithers played a similar role to Deep Throat's when covertly helping the Simpson children find a way to depose the newly elected mayor of Springfield, Sideshow Bob (he even paraphrased one of Deep Throat's statements).
• In the 1996 NewsRadio season 3 premiere episode, "President", station owner Jimmy James (played by Stephen Root) runs for President and claims to be Deep Throat during a press conference.
• In the 1997 Frasier season 4 episode, "Three Days of the Condo", Frasier meets a secretive informant in an underground parking garage who supplies him with information.
• In the 2004 Fairly OddParents episode "Channel Chasers", Tootie uses the "Deep Toot" undercover persona to help out Mr. and Mrs. Turner against Vicky.
• In the 2005 Arthur episode, "Buster the Myth Maker", Brain acts as an informant under the pseudonym Deep Float.
• In the 2006 Family Guy episode "Deep Throats", Kermit the Frog plays a similar role to provide evidence of Mayor Adam West's corruption to Brian and Stewie.
• In the 2019 Manifest episode, "Crosswinds", Ben Stone records an interview with podcast host Aaron Glover but tells him not to release it to the public yet. Stone tells Glover he'll be his Deep Throat if Stone doesn't get killed trying to unravel the mystery of Flight 828.
• In the 2021 American Horror Story episode, "Take Me to Your Leader", Eisenhower's wife, Mamie Eisenhower is said to be Deep Throat.
• The X-Files featured an informant who was identified by the name "Deep Throat". This "Deep Throat" leaked secret government information to the series character Agent Mulder in a manner similar to the meetings described by Woodward. The character never identified himself as "Deep Throat" – the name was used by other characters when referring to him. It was never specifically mentioned whether he was initially intended to be the same Deep Throat from Watergate; eventually, the character was revealed to be a government official named Ronald Pakula.