FELT IS DEEP THROAT

Washington Post Confirms Felt Is 'Deep Throat'

Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee Reveal Former FBI Official as Secret Watergate Source

By William Branigin and David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 31, 2005; 5:29 PM

The Washington Post today confirmed that W. Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was "Deep Throat," the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard M. Nixon.

The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their former top editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee. The three spoke after Felt's family and Vanity Fair magazine identified the 91-year-old Felt, now a retiree in California, as the long-anonymous source who provided crucial guidance for some of the newspaper's groundbreaking Watergate stories.

...In a statement today, Woodward and Bernstein said, "W. Mark Felt was 'Deep Throat' and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage. However, as the record shows, many other sources and officials assisted us and other reporters for the hundreds of stories that were written in The Washington Post about Watergate."

...Woodward said Felt helped The Post at a time of tense relations between the White House and much of the FBI hierarchy. He said the Watergate break-in came shortly after the death of legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Felt's mentor, and that Felt and other bureau officials wanted to see an FBI veteran promoted to succeed Hoover.

Felt himself had hopes that he would be the next FBI director, but Nixon instead appointed an administration insider, assistant attorney general L. Patrick Gray, to the post.

Bradlee, in an interview this afternoon, said that knowing that "Deep Throat" was a high-ranking FBI official helped him feel confident about the information that the paper was publishing about Watergate. He said that he knew the "positional identity" of "Deep Throat" as the Post was breaking its Watergate stories and that he learned his name within a couple of weeks after Nixon's resignation.
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What was that dance about that Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee were doing earlier today when news of the Vanity Fair story became public?

How funny that the Post still wanted a scoop of sorts! The paper CONFIRMED that Felt was the person who leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein.

I think the three of them look like complete fools, trying to hang on to the mystery even though Felt himself came clean.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY!!!

It's interesting that the Post story fails to report that Woodward and Bernstein tried desperately to keep the mystery alive.

I think another point worth noting is that Felt was passed over by President Nixon to be the FBI director.

Felt redefines "disgruntled employee."