Watergate's Deep Throat revealed
The Washington Post has confirmed a former deputy chief of the FBI was Deep Throat, the source who leaked secrets during the Watergate scandal.
Vanity Fair magazine had reported Mark Felt admitted being the source whose identity had been secret for decades.
The scandal forced the resignation of Republican President Richard Nixon in August 1974.
Deep Throat helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the Watergate affair.
Initially the reporters refused to confirm Mr Felt's identity.
"We've said all along that when the source, known as Deep Throat, dies, we will reveal his identity," said Bernstein, according to MSNBC.
But later on Tuesday, Woodward said Mr Felt was indeed Deep Throat, in a statement carried on the Washington Post's website.
"It's the last secret" of the story, said Ben Bradlee, who was the Washington Post's senior editor at the time.
Family secret
Mr Felt, now 91, told Vanity Fair: "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat."
The name derived from a famous pornographic film of the time.
Mr Felt only admitted his secret to his family in 2002, he told the magazine, when his daughter confronted him after being tipped off by one of his close associates.
The FBI has not commented on the admission.
In the 1970s, Mr Felt was convicted of organising illegal searches of houses of radicals associated with the Weather Underground movement.
He was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Flowerpot man
The identity of the most famous unidentified single source in the history of journalism has also been one of the profession's best kept secrets.
Deep Throat assisted Woodward and Bernstein with prompts and hints.
If Woodward needed to meet the source to check information, he would place a flag in a flower pot on a certain place on his window sill, as a signal for the pair to meet in secret in an underground car park in the dead of night.
For decades, there had been speculation about who the source was - but no credible individual had ever come forward.
Bugging attempt
When Nixon resigned in August 1974, it was the first time any US president had done so.
The Watergate scandal concerned a break-in at the offices of the rival Democratic party in the Watergate building in Washington in 1972, and a subsequent cover-up.
The attempted bugging of the building was linked to officials in the Nixon White House, and the cover-up went all the way to the top.
The reporters' role in the affair was immortalised in the 1976 film All The President's Men.
John Dean, counsel in Nixon's White House who served four months in prison for his role in the Watergate affair, expressed surprise that Mr Felt had the opportunities to pass on the information.
"How in the world could Felt have done it alone?" said Dean, raising the question, often debated, of whether the Deep Throat informant could ever have been a single person.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/w ... 597503.stm
Published: 2005/06/01 03:35:31 GMT