Lawman's Unwavering Compass Led Him to White House Showdown

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'Deep Throat' Dead at 95

Mark Felt, the man better known as Deep Throat, has died at the age of 95 at his home in California from congestive heart failure. Felt's information, given to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, helped uncover the Watergate scandal.

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The Watergate controversy erupted all over again, with former Nixon aides denigrating Felt. "I think Deep Throat is a snake," former Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan told CNN in 2005.

But others said Felt did what had to be done.

"I do think Felt was justified in leaking because Nixon had corrupted the standard channels," said Ken Hughes, a research fellow who has studied the Nixon tapes at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.

Few could imagine such a straight-arrow career employee, known for enforcing the FBI's strict rules of behavior and demeanor, playing such a dangerous game. A loyalist to longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Felt supported Hoover's eavesdropping on the Rev. Martin Luther King during the Kennedy administration. He opposed Gray's decisions to hire women as FBI agents, loosen the dress code and ease weight restrictions for FBI agents.

Although Deep Throat was a hero to the counterculture, civil rights advocates and Nixon's opponents, Felt was no friend to the political left.

In 1980, he was convicted of approving illegal "black bag" break-ins of the homes of people who the FBI believed were connected to the radicals of the violent Weather Underground movement. Felt was later pardoned by President Ronald Reagan.

No one knows exactly what prompted Felt to leak the information from the Watergate probe to the press. He was passed over for the post of FBI director after Hoover's 1972 death, a crushing career disappointment.

But by the time he told O'Connor "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat," he was enfeebled by a stroke and his memory of the era had almost vanished because of Alzheimer's disease.

In his 2006 book with O'Connor, "A G-Man's Life," Felt expressed his anger at White House officials who attempted to interfere with the FBI investigation.

"It's impossible to exaggerate how high the stakes were in Watergate," he and his co-author wrote. "We faced no simple burglary, but an assault on government institutions, an attack on the FBI's integrity, and unrelenting pressure to unravel one of the greatest political scandals in our nation's history.

"From the start, it was clear that senior administration officials were up to their necks in this mess and would stop at nothing to sabotage our investigation. White House staffers, high and low, were either evasive or obstructive. They drew the Justice Department and the CIA into their cover-up. They used the acting director of the FBI, a political appointee, to inform them of the information we dug up and attempt to limit our inquiries. . . .

"I really can't describe adequately how bad it was," the book went on. "As investigators trying to bring the truth to light, we could not rely on Justice Department prosecutors or even federal grand juries to bring indictments. What we needed was a 'Lone Ranger' who could bypass the administration's hand-picked FBI director and Justice Department leadership and derail the White House cover-up."