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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It was during that period that Felt came closest to disclosing his secret. Under questioning by grand jurors, he cavalierly mentioned that he was often suspected of being Deep Throat. A grand juror immediately asked him if he was. Felt, according to assistant attorney general Stanley Pottinger, turned pale and denied it. According to Woodward's book, Pottinger went off the record, reminded Felt that he was under oath and offered to withdraw the "irrelevant" question if Felt preferred. Withdraw it, Felt snapped.

Few others came that close. After Felt's wife, Audrey, committed suicide in 1984, Felt told a close friend, Yvette LaGarde, of his secret identity, and she told her son. Over the years, speculation about the identity of the secret source became a journalistic parlor game; Post columnist Richard Cohen and author Ronald Kessler both suggested Felt as the source.

On the day of his conviction in 1980, Felt told reporters, "I spent my entire adult life working for the government, and I always tried to do what I thought was right and what was in the best interest of this country and what would protect the safety of this country."

Five months later, Reagan pardoned Felt and Miller.

William Mark Felt Sr. was born Aug. 17, 1913, in Twin Falls, Idaho, the son of a general contractor and a housewife. He worked his way through the University of Idaho, waiting tables and stoking furnaces, and graduated in 1935.

He moved to Washington to work for two Idaho Democrats, Sen. James P. Pope and then Sen. David Worth Clark, while attending night law school at George Washington University. He graduated in 1940.

After law school, he worked briefly at the Federal Trade Commission, where he was assigned to ask consumers about their impressions of the Red Cross brand of toilet paper. Unhappy with the job, he joined the FBI in 1942.

Assigned to counterintelligence work, he thrived. In his 1979 book "The FBI Pyramid," Felt said he learned techniques and the uses of misinformation that allowed him to unmask a German spy on U.S. soil just before World War II.

After the war, he chose to go to the FBI's Seattle office, then Houston, San Antonio, Washington, New Orleans, Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, where he was named special agent in charge in 1956. He led the FBI field office in Kansas City, a town that was a hotbed of political corruption, before finally moving back to Washington in 1962 -- 17 moves by the time he retired.

In 1964, Felt began a six-year stint as the FBI's chief inspector, making sure that all agents and field offices toed the line on regulations, an outfit known internally as the "goon squad." During that time, he also served as FBI liaison and technical adviser to MGM Studios for "The FBI" television series.

Promoted to deputy associate director in 1971, he was, by all accounts, loyal to Hoover. He was also suspicious of the Nixon White House effort to bring the FBI under its control. He resisted a directive from the White House in 1971 to begin massive wiretaps to find the source of leaks about the administration's national security strategy. But he won the administration's confidence when he quietly closed a Hoover-ordered investigation into "a ring of homosexualists at the highest levels," an allegation that proved unfounded.

In early 1972, the administration was embarrassed by a memo from ITT lobbyist Dita Beard that said if her employer contributed to Nixon's campaign fund, the Justice Department would drop its antitrust investigation. Hoping to prove the memo was a forgery, the White House sought the FBI's cooperation. But Felt reported that the FBI laboratory could not make a definitive finding. White House special counsel Charles W. Colson pressured Felt to change the FBI's summary of its investigation, but Felt would not budge.