Mark Felt appears on "Face the Nation" on Aug. 30, 1976. Felt, the former FBI second-in-command, denied on the CBS show — and to anyone else who asked, over the course of three decades — that he was "Deep Throat," the anonymous source who tipped off reporters to the Watergate scandal that toppled a president. (AP)
Washington was abuzz.
A senior administration official with deep knowledge about the inner workings of the White House had surfaced in the news media with bombshell disclosures about a scandal that encircled the president. And after the publication of a work that detailed interactions with him, everyone wanted to know who he was.
It was 1974, days after the publication of “All the President’s Men” by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose steady stream of reporting would lead to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation just months later.
But Mark Felt, the high-ranking FBI official who later admitted that he was the anonymous source known as “Deep Throat,” wasn’t giving anything away — despite being named in the guessing game going on around him.
A Wall Street Journal report noted that Felt “says he isn’t now, nor has he ever been, Deep Throat.”
“Of course, says the former acting associate director of the FBI, if he really were Deep Throat, you’d hardly expect him to admit it, now would you?” the Journal piece asked.
The wry headlines of that front-page piece:
“If You Drink Scotch, Smoke & Read, Maybe You're ‘Deep Throat’ "
“Almost Anyone Can Qualify As Capital Tries to Guess Watergate-Story Source”
That Journal article circulated widely on social media Wednesday and Thursday amid the denials issued by more than a dozen Trump administration officials, who insisted that no, they were most definitely not involved with the anonymous New York Times op-ed that raised questions about the president’s fitness for office.
Amid this backdrop, Felt’s false assertions that he was not Deep Throat, which were issued regularly and repeatedly for more than 30 years, are a reminder of how officials’ denials may not be all that they seem.
Within them is a reflection of the limited choices these anonymous sources face: admit to their decision when confronted by it, though they have already opted for secrecy, or continue the charade at the expense of honesty.
The similarities between the two situations might end there; Felt committed a rebellion at considerable personal risk that culminated with disclosures significant enough that they toppled the Nixon presidency.
The motives of this week's anonymous writer, whose op-ed disclosed less new information but confirmed the reams of reporting showcasing the chaos inside the White House, are less clear. So are the piece's effects, beyond aggravating the president.
Many believe that the writer's decision was not one driven by heroism or patriotism but instead by a desire to save his or her party’s reputation. And many say it seems unlikely that this anonymous source’s identity will stay hidden long.
[The Trump officials who have denied writing NYT ‘resistance’ op-ed]
Felt, on the other hand, maintained his cover for decades, despite being asked about it repeatedly, even as Nixon and others suspected him.
“It was not I and it is not I,” he told Washingtonian magazine in 1974.
During an interview on “Face the Nation” in 1976, in which CBS host Ronald J. Ostrow asked him if “you want to take credit at this time for helping unmask any of the Watergate coverup,” Felt was again unequivocal.
“I am not Deep Throat, and the only thing I can say is that I wouldn’t be ashamed to be,” he said.
Felt co-wrote a memoir in 1979, “The FBI Pyramid,” that delved heavily into the investigations into Watergate but still included a categorical denial that he was Deep Throat.
In the memoir, The Post noted years later, “Felt acknowledged speaking once to Woodward, but in that book and whenever else he was asked, he denied being Deep Throat. In 1999, Felt denied it again to the Hartford Courant after there was another suggestion that he was Deep Throat.
“ 'I would have done better,' he told the paper. 'I would have been more effective.' That same summer, Felt told Slate's Tim Noah that it would have been contrary to his responsibilities at the FBI to leak information."
Then, in mid-2005, Felt finally came clean in the pages of Vanity Fair.
“Deep Throat, the secret source whose insider guidance was vital to The Washington Post’s groundbreaking coverage of the Watergate scandal, was a pillar of the FBI named W. Mark Felt, The Post confirmed yesterday,” David Von Drehle wrote on the front page on June 1, 2005.
“Felt’s identity as Washington’s most celebrated secret source had been an object of speculation for more than 30 years until yesterday, when his role was revealed by his family in a Vanity Fair magazine article. Even Nixon was caught on tape speculating that Felt was 'an informer' as early as February 1973, at a time when Deep Throat was supplying confirmation and context for some of The Post’s most explosive Watergate stories."
Von Drehle continued: “But Felt’s repeated denials, and the stalwart silence of the reporters he aided — Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — kept the cloak of mystery drawn up around Deep Throat. In place of a name and a face, the source acquired a magic and a mystique.
"He was the romantic truth teller half hidden in the shadows of a Washington area parking garage. This image was rendered indelibly by the dramatic best-selling memoir Woodward and Bernstein published in 1974, 'All the President’s Men.' Two years later, in a blockbuster movie of the same name, actor Hal Holbrook breathed whispery urgency into the suspenseful late-night encounters between Woodward and his source."
In their book, Woodward and Bernstein described Deep Throat as “a source in the Executive Branch who had access to information at [the Nixon effort] . . . as well as at the White House. He could be contacted only on very important occasions” and asked to confirm information learned elsewhere and provide “perspective."
In their newspaper coverage, The Post later recounted, the reporters attributed their information only to “sources close to the Watergate investigation."
[Before the Trump op-ed, another mysterious anonymous author lit up Washington]
John D. O’Connor, a lawyer who wrote the Vanity Fair story in 2005, three years before Felt's death, described the former FBI official's deep ambivalence about his role as Deep Throat.
“On that Sunday in May when I first met Mark Felt, he was particularly concerned about how bureau personnel, then and now, had come to regard Deep Throat,” O’Connor wrote. “He seemed to be struggling inside with whether he would be seen as a decent man or a turncoat. I stressed that FBI agents and prosecutors now thought Deep Throat a patriot, not a rogue.”
If any source proved most elusive about confirming Felt’s identity, it was the reporters who broke the story. Felt’s daughter, Joan, described to Vanity Fair her attempts to get Woodward to confirm that her father was Deep Throat.
“At one point I said, ‘Bob, just between you and me, off the record, I want you to confirm: Was Deep Throat my dad?’ He wouldn’t do that. I said, ‘If he’s not, you can at least tell me that. We could put this to rest.’ And he said, ‘I can’t do that,’ ” she said.
In “How Mark Felt Became ‘Deep Throat’ " — an essay published days after his secret source's identity was publicly confirmed — Woodward wrote: “I suspect in his mind I was his agent. He beat it into my head: secrecy at all cost, no loose talk, no talk about him at all, no indication to anyone that such a secret source existed."
Woodward added that in their book, he and Bernstein “described how we had speculated about Deep Throat and his piecemeal approach to providing information. Maybe it was to minimize his risk. Or because one or two big stories, no matter how devastating, could be blunted by the White House. Maybe it was simply to make the game more interesting. More likely, we concluded, 'Deep Throat was trying to protect the office, to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost.'
"Each time I raised the question with Felt, he had the same answer: 'I have to do this my way.' ”
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