W Mark Felt snr:W MARK Felt snr, the associate director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal who, better known as "Deep Throat", became the most famous anonymous source in American history, died on Thursday. He was 95.
As the second-highest official in the FBI under longtime director J Edgar Hoover and interim director L Patrick Gray, Felt detested the Nixon administration's attempt to subvert the bureaus investigation into the complex of crimes and cover-ups known as the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of president Richard Nixon.
He secretly guided Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward as he and his colleague Carl Bernstein pursued the story of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate office buildings and later revelations of the Nixon administrations campaign of spying and sabotage against its perceived political enemies.
Felt insisted on remaining completely anonymous, or on "deep background". A Washington Post editor dubbed him "Deep Throat", a bit of wordplay based on the title of a pornographic movie of the time.
The source's existence, but not his identity, became known in Woodward and Bernstein's 1974 book, All the President's Men, and in the subsequent movie version, in which actor Hal Holbrook played the charismatic but shadowy source.
Felt, a dashing figure with a full head of silver hair, an authoritative bearing and a reputation as a tough taskmaster, adamantly denied over the years he was Deep Throat, even though Nixon suspected him from the start.
"It was not I and it is not I," Felt told Washingtonian magazine in 1974.
Five times Nixon ordered Gray to fire Felt, but Gray, convinced by Felt's denials, never did.
Felt, a master of bureaucratic infighting and misdirection, seized upon a Washington Post story that had not used him as a source.
In a bold stroke, he denounced it in an internal memo and ordered an investigation into the leak.
"Expedite," he commanded. The next day, in a notation on another memo that passed over his desk, he pointed to a prosecutor as the source of the leak.
"I was impressed. My guy knew his stuff," Woodward wrote in Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat (2006).
"The memo was an effective cover for him, the very best counterintelligence tradecraft. Not only had he initiated the leak inquiry, but Felt appeared to have discovered the leaker."
It was not until May 30th, 2005, that Felt's family revealed his identity in an article for Vanity Fair magazine.
The article, written by San Francisco lawyer John D O'Connor, did not make clear why Felt, who was suffering from dementia, admitted his identity after more than 30 years.
Woodward confirmed the revelation, and the secret was finally out.
Few could imagine such a straight-arrow career employee, known for enforcing the FBI's strict rules of behaviour and demeanour, playing such a dangerous game.
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 against the families and friends of Weather Underground radicals. He 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.
Felt, who saw all the FBI investigative paperwork on Watergate, was acquainted with Woodward from a chance meeting at the White House in 1970 when Woodward was still in the navy.
After Woodward became a reporter, Felt helped him on a story about the attempted assassination in May 1972 of George Wallace jnr, the segregationist Alabama governor then running for president.
Days after the June 17th, 1972, break-in at the Watergate, Felt told Woodward that the Washington Post could safely make a connection between the burglars and a former CIA agent working at the White House, Howard Hunt.
It took many newspaper stories, a House of Representatives and Senate investigation, the revelation of a secret tape recording system in the Oval Office, the firing of a special prosecutor, the opening of articles of impeachment and the discovery of a "smoking gun" tape recording before Nixon resigned on August 9th, 1974.
The Washington Post won American journalism's highest honour, the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for public service, for its investigation of the Watergate case.
Felt was passed over for the job of FBI director a second time, in 1973, and retired from the bureau that summer.
After his wife, Audrey Felt, committed suicide in 1984, Felt told a close friend, Yvette LaGarde, of his secret identity, and she told her son.
William Mark Felt snr: born August 17th, 1913; died December 18th, 2008