Hahah I kept hearing this on TV and then when i looked it was this old man. I was like huh!? lol so i read up on it.



(CNN) -- The legendary source "Deep Throat" in the Watergate scandal that brought down a president was identified Tuesday by Vanity Fair magazine and The Washington Post as W. Mark Felt.

Felt, now 91, was the No. 2 official at the FBI in the early 1970s. The information he provided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein helped them break many of the stories that led to the resignation of President Nixon in August 1974.

The revelation ended more than three decades of speculation about Woodward and Bernstein's famous confidential source in reporting on the cover-up by the Nixon White House following the bungled break-in of National Democratic Committee headquarters at the Watergate office-hotel complex in June 1972.

Woodward, Bernstein and Benjamin C. Bradlee, who was the Post's executive editor at the time, confirmed that Felt was Deep Throat in an article Tuesday on the paper's Web site.

"W. Mark Felt was 'Deep Throat' and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage," according to a statement issued by Woodward and Bernstein.

"However, as the record shows, many other sources and officials assisted us and other reporters for the hundreds of stories that were written in The Washington Post about Watergate."

Woodward and Bernstein had declared they would not reveal their source's identity until he died.

But an article in Vanity Fair posted Tuesday on the magazine's Web site did it for them.

According to the story, Felt told California attorney John D. O'Connor, a family friend who wrote the article: "I'm the guy they called Deep Throat."

At the time of the Post stories, only Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee knew Deep Throat's identity.

Bradlee told the Post that he knew the paper was "on the right track" by using Felt.

"The No. 2 guy at the FBI, that was a pretty good source," Bradlee said. The "quality of the source" and the soundness of his guidance made him sure of that, he said.

On Tuesday, Felt appeared at the door of the Santa Rosa, California, home where he lives with his daughter, Joan Felt, and smiled. "Thanks for coming," he told reporters.

"He's grinning from ear to ear," Joan Felt said. "I think it's a great moment in American history; it's a great moment for our family."

She disputed reports that her father was in poor health, saying she expects him to live to 100.
Nixon resigns

Woodward and Bernstein used Deep Throat largely to confirm information or fill gaps from other sources. He also helped point them in the right direction and gave them tips, according to the reporters' 1974 book "All the President's Men," which was made into a movie two years later.

Their stories and those of others sparked a Senate investigation in 1973 whose televised hearings riveted the nation. After the House Judiciary Committee voted out articles of impeachment against him, Nixon resigned.

Felt gave Woodward information on "deep background" and met him often in D.C. parking garages. The Deep Throat nickname, coined by a Post editor, was a combination of the phrase and a popular porn movie by the same name.

The break-in occurred shortly after Felt's supporter, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, died.

"Felt himself had hopes that he would be the next FBI director, but Nixon instead appointed an administration insider, assistant attorney general L. Patrick Gray, to the post," the Post said.

In his 1979 book, "The FBI Pyramid from the Inside," Felt denied he was Deep Throat.

"I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!" he wrote, six years after he retired.

The Vanity Fair article said Felt had kept the secret even from his family members until 2002 because he felt his leaking had been dishonorable.

The apparent revelation came in stages, O'Connor wrote.

In 1999, the Hartford Courant in Connecticut published a story saying that 11 years before the son of Bernstein and the reporter's then-wife, Nora Ephron, told a friend at a summer camp that his father had said the former G-man was the anonymous source.

Ephron and Bernstein, who divorced in 1980, denied that was the case, the magazine said, contending that Felt had simply been Ephron's favorite suspect, but that Bernstein had never told her his source's true identity.

Their son, they said, was just repeating his mother's favorite guess.

Speculation on the identity of Deep Throat also ranged from Alexander Haig, Nixon's chief of staff, White House counsel John Dean, press office assistant Diane Sawyer and speechwriter Pat Buchanan.
The admission

The Vanity Fair article said Joan Felt first confronted her father in 2002, after a she received a a call from Yvette LaGarde, who had been a social companion of her father after the death of his wife in the late 1980s.

LaGarde asked Joan Felt why her father supposedly had revealed his secret to a tabloid newspaper.

Joan Felt said her father first denied he was Deep Throat and then confirmed it, the Vanity Fair article says.

O'Connor said he wrote the piece after receiving permission to do so from the elder Felt and Joan. The Felts were not paid for the story, he said.

The elder Felt was convicted in 1980 on charges he ordered FBI agents to break into homes without search warrants in a hunt for bombing suspects in 1972 and 1973 during an investigation of the radical group Weather Underground.

President Reagan pardoned him in 1981. He never served any time in prison.

The FBI had no immediate comment on Tuesday's revelation.

 

word, I saw that on yahoo! news.

 

Antarius lives in Santa Rosa

 

so... Antarius is no stranger to Deepthroat? :eek3:

 

:shocked: :jawdrop: :shocked:Wow....

 

Maybe Antarius is the REAL deep throat?

 

:rofl: outstanding

 

yeah, it kinda bugged me to see "The Real Deep Throat" on the top of CNN.com all day....made me chuckle every time

 

i find it increasingly humorous that whenever dems are under fire for questionable practices(ie reaching a bipartisan agreement for cloture and then not honoring said agreement) that something about the nixon administation or watergate hits the media.

just an observation

 

They call this guy a hero. He was just some bitter beaurocrat who did not get the job he was convinced he "deserved", so he went to the press with a bunch of info to screw the man he felt screwed him. Don't even think you can convince me that this was motivated by some sense of outrage, or urge to do the right thing. If he had been promoted, the entire scandal would have never happened, and our relations with the rest of the world would be about 20 years farther advanced than they are now. This guy screwed his country because he was bitter, and is significantly more guilty of treason than any Dmeocrat could even think about making our executive branchout to be.