The man who tipped reporters off about the Watergate scandal has died at the age of 95. W. Mark Felt, the former FBI second-in-command, known only as "Deep Throat" during the Watergate Era kept his identity secret until 2005.
Felt's true identity was only revealed in 2005 although many speculated that he was the source of information that Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward used that helped topple Nixon's time in office.
In 2005, his friend John D. O'Connor wrote the Vanity Fair article that revealed Felt's role. He then wrote his memoir.
The
Associated Press quotes:
"People will debate for a long time whether I did the right thing by helping Woodward," Felt wrote in his 2006 memoir, "A G-Man's Life: The FBI, `Deep Throat' and the Struggle for Honor in Washington." "The bottom line is that we did get the whole truth out, and isn't that what the FBI is supposed to do?"
The Watergate scandal may not have broke the way it did had Felt not already been a mentor to the young Woodward. Felt was able to keep the facts and vital information for Woodward and partner Carl Bernstein earning the The Post a Pulitzer Prize.
"He reminded me how he disliked phone calls at the office but said that the Watergate burglary case was going to `heat up' for reasons he could not explain," Woodward wrote after Felt was named. "He then hung up abruptly."
To ensure that conversations with the reporters would not involve tapped phones, Felt meet with the reporters in settings right out of a spy novel. While he was the one feeding information to the Post he was also a FBI agent. One of the assignments he had was to ferret out the newspaper's source of information. The investigation never went anywhere leading many to believe that Felt may be acting as a double agent.
Felt left the FBI in 1973 and joined the lecture circuit.
In recent months Felt had suffered from congestive heart failure. He leaves behind his two children: Joan Felt and Mark Felt, Jr., in addition to four grandchildren. His wife, Audrey Felt died in 1984.
