'Deep Throat' revealed !!!!!

[bingolong]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/06/01/ ... index.html - DEEP THROAT!!!!'

'Deep Throat's' role revisited
Felt helped reporters on stories that led to Nixon's downfall
Wednesday, June 1, 2005 Posted: 4:14 PM EDT (2014 GMT)

(CNN) -- The revelation that retired FBI official W. Mark Felt was "Deep Throat," the famous confidential source in the Watergate scandal, ended more than three decades of speculation and drew new attention to his role in the story.

Vanity Fair magazine reported Tuesday that Felt, now 91, had come forward as the mysterious informant who provided crucial information to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

The information helped the reporters expose the cover-up by the Nixon White House following the bungled break-in of the National Democratic Committee headquarters at the Watergate office-hotel-apartment complex on June 17, 1972.

The scandal led to the resignation of President Nixon in August 1974 -- and Watergate became synonymous with corruption and cover-up.

Felt was the No. 2 official at the FBI in the early 1970s.

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," Woodward and Bernstein said in a statement.

"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 Felt's revelation in the Vanity Fair article let them off the hook.

Post staff writer David Von Drehle said the Vanity Fair article caught the paper by surprise.

"We had no idea that the story was coming. We learned of it yesterday morning. Our top editors were at a corporate retreat They had to rush back to the Post. Bob Woodward had to read the story, figure out what was in it," said Drehle, who wrote the story confirming Felt's identity.

"He had been in contact with the Felt family for the past several years, trying to figure out exactly what Mr. Felt's wishes were and whether he was lucid enough, at his advanced age, to undo the agreement they both had kept for so many years."

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.

Woodward is now an assistant managing editor at the paper. Bernstein is a freelance writer. Bradlee is retired.

Felt retired from the FBI in 1973 and lives in Santa Rosa, California, with his daughter, Joan.

President Bush told reporters Wednesday the news caught him by surprise.

When asked about his thoughts on it, he said it was not "for me to judge." Bush said he looked forward to "learning more about the situation," including reading about Felt's "relationship with the news media."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was a Nixon administration official during the Watergate era, said he did not want to judge Felt's actions.

"I think that anytime wrongdoing occurs, it's important that that wrongdoing be reported. And I think that's appropriate. Now, who one reports that to -- the authorities -- is one thing or somebody else is another. But I'm not knowledgeable enough to be in a position to judge it," Rumsfeld said.

But he stressed that current government officials should report wrongdoing to the proper authorities.

"Anyone who sees wrongdoing who works for the United States government has an obligation to report that wrongdoing to the Department of Justice or to the proper authorities in the department. That is -- I wouldn't want to leave any ambiguity about that," he said.

Previous denials
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 to impeach him in July 1974, Nixon resigned.

The wrongdoing in Watergate largely involved obstruction of justice and abuse of power.

Forty people -- either government officials or members of the Nixon's re-election committee -- were convicted of felonies related to their roles in the scandal, according to The Associated Press.

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 play on the phrase and a popular porn movie by the same name.

The break-in occurred shortly after Felt's supporter and mentor, 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.

It was Felt's unhappiness with the way the administration meddled with the FBI's investigation into the break-in under Gray that apparently led him to leak information about it to the Post.

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 admission
The Vanity Fair article said Joan Felt first confronted her father in 2002 after she received a call from Yvette LaGarde, who had been a social companion of her father's 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 article said the family believed Felt should get credit for his involvement in the case while he was alive and quoted Joan Felt as saying that the family should be a part of any financial gains from the revelation.

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.

[bcddjjsc690]

bingolong,
Even after 30 years the jury is still out on whether or not this was an "Patriotic" act on Mr. Felt's part.I heard Pat Buchanan make a good point today, He said " FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover knew all the lurid details of the Kennedy White House and He never went to the Chicago Tribune and leaked information " that he said , would have been the most underhanded thing to do . Kennedy however , was not trying to squash an FBI investigation as was Nixon, an Investigation being headed by Felt. So personally I think Felt had his own career minded agenda fueling his reasoning for leaking information about the Watergate break-in to Washington Post reporters.Whether or not the acts were honorable for an FBI co-director to do is still going to be debated for another 30 years.

[bingolong]

bcddjjsc690,
I say we need more like him....at least in the current [/i]administration[/i]!!!!!

[bcddjjsc690]

bingolong,
if anybody in the current administration had the nuts to leak info about W or his Dick cheney , they would wind in Guantanamo so fast , they would think aliens abducted them.Enemy combatants of a political nature..

Nixon was so power hungry and insecure,If he had just copped to the burglary, He wouldn't have been impeached in the first place,He was his own worst enemy, tring to find dirt on his opposition.He was really sunk on the cover-up.