Apple Scruff
Joined: 29 Oct 2003
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 Posted: Tue May 31, 2005 2:28 pm Post subject: "Deep Throat" Reveals Himself |
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http://edition.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/05/31/deep.throat/index.html
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Ex- FBI official was 'Deep Throat'
Tuesday, May 31, 2005 Posted: 2131 GMT (0531 HKT)
Vanity Fair reports that W. Mark Felt says that he was "Deep Throat."
(CNN) -- The man who was the No. 2 at the FBI in the early 1970s was Deep Throat, the source who leaked information about Watergate that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the Washington Post confirmed on its Web site on Tuesday.
The former executive editor of the paper, Ben Bradlee, told The Post that he knew the paper was "on the right track" by using W. Mark Felt.
The identity of Deep Throat was first revealed in a Vanity Fair magazine article posted Tuesday.
According to a story, Felt, 91, told John D. O'Connor: "I'm the guy they called Deep Throat."
If true, the revelation would end more than three decades of speculation about the anonymous source who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on many stories about the bungled break-in of the National Democratic Party offices at the Watergate office-hotel complex and the subsequent cover-up by the Nixon White House.
Woodward and Bernstein used information from Deep Throat largely to confirm information or fill gaps from other sources. He also helped point them in the right direction. The stories appeared in the Post from June 1972 until Nixon resigned in August 1974.
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.
But family members said Tuesday they did not feel that way.
"Mark had expressed reservations in the past about revealing his identity and about whether his actions were appropriate for an FBI man," his grandson Nick Jones, 23, said to reporters outside his family's home in Santa Rosa, California, where his grandfather lives.
"But, as he recently told my mother, 'I guess people used to think Deep Throat was a criminal, but now they think he's a hero.' "
The apparent revelation came in stages, O'Connor said.
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 had divorced by 1999, 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 guess.
Thirty years of denial
The two reporters have refused to name Deep Throat, contending that they agreed to do so only after he dies. Bernstein reiterated that pledge Tuesday.
"With all our confidential sources, we agreed not to identify them until their death," he said. "Nothing has changed that. No one has released us from any pledge. It is our intention not to identify Deep Throat until his death."
But that stance never appeared to diminish the speculation. In 2002, for a story about the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, the tabloid Globe repeated the claim about Felt, under the headline, "Deep Throat Exposed!"
Shortly after, according to the article, Felt's daughter Joan got a call from Yvette LaGarde, who had been a social companion of her father after the death of his wife in the late 1980s.
"Why is he announcing it now?" LaGarde asked Joan Felt, who did not then know that her father was the source, according to O'Connor. "I thought he wouldn't be revealed until he was dead."
At that, Joan Felt confronted her father, who first denied it and then confirmed it, the article said.
O'Connor said he was writing the piece after receiving permission to do so from Felt and Felt's daughter, Joan. The Felts were not paid for the story, he said.
"We believe our father, William Mark Felt Sr., was an American hero," said William Mark Felt Jr., in a statement to reporters.
"He went well above and beyond the call of duty at risk to himself to save his country from a horrible injustice and we just hope that, at some point, the rest of the nation can see it that way as well.
"We feel, having talked to our father, that dad is pleased with the attention that this whole thing has drawn to his 32 years of service to his country. But he believes in his heart that the men and women of the FBI who have put their life at risk for more than 50 years really deserve recognition far more than he does.
"The Felt family does, however, ask that, in view of his age and his health, that you respect his zone of privacy as he enjoys this moment with the rest of his family."
Felt's health and mental acuity have declined recently, O'Connor said.
Some convinced, some still doubt
The news was not surprising to some observers.
"I am highly persuaded that this is the fellow," said former Nixon White House adviser David Gergen, who added that secondary questions remain. "Why in the world did he do it? What was behind it? And why now?"
Still, one prominent Watergate figure expressed misgivings. "I've got grave doubts about the story," said the figure, who asked not to be identified.
"The guy might think he's Throat, but if he is, it raises some serious questions about Woodward's journalism.
"There's a tremendous amount of information that Throat gives Woodward that's wrong. Felt, in a piece in the Atlantic recently, denied he was Throat, and he said that had he been Deep Throat, he would have had better information."
"Also, the info that Throat is giving to Woodward at the end of Watergate is not information that Felt would have had access to at the FBI. I don't think he was at the FBI at that time. It's possible he could have gotten access, but I don't think he did.
"Plus, I gather that Woodward and Bernstein have refused to comment on the [Vanity Fair] reports. But that doesn't make sense -- if Felt is Throat, then wouldn't he have been able to release Woodward and Bernstein from their confidentiality agreement? Why wouldn't he?
"Wouldn't they have all talked beforehand about this interview he was doing with the magazine?" |
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