Deep Throat revealed: He was Mark Felt of FBI

When W. Mark Felt led the FBI's Salt Lake City office back in 1958, the Deseret News featured a story about how he could draw faster than Old West gunslingers — able to draw from the hip and bury six shots into the center of a target within three seconds.

Maybe such dead-eye shooting was in the back of minds at the Washington Post. The newspaper had never, before Tuesday, revealed him as its secret "Deep Throat" source in the Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon. But Felt, now 91, who was the No. 2 man at the FBI during Watergate, and his family finally acknowledged Tuesday that he is Deep Throat.

"I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat," Felt told John D. O'Connor, an attorney who wrote a story in Vanity Fair revealing the long-kept secret. O'Connor said Felt and his family had released him from client-attorney privilege to write the story.

In a statement issued later, Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein confirmed that Felt was Deep Throat "and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage. 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."

Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post editor who oversaw their work, was the only other person to whom they had revealed his identity. "The number two guy at the FBI, that was a pretty good source. . . . I knew the paper was on the right track," Bradlee said Tuesday, as reported by the Post.

Later Tuesday, outside Felt's home in Santa Rosa, Calif., Felt's grandson, Nick Jones, read a family statement saying, "My grandfather is pleased he is being honored for his role as 'Deep Throat' with his friend Bob Woodward. As he recently told my mother, 'I guess people used to think Deep Throat was a criminal, but now they think he was a hero.' "

Jones added, "The family believes my grandfather, Mark Felt Sr., is a great American hero who went well above and beyond the call of duty at much risk to himself to save his country from a horrible injustice. . . . We all sincerely hope the country will see him this way as well."

Deseret Morning News archives contain many stories depicting Felt as a Western straight-shooter — literally and figuratively — who attacked corruption. He once was considered the heir apparent of longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

However, he also became the highest-ranking FBI official ever convicted of a crime — for ordering break-ins in the 1970s of people possibly connected to the Weather Underground, a group claiming responsibility for many bombings (including at the U.S. Capitol and Pentagon). Felt said the break-ins were essential for national security and Ronald Reagan later pardoned him.

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