The mysterious Watergate informant Deep Throat, aka W. Mark Felt, undercover for keeps at 95.
His identity as the man who leaked info to Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and helped bring down President Nixon was kept hush-hush for more than 30 years after the infamous 1972 break in.
Felt, the former FBI second in command, was branded a traitor by the commander-in-chief’s aides who went to prison as part of Nixon’s Dirty Tricks gang of plumbers and CIA black ops.
Felt was outed in a Vanity Fair article in 2005 by his pal John D. O’Connor.
"I’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat," Felt finally divulged.
In the film All the President’s Men, Felt ,whose identity was still unknown at the time, was played by actor Hal Holbrook. The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its reportage of the Watergate scandal. Deep Throat acquired his nickname by one of the Post’s editors as Woodward’s unnamed source. It derived from a chic porno film of the era which starred the late Linda Lovelace.
"People will debate for a long time whether I did the right thing by helping Woodward," Felt wrote in his memoir, A G-Man’s Life: The FBI, `Deep Throat’ and the Struggle for Honor in Washington. (2006)
"The bottom line is that we did get the whole truth out, and isn’t that what the FBI is supposed to do?"
Felt died yesterday in Santa Rosa, California after suffering from congestive heart failure, his friend O’Connor confirmed.
