Mark Felt

William Mark Felt Sr. (August 17, 1913 – December 18, 2008) was an American law enforcement officer who worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1942 to 1973 and was the informant known as "Deep Throat" in the Watergate scandal.

After working in several FBI field offices and ascending through the ranks, Felt became the bureau's deputy director following J. Edgar Hoover's death in mid-1972. While his only superior was on sick leave, he provided two Washington Post reporters information about the Watergate scandal under the pseudonym "Deep Throat". He resigned in mid-1973 under suspicions that he was the informant. In 1980, he was convicted of having violated the civil rights of people thought to be associated with members of the Weather Underground, having ordered FBI agents to break into their homes and search the premises as part of an attempt to prevent bombings. He was ordered to pay a fine, but was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan during his appeal.

In 2005, at age 91, Felt revealed to Vanity Fair magazine that during his tenure as Deputy Director of the FBI he was Deep Throat, who provided The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein critical information about the Watergate scandal, ultimately leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Woodward, who had long vowed not to reveal Deep Throat's identity while the source was still alive, quickly confirmed Felt's claim. Though Felt's identity as Deep Throat was suspected, including by Nixon himself, it had generally remained a secret for 30 years. Felt finally acknowledged that he was Deep Throat after being persuaded by his daughter to reveal his identity before his death.

Early life and career Born on August 17, 1913, in Twin Falls, Idaho, Felt was the son of Rose R. Dygert and Mark Earl Felt, a carpenter and building contractor. His maternal grandparents were born in Canada and Scotland. Through his maternal grandfather, Felt was collaterally descended from Revolutionary War general Nicholas Herkimer of New York. He was a member and president of the Gamma Gamma chapter of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1935.

Felt then went to Washington, D.C., to work in the office of Democratic US Senator James P. Pope. In 1938, Felt married Audrey Robinson of Gooding, Idaho, whom he had known when they were students at the University of Idaho. She had come to Washington to work at the Internal Revenue Service. Their wedding was officiated by the chaplain of the United States House of Representatives, the Rev. James Shera Montgomery. The Salt Lake City office included Nevada within its purview, and Felt oversaw some of the bureau's earliest investigations into organized crime, assessing the Mob's operations in the Reno and Las Vegas casinos. In February 1958, Felt was assigned to Kansas City, Missouri (which he dubbed "the Siberia of field offices" in his memoir), In his memoir, Felt quoted Hoover as having said, "I need someone who can control Sullivan. I think you know he has been getting out of hand."

After Hoover's death L. Patrick Gray, acting director of the FBI from May 1972 to April 1973

Hoover died in his sleep and was found on the morning of May 2, 1972. Tolson was nominally in charge until the next day, when Nixon appointed L. Patrick Gray as Acting FBI Director. Tolson submitted his resignation, which Gray accepted. Felt succeeded to Tolson's post as Deputy Director, the number-two job in the bureau. According to Woodward, Simons thought of the term because Felt had been providing information on a deep background basis.

When Felt revealed his role in 2005, it was noted that "My Friend" has the same initial letters as "Mark Felt". Woodward's notes from interviewing Felt were marked "M.F.", which Woodward says was "not very good tradecraft".

Code for contacting Woodward

Woodward explained that when he wanted to meet Deep Throat, he would move a flowerpot with a red flag on his apartment balcony; he lived at number 617, Webster House, 1718 P Street, Northwest. On occasions when Deep Throat wanted a meeting, he would circle the page number on page twenty of Woodward's copy of The New York Times (delivered to his building) and draw clock hands to signal the hour. But in a taped conversation on October 19, 1972, Haldeman told the president that sources had said that Felt was speaking to the press.

You can't say anything about this because it will screw up our source and there's a real concern. Mitchell is the only one who knows about this and he feels strongly that we better not do anything because ... if we move on him, he'll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that's to be known in the FBI. He has access to absolutely everything. On June 21, Ruckelshaus met privately with Felt and accused him of leaking information to The New York Times, a charge that Felt adamantly denied.

Many agents were investigated after the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI and the subsequent Church Committee of Congress revealed the FBI's illegal activities. In 1976, Felt publicly stated he had ordered break-ins and recommended against punishment of individual agents who had followed orders. Felt also stated that Gray had also authorized the break-ins, but Gray denied this. Felt said on the CBS television program Face the Nation he would probably be a "scapegoat" for the bureau's work.

Felt and Miller attempted to plea bargain with the government, willing to agree to a misdemeanor guilty plea to conducting searches without warrants—a violation of . The government rejected the offer in 1979. After eight postponements, the case against Felt and Miller went to trial in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on September 18, 1980. He testified that in authorizing the bureau to conduct break-ins to gather foreign intelligence information "he was acting on precedents established by a number of Presidential directives dating to 1939." It was Nixon's first courtroom appearance since before Watergate. He had avoided appearing in any legal proceedings during it and had been pardoned by President Gerald Ford after his resignation. Nixon also contributed money to Felt's defense fund, since Felt's legal expenses were running over $600,000 by then. Also testifying were former Attorneys General Mitchell, Kleindienst, Herbert Brownell Jr., Nicholas Katzenbach, and Ramsey Clark, all of whom said warrantless searches in national security matters were commonplace and understood not to be illegal. Mitchell and Kleindienst denied they had authorized any of the break-ins at issue in the trial. The bureau used a national security justification for the searches because it alleged the Weather Underground was in the employ of Cuba. The charge carried a maximum sentence of ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine; on December 15, Judge William B. Bryant fined Felt $5,000 and Miller $3,500, but imposed no jail time for either. Writing an op-ed piece in The New York Times a week after the conviction, attorney Roy Cohn claimed that Felt and Miller were being used as scapegoats by the Carter administration and it was an unfair prosecution. Cohn wrote the break-ins were the "final dirty trick" of the Nixon administration, and there had been no "personal motive" to their actions.

In the pardon, Reagan wrote:

During their long careers, Mark Felt and Edward Miller served the Federal Bureau of Investigation and our nation with great distinction. To punish them further—after 3 years of criminal prosecution proceedings—would not serve the ends of justice.

Their convictions in the U.S. District Court, on appeal at the time I signed the pardons, grew out of their good-faith belief that their actions were necessary to preserve the security interests of our country. The record demonstrates that they acted not with criminal intent, but in the belief that they had grants of authority reaching to the highest levels of government. Carter Attorney General Griffin Bell said he did not object to the pardons, as the convictions had upheld constitutional principles.

Despite their pardons, Felt and Miller won permission from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to appeal their convictions so as to remove it from their record and to prevent it from being used in civil suits by victims of the break-ins they had ordered. Felt settled in Alexandria, Virginia, while she was an undergraduate, for his post at the FBI Academy. Prior to the Watergate scandal, Felt had become estranged from Joan. They had been close during her childhood, but after she graduated from Stanford, she had gone to Chile under a Fulbright scholarship to continue her studies. While there, she became friends with Marxist revolutionary Andrés Pascal Allende, nephew of future president Salvador Allende. When she returned home, her political views had shifted to the extreme left, putting her in conflict with her conservative father. Joan did not learn the truth about her mother's suicide until 2001.

Joan, who was caring for her father, told Kessler that her father had greeted Woodward like an old friend. Their meeting appeared to be more of a celebration than an interview. "Woodward just showed up at the door and said he was in the area," Joan Felt was quoted as saying in Kessler's 2002 book: "He came in a white limousine, which parked at a schoolyard about ten blocks away. He walked to the house. He asked if it was okay to have a martini with my father at lunch, and I said it would be fine."

Deep Throat speculation

The identity of Deep Throat was debated for more than three decades, and though Felt was not prominently mentioned as Watergate unfolded, his name was subsequently mentioned often as a possibility. An October 1990 Washingtonian magazine article about "Washington secrets" listed the 15 most prominent Deep Throat candidates, including Felt.

Jack Limpert published evidence as early as 1974 that Felt was the informant. During a grand jury investigation in 1976, Felt was called to testify. The prosecutor, J. Stanley Pottinger, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, discovered that Felt was "Deep Throat", but the secrecy of the proceedings protected the information from being public. Ephron read in Woodward and Bernstein's book All the President's Men that in Bernstein's notes, he referred to Deep Throat as "MF"; Classmates of Jacob at the Dalton School and Vassar College recall him revealing to numerous people that Felt was Deep Throat. This revelation attracted little media attention despite Deep Throat's identity being publicly unknown. Ephron said, "No one, apart from my sons, believed me." Ephron was invited by Arianna Huffington to write about the experience in The Huffington Post, for which Ephron was a regular blogger and part-time editor. and then served on the Supreme Court until his death in 2005.

Deep Throat revealed Vanity Fair magazine revealed that Felt was Deep Throat on May 31, 2005, when it published an article (eventually appearing in the July issue of the magazine) on its website by John D. O'Connor, an attorney acting in Felt's behalf. Felt said, "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat." After the Vanity Fair story broke, Benjamin C. Bradlee on June 1, 2005, the editor of the Washington Post during Watergate, confirmed that Felt was Deep Throat. According to the Vanity Fair article, Felt was persuaded to come out by his family. They hoped to capitalize on the book deals and other lucrative opportunities which Felt would be offered in order to help pay for his grandchildren's education. His family was unaware that he was Deep Throat for many years. Although Felt was suffering from dementia and had previously denied he was Deep Throat, both Woodward and Bernstein confirmed the attorney's claim. Felt's family realized the truth after his retirement, when they became aware of his close friendship with Bob Woodward.

Nixon's Chief Counsel Charles Colson, who served prison time for his actions in the Nixon White House, said Felt had violated "his oath to keep this nation's secrets".

In mid-2005 Woodward published an account of his contacts with Felt, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat .

Death Felt died at home, in his sleep, in Santa Rosa, California, on December 18, 2008. He was 95 years old and his death was attributed to heart failure.

In the 2023 TV mini-series White House Plumbers, he was played by Gary Cole.

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