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
thumb|[[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
thumb|Felt saw all files on the FBI's investigation of the burglary at the [[Watergate complex in 1972]]
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.
<blockquote>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 OpEd 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: