Inside Watergate's Last Chapter

BEN MARGOT / AP
Mark Felt, with his daughter, is unmasked as Deep Throat

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Felt, for his part, had good reason to speak up now, according to Vanity Fair: mortality and money. A leading suspect for years, he had always firmly denied he was Deep Throat, including in his memoir, The FBI Pyramid from the Inside, published in 1979. But at 91, wrote author John O'Connor, a lawyer for the family, Felt, who had a stroke in 2001, is frail and suffers from confusion and memory loss. Members of his family, led by daughter Joan, said they wanted the world to know what Felt did before he died. Although he had admitted his secret identity to intimates and family in recent years, he was still reluctant to disclose it to the public, fearing that others, especially his confreres in the FBI, would judge it dishonorable. But his family argued posterity would regard Felt as a "true patriot" who "did the right thing" and now deserves the credit.

And the money. The Felt family saw how Woodward and Bernstein had cashed in on the Deep Throat mystery in the book and the movie.

According to O'Connor, whom Vanity Fair paid about $10,000 for the story, Woodward had deflected the family's efforts to collaborate on a Deep Throat book. Now the Felts wanted their share. "Bob Woodward's gonna get all the glory for this," Joan, a mother of two, told her father, "but we could make at least enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I've run up for the kids' education." Felt's competence to produce a memoir at this point is in question, but he seemed eager to try last week when he cheerfully told reporters besieging his daughter's California house, where he lives, "I'll arrange to write a book or something and get all the money I can." O'Connor and Felt's agent, David Kuhn, met with publishers in New York City last week, but opinion was divided on how large an advance such a book would get. Caught by surprise at the sudden exposure of a secret he had obviously hoped to publish once Deep Throat was dead, Woodward is rushing to print next month with a slender volume recounting his relationship with Felt.

If Felt's reasons for unmasking himself are a mix of high and low, so too were his apparent motives for talking to Woodward in the first place. After all, Felt was a by-the-book G-man, a ramrod-straight protege of J. Edgar Hoover's who made the FBI his life. In their book, Woodstein, as the Post duo came to be called, portrayed their source as a contradictory character who liked gossip and drink and had grown fiercely disillusioned by the "switchblade mentality" of the Nixon White House. But in a long Washington Post piece last week, presumably from his upcoming book, Woodward says, "With a story as enticing, complex, competitive and fast breaking as Watergate, there was little tendency or time ... to ask why [our sources] were talking or whether they had an ax to grind."

In a perceptive 1992 article in Atlantic Monthly, former Post reporter James Mann speculated that Felt or another top FBI official was the one who had leaked to Woodward as a way to protect his beloved FBI from Nixon's efforts to use the agency for political purposes. Deep Throat, wrote Mann, probably resented the appointment of outsider and Nixon loyalist L. Patrick Gray to replace FBI Director Hoover, who had died six weeks before the Watergate break-in, and wanted to blunt White House efforts to suppress the FBI investigation of the burglary. Of course, the FBI under Hoover had its problems with autocratic control and operations outside the normal bounds of law enforcement. In 1980 Felt was convicted of approving "black-bag jobs," illegal searches of homes of relatives and friends of fugitive American radicals. (Felt was pardoned by Ronald Reagan in 1981.) Mann and others have speculated that Felt became Deep Throat for revenge as well: he had thought himself ready and able to replace Hoover as FBI director and resented being passed over. "That could have figured in it," says Bernstein. "He never told us what his motivations in this were, for the most part."