US: He always advised the reporters to 'follow the money', writes Conor O'Clery in New York
Mark's Felt's covert advice to Woodward and Bernstein as they investigated corruption in the Nixon administration was always: "Follow the money".
And anyone looking for a reason why the former FBI deputy chief "outed" himself as "Deep Throat" could apply the same principle.
He did it apparently because the Felt family wanted to capitalise on their father's historic role and get money to put their children through college.
Thus, on Tuesday, Felt's identity was disclosed by Vanity Fair in an article on its website by family lawyer John O'Connor that scooped the Washington Post on its biggest secret.
For 30 years only a handful of people knew for certain who "Deep Throat" was, including Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who used him as a source to expose Nixon's misdemeanours and promised to preserve his identity until after he died.
There was consternation in the Washington Post on Tuesday when the news broke that Felt, now 91 and living in California, had finally said: "I'm the guy they used to call 'Deep Throat'."
At first, Woodward and Bernstein insisted on their long-standing promise not to confirm who "Deep Throat" was. Woodward then had to disclose that he had known that the family was thinking of going public and had been discussing with them by e-mail - as recently as last weekend - the idea of a joint book to disclose the secret together.
He said his only reservations were about Felt's ability to withstand the pressures of publicity at his advanced age. He is now rushing out a short book he had written for publication after "Deep Throat's" death.
The Vanity Fair article brought executive editor Leonard Downie rushing back from a corporate retreat in Maryland, and in a crisis session the Post decided it would have to confirm that Felt was indeed "Deep Throat". It did so in a lead story yesterday.
Ben Bradlee, the former editor and the only other person officially in the know, commented: "What would you think the odds were that this town could keep that secret for this long?"
It had been a secret that intrigued Washington for three decades and made Woodward, still a Post reporter, a favourite guest at countless dinner parties, as former diplomat Richard Haass put it.
"Deep Throat" emerged as a key source for Woodward and Bernstein when they named him after a porn movie title in their book All the President's Men about Watergate and Nixon's subsequent resignation.
The two reporters stumbled on White House law-breaking after they investigated the June 17th 1972 break-in at Democratic Party HQ at the Watergate complex.
The burglars turned out to be working for Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, former intelligence agents employed by a committee to re-elect Nixon headed by former attorney general John Mitchell.
Felt headed an FBI investigation into the break-in but came up against White House obstruction. He also suspected the bureau's files were being secretly passed on to Nixon counsel John Dean by his boss.
In an article prepared for today's Washington Post, Woodward recounts how he met Felt, "a dashing gray-haired figure," by chance, and was first helped by the FBI official to get some leads on the FBI investigation into the 1972 shooting of presidential candidate George Wallace.
Shortly afterwards, Felt was passed over as head of the FBI, which left him furious at Nixon. When Woodward turned to him for help on Watergate he indicated that the crime went right to the top, through White House aides, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman to Nixon himself.
Woodward and "Deep Throat" devised cloak-and-dagger methods to avoid detection and would rendezvous in an underground car park.
If Woodward wanted a meeting, he put an empty flower pot at the back of his balcony. If "Deep Throat" needed to see him, he would ink the hands of a clock (giving the time to meet) on page 20 of the copy of The New York Times before Woodward picked it up from his doorstep.
The authors described "Deep Throat" as "an incurable gossip, careful to label rumour for what it was, but fascinated by it. He could be rowdy, drink too much, overreach. He was not good at concealing his feelings, hardly ideal for a man in his position."
The Washington Post yesterday said that Felt "had the means and the motive to help uncover the web of internal spies, secret surveillance, dirty tricks and cover-ups that led to Nixon's unprecedented resignation".
However, Woodward and Bernstein said that while Felt helped them immeasurably, "many other sources and officials assisted us" in writing about Watergate.
Ironically, Felt was convicted in 1980 for conspiring in the early 1970s - through break-ins to family homes - to violate the civil rights of domestic dissidents in the violent Weather Underground movement. He was later pardoned by Ronald Reagan.
"I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!" Felt wrote in his 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid, a pretence he kept up until this week. Now in poor health after a stroke, when the news broke, he just waved at the media from his front door in Santa Rosa, grinning broadly.
His grandson, Nick Jones, read a family statement saying that they believed he was "a great American hero" who did what he did "to save his country from a horrible injustice."
Felt was born in Idaho and after joining the FBI helped defeat the Kansas City Mob. he was named second-in-command of the bureau's training division in 1962. In 1971, the FBI chief J Edgar Hoover appointed him his deputy. After Hoover died he was passed over for William Sullivan.
When the Watergate stories started appearing in the Post, the White House suspected Felt. The Nixon tapes show he was distrusted by the president, who in October 1972 singled him out as part of a plot against him.
"Is he a Catholic?" Nixon asked his adviser HR Haldeman, who replied wrongly that Felt, who is Irish-American and not religious, was Jewish. Nixon replied: "Christ," he said, "the FBI put a Jew in there? It could be the Jewish thing. I don't know. It's always a possibility."
Felt's daughter Joan, a former "hippie" who was once estranged from her FBI father, told Vanity Fair that he gave in to family pressure to go public when his daughter persuaded him that the story could bring some financial benefit that would help pay for his grandchildren's education.
"A good secret deserves a decent burial and this one is going to get a state funeral," said former Nixon counsel Leonard Garment, author of In Search of Deep Throat.