Bits and bobs

Breaking a silence of 30 years, former top FBI official W.Mark Felt was identified by Vanity Fair magazine and later by the Washington Post as the source who leaked secrets during the Watergate scandal and forced the resignation of Republican President Richard Nixon in August 1974.

The revelation ended more than three decades of mystery and especulation. Felt was the Nº 2 official at the FBI on the early 1970s. The information he provided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein helped them uncover the Watergate affair.
"It was the last secret" of the story, said Benjamin C. Bradley, who was the Post's executive editoe at the time, when the newspaper confirmed Felt's claim, ending one of the most enduring mysteries in American politics and journalism.
When Nixon resigned in August 1974, it was the first time any US president had done so. The scandal began with burglary and attempted tapping of phones in Democratic offices at the Watergate office building during his 1972 re-election campaign. It went on to include disclosures of covert Nixon administration spying on and retaliating against a host of perceived enemies.
But the most devastating disclosure was Nixon's own role in trying to cover up his administration's involvement. The wrongdoing in Watergate largely implicated obstruction of justice and abuse of power. Forty people, government officials and members of the Nixon's re-election committee were convicted of felonies related to their roles in the scandal.

W. Mark Felt, now 91, lives in Santa Rosa, Calif., and is said to be in poor mental and physical health because of a stroke, his family asked the news media to respect his privacy "in view of his age and health".
The Deep Throat nickname was coined by a Post editor, the name derived from a famous pornographic film of the time.
Mr Felt told Vanity Fair "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat". He kept his secret even from his family for almost three decades before his declaration and only admitted it to his family in 2002 when his daughter Joan Felt confronted him after she received a call from Yvette LaGarde, one of her father's close associates.
Joan Felt said her father first denied he was Deep Throat but then confirmed it, Vanity Fair published the article after receiving permission from the Felts who were not paid for the story.
In the 1970s, Mr Felt was convicted of organizing illegal searches of houses of radicals associated with the Weather Underground movement.He was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. He never served any time in prison.
His grandson, Nick Jones, described his grandfather as "a great American hero who went well above and beyond the call of duty at much risk of himself to save his country from a horrible injustice" and added "We all sincerely hope the country will see him this way as well".
But former Nixon aides condemned him. G Gordon Liddy, who was jailed for four and a half years for his role in the Watergate break-in, said Mr Felt "violated the ethics of the law enforcement profession" and Nixon's speechwriter and later US presidential candidate Pat Buchanan called him a "traitor".

The breal-in happened after Felt's supporter and mentor FBI Director J. Edgard Hoover death. He had hoped to be the next FBI director, but Nixon appointed to the post an administration insider,assistant attorney general L. Patrick Gray.
It was Felt's unhappiness about this that led him to leak information about it. He retired from the agency in 1973.
Initially the Washington Post reporters refused to confirm Mr Felt's identity, they had declared they would not reveal their source's identity until he died but the article in Vanity Fair did it for them. So, later they issued a joint statement, saying: "Mark Felt was Deep Throat and helped us immesurably in our Watergate coverage. However, as the record shows, many other sources and officials assisted us and other reporters for the hundreds of stories that were written in the Washington Post about Watergate".
Among other things, Deep Throat urged the reporters to follow the money trail - from financing of burglars who broke into the Democratic National Committee offices to the financing of Nixon's re-election campaign.

Woodward and Berstein revealed their reporting had been aided by a Nixon administration source in their best-selling book "All the President's Men" which was made into a film in 1976 starring Robert Redford as Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Berstein and Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat.
In the film they met in dark parking garages in the dead night and provided clues about the scandal.
The film portrayed cloak-and-dagger methods employed by Woodward and Deep Throat. If Woodward needed a meeting, he would place a red flag in an empty flowerpot on his apartment balcony. If Deep Throat wanted to meet, the hands of a clock would appear written inside Woodward's copy of the New York Times.