Sports Calendar

Some of the characters of the Watergate era criticised Felt’s role when he confessed. The Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy said he had “violated the ethics of law enforcement”. Nixon’s speech writer, Pat Buchanan, called Felt “a traitor”. But it is hard to see how Felt could have raised his concerns through official channels when even the US Attorney-General, John Mitchell, was a leading Watergate conspirator.

“From the very beginning, it was obvious to the Bureau that a cover-up was in progress,” Felt wrote in his 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid. He saw it as his public duty to leak information.

His revelations were crucial. A key part of his advice was to “follow the money”. Woodward and Bernstein duly discovered that a $25,000 cashier’s cheque, earmarked for Nixon’s re-election campaign, had wound up in the account of a Watergate burglar.

Mark Felt was born in Twin Falls Idaho, in 1913, the son of a building contractor. He graduated from Twin Falls High in 1931 and the University of Idaho in 1935. In 1942 he joined the FBI and learnt the arts of espionage during the Second World War. He became a favourite of Hoover and climbed rapidly up the promotion ladder until becoming second-in-command of the FBI shortly before Hoover’s death.

Times Archive, 1974: Backroom boys of Watergate

Bernstein and Woodward identify their main source as 'Deep Throat', who prosecutors believe was Mark Felt Jr, a deputy associate director of the FBI

• Guessing the identity of 'Deep Throat', 1976

• Archive Topic: Watergate and the Fall of Nixon

Related Links

• Watergate mole's motives questioned

• Woodward - why I kept Deep Throat secret

• Watergate’s invisible man strikes back

Soon after Gray’s appointment as FBI director, Felt began the clandestine meetings with Woodward that were critical in leading to congressional impeachment hearings of Nixon, the conviction of 40 government officials or members of the Nixon re-election committee and the historic resignation of the President. Felt gave Woodward the information on “deep background” and a Post editor gave him the code name Deep Throat, after the then current pornographic movie.

Although Felt was only one of many suspects for the role of Deep Throat, Nixon never trusted him. Felt’s name comes up twice on tapes from Nixon’s Oval Office. On the first, discussing a story in Time magazine, the White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman tells Nixon: “We know who leaked it.”

“Somebody in the FBI?” the President asks. “Yes Sir, Mark Felt,” comes the reply.

In a second talk about Felt with White House Counsel John Dean, Nixon said: “The informer is not wanted in our society — that’s the sort of thing people do line up against — they say ‘Well, that son of a bitch informed, I don’t want him around.’ We wouldn’t want him around, would we?”

Felt retired from the FBI in 1973, by which time most of the facts of the Watergate cover-up were widely known. In 1980 he was convicted on charges that he ordered FBI agents to break into homes without search warrants in 1972 and 1973 during an investigation of a terrorist group, the Weather Underground. Five hundred FBI employees and friends turned up at the court house steps to support him. He never served any time in prison, and President Reagan pardoned him the following year.

In his retirement Felt lived with his daughter Joan in Santa Rosa, California. As time passed he suffered inner conflict about his action and told the author of the Vanity Fair article, John O’Connor, that he felt for years that he was a dishonourable man for talking to Woodward. “I don’t think it was anything to be proud of,” he told his son, Mark Felt Jr.

O’Connor said Felt now wanted public respect and to be known as a good man: “He’s very proud of the Bureau. He now knows he is a hero.”

O’Connor said he wrote the piece after receiving permission from Felt and his daughter. The Felts were not paid for the story, he said.

When the story of Deep Throat broke it caused a big stir in Felt’s home town. “Glad to see you,” said the old man who greeted the press at his door. Outside a crowd gathered and a little girl loaded up a wheelbarrow and sold cold drinks to the reporters.

Mark Felt, FBI agent, was born on August 17, 1913. He died on December 18, 2008, aged 95