Mark Felt, the FBI official known as Deep Throat who helped to bring down President Nixon, died on Thursday aged 95, sparking a debate between Watergate’s surviving protagonists over whether he was a hero or a villain.

Mr Felt, the most famous anonymous source in American political history, was No 2 at the FBI when the Watergate case broke. He secretly provided the Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward with crucial leads that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation, a humiliation forced on no other US president.

Mr Felt revealed his identity as Deep Throat only in 2005, ending a 30-year mystery that became one of the most prolonged and tantalising Washington guessing games. His tips to Woodward helped to uncover the break-ins, wiretaps and smear tactics used against Nixon’s political opponents, and the President’s attempt to cover up the 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972.

In a series of interviews with The Times yesterday, some of the key players in the scandal were divided over Mr Felt’s role and motives. Carl Bernstein, Woodward’s journalistic partner during the saga, did not meet Mr Felt until this year. He said yesterday that he felt emotional over his death. “I think Mark Felt had the intelligence and the courage to recognise the threat of an unconstitutional and criminal presidency and help the only institution that under those circumstances was beyond corruption, and that was the press,” Bernstein said. “He was able to understand the danger of a criminal president who was out of control and who had provoked a constitutional crisis. It took great courage.”

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

• The Times obituary: Mark Felt

• The biggest scoop ever: if only we'd noticed

• Deeply Felt

Multimedia

• ARCHIVE: Nixon and Watergate

• Watergate

• Comment Central: Deep Throat reader

Woodward said that Mr Felt’s motivations for leaking information was his belief that the Nixon White House was attempting to obstruct the FBI investigation into Watergate. Others say that he acted out of spite as Nixon had failed to make him the head of the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover’s death.

Pat Buchanan, a speechwriter for Nixon who later ran for the presidency himself, said: “What [Mark Felt] did was dishonourable. I believe his motives were bitterness and revenge for not being named director of the FBI. He was a traitor to the nation. He betrayed his trust and violated his oath and he engaged in a shameful act. The very fact that he hid it for most of his life shows that he did not consider it honourable. Mark Felt was a scoundrel, in my judgment.”

In his 2006 memoir Mr Felt wrote: “People will debate for a long time whether I did the right thing helping Woodward. The bottom line is that we got the whole truth out, and isn’t that what the FBI is supposed to do?”

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