Confused old geezer, what? Maybe he would have claimed responsibility earlier if he had brought the White House crashing down.Mark Felt, 91, who was second-in-command at the FBI in the early 1970s, kept the secret from even his family until 2002, when he confided to a friend that he had been Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's source, the magazine said.
"I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat," he told lawyer John O'Connor, author of the Vanity Fair article, the magazine said in a news release.
Mr. Felt was initially adamant about remaining silent on the subject, saying that such disclosures were dishonourable.[...]
"I don't think (being Deep Throat) was anything to be proud of," Mr. Felt indicated to his son, Mark Jr., according to the article. "You (should) not leak information to anyone."
Mr. Felt is a retiree living in Santa Rosa, Calif., with his daughter, Joan, the magazine said.[...]
In 1999, Mr. Felt denied he was the man.
"I would have done better," Mr. Felt told the Hartford Courant newspaper. "I would have been more effective. Deep Throat didn't exactly bring the White House crashing down, did he?"
Oh well, he did his patriotic duty. And we're grateful to him.
Courtesy Raw Story
And we are sorely in need of new voices. We have a White House now that makes Tricky Dick's look almost harmless.
Maybe this is the beginning.
Update 6/1/05:
So maybe patriotism wasn't a motive. More like "no honor among thieves" type of thing.
Only two FBI officers were ever convicted for the numerous crimes carried out under the CoIntelPro program. One of them was W. Mark Felt. Ronald Reagan pardoned him.[...]
Clemency for authorizing FBI agents to break into Vietnam protestors' offices without warrants.
[...] James Mann, a former Washington Post reporter who now works for the Los Angeles Times. Mann's article didn't solve the "who" question, but it did pretty persuasively answer the "what" question. That is, Mann identified where Deep Throat worked: at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to Mann, Deep Throat was probably W. Mark Felt, then the No. 3 guy at the FBI, and later famous for approving illegal break-ins to investigate the Weather Underground.
One month before the Watergate break-in, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had died. Hoover loyalists at the bureau were frantic that President Richard Nixon would get his mitts on the FBI, which Hoover had kept independent of political control through a variety of nasty methods, including blackmail.[...]
Why did Felt maintain his silence for so long? Part of the reason, I imagine, is that Felt knew his prosaic, bureaucratic-infighting motive was at least as strong as any moralistic desire to expose the truth about the crooks in the White House. That tarnishes Deep Throat's luster a little. Also, Felt's previous brush with national publicity involved his criminal conviction for bypassing warrants in his investigation of the Weather Underground. Ronald Reagan pardoned him, but it was a deeply painful experience, and Felt thinks the stress contributed to his wife's early death. It would only be logical that he'd avoid the spotlight after that. Possibly, too, he could imagine that the press would note that Deep Throat shared with Nixon an enthusiasm for illegal break-ins.
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