Who was 'Deep Throat'?

1 ANSWERS

1. GiGi
   

   Deep Throat was the pseudonym given to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Deputy Director William Mark Felt, Sr. who, as a secret source, provided information to The Washington Post about the involvement of United States President Richard Nixon's administration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal.
   
   Deep Throat was first introduced to the public in the 1974 book All the President's Men by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film two years later. In the book and movie, the two used Deep Throat's information to write a series of articles on a scandal which played a leading role in introducing the misdeeds of the Nixon administration to the general public. The scandal would eventually lead to the resignation of President Nixon as well as prison terms for White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, Egil Krogh, White House Counsel Charles Colson and John Dean, and presidential adviser John Ehrlichman.
   
   Howard Simons, the managing editor of the Post during Watergate, dubbed the secret informant "Deep Throat" as an allusion to the notorious pornographic movie which was a mainstream cause célèbre at the time. The name was also a play on the journalism term "deep background," referring to information provided by a secret source that, by agreement, will not be reported directly.
   
   For more than 30 years, the identity of Deep Throat was one of the biggest mysteries of American politics and journalism and the source of much public curiosity and speculation. Woodward and Bernstein insisted they would not reveal his identity until he died or consented to have his identity revealed.
   
   Vanity Fair magazine revealed that William Mark Felt, Sr. was Deep Throat on May 31, 2005, when it published an article (eventually appearing in the July issue) on its website by John D. O'Connor, an attorney acting on Felt's behalf, in which Felt reportedly said, "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat." After the Vanity Fair story broke, Woodward, Bernstein, and Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Post's executive editor during Watergate, confirmed Felt's claim to be Deep Throat. L. Patrick Gray, former acting Director of the FBI and Felt's boss, disputes Felt's claim to be the sole source in Gray's book, In Nixon's Web, written with his son Ed Gray. Instead, Gray and others have continued to claim that Deep Throat was a compilation of sources combined into one character in order to improve sales of the book and movie.

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