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© St. Petersburg Times, published June 17, 2002
WASHINGTON -- Only in a city such as this one, where unidentified sources can make or break a political career, would seemingly sane people spend 30 years trying to guess the identity of a phantom source known as Deep Throat.
Entire books have been written about this mysterious character who supposedly served as the Washington Post's primary source on the Watergate scandal. Some political scientists have devoted years to researching it. There are even Web sites that keep track of likely contenders.
And yet, as we observe the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in today, the nation still does not know for certain who it was behind the scandal that forced President Richard M. Nixon from the White House in 1974.
In All the President's Men, the book co-authored by the Post's Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Deep Throat is described as a chain-smoking man who met them in an underground garage and moved a flower pot on his apartment balcony to signal them when he had information to share.
Only four people are said to be privy to the source's identity: Woodward, Bernstein, former Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee and Deep Throat himself. None of them have been willing to satisfy our curiosity.
Many people, including Nixon, have expressed the opinion that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, then deputy director of the FBI. Former Nixon counsel Leonard Garment, in his book, In Search of Deep Throat, names GOP political consultant John Sears.
Others named from time to time include former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, former Watergate prosecutor Earl Silbert and former White House aides Pat Buchanan, Ron Ziegler and David Gergen.
All of them have denied it and Woodward, who still works for the Post, insists the true Deep Throat is not among them. He says the name will be made public "when (Deep Throat) says it can be released or when he's deceased."
According to Daniel Schorr, a broadcast journalist who covered Watergate for CBS News, people are still speculating on Deep Throat's identity because it is both intriguing and historically significant. "It's important because he changed the course of history," he said.
But others who observed Watergate from a close vantage point disagree with Schorr.
"It really doesn't matter," declared Jim Doyle, who was an aide to Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. "The Post deserves a lot of credit, but Watergate would not have been uncovered without the work of Judge John Sirica, the Ervin Committee and Archie Cox."
Likewise, Robert L. Jackson, who covered Watergate for the Los Angeles Times along with Ronald Ostrow, noted that many of the stories attributed to Deep Throat appeared in the Post before the election in November, 1972, when Nixon was elected overwhelmingly. It was not until the government was investigating the case that the public began to take the allegations seriously, he said, and thus the scandal would have come to light without Deep Throat.
Journalists such as Jackson and Ostrow, who plied many of the same sources as Woodward and Bernstein during that era, believe Deep Throat was a literary device created by the Post reporters to represent a variety of government sources.
"We were trying to compete with them and when we got some of the same stories, we know they did not all come from the same person," Ostrow said. "For that reason, I never thought it was one person. I thought it was a composite."
Another reason that the composite theory is so popular: None of the likely candidates have all of the characteristics that Woodward and Bernstein attributed to Deep Throat. "The clues just don't add up," observed Jackson.
If it were not a composite, Jackson said, the real Deep Throat would already have identified himself, if only to bask in the glory. "Nothing stays a secret in Washington for more than 25 years," he noted.
Nevertheless, Woodward and Bernstein insist it was not a composite. "It was one source -- someone occupying a sensitive position in the executive branch," says Bernstein, who writes for Vanity Fair.
Reporters who worked in the Post newsroom at the time say the name was actually coined by editor Howard Simons, who would frequently yell at Woodward and Bernstein, asking if they had heard from their confidential source -- "Deep Throat" -- lately. Simons borrowed the name from a porn movie that was popular at the time starring Linda Lovelace.
Since then, interest in Deep Throat has never waned.
Former White House counsel John Dean, who blew the whistle on Watergate during the Senate hearings, is writing an e-book that promises to identify Deep Throat. Dean had promised to publish the book by today, but he recently told the Associated Press that it will be delayed.
"What's happened is, as the field has narrowed, the denials have become much more forceful," Dean said. "But there are only "X' number of people out there who can fall into the clues and who could have been Deep Throat."
Dean has been trying to guess the name for years. At different times, he has named Watergate prosecutor Earl J. Silbert and Nixon chief of staff Alexander M. Haig as potential Deep Throats.
Woodward jokes that this should be Dean's last guess. "I think in baseball and guessing Deep Throat, three strikes and you're out," he said.
Schorr notes that Nixon and then-Attorney General John Mitchell had a conversation about the source of the Post Watergate stories that was recorded on the infamous Oval Office taping system. Nixon and Mitchell agreed it was Felt because, as deputy FBI director, he had access to all the information about the case.
Felt also had a motive, according to Schorr, because he had been passed over for FBI director after J. Edgar Hoover's death. Instead of choosing Felt, Nixon chose an FBI outsider, L. Patrick Gray.
According to Ron Kessler, author of a new book, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI, most of the FBI agents working on the Watergate investigation also thought that Felt was the source.
"The agents were amazed to see material in Woodward and Bernstein's stories lifted almost verbatim from their reports of interviews a few days or weeks earlier," Kessler said.
Kessler wrote that Woodward showed up unexpectedly at the home of Felt's daughter, Joan, in California during the summer of 1999, after Bernstein's wife at the time, writer Nora Ephron, identified Felt as Deep Throat. Although Felt had suffered a stroke, he said, the former FBI official greeted Woodward as an old friend and they went out to lunch together.
Since Watergate, journalists also have continued to debate the question of whether the Post did the right thing in publishing those stories based entirely on unnamed sources. Ostrow said the standards for sourcing have been raised since then.
"These days," Ostrow said, "you have got to at least let the reader know whether this person has an ax to grind. Is he a prosecutor, a police source or a defense source?"
But Schorr was horrified at the suggestion that unnamed sources are no longer trustworthy.
"My life is based on unnamed sources," said Schorr, who now does commentary for National Public Radio. "I believe in unnamed sources. God willing, we'll go on having unnamed sources."