The Deep Throat ThingConfirmed
by the WaPo. I had to laugh at this though:
He was the romantic truth teller half hidden in the shadows of a Washington parking garage.Earlier:
But Felt's repeated denials, and the stalwart silence of the reporters he aided -- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein -- kept the cloak of mystery drawn up around Deep Throat.So to recap, he was the romantic truth teller half hidden in the shadows of a Washington parking garage who lied for over 30 years about it.
Meanwhile,
others aren't so certain about the truth of Felt's confession:
On the other hand, as the years rolled by, Nixon ruled out Peterson and everyone else at Justice and FBI because they could not possibly have had access to what was perhaps Deep Throat's greatest revelation.
This was the story in the Washington Post of November 8, 1973 saying that a crucial White House tape of June 20, 1972 featuring Nixon and his chief of staff, H R Halderman, had been "doctored" and that the problems on the tape were of a "suspicious nature".
Deep Throat told Bob Woodward that this tape contained "deliberate erasures". This was the sensational story of the 18-and-a-half minute gap on the tape. It remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of Watergate because it contains the probable identity of Deep Throat.
When Deep Throat leaked the information about "deliberate erasures" to Woodward at some time in the first week of November 1973 only six people in the White House, or for that matter in the world, knew about the problem of the gap in the tape. They were Richard Nixon; Rose Mary Woods (Nixon's personal secretary); Alexander Haig (The White House chief of staff); Haig's deputy, Major General John C Bennett and two trusted Nixon White House aides, Fred Buzhardt and Steve Bull.It's long been suspected by those in the know that Deep Throat was not just one person, but a composite of several people. The advantage from the informants' standpoint was that they could then claim not to be the leaker because they hadn't been at a particular meeting. And of course from Woodward & Bernstein's point of view, they could offer plausible deniability to new sources for that same reason. In theory, they could fill in the gaps based on their guesstimates and just claim they got it from Deep Throat.
Hugh Hewitt mentioned on the radio that John Dean did a book revealing Deep Throat's identity. That book is called "
Unmasking Deep Throat". Published by Salon, it sits at #630,574 on Amazon's Hot 700,000 list. Unfortunately there are no reviews with spoilers so I went on to Google.
Here's an article
Dean wrote earlier this year for the LA Times. He's coy, but he sure doesn't sound like he's describing the #2 guy at the FBI here:
I have little doubt that one of my former Nixon White House colleagues is history's best-known anonymous source — Deep Throat. But I'll be damned if I can figure out exactly which one.
