The search for Deep Throat
went on for so long that some Watergate aficionados wondered whether
the source was really all he was made out to be – or whether Woodward
and Bernstein had used some poetic licence to exaggerate Deep Throat’s
importance and embellish the details of their meetings.

But no,
Mark Felt was indeed a major player, number two at the FBI and privy to
the whole Watergate investigation. And, as this morning’s papers report
here,
he had a background in espionage, which explains some of the outlandish
routines that he insisted on. (How did he get those messages into
Woodward’s New York Times?)

It’s also true that Felt has been a suspect before. The earliest speculation I’ve found in print is by George V Higgins in The Friends of Richard Nixon
(1976: Ballantine Books, New York). After taking the reader through the
famous “smoking gun” tape of 23 June 1972 (now conveniently available
at the Nixon archives),
he reaches the point where Bob Haldeman says that FBI head Pat Gray
will “call Mark Felt in, and the two of them – and Mark Felt wants to
cooperate because he’s ambitious …”

Higgins then comments (p
147): “Haldeman didn’t know much about Mark Felt, either: Mark Felt
knows more reporters than most reporters do, and there are those who
think he had a Washington Post alias borrowed from a dirty movie.” How right he was.