Information security

This Day in History: Watergate Leaker 'Deep Throat' Reveals Self in 2005

Twelve years ago today, May 31 — and 31 years after the resignation of President Richard Nixon — the principal leaker in the Watergate scandal, known as “Deep Throat,” revealed his identity in an article published in Vanity Fair magazine.

Mark Felt's coming forward stunned both Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose reporting in The Washington Post newspaper helped bring down Nixon’s presidency. Both went to great lengths to conceal Felt’s identity, and they promised to keep it a secret until his death.

Although his name was circulated in the years after Nixon resigned, Felt consistently denied being Deep Throat.

“I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else," he wrote in his 1979 memoir.

Just six years before his 2005 admission, Felt, then aged 91, was quoted as saying, “It would be contrary to my responsibility as a loyal employee of the FBI to leak information.”