Mark Felt remained one of this century’s best kept secrets until 2005 when he revealed that he was the infamous “DEEP THROAT,” the source who had secretly supplied Bob Woodward of The Washington Post with crucial leads in the Watergate affair in the early 1970s.

W. Mark Felt, who was the No. 2 official at the FBI when he helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history, died on Thursday. He was 95 and lived in Santa Rosa.

Felt’s decision to unmask himself, in an article in Vanity Fair, ended a guessing game that had gone on for more than 30 years.

The disclosure even surprised Woodward and his partner on the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein. They had kept their promise not to reveal his identity until after his death. Indeed, Woodward was so scrupulous about shielding Felt that he did not introduce him to Bernstein until this year, 36 years after they cracked the scandal. The three met for two hours one afternoon in November in Santa Rosa, where Felt had retired. The reporters likened it to a family reunion.

Felt played a dual role in Nixon’s downfall. As a secret informant, he kept the story alive in the press. As associate director of the FBI, he fought the president’s efforts to obstruct the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in.

Felt later said he believed that Nixon had been misusing the FBI for political advantage. He knew that Nixon wanted the Watergate affair to vanish. He knew that the White House had ordered the CIA to tell the bureau, on grounds of national security, to stand down in its felony investigation of the June 1972 break-in. He saw that order as an effort to obstruct justice, and he rejected it. That resistance led indirectly to Nixon’s resignation. 

Felt had expected to be named to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, who had run the bureau for 48 years and died in May 1972. The president instead chose a politically loyal Justice Department official, L. Patrick Gray, who later followed orders from the White House to destroy documents in the case.

The choice infuriated Felt. He later wrote that the president "wanted a politician in J. Edgar Hoover’s position who would convert the bureau into an adjunct of the White House machine."

Hoover had sworn off break-ins without warrants — "black bag jobs," he called them — in 1966, after carrying them out at the FBI for four decades. The Nixon White House hired its own operatives to steal information, plant eavesdropping equipment and hunt down the sources of leaks. The Watergate break-in took place six weeks after Hoover died.

NOTE: It turned out that America’s #1 Crime Fighter was also America’s #1 CROOK!

While Watergate was seething, Felt authorized nine illegal break-ins at the homes of friends and relatives of members of the Weather Underground, a violent left-wing splinter group. The people he chose as targets had committed no crimes. The FBI had no search warrants. He later said he ordered the break-ins because he felt national security required it.

In a criminal trial, Felt was convicted in November 1980 of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans. Nixon, who had denounced him in private for leaking Watergate secrets, testified on his behalf. Called by the prosecution, he told the jury that presidents and by extension their officers had an inherent right to conduct illegal searches in the name of national security.

"As Deep Throat, Felt helped establish the principle that our highest government officials are subject to the Constitution and the laws of the land," the prosecutor, John W. Nields, wrote in The Washington Post in 2005. "Yet when it came to the Weather Underground bag jobs, he seems not to have been aware that this same principle applied to him."

Seven months after the conviction, President Ronald Reagan pardoned Felt. Then 67, Felt celebrated the decision as one of great symbolic value. "This is going to be the biggest shot in the arm for the intelligence community for a long time," he said. After the pardon, Nixon sent him a congratulatory bottle of champagne.

Felt then disappeared from public view for a quarter of a century, denying unequivocally, time and again, that he had been Deep Throat. It was a lie he told to serve what he believed to be a higher truth.

Millions of Americans knew him only as a shadowy figure in the 1976 movie made from the Watergate saga, "All the President’s Men," which made "Woodward and Bernstein" legends of American journalism. In the movie, Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) gives Woodward (Robert Redford) probably the most famous bit of free advice in the history of investigative journalism. It was a three-word road map to the heart of the matter: "Follow the money."

Felt never said it. It was part of the myth that surrounded Deep Throat.