Deep Throat - Role in Watergate

Role in Watergate

On June 17, 1972 at 2:31 AM local time, five men were arrested by police on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel building in Washington, D.C., inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Police had arrived on the scene after being alerted by Frank Wills, a security guard, who noticed that a door leading into the hotel had been taped open.

The situation was unusual because the five burglars had $2,300 in hundred-dollar bills with serial numbers in sequence, some lock-picks and door-jimmys, a walkie-talkie, a radio scanner capable of listening to police frequencies, two cameras, 40 rolls of unused film, tear-gas guns, and sophisticated electronic devices capable of recording all conversations that might be held in the offices.

At least one of the men was a former Central Intelligence Agency employee. This person, Jim McCord, Jr., was, at the time of his arrest, a security man for President Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President (also known by its acronym, "CREEP", among Nixon's political opponents). Notebooks were found on two of the men containing the telephone number of E. Howard Hunt, whose name in the notebooks was accompanied by the inscriptions "W House" and "W.H."

The scandal immediately attracted some media scrutiny. A protracted period of clue-searching and trail-following then ensued, with reporters, and eventually the United States Senate and the judicial system probing to see how far up the Executive branch of government the Watergate scandal, as it had come to be known, extended.

A pair of young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, wrote the coverage of the story over a period of two years. The scandal eventually was shown to involve a variety of legal violations and it implicated many members of the Nixon White House. With increasing pressure from the courts and the Senate, Nixon eventually became the first U.S. President to resign, thereby avoiding impeachment by the House of Representatives.

Woodward and Bernstein's stories contained information that was remarkably similar to the information uncovered by FBI investigators. This was a journalistic advantage not enjoyed by any other journalists at the time. In their later book, All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein claimed this information came from a single anonymous informant dubbed "Deep Throat". It was later revealed, and confirmed by Woodward and Bernstein, that Deep Throat was FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt.

Woodward had befriended Felt years earlier, and had consulted with him on stories before the Watergate scandal. Woodward, Bernstein, and others credit the information provided by Deep Throat with being instrumental in ensuring the success of the investigation into the Watergate Scandal.