William Mark Felt Sr. (August 17, 1913 – December 18, 2008) was an American law enforcement officer who worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1942 to 1973 and was the informant known as "Deep Throat" in the Watergate scandal.
After working in several FBI field offices and ascending through the ranks, Felt became the bureau's deputy director following J. Edgar Hoover's death in mid-1972. While his only superior was on sick leave, he provided two Washington Post reporters information about the Watergate scandal under the pseudonym "Deep Throat". He resigned in mid-1973 under suspicions that he was the informant. In 1980, he was convicted of having violated the civil rights of people thought to be associated with members of the Weather Underground, having ordered FBI agents to break into their homes and search the premises as part of an attempt to prevent bombings. He was ordered to pay a fine, but was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan during his appeal.
In 2005, at age 91, Felt revealed to Vanity Fair magazine that during his tenure as Deputy Director of the FBI he was Deep Throat, who provided The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein critical information about the Watergate scandal, ultimately leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Woodward, who had long vowed not to reveal Deep Throat's identity while the source was still alive, quickly confirmed Felt's claim. Though Felt's identity as Deep Throat was suspected, including by Nixon himself, it had generally remained a secret for 30 years. Felt finally acknowledged that he was Deep Throat after being persuaded by his daughter to reveal his identity before his death.
Felt published a memoir, The FBI Pyramid (1979), which was updated and republished as A G-Man's Life, with John O'Connor, in 2006. In 2012, the FBI released Felt's personnel file covering the period from 1941 to 1978. The agency also released files pertaining to an extortion threat made against Felt in 1956.
Born on August 17, 1913, in Twin Falls, Idaho, Felt was the son of Rose R. Dygert and Mark Earl Felt, a carpenter and building contractor. His paternal grandfather was a Free Will Baptist minister. His maternal grandparents were born in Canada and Scotland. Through his maternal grandfather, Felt was collaterally descended from Revolutionary War general Nicholas Herkimer of New York.
After graduating from Twin Falls High School in 1931, Felt attended the University of Idaho in Moscow. He was a member and president of the Gamma Gamma chapter of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1935.
Felt then went to Washington, D.C., to work in the office of Democratic US senator James P. Pope. In 1938, Felt married Audrey Robinson of Gooding, Idaho, whom he had known when they were students at the University of Idaho. She had come to Washington to work at the Internal Revenue Service. Their wedding was officiated by the chaplain of the United States House of Representatives, the Rev. James Shera Montgomery.
Felt stayed on with Pope's successor in the Senate, David Worth Clark (D-Idaho). He then attended the George Washington University Law School at night, earning his J.D. degree in 1940 and being admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1941.
Upon graduation, Felt took a position at the Federal Trade Commission but did not enjoy his work. His workload was very light, and he was assigned to investigate whether a toilet paper brand, called "Red Cross", was misleading consumers into thinking it was endorsed by the American Red Cross. Felt wrote in his memoir:
My research, which required days of travel and hundreds of interviews, produced two definite conclusions:
1. Most people did use toilet tissue.
2. Most people did not appreciate being asked about it.
That was when I started looking for other employment.
He applied for a job with the FBI in 1941 and was accepted.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover often moved Bureau agents around so they would have wide experience in the field. This was typical of other agencies and corporations of the time. Felt observed that Hoover "wanted every agent to get into any field office at any time. Since he [Hoover] had never been transferred and did not have a family, he had no idea of the financial and personal hardship involved."
After completing 16 weeks of training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and FBI Headquarters in Washington, Felt was assigned to Texas, spending three months each in the field offices in Houston and San Antonio. He returned to FBI Headquarters, where he was assigned to the Espionage Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division, tracking down spies and saboteurs during World War II. He worked on the Major Case Desk. His most notable counterintelligence work was on the "Peasant" case. Helmut Goldschmidt, operating under the codename "Peasant", was a German agent in custody in England. Under Felt's direction, his Nazi superiors were led to believe that "Peasant" had made his way to the US, and thus were fed disinformation on Allied plans.
The Espionage Section was abolished in May 1945 after V-E Day. After the war, Felt was assigned to the Seattle field office. After two years of general work, he spent another two as a firearms instructor and was promoted from agent to supervisor. Upon passage of the Atomic Energy Act and the creation of the US Atomic Energy Commission, the Seattle office became responsible for completing background checks of workers at the Hanford plutonium plant near Richland, Washington. Felt oversaw those investigations. In 1954 Felt returned briefly to Washington as an inspector's aide. Two months later, he was sent to New Orleans as Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge of the field office. When he was transferred to Los Angeles fifteen months later, he held the same rank there.
In 1956, Felt was transferred to Salt Lake City and promoted to Special Agent-in-Charge. The Salt Lake City office included Nevada within its purview, and Felt oversaw some of the bureau's earliest investigations into organized crime, assessing the Mob's operations in the Reno and Las Vegas casinos. (It was Hoover's, and therefore the bureau's, official position at the time that there was no such thing as the Mob.) In February 1958, Felt was assigned to Kansas City, Missouri (which he dubbed "the Siberia of field offices" in his memoir), where he directed further investigations of organized crime. By this time, Hoover had come to believe in organized crime, in the wake of the infamous conclave of underworld bosses in November 1957 in Apalachin, New York.