Biography

Mark Felt grew up in a modest Idaho home. He graduated from the University of Idaho and attended George Washington University Law School. Felt joined the FBI in 1942 and worked his way up to become assistant director to J. Edgar Hoover in 1965, succeeding to the No. 2 position of Associate Director upon Hoover's death. In 1972, after a break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex, the FBI began investigating the White House for potential cover-up and surveillance activities. Two reporters at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, pieced together the Watergate conspiracy with the help of an anonymous informant named 'Deep Throat.' Their reporting eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974, and the indictment of over two dozen people in the Nixon administration. Woodward and Bernstein, however, kept Deep Throat's identity a closely-guarded secret.

For three decades, the identity of Deep Throat was modern journalism's greatest unsolved mystery. Dozens of books speculated on Deep Throat's identity, and a long list of names was guessed over the years. As for Felt, he retired from the FBI and moved to northern California. Though he had originally planned for his secret identity to be revealed only after his death, he came forward at his family's urging on May 31, 2005 in a Vanity Fair article. Felt revealed, at the age of 91, that he was the infamous Deep Throat.