Mark Felt , the most famous anonymous source in the history of journalism who was known to the world as `` Deep Throat '' , died yesterday aged 95 .
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mark felt famous anonymous source history journalism know world `` deep throat die yesterday age 95
Mark Felt , the most famous anonymous source in the history of journalism who was known to the world as `` Deep Throat '' , <m> died </m> yesterday aged 95 .
Mark Felt , the most famous anonymous source in the history of journalism who was known to the world as `` Deep Throat '' , <m> died </m> yesterday aged 95 .
As the associate director of the FBI , Mr Felt was outraged by the Nixon administration 's attempts to block its investigation of the Watergate scandal which ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 .
A master of counter-intelligence from his days tracking German WWII spies , he secretly helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pursue the story .
It was thirty four years before he finally broke cover , admitting in 2006:
`` I 'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat . ''
By then , he was so crippled by a stroke and Alzheimer 's disease that his memory of his role in US history had almost vanished .
From the first day of the bungled 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee 's headquarters in the Watergate hotel Mr Felt was at the heart of the FBI investigation .
The agency soon learned that the Nixon administration was running an extensive spying and sabotage campaign against its political enemies .
Under intense pressure from the White House to suppress its investigation , the FBI was starting to buckle .
A protagonist of the famous FBI director Herbert Hoover , the Mr Felt was already embittered for being passed over as his replacement .
When White House officials tried to block the FBI 's corruption investigation , he became infuriated with what he would call their 'switchblade mentality . '
A debonair man about town and incurable political gossip , Mr Felt was already known to Mr Woodward when he first reached out to him .
Soon he was arranging cloak and dagger meetings with the young reporters in darkened parking garages across the Potomac River .
The chain-smoking FBI-man provided an insight into the scale of the presidential scandal that was larger than anyone had imagined .
`` Deep Throat '' , the name given to him at the Washington Post , was a wordplay based on a well known pornographic movie and his insistence on remaining on `` deep background '' despite the sensational nature of his revelations .
From the outset President Nixon suspected him of being the leaker and five times ordered the FBI director Patrick Gray to fire him .
Felt 's adamant denials were convincing enough and he was never sacked .
Deep Throat continued to leak and on the assumption that he was being monitored he had elaborate procedures for contacting Mr Woodward .
When he had information to pass on , he would arrange meetings by circling the page number on page twenty of the reporter 's copy of The New York Times and then drawing the hands of a clock to signal the hour .
If Mr Woodward wanted to see him he would simply place a red flag in a flowerpot on the balcony of his P street apartment .
Over the course of the scandal , Deep Throat supplied crucial information for some 400 Washington Post stories .
The reporters went on to win a Pulitzer prize , journalism 's highest accolade .
A master of the black arts of disinformation , at FBI headquarters he alighted on a newspaper story for which he was not the source and ordered an investigation to find the leaker .
He then fingered a prosecutor as the source .
Mr Woodward wrote in his 2006 expose , `` Secret Man : The Story of Watergate 's Deep Throat '' that `` The memo was an effective cover for him , the very best counterintelligence tradecraft .
Not only had he initiated the leak inquiry , but Felt appeared to have discovered the leaker . ''
By then Deep Throat 's real identity had already been revealed in Vanity Fair magazine .
More than 30 years after Watergate and Mr Woodward confirmed the revelation , finally letting his secret out .
By then Mr Felt was suffering from dementia and had little or no memory of his role in history .
Though Deep Throat was a hero to the anti Vietnam War movement and the left , Mr Felt was no liberal .
A law and order crime-fighter , he ran the agency 's `` goon squad '' to monitor agents in the field .
He also advised Hollywood for its 1965 television series The FBI , ensuring that G-men were always shown in the most favourable light .
Long after Watergate he was convicted of running his own so called `` black bag '' burglaries of the radical Weather Underground movement .
He was later pardoned by President Ronald Reagan .
In a 1979 book , he bragged about the FBI 's bugging of the Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King and he vehemently opposed the hiring of women agents by the FBI .