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"Deep Throat" dies

Anyone who lived through the years of the Nixon presidency and the whole Watergate scandal - including the revelations by the then unknown Woodward and Bernstein in the Washington Post of the Nixon machinations - will have known of "Deep Throat".

Perhaps one of those "funny" coincidences, but with the release of a the movie Frost / Nixon, it has been announced that "Deep Throat" has just died. The IHT reports:

"W. Mark Felt, who was the No. 2 official at the FBI when he helped bring down President Richard 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, California.

His death was confirmed by Rob Jones, his grandson.

In 2005, Felt revealed that he was the source who had secretly supplied Bob Woodward of The Washington Post with crucial leads in the Watergate affair in the early 1970s. His 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."

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