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i just read it too on CNN...i know that Bob Woodward has written deep throat's obit, and was waiting to publish it at the appropriate time. i would like to know the truth also.

CeltWmn wrote: I just saw on the news Deep Throat is W. Mark Felt(s). Interesting. I never thought that would happen. He's 91 now, and his family thought they should tell who he was before he died. What do you think? Have i missed something??

Popeye wrote: I thought it was Linda Lovelace. :-3:yh_laugh I thought it was the Bush Daughters...........

Mark Felt had (with maybe a dozen other people) the means, the motive and the opportunity. As a top career FBI man, he would have been naturally disgusted at the interference run from the White House team against the Watergate investigation he was responsible for - the fact that he had hoped to succeed Hoover in 1972 needn't come into it.

The White House tapes show Nixon blaspheming about Mark Felt on occasion, which shows his instincts were still well honed. He'd appointed L Patrick Gray as acting director over Felt, and that might have been enough to keep the lid in place. What circumvented the cap was Deep Throat, and Alexander Butterfield letting slip - deliberately, I thought at the time, and more so since - the existence of the Oval Office taping system which Nixon had put in place.

Reading the Vanity Fair article, I'm not convinced that Mr Felt is capable of deciding any longer whether he either wants to retain or discard anonymity. It seems likely that he's been accurately outed, though. There will be colleagues from the time who agree with his initial assessment that to have leaked was unprofessional.

This just arrived in my email, from Daniel Ellsberg's mailing list:

Edited comments by Daniel on the Pat Thurston Show, KSRO, Santa Rosa, CA:

Mark Felt understandably felt a conflict of loyalties here, to his secrecy oath, his agency, and to the president on one hand, and on the other hand, to the Constitution, which is what he and I had taken an oath to. We don't take an oath to a commander-in-chief, we take an oath to uphold the Constitution in this country. That was clearly being violated by the president, who could not be held accountable without an insider like Felt revealing what he knew.

So, I'm very glad he did it, he did the right thing, and I'd like to see him get a Pulitzer Prize from the journalistic profession.

THURSTON: There's a good possibility that there are members of his family that are listening to us as we speak right now, since he's a member of our community. He may be listening himself.

ELLSBERG: I want to congratulate him and thank him. I think he's a hero. I think he acted courageously, and rightly, and I do understand that he has mixed feelings about that, even now, because it's clear from the Vanity Fair article that he still has great loyalty to his agency, the FBI, and to his service, and probably to other presidents that he served. But he was right in realizing that his loyalty to the Constitution and the country overrode his loyalty to a president who was abusing his office. So I want to thank him.

Please could somebody explain / tell us more about this as it seem to have passed the UK by (or at least me)