Identity of ‘Deep Throat’ Is an Enduring Mystery

Richard Nixon is dead, Katharine Graham is dead, even Linda Lovelace is dead.

But Deep Throat? Still alive, and still a secret more than a quarter-century after his guidance helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein break the Watergate story and unseat a president.

John Dean says he knows Deep Throat’s identity. And the former White House counsel, whose testimony against Nixon was a key moment in the saga, says he will reveal all in “The Deep Throat Brief.” The electronic book will be published June 17, the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in.

“He’s pretty certain he knows who it is,” said Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of the online magazine Salon, which will offer Dean’s book.

Of course, Dean was pretty certain in 1975, when he said Deep Throat was Earl J. Silbert, a Watergate prosecutor. And he was pretty certain in 1982, when he named Alexander M. Haig, who was Nixon’s chief of staff and Ronald Reagan’s secretary of State.

Silbert and Haig denied it. This is to be expected. Everyone denies being Deep Throat. Including, Woodward says, Deep Throat.

The shadowy source “was risking a great deal personally and professionally,” he said in 1997. Washington cannot abide a secret, especially one Dean has called “the best-kept secret in the history of the capital.” So while the particulars of Deep Throat’s exploits have faded in memory for many Americans, for others--politicians, historians and journalists--speculation about his identity remains a favorite parlor game.

Nixon was not immune. Monica Crowley, a young aide to the former president for four years before his death in 1994, quoted Nixon as saying Deep Throat was “someone on the inside.... One person who thought he had a lot to gain by spilling his guts to those two guys,” someone who wanted to be seen as a liberal because he wanted “a media career.”

Most of the public only came to know Deep Throat through “All the President’s Men,” the 1974 book by Woodward and Bernstein, and through the 1976 film based on the book in which the source was played by Hal Holbrook.

“Woodward had a source in the executive branch who had access to information at [the Committee to Re-Elect the President] as well as at the White House. His identity was unknown to anyone else,” the book says.

Woodward promised he would never identify the source or quote him, even anonymously.