Woodward and Bernstein were reporters for The Washington Post, and Deep Throat provided key details about the involvement of U.S. president Richard Nixon's administration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal.

Deep Throat was first introduced to the public in the February 1974 book All the President's Men by The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

According to the authors, Deep Throat was a key source of information behind a series of articles that introduced the misdeeds of the Nixon administration to the general public.

[1] For more than 30 years, Deep Throat's identity was one of the biggest mysteries of American politics and journalism and the source of much public curiosity and speculation.

J. Anthony Lukas speculated that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt in his book Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (1976), based on three New York Times Sunday Magazine articles, but he was widely criticized.

According to an article in Slate on April 28, 2003, Woodward had denied that Deep Throat was part of the "intelligence community" in a 1989 Playboy interview with Lukas.

After the Vanity Fair story broke, Woodward, Bernstein, and Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Post's executive editor during Watergate, confirmed Felt's identity as Deep Throat.

In their possession were $2,300 (equivalent to $16,800 today), plastic gloves to hide fingerprints, burglary tools, a walkie-talkie and radio scanner capable of listening to police frequencies, cameras with 40 rolls of film, tear gas guns, multiple electronic devices which they intended to plant in the Democratic Committee offices, and notebooks containing the telephone number of White House official E. Howard Hunt.

One of the men was James W. McCord Jr.;[4] a former Central Intelligence Agency employee and a security man for Nixon's Committee for the Re-Election of the President, later notoriously mocked with the acronym "CREEP".

The book also calls him "an incurable gossip" and states "in a unique position to observe the Executive Branch", and as a man "whose fight had been worn out in too many battles".

Woodward claimed that he would signal to "Deep Throat" that he desired a meeting by moving a flowerpot with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment.

In 2014, the garage was scheduled to be demolished, though the county decided to save the historical marker, and the landowner promised to design a memorial commemorating the Watergate scandal.

Woodward, however, has stated that in the early 1970s the interior courtyard was an alleyway and had not yet been bricked off and that his balcony was visible from street level to passing pedestrians.

[8] In public statements following the disclosure of his identity, Felt's family called him an "American hero", stating that he leaked information about the Watergate scandal to The Washington Post for moral and patriotic reasons.

[10] Although Deep Throat's identity was unconfirmed for over 30 years, there were suspicions that Felt was indeed the reporters' mysterious source long before the public acknowledgment in 2005.

In turn, Petersen revealed the information to White House Counsel John W. Dean,[12] who finally reported it to President Richard Nixon.

[citation needed] Using this and other widespread clues, real or perceived, some members of the press and the public came to suspect Felt of being Deep Throat.

[15] Writer Nora Ephron became obsessed with figuring out the secret of Deep Throat's identity and eventually correctly concluded that he was Mark Felt.

[16] In 1999, a 19-year-old college student, Chase Culeman-Beckman, claimed that Bernstein's son, Jacob, told him Mark Felt was Deep Throat.

Ephron explained that Jacob overheard her "speculations"; Carl Bernstein himself also immediately stepped forward to reject the claim, as he and Woodward did for many others.

[17] James Mann, who had worked at the Post at the time of Watergate scandal and was close to the investigation, brought a great deal of evidence together in a 1992 article in The Atlantic Monthly.

[20] In 1976, Assistant Attorney General John Stanley Pottinger had convened a grand jury to investigate a series of potentially illegal break-ins Felt authorized against various dissident groups.

"There are plenty of people claiming they knew Deep Throat was actually former FBI man Mark Felt ..." the New York Post reported.

But others had received more attention over the years, such as Pat Buchanan, Henry Kissinger, then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist, General Alexander Haig, and, before "Deep Throat" was confirmed a man, Diane Sawyer.

On June 2, 2005, The Washington Post ran a lengthy front-page column by Woodward in which he detailed his friendship with Felt in the years before Watergate.

"[25] Prior to Felt's revelation and Woodward's confirmation, part of the reason historians and other scholars had so much difficulty in identifying the real Deep Throat is that no single person seemed to truly fit the character described in All the President's Men.

[26] From a literary business perspective, this theory was further supported by David Obst, the agent who originally marketed the draft for All the President's Men, who stated that the initial typescript of the book contained no reference to Deep Throat.

[27] Gray wrote that he contacted Stephen Mielke, the archivist who oversees the Woodward-Bernstein collection at the University of Texas, who said that a carbon copy of the paper contained a note in Woodward's handwriting attributing the interview to Donald Santarelli, an official with the Department of Justice during the Watergate era.