W. Mark Felt aka Deep Throat
For more than 30 years, W. Mark Felt, and three co-conspirators have protected his privacy after one of the most spectacular whistleblowing act in history.
He’s admitted to being Deep Throat in this Vanity Fair article. The Washington Post has coverage in “FBI’s No. 2 Was ‘Deep Throat’“, and
“Conflicted and Mum For Decades.”
I’ve got too much to do today to add much deep analysis, so I’ll simply say it was the strong privacy guarantees that Woodward and Bernstein gave, and kept, that enabled Felt to do what he believed was right. Such protection is under attack today, and we are poorer for it.
[Update: David Stephenson has an interesting post in which he mentions Frank Wills, the guard at the Watergate who noticed and reported the tape on the doorway.]