Washington ? Deep Throat, the secret source whose insider guidance was vital to The Washington Post’s groundbreaking coverage of the Watergate scandal, was a pillar of the FBI named W. Mark Felt, The Post confirmed on Tuesday.

As the No. 2 man at the bureau during a period when the FBI was battling for its independence against the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, Felt had the means and the motive to help uncover the web of internal spies, secret surveillance, dirty tricks and coverups that led to Nixon’s unprecedented resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, and to prison sentences for some of Nixon’s highest-ranking aides.

Felt’s identity as Washington’s most celebrated secret source has been an object of speculation for more than 30 years until Tuesday, when his role was revealed in a Vanity Fair magazine article. Even Nixon was caught on tape speculating that Felt was “an informer” as early as February 1973, at a time when Deep Throat was actively supplying confirmation and context for some of The Post’s most explosive Watergate stories.

But Felt’s repeated denials, and the stalwart silence of the reporters he aided – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – kept the cloak of mystery drawn up around Deep Throat. In place of a name and a face, the source acquired a magic and a mystique.

Better than fiction

He was the romantic truth-teller half-hidden in the shadows of a Washington parking garage. This image was rendered indelibly by the dramatic best-selling memoir Woodward and Bernstein published in 1974, “All the President’s Men.” Two years later, in a blockbuster movie by the same name, actor Hal Holbrook breathed whispery urgency into the suspenseful late-night encounters between Woodward and his source.

For many Americans under 40, this is the most potent distillation of the complicated brew that was Watergate. Students who lack the time or interest to follow each element of the scandal’s slow unraveling quickly digest the vivid relationship of a nervous insider guiding a relentless reporter. As dramatic as those portrayals were, they hewed closely to the truth, Woodward said.

“Mark Felt at that time was a dashing gray-haired figure,” Woodward said, and his experience as an anti-Nazi spyhunter early in his career at the FBI had endowed him with a whole bag of counterintelligence tricks. Felt dreamed up the signal by which Woodward would summon him to a meeting (a flower-pot innocuously displayed on the reporter’s balcony) and also hatched the counter-sign by which Felt could contact Woodward (a clock face inked on page 20 of Woodward’s daily New York Times).

Bob Woodward, left, and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, arrive at Woodward's home in Washington. In a statement issued Tuesday, Woodward and Bernstein confirmed that former FBI official W. Mark Felt was Deep

“He knew he was taking a monumental risk,” said Woodward, now an assistant managing editor of The Post whose catalog of prizewinning and best-selling work has been built on the sort of confidential relationships he maintained with Deep Throat. Felt also knew, by firsthand experience, that Nixon’s administration was willing to use wiretaps and break-ins to hunt down leakers, so no amount of caution was too great.

Overstated role?

Indeed, the mystery came to obscure the many other elements that went into the Watergate story – other sources, other investigators, high-impact Senate hearings, a shocking trove of secret White House tape recordings and the decisive intervention of a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court.

“Felt’s role in all this can be overstated,” said Bernstein, who went on after Watergate to a career of books, magazine articles and television investigations. “When we wrote the book, we didn’t think his role would achieve such mythical dimensions. You see there that Felt/Deep Throat largely confirmed information we had already gotten from other sources.”

Felt, 91 and enfeebled by a stroke, lives in California, his memory dimmed. For decades, Woodward, Bernstein and Benjamin C. Bradlee, The Post’s executive editor during the Watergate coverage, maintained that they would not disclose his identity until after his death. “We’ve kept that secret because we keep our word,” Woodward said.

The secrecy held through some amazing twists of fate. In 1980, Felt and another senior FBI veteran were convicted of conspiring a decade earlier to violate the civil rights of domestic dissidents in the Weather Underground movement; President Ronald Reagan then issued a pardon.

Change of heart

Tuesday, however, Vanity Fair released an article by a California attorney named John D. O’Connor, who was enlisted by Felt’s daughter, Joan Felt, to help coax her father into admitting his role in history. O’Connor’s article quoted a number of Felt’s friends and family members saying that he had shared his secret with them, and went on to say that Felt told the author – under the shield of attorney-client privilege – “I’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat.”

President Richard Nixon says goodbye outside the White House, Aug. 9, 1974, as he prepares to board a helicopter for a flight to nearby Andrews Air Force Base. W. Mark Felt, 91, a former FBI official, was revealed Tuesday to be Deep

O’Connor wrote that he was released from his obligation of secrecy by Mark Felt and Joan Felt. He also reported that the Felt family was not paid for cooperating with the Vanity Fair article, though they do hope the revelation will “make at least enough money to pay some bills,” as Joan Felt is quoted in the magazine.

Post verifies story

Woodward and others at The Post were caught by surprise. Woodward had known that Felt’s family was considering going public; in fact, they had talked repeatedly with Woodward about the possibility of jointly writing a book to reveal the news. An e-mail from Felt’s family over the Memorial Day weekend continued to hold out the idea that Woodward and Felt would disclose the secret together.

Throughout those contacts, Woodward was dogged by reservations about Felt’s mental condition, he said Tuesday, wondering whether the source was competent to undo the long-standing pledge of anonymity that bound them.

Caught flatfooted by Vanity Fair’s announcement, Woodward and Bernstein initially issued a terse statement reaffirming their promise to keep the secret until Deep Throat died. But the Vanity Fair article was enough to bring the current executive editor of The Post, Leonard Downie Jr., back to Washington from a corporate retreat in Maryland. After consulting with Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee, “the newspaper decided that the newspaper had been released from its obligation by Mark Felt’s family and by his lawyer, through the publication of this piece,” Downie said. “They revealed him as the source. We confirmed it.”