Deep Throat in an 1958 FBI pub­lic­i­ty pho­to. “From Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Felt1958.jpg

One of the great­est polit­i­cal mys­ter­ies of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry was revealed this week as “Van­i­ty Fair revealed the iden­ti­ty of Deep Throat”:http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/050530roco02, the gov­ern­ment informer who led Wash­ing­ton Post reporters onto the full scope of the Water­gate Scan­dal. Here’s the “Post’s own arti­cle on the revealing”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/31/AR2005053100655.html.
Although I was far too young to fol­low the events at the time, the _Washington Post_ sto­ries com­bined with the fol­lowup book and movie to cre­ate a pop­u­lar images of the fear­less inves­tiga­tive reporter, the show­dowy gov­ern­ment insid­er with unclear motives and the news­pa­per pub­lish­ers tak­ing a risk for the big story.
So it seems iron­ic that Deep Throat – no excuse me, W. Mark Felt, the num­ber two man at the FBI in the ear­ly 1970s – was a close assis­tant of the noto­ri­ous FBI head J. Edgar Hoover and was him­self con­vict­ed in 1980 for autho­riz­ing gov­ern­ment agents to break into homes of sus­pect­ed anti-Vietnam war pro­test­ers (look­ing for sus­pects from the rad­i­cal Weath­er Under­ground bombings).