[Mb-civic] Deep Throat's Other Secret - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Deep Throat's Other Secret
Watergate Source's New Book Reveals His Wife Committed Suicide

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 22, 2006; C04

W. Mark Felt, who for nearly 33 years denied that he was Deep Throat, 
also held a tragic secret from his family: It was suicide, not a heart 
attack, that felled his wife after years of strain from Felt's FBI 
career and ensuing legal troubles.

In his new book, "A G-Man's Life: The FBI, 'Deep Throat' and the 
Struggle for Honor in Washington," Felt reveals for the first time that 
Audrey Robinson Felt, his wife of 46 years, shot herself in 1984 with 
his .38 service revolver after a long emotional and physical decline.

Co-authored with John O'Connor, the lawyer whose Vanity Fair article 
last year revealed Felt as Deep Throat, the book also reveals Felt's 
discomfort with the famous moniker given him by Bob Woodward and Carl 
Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story 
and brought down President Richard Nixon.

And the book tells of Felt's deep anger at what he believed was 
Woodward's violation of their source-reporter relationship. Felt did not 
want to be described in any way in print, but Woodward both described 
him and called him "Deep Throat" in 1974 in "All the President's Men."

"Mark has never seen himself as a chatterbox who gave up secrets," 
writes O'Connor in a lengthy introduction.

"If this book does nothing else, let it destroy that caricature. Deep 
Throat was a journalistic joke; the name never described Mark Felt. 
After Woodward revealed that he had a senior source in the executive 
branch, thereby breaking his agreement with Mark Felt, and after the 
journalist identified his confidant as 'Deep Throat,' the retired FBI 
man was furious -- slamming down the phone when Woodward called for his 
reaction" to the 1974 book.

In "The Secret Man," Woodward's 2005 book on Felt's outing as Deep 
Throat, Woodward also describes Felt's anger at "All the President's 
Men." Felt had wanted their agreement to be "inviolate," Woodward wrote. 
But Woodward wrote that he thought he had "some leeway" because Felt had 
not previously objected to Woodward's other published references to the 
secret source.

Though the Felt book appears well after Woodward's, it provides the 
unique perspective of "Watergate in the words of the person most 
responsible along with Woodward for exposing these massive crimes," 
O'Connor said in an interview.

Felt, now 92, suffers from dementia. He was hospitalized with a fever 
even as his book was about to go on sale.

He had been reluctant to publish a book on his secret identity. But his 
daughter, Joan Felt, convinced him by saying a book could potentially 
make enough money to pay off some of his grandsons' school bills.

Shortly after Felt publicly revealed his identity last year, he 
laughingly told the press staked out at his Santa Rosa, Calif., home 
that he planned to "write a book or something and get all the money I can."

The book is based on his 1979 memoir, "The FBI Pyramid From the Inside," 
as well as a manuscript he prepared in the 1980s with his son, W. Mark 
Felt Jr., -- before he publicly revealed himself as Deep Throat. It also 
is based on FBI memos, recollections and interviews conducted by his family.

O'Connor, a former U.S. attorney in San Francisco who now is in private 
practice there, adds to Felt's own writings and recollections. In an 
introduction and epilogue, O'Connor puts into context Felt's many 
secrets and how he kept them, against the backdrop of Watergate and the 
malfeasance for which Felt himself was responsible.

"In the FBI, agents learned to keep secrets and compartmentalize, and 
nobody built more compartments than Mark Felt," O'Connor writes. "He 
isolated his family life from his Bureau life, hid aspects of his 
personal life and aspects of his professional life, and of course walled 
off his secret identity from his public identity."

Scandal engulfed him and his family when, after Watergate, he was 
prosecuted for ordering "black bag jobs," or secret, warrantless 
break-ins that in 1972 and 1973 targeted friends and relatives of 
Weather Underground members. His wife could not bear the trial. She 
attended only its first day. Even after Felt's 1980 conviction and his 
subsequent pardon by President Ronald Reagan, her health and stability 
continued to decline.

She had endured years of stress: moving the two Felt children from city 
to city to keep up with their father's career, being estranged from her 
daughter, Joan, who lived a countercultural lifestyle under the sway of 
a Northern California guru. Alcohol also played a role in Audrey Felt's 
decline, the book says.

Upon finding his wife's body in the guest bath of their Washington-area 
apartment, Felt phoned his son.

But as he had done for most of his life as an FBI man and a secret 
source on Watergate, O'Connor writes, Felt "immediately 
compartmentalized the family tragedy. Sitting with his son at a table 
for hours, the father decreed that the suicide would be kept a strict 
secret, even from Joan. Mark did not want to burden the family or the 
family history with the record of the suicide. The cover story would be 
that Audrey died of a sudden heart attack."

Though Felt portrays the strain his wife suffered as an FBI wife, he 
ultimately blamed the government, O'Connor writes, "charging it with 
killing his wife."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101858.html?nav=hcmodule
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