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'Deep Throat' To Deep Pockets?

"Deep Throat" could become deep pockets if he can pull together a compelling story of his role as a source on Watergate for The Washington Post.

Publishing industry sources interviewed by The Wall Street Journal said that W. Mark Felt's tale could fetch a book advance of more than $1 million.

But in order to get that kind of money, the former FBI official will have to convince publishers he has taut, suspenseful tale to tell.

"What he's got to do is team up with a writer known for suspenseful narratives," literary agent Richard Pine told the Journal. "He'll need a writer that a publisher knows will deliver a good tale in the right way."

In the past, Felt expressed reservations about revealing his identity, and about whether his actions were appropriate for an FBI man, his grandson said on Tuesday. However, his family members thought otherwise and were behind convincing him to come forward, reports CBS News Correspondent Wyatt Andrews.

His daughter, Joan, also argued that he could "make enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I've run up for the children's education."

At age 91, after decades of hiding his role as The Washington Post's tipster from politicians, the public and even his family, Felt finally told his secret to a lawyer his family had consulted on whether Felt should come forward.

The attorney, John O'Connor, then wrote a Vanity Fair magazine article revealing Felt's disclosure, and within hours of the story's release Tuesday, Felt's family and the Post confirmed it.

"I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat," Vanity Fair quoted Felt, the former No. 2 man at the FBI, as saying.

On CBS News' The Early Show, O'Connor said that Felt told The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein because he was sworn to uphold the law and that those around him were obstructing the investigation he was trying to do.

"He knew that everyone else was obstructing this investigation, and he had to go around the power structure that was doing the obstruction," he told Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith.

O'Connor added that Felt now thinks he did the right thing.

"Over the last I'd say six to nine months he's come to accept himself as a hero," O'Connor said.

"It's the last secret" of the story, said Ben Bradlee, the paper's top editor at the time the riveting political drama played out three decades ago.

Felt lives in Santa Rosa, Calif., and is said to be in poor mental and physical health because of a stroke. His family did not immediately make him available for comment, asking the news media horde gathered outside his home to respect his privacy "in view of his age and health."

"The family believes that my grandfather, Mark Felt Sr., is a great American hero who went well above and beyond the call of duty at much risk to himself to save his country from a horrible injustice," Felt's grandson, Nick Jones, said, reading a family statement. "We all sincerely hope the country will see him this way as well."

Watergate reporters Woodward and Bernstein said in a statement: "W. Mark Felt was 'Deep Throat' and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage. However, as the record shows, many other sources and officials assisted us and other reporters for the hundreds of stories that were written in The Washington Post about Watergate."

For many, Felt's admission answers one of the biggest questions in American politics and journalism: Who was the source so fearful he'd be found out by the Nixon White House that he insisted on secret signals rather than phone calls to arrange meetings with the Post reporters, a man portrayed as a cigarette-smoking bundle of nerves by Hal Holbrook in the 1970s movie "All the President's Men"?

"A good secret deserves a decent burial and this one is going to get a state funeral," Leonard Garment, acting special counsel to President Nixon after the Watergate story broke and author of the book "In Search of Deep Throat."

For some, it raises new questions.

"I never thought he was in the loop to have the information," John Dean, counsel in Nixon's White House and the government's top informant in the Watergate investigation, told The Associated Press. "How in the world could Felt have done it alone?"

"He had the trust of America's leaders and to think that he betrayed that trust is hard for me to fathom," said Nixon chief counsel Charles Colson, who worked closely with Felt in the Nixon administration and served prison time in the Watergate scandal.

CBS News Correspondent Mark Knoller reports that the White House followed the revelations with interest. Spokesman Scott McClellan said the White House would leave the analysis on whether Felt was a hero or a villain to others.

The scandal that brought Nixon's resignation began with a burglary and attempted tapping of phones in Democratic Party offices at the Watergate office building in Washington during Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign. It went on to include disclosures of covert Nixon administration spying on and retaliating against a host of perceived enemies. But the most devastating disclosure was the president's own role in trying to cover-up his administration's involvement.

Among other things, Deep Throat urged Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money trail — from the financing of burglars who broke into the Democratic National Committee offices to the financing of Nixon's re-election campaign.

Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee had kept the identity of Deep Throat secret at his request, saying his name would be revealed upon his death. But then Felt revealed it himself, a move that startled Woodward and the Post, the newspaper reported.

Even the existence of Deep Throat, nicknamed for an X-rated movie of the early 1970s, was kept secret for a time. Woodward and Bernstein revealed their reporting had been aided by a Nixon administration source in their best-selling book "All the President's Men." Felt's name doesn't appear there.



In a story on Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt, on the Tuesday, May 31, Evening News, Correspondent Jim Axelrod said, "the new game for people like Chuck Colson, the Nixon aide who did seven months in prison for his role in the Watergate break-in, is to explain why leaking to Woodward and Bernstein made Felt a bum."

Colson actually pleaded guilty to Watergate-related charges, not the break-in itself. He admitted to obstructing justice in the Daniel Ellsberg case. He served seven months of a 1-3 year federal prison sentence.

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