Woodward tells how FBI man became Deep Throat

A CHANCE encounter in 1970 grew into a friendship that became the Deep Throat source that helped bring down Richard Nixon, reporter Bob Woodward wrote in The Washington Post yesterday.

Woodward said he was a young Navy lieutenant on an errand at the White House when he first met Mark Felt, who was unveiled this week as the instrumental source for the Post’s Watergate stories written by Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

“I asked Felt for his phone number and he gave me the direct line to his office,” Woodward wrote. He said he came to regard the senior FBI official as a friend and a mentor and kept in touch with him. Felt was promoted to the No 3 position at the FBI in July 1971, about a year before J. Edgar Hoover’s death and the Watergate break-in, and two months before Woodward joined The Washington Post.