 Mark Felt, the former FBI second-in-command who revealed himself as "Deep Throat" 30 years after he tipped off reporters about the Watergate scandal that toppled a president, has died at the age of 95.
Family friends said Felt died on Thursday of congestive heart failure in Santa Rosa, California, after several months of failing health.
Carl Bernstein is the reporter from the Washington Post who broke stories about the scandal with his colleague, Bob Woodward, a then close friend of Felt.
"It's always a question of trying to drag out of a source, including this one, information. And in very brief encounters - there were probably less than a dozen times that Bob talked or met with Mark Felt in the course of two years - and each time, time was of the essence. It was hard to get the information."
Felt, a former associate director at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, secretly guided Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they pursued stories stemming from the 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington.
President Richard Nixon ultimately resigned in 1974 as a consequence of the White House role in the scandal and the cover-up that followed.
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