Is there a "boiling point" for humans? Obviously there is. It is the focal point where when one feels wronged one is capable of detonating any bomb found in one's hands, only to seek revenge.
One such story is that of Mark Felt. The name may not tell you many things, but the "nickname" with which it went down in history will surely remind you of one of the biggest scandals in US history. It is the main "deep larynx". He is the one who opened as many doors as the Washington Post reporters needed to expose Richard Nixon's machinations.
Felt was not a random man. He was behind the "dark" and controversial FBI Director Edgar Hoover. The one who passionately served the American secret services. When he felt wronged he decided to declare war…
The Watergate scandal
Here things are more or less known. Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, five men broke into the Democratic Party headquarters inside the Watergate complex in Washington. A series of unfortunate incidents for them (and not only, as history has shown), lead them to their almost immediate arrest.
And from there on the paradoxes begin. Initially the burglars did not come in to take, but to leave. They placed bed bugs, which immediately made the police "whisper" that something was wrong.
At the same time, the burglars did not look like burglars. They were well dressed, had a lot of money on them, wore surgical gloves and had expensive cameras, radios, etc. in their possession.
The arrested are taken to the truck within a few hours and the first bomb "explodes" there. One of the defendants states, without thinking much, in front of the embarrassed judge, that his name is James McCord, and his profession is "CIA Security Advisor"!
From that moment on, everything was in the air and the situation smelled of gunpowder as many were already looking in the direction of the White House to find the perpetrator of the burglars.
A ruthless underground war of power
On May 2, 1972, the "dark" director of the FBI, Edgar Hoover, the man who had a special file for everyone in the United States, died in his sleep. As the news of his death becomes known, his decades-long collaborator and, in fact, No. 2 in the US intelligence hierarchy, Mark Felt, activates the plan that stipulated that from the moment Hoover died, a relevant "Cleanliness" in view of the next day in the service.
Hundreds of files are destroyed and so many others "mysteriously disappear". Felt, the man for all the FBI jobs for many decades, feels that it is finally his turn. Legally he had to take Hoover's place. And he knows the service from the outside and mixed up and he has the qualifications and he served his homeland with passion and self-denial.
What Felt did not anticipate, however, was the strange psychosynthesis of US President Richard Nixon, who constantly felt that everyone was conspiring against him.
So the death of the "uncontrollable" Hoover gives Nixon the opportunity to take full control of the FBI. And so, he ostentatiously ignores Felt and puts in the position of director the "skyscraper" Patrick Gray who was a man completely manipulated by Nixon.
Mark Felt felt the earth leave under his feet. He felt betrayed. Unjust and that was something Nixon would pay for with his own chair.
The "deep throat" and the real reasons for revealing a scandal
The bad thing about Nixon is that Felt was in the FBI for many decades (almost five) and he knew everyone and everything. Even with Patrick Gray as director, virtually everything was in his hands. Even the information about "Watergate".
Blurred Mark Felt is starting to leak details of the case to reporters. Every element that gave another push to the exit of the White House in Nixon.
The FBI is in a state of panic. The President of the USA demands that the informant be found and punished by example. The panicked Gray leans on Felt above all suspicion to locate the culprit. Information, however, continues to leak and grow exponentially. And they were not just about this scandal but also many other cases that revealed underground connections of White House executives with people from the underworld and the secret services that served Nixon's dark plans.
It was clear from the reports that the informant had selected two journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the "Washington Post", to give his information.
There are two answers to "why, a man like Felt with a high sense of responsibility and love for his service" does such a thing. An ideological one (always expressed by Felt himself and those around him) and a shallower one expressed by everyone else.
According to the first, Felt discovered many of Hoover's secret files that showed that the White House was immersed in the entanglement and thus protected his own country.
According to the second, motivated by a sense of revenge, Felt met Woodward in an underground car park and secret locations and gave him the details in order to "saw" Gray's chair, make him look incompetent and force the White House to admit the mistake and make him director of the FBI.
Nixon's resignation and revelation of who the "deep throat" is
All attempts to reveal the informant and stop the leaks were fruitless. The countdown for Nixon began on February 6, 1974, when Congress approved the investigation into the allegations against the US President. Then, with the revelations now taking the form of an avalanche, Nixon is accused of obstructing justice, a little later of abuse of power and finally of disrespect to Congress. Finally, on August 8, 1974, Nixon resigned through a televised sermon.
Felt resigned from the FBI in June 1973. The two journalists had protected their source and never said his name. He did, however, about 30 years later, in 2005 (just three years before he died) in an article in Vanity Fair, saying "I am the 'deep throat'"!
For the record alone, it is worth mentioning that the two Washington Post journalists, initially in their texts, referred to Felt as a "friendly person" and a "well-known informed source". Harry Rosenfeld, however, the then director of internal reporting at the newspaper, had said that these names were very common and did not fit into revelations of this magnitude, and suggested (and almost forced) that the informant be given the title of the title of the hardcore porn film. by Linda Lovelace (The deep throat) who then "broke" funds throughout America.