ABSTRACT
In 1972 when the Washington Post's Bob Woodward met the man known at the time simply as Deep Throat for a briefing on what to look for next in his Watergate investigation of President Richard Nixon, he took the kind of precautions which kept the identity of his source secret for 30 years. The famous rendezvous between Woodward and the deputy director of the FBI, Mark Felt, took place close enough to the centre of Washington to be accessible, without being somewhere they might easily be seen by people they knew. As deputy chief of the FBI – America's counter-intelligence agency whose job it is to catch foreign spies – it might be expected that Felt would be used to living in the shadows and remaining anonymous. Woodward too had no doubt learned skills in the US Navy, where he had top-secret security clearances in cryptography before turning to journalism.
