I am the guy they called Deep Throat: ex-FBI man, now 91

Now, an ailing and aging former FBI agent in California, W Mark Felt, has told Vanity Fair magazine that he was the one who leaked certain secrets about Nixon’s Watergate coverup to the Washington Post reporters.

‘‘I’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat,’’ Felt told John D O’Connor, a lawyer and the author of the Vanity Fair article, the magazine said today in a Press release. Felt, who is 91 and living in Santa Rosa, California, was the second-in-command at the Federal Bureau Investigation in the early 1970’s.

According to the magazine, Felt kept the secret even from his family until 2002, when he confided the information to a friend.

Felt reportedly gave O’Connor permission to disclose his identity in the magazine’s July issue.

‘‘The Felt family cooperated fully, providing old photographs for the story and agreeing to sit for portraits,’’ Vanity Fair said in its Press release.

The Washington Post had no comment on the Vanity Fair article. Bernstein released a statement to MSNBC that declined to confirm Felt’s claim.

For years, Woodward and Bernstein have refused to identify Deep Throat, even as others have speculated about who their source could have been. Felt’s name has often been on the shortlist of likely suspects, but he has denied it in the past.

In the book they co-authored, on which the movie was based, the two reporters described Deep Throat — a name inspired by a notorious pornographic film of that era — as a chain-smoking man who moved a flower pot on his apartment balcony to let them know when he wanted to meet them with new information. Trying to guess his identity became a Washington parlor game, and has been the subject of books, academic studies and even website chatter.

Over the years, the list of likely suspects has included former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, former Watergate prosecutor Earl Silbert and former White House aides Pat Buchanan, Ron Ziegler and David Gergen. Others suggested Deep Throat was not one person, but actually a composite of several people.

Besides Deep Throat himself, only three other people reportedly know the source’s true identity. They are Bernstein and Woodward, and Ben Bradlee, then the executive editor of the Washington Post. They have maintained since that time that they would reveal Deep Throat’s true identity when he died.

‘‘We’ve said all along that when the source, known as Deep Throat, dies, we will reveal his identity, and explain at great length all of our dealings with that individual and context of that relationship,’’ Bernstein said in his statement.

‘‘Beyond that,’’ he said, ‘‘when there have been articles, books, speculations, classes of university journalism students, we’ve always said the same thing. That we’re not going to say anything because we have an obligation to all our sources, to whom we gave our word that they will remain confidential, including Deep Throat, until their deaths’’.

Felt was quoted by Vanity Fair as saying at one point to his son, Mark Jr.: ‘‘I don’t think (being Deep Throat) was anything to be proud of. You (should) not leak information to anyone.’’

In 1999, Felt denied to the Hartford Courant that he was Deep Throat.

‘‘I would have done better,’’ he said, ‘‘I would have been more effective. Deep Throat didn’t exatly bring the White House crashing down, did he?’’

New York Times