When a monthly magazine caught The Post by surprise

The initial reaction was not to comment. But at 5.29 p.m., the newspaper confirmed on its website that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat. ‘‘It really landed on us,’’ said Benjamin C. Bradlee, The Post’s executive editor during the Watergate era. ‘‘I had no idea it was coming.’’

The surprise stemmed partly from the fact that The Post had pledged to Felt to keep his identity secret until he died. Moreover, Vanity Fair, which has a policy of fact-checking articles before they are printed, had not contacted the Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, deliberately, it turns out.

Tom Wilkinson, an assistant managing editor at the newspaper, said the reaction at the paper was surprise. ‘‘I think also there’s not been a lot of time to digest it, nor do we know enough about the machinations,’’ he said.

Once his family acknowledged on Tuesday on television that Felt was Deep Throat, those at the paper said they had little choice but to let go of their secret.

As Bernstein put it: ‘‘Once we could determine that indeed it was the wish of his family, and they were legitimately saying that their father and grandfather was Deep Throat, and with his consent, it seemed to us we had a new obligation—which was to be straightforward.’’

Michael Getler, The Post’s ombudsman, said: ‘‘Certainly it’s strange in one sense: The Post got scooped on a story with which it’s intimately familiar. On the other hand, if this was a family-generated decision, it seems at least from what’s publicly visible that there is really no way to avoid that.’’

The hours between The Post’s ‘‘no comment’’ and its acknowledgment were frantic. Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor, who had been attending a management retreat, raced back to the newsroom. Woodward, an assistant managing editor, was also out of town. ‘‘We really had to let the dust settle,’’ Bradlee said. ‘‘I felt bound by my word to Woodward not to reveal the name.’’

In early 2003, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, got a call from a man named John D. O’Connor, a San Francisco lawyer, asking him if he was interested in having Deep Throat reveal his identity in the pages of his magazine. Thus began the slow unraveling of the Post’s proprietary grip on the mystery.

Carter, in an editor’s note that accompanies the article unmasking Deep Throat, said that after the phone call, he turned the story over to David Friend, ‘‘who began a two-year journey with O’Connor and his client,’’ Felt.

‘‘As we got close to publication, we faced a conundrum,’’ Carter wrote. ‘‘If we called Woodward, assistant managing editor of the Post, to verify the identity of Deep Throat, he could rush into print his own article about the source’s identity, well in advance of our own. Checking the story with his former partner Carl Bernstein (a Vanity Fair contributing editor) posed a similar problem.’’

So, Carter wrote, ‘‘We didn’t call either of them realising that for 33 years they have consistently refused to divulge their source’s name anyway and we chose, instead, to verify the facts surrounding this amazing tale of intrigue and courage as best we could, using alternative and overlapping sources.’’ The Vanity Fair article said Felt’s family wanted to collaborate with Woodward on an article, wondering at one point why Woodward should ‘‘get all the glory’’ for what they saw as their father’s courage.

On Tuesday at The Post, there was some confusion about where the paper’s obligations lay.

The Vanity Fair article portrayed Woodward as being especially concerned about whether Felt was of sound mind when he told his family he wanted to reveal his identity and whether his family was pushing him to do so.

The announcement appeared on the website in the form of a news article, but with a variety of headlines. It said that Woodward confirmed Deep Throat’s identity, but without a quote from him. It then said The Post confirmed the identity. Later, it went back to saying Woodward confirmed it.

Around 6.30 p.m., Woodward emerged from his office with Bernstein, and Bradlee nearby, creating a tableau of the old days when they brought down a President. The scene left many in The Post’s fifth-floor newsroom simply to stare as a photographer took pictures. —NYT