Deep Throat

The FBI's number two, steering the story from a parking garage.

The anonymous source who guided Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate reporting, identified in 2005 as FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt. The confirmation rewrote the story's meaning: the leak that toppled a president came from the number two of the secret police, passed over for the directorship — institutional infighting as much as whistleblowing. Documented end to end. The node matters here as the proof-case that 'a hidden hand feeds the press' is sometimes simply true, and that the hand has its own agenda.