Deep Throat's story set to speak volumes

Yet while book deals, film rights and serialisation of his story would seem to promise him a king's ransom, Mark Felt's confession is unlikely to lay Washington's most intriguing political episode to rest.

In revealing himself as the FBI man who leaked secrets that led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon, Felt has triggered a media earthquake whose aftershocks seem set to endure, as Hollywood film studios, television companies and New York publishing houses jostle to re-tell his side of the story.

In his twilight years, the 91-year-old is finally looking to reap his reward for being what some describe as an all-American hero.

But given his age and state of health, Felt may have left it too late to fully capitalise on his unique place in history. Physically and mentally frail, he is considered incapable of penning his own memoirs and is said to have only limited capacity for spilling his story owing to the onset of dementia.

He could also see some of his financial thunder stolen by the very man he helped make famous, Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.

The former mole was upbeat after he was unmasked by Vanity Fair magazine last week. "It's doing me good," he admitted. "I'll arrange to write a book or something, and collect all the money I can."

Currently living in his daughter Joan's converted garage in Santa Rosa, California, and struggling to pay off medical bills, Felt is tipped for a windfall should a publishing or television deal be struck.

"Outside of the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, this is the third best mystery out there," Henry Schleiff, chairman of Court TV, told The Washington Post.

At HarperCollins, senior vice-president David Hirshey was similarly effusive. "Deep Throat is still one of the biggest 'gets' of all time and I expect major publishers to chase it like Ahab did the whale," he said. "And I'll be one to have the harpoon out."

It was as a cub reporter that Woodward, together with colleague Carl Bernstein, blew the lid on one of the greatest political scandals in America.

Assisted by an anonymous source nicknamed Deep Throat, they revealed how the Republican administration orchestrated and then attempted to cover up a 1972 break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, housed in Washington's Watergate building.

Their stories led to a Senate investigation and, in 1974, to the resignation of Nixon, as the key question of what the president knew, and when he knew it, unravelled.

In the decades that have ensued, Woodward and Bernstein have fought fiercely all attempts to expose Deep Throat's identity, having given Felt their word that they would do so.

In the end, it was Felt himself, driven by a family weighed down by debt and eager that his deeds be rewarded with "a heroic and permanent legacy", who brought Washington's best-kept secret into the open.

"I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat," he revealed to Vanity Fair last week, after years of denials.

But publishers who have stampeded to the former deputy director of the FBI's door to establish what he has to sell may not get the level of detail they crave. Felt, it has been revealed, cannot recall much of the colour and drama of his 12 clandestine meetings with Woodward in the early 1970s, a factor that has prompted reservations among some editors.

Felt family attorney John O'Connor told ABC's Nightline programme, for example, that his client "had no memory of the elaborate signals - a red flag in a flower pot, a clock's hands scrawled on page 20 of Woodward's home-delivered copy of The New York Times - that Woodward said were used to arrange meetings with Deep Throat".

Despite having harboured such a compelling mystery for so long, Felt and his family have had difficulty hawking his story because of his shaky memory. People magazine and Regan Books both turned him down before Vanity Fair jumped in.

His children, Joan and Mark, to whom he came clean in 2002, make no bones about the fact that cash is a motive in going public; there are bills to pay, grandchildren's education to fund, and an old man of 91 who needs constant care and supervision.

They even approached Woodward offering to work on a joint book deal that would allow both parties to bask in the limelight and share the proceeds. Woodward turned them down and is instead going it alone.

"My judgment was, in talking to Mark Felt, that he wasn't competent at that point," he explained last week.

While Vanity Fair paid just $10,000 (5,500) for its scoop, Woodward enjoys millionaire status on the back of a spectacular journalistic career.

In the light of last week's revelations, his Watergate book, All the President's Men, is enjoying an unexpected new lease of life. First published in 1974 and penned jointly with Bernstein, it has leapt back into the Amazon.com bestseller list at number 26. Bookshops have sold out and video stores report that the screen version is in high demand.

"It's a huge news story of historic importance, something the world has been speculating about," said Victoria Meyer, spokeswoman for Simon & Schuster, a unit of Viacom VIAb.N and publisher of All the President's Men.

"It's no surprise to us that there is consumer interest in learning more," Meyer said.

From a ranking somewhere above 10,000 at the start of the week, the book now ranks No 44 on Barnes & Noble.com's BKS.N bestseller list. DVD sales of the Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford movie based on the book have proved just as hot, coming in at No 28 on the site's hottest-selling list.

All of which bodes well for Woodward's next project. His new tome, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat, is being rushed into print next month, almost certainly beating to the bookstores anything that Felt may have left to offer.

The prospect of duelling versions hitting the bookshelves has prompted debate as to which has the hottest tale, and who should have the right to tell it.

"I'm thinking there may be a need for journalists to make a sort of pre-nuptial agreement with their anonymous sources," said Stephen Burgard, director of the school of journalism at Boston's Northeastern University.

"There was a 'till death do us part' quality to what Woodward and Bernstein agreed to with Deep Throat. They said: 'We will honour your anonymity till you die', but when it is broken by the source himself, all bets are off. The question becomes: Who has the rights to whatever financial benefit may accrue?"

As the Felts tout their wares behind closed doors, Woodward and Bernstein have hit the talk-show circuit, fending off suggestions from former Nixon aides and officials that Deep Throat was a traitor.

"He obviously felt an obligation to the truth. He felt an obligation to the Constitution. He realised there was a corrupt presidency, that the Constitution was being undermined... he was disappointed that the FBI that he loved and revered was being misused as part of a criminal conspiracy," said Bernstein.

Even with Felt's identity unveiled and publishers falling over themselves to snap up the saga, there are probably still things about Nixon and Watergate that will remain secret forever, Woodward has suggested.

"We will never really know everything," he said. "I think today no one has the full story."