Mark Felt in 1958, when he was head of the Salt Lake, Utah FBI office.

One of the most famous anonymous characters in the history of American political literature, Deep Throat, has died. W. Mark Felt, who as associate director of the FBI secretly tipped of Bob Woodward to “follow the money” behind President Richard Nixon‘s attempts to tamp down the Watergate scandal, died in Santa Rosa, California from congestive heart failure at age 95. Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein dubbed him “Deep Throat” in their classic book of political reportage, All the President’s Men, then kept his identity secret for over 30 years until Felt outed himself in 2005. An Associated Press obituary quotes Felt’s 2006 memoir, A G-Man’s Life: The FBI, `Deep Throat’ and the Struggle for Honor in Washington, on why he did it: “People will debate for a long time whether I did the right thing by helping Woodward. The bottom line is that we did get the whole truth out, and isn’t that what the FBI is supposed to do?”