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IN FEBRUARY 1992, AS THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF the Watergate break-in approached, I went to the fortress-like J. Edgar Hoover FBI headquarters building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. An imposing cement structure with large dark windows, the Hoover building sits appropriately about midway between the White House and the Capitol. It is as if Hoover, the founding director and the embodiment of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, is still present in Washington, D.C., playing off presidents against the Congress. I navigated the labyrinth of security and finally made my way to the documents room. I had come to examine some of the FBI's investigative Watergate files that had been opened to the public. Private cubicles are available in the classy, law-firm atmosphere, well lit, all done in high-quality wood paneling well above the standard government issue. The room is quiet. I was offered blue-lined paper to take notes.

The Watergate files contain hundreds of internal FBI memos, requests for action, investigative summaries, and Teletypes to headquarters from field offices which had conducted hundreds of interviews. There were the first summaries of information on the five burglars arrested in the Democrats' Watergate office building headquarters: their names, their backgrounds, their CIA connections, and their contacts with E. Howard Hunt Jr., the former CIA operative and White House consultant, and G. Gordon Liddy, the former FBI agent. The files teemed with notes, routing slips and queries bearing initials from senior Bureau officials, dates and intelligence classifications.

The outline of the Watergate cover-up was so clear in retrospect. White House counsel John W. Dean III, who later confessed to leading the illegal obstruction of justice on behalf of President Richard Nixon, "stated all requests for investigation by FBI at White House must be cleared through him," according to a summary dated six days after the June 17, 1972, break-in.

A memo on October 10, 1972, addressed The Washington Post story that Carl Bernstein and I had written that day. It was probably our most important story; it reported that the Watergate break-in was not an isolated event but "stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage" run by the White House and President Nixon's reelection committee. The two-page memo stated that the FBI had learned that Donald H. Segretti, who headed the efforts to harass Democratic presidential candidates, had been hired by Dwight L. Chapin, the president's appointments secretary, and paid by Herbert W. Kalmbach, the president's personal lawyer. Because there was no direct connection to the Watergate bugging, the memo said, the FBI had not pursued the matter.

I smiled. Here were two of the reasons the Watergate cover-up had worked at first: Dean's effectiveness in squelching further inquiry; and the seeming utter lack of imagination on the part of the FBI.

All of this was a pleasant, long, well-documented reminder of names, events and emotions as I sifted through the Bureau memos, as best I could tell almost a complete set of internal memos and investigative files. The files and memos provided a kind of intimacy with what had been four intense years of my life, as Carl Bernstein and I covered the story for The Washington Post and wrote two books about Watergate: All the President's Men, published in 1974, which was about our newspaper's investigation; and The Final Days, published in 1976, which chronicled the collapse of the Nixon presidency.

At the time of my visit I was 48 years old, but I was not there for a trip down memory lane. I was not hunting for more information in the rich history of Watergate; not looking for new avenues, leads, surprises, contradictions, unrevealed crimes or hidden meaning, although the amazements of Watergate rarely ceased.

Instead, I was really there in further pursuit of Deep Throat—the celebrated, secret anonymous source who had helped direct our Watergate coverage during late-night meetings in an underground parking garage. The Post's managing editor, Howard Simons, had dubbed the source Deep Throat, after the pornographic movie of the time, because the interviews were technically on "deep background"—a journalistic term meaning that the information can be used but no source of any kind would be identified in the newspaper.

Only six people knew Deep Throat's identity besides Deep Throat himself: me, Carl, my wife Elsa Walsh, former Post executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee and later his successor, Leonard Downie Jr., and a Justice Department lawyer who discovered the secret in 1976. More on that later.

Despite all the guesses and speculation, articles and books, no one else had pinned down his identity. The more names and lists that had been floated over the decades, the more clouded the trail seemed to become. Systematic, meticulous analysis, even books by Nixon Watergate lawyers John Dean and Leonard Garment, had failed to illuminate because Deep Throat himself had embedded part of his identity in not being such a source, not the man in the underground garage so memorably portrayed by actor Hal Holbrook in the movie All the President's Men. Wise, almost Delphic, but convoluted, creepy and angry, Holbrook had captured the real Deep Throat's side of one of the most clandestine relationships in American journalism. In our conversations at the time, the real Deep Throat had clearly been torn, and even uncertain—not fully convinced that helping us was the proper course, wanting both to do it and not do it. Like many if not most confidential sources he wanted to be free of the ramifications of his actions and words. He wanted to be protected at nearly any cost, and he had gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal his identity. As best I could tell he had lied to his colleagues, friends and even his family. He had been in hiding and still was.

I was there at the Hoover building that day in 1992 because Deep Throat had worked in the very center of the FBI. His position gave him access to information from hundreds, eventually thousands of interviews and documents in the first months after the 1972 burglary. In addition, he was well situated to learn much about the Nixon White House, its behavior and concealment strategies. Facts, leads and even rumors about Nixon, Washington and politics came to his desk and ears. He could draw on the raw data in FBI files. He was able to provide all kinds of clues, ultimately giving us the schematic diagram of the Watergate conspiracy, or at least pointing us to it.

In All the President's Men, Carl and I identified Deep Throat as someone in the executive branch of the government whose position was "extremely sensitive." Many took this, incorrectly, to mean it was someone in the Nixon White House.

In an attempt to determine who was behind the break-in, Carl and I had spent months going down through a list of people who had worked at the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CREEP was its unfortunate acronym), tracking them down by phone or in person at their homes in D.C. or the Washington suburbs. Carl was driven and systematic, haunting people. One person he talked to was CREEP's bookkeeper, later identified as Judy Hoback. During several interviews at her home she described for us in detail how Liddy and other close assistants to John N. Mitchell, the former attorney general and then head of CREEP, had been given hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash for campaign espionage and dirty tricks. As I went through the FBI files, I found the "302" form of Hoback's interview with the FBI. She had described to them exactly what she told Carl and me. We had written it in the Post, leading many FBI agents to conclude, incorrectly, that we were getting raw FBI reports.

Deep Throat never provided exact details from these 302 reports. He confirmed the breadth of questionable and illegal activities by CREEP and the White House, and their possible significance, and he carefully steered us in important directions, supporting the theme we were discovering in our reporting: namely that the Watergate burglary was not an isolated event, but part of a sweeping pattern of illegal, undercover activities aimed at perceived Nixon enemies—anti–Vietnam War leaders, members of the news media, Democrats, dissenters within the administration, and eventually those in the American justice system and FBI who were investigating Watergate.

Many of the old FBI memos in the files I read that day, which recorded the Bureau's progress on its investigation of Watergate, were not even written on FBI or Justice Department letterhead. Instead, they are on the blandest, garden-variety paper called Optional Form No. 10 with "United States Government, MEMORANDUM" printed at the top.

One such MEMORANDUM, dated February 21, 1973, caught my eye. "On page 1 of the Washington Post today is an article by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein captioned, 'Hunt Linked to Dita Beard Challenge.' (Copy attached.)"

This was during the darkest days of our Watergate coverage, eight months after the break-in, a month after Nixon's second inaugural. He had won an overwhelming election victory. Carl and I had written dozens of Watergate stories describing White House funding and involvement, but many of our colleagues in the media—even some of our fellow journalists in the Post newsroom—did not believe most of what we had reported.

Carl and I were scrambling hard to show that Howard Hunt, who had been a White House consultant and was the operational chief of the Watergate break-in and bugging effort, along with Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, had undertaken additional unsavory tasks for the White House. Having established the theme of our coverage—that undercover and illegal operations were widespread—we were beating the bushes hard to find any evidence that the Watergate burglary and the bugging operation were part of a larger campaign of secret actions designed to spy on, sabotage or do harm to political enemies. In the February 21, 1973, story we reported that Hunt had been dispatched to interview Dita Beard, a Washington lobbyist for International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), the previous year.

Beard had been at the center of one of the biggest pre-Watergate Nixon scandals. She had written a memo alleging a connection between ITT's promise of a $400,000 contribution to the Republican convention and a favorable antitrust settlement with Nixon's Justice Department. Columnist Jack Anderson had published the Beard memo four months before Watergate, sending shock waves through the Nixon White House. In February 1973, Carl and I reported that Howard Hunt had been sent to interview Beard to attempt to demonstrate that the famous memo was a forgery, and perhaps even to get her to disavow it. A former CIA operative, Hunt had worn an ill-fitting red wig during the interview in order to disguise his identity.

But the FBI memo contained some tantalizing assertions. "As you know, Woodward and Bernstein have written numerous articles about Watergate. While their stories have contained much fiction and half truths…"—a favorite White House line about our Watergate stories—"they have frequently set forth information which they attribute to Federal investigators, Department of Justice sources and FBI sources. We know that they were playing games with the case agent in the Washington Field Office trying to trick him into giving them bits of information."

Copyright © 2005 by Bob Woodward