Identity of 'Deep Throat' Remains Elusive

July 24 -- Who was “Deep Throat,” that unnamed source who famously helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the biggest political scandal in American history?

More than a quarter-century after that scandal forced President Nixon’s 1974 resignation, the Deep Throat mystery is still a mystery. But former Nixon White House insider Leonard Garment now says he may have the answer.

In his newly published book In Search of Deep Throat: The Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time (Basic Books), Garment argues Deep Throat was the former White House operative John Sears, a man Garment would later call a protégé.

“It is my conviction that Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s mysterious source … was John Sears,” he writes.

Garment’s analysis, though, provides no definitive answer, and the author admits it. What’s more, Garment’s claim is denied by Sears.

‘No Smoking Gun’

After many, many re-readings of All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s book describing how they uncovered the Watergate scandal, Garment concluded the voice of Deep Throat was unmistakably that of Sears.

But his book provides no factual evidence directly linking the supposedly cigar-smoking, heavy-drinking Deep Throat to Sears.

The evidence is “circumstantial,” says the author, who acknowledges “the absence of a smoking gun or a confession …”

What’s more, Garment’s theory is confronted with an uncomfortable detail: Sears was a former official as the Watergate scandal unfolded, not a person inside the executive branch, as Woodward and Bernstein described Deep Throat in All the President’s Men.

Sears, for his part, “categorically” denies he was Deep Throat and says he proposed to Basic Books to take a polygraph test to prove it.

“Neither the author nor his publisher were willing to accept this offer. Such a test would confirm, among other things, that I contributed nothing of a substantive nature to the Woodward and Bernstein articles, and, in fact, never laid eyes on either one of them until after the Watergate Investigation ended,” Sears wrote in a press release Monday.