After 20 Years, ‘Deep Throat’ Mystery Is Revived : The media celebrate the June 17 anniversary of Watergate with renewed interest in source’s identity.

As the 20th anniversary of the Watergate break-in draws near, the Western world should brace for a new flurry of media speculation about the identity of Deep Throat.

The reappraisals include the unusual spectacle of one Washington Post reporter, Walter Pincus, trying to identify the source of another Washington Post reporter, Bob Woodward, for a television program on Watergate. Woodward was interviewed last month by CBS correspondent Mike Wallace for the program, which will air around the June 17 anniversary.

And in a piece in Atlantic magazine, James Mann, a former Post reporter, draws on his previous friendship with Woodward in arguing that Deep Throat had to have worked at the FBI. Mann names three FBI officials from that era as possible suspects.

Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Post, said in an interview that he sees no reason to break the confidentiality pledge he extended in 1972, when the source was feeding him information about the investigation into Watergate.

“Any reporter who’s ever had a good source knows how important and vital sources are to the news business,” he said. “My feelings about it are almost ecclesiastical.”

Woodward said Deep Throat “obviously” still wants his identity protected, but would not say when they last discussed the matter.

“In lots of people’s eyes, Deep Throat is someone of great conscience and purpose, and in other people’s eyes he’s a snitch.”

The Deep Throat tale took on an air of mythology after Richard M. Nixon resigned in 1974 and Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote a best-selling book about their Watergate reporting. Hal Holbrook played the super-secret source in the movie version of “All the President’s Men.”

The Deep Throat mystery is among the questions to be explored in a two-hour program being produced by CBS News and Post-Newsweek stations, the string of stations owned by The Washington Post Co.

Pincus, an off-air reporter for the broadcast, said thousands of pages of documents from the FBI and the Watergate special prosecution force help shed light on Deep Throat’s identity, showing that the bureau was far ahead of the press in investigating Watergate.

“Clearly, one of the unanswered questions about Watergate is Deep Throat, and we’ll naturally explore it,” Pincus said. “You can’t redo Watergate without dealing with that question. . . . Who Deep Throat is or was is an interesting question, but the real thing is to remind people how a president manipulated an election and kept an investigation bottled up.”

In his Atlantic piece, Mann, now a Los Angeles Times reporter, says the FBI had good reason to leak to the press in 1972-73 because bureau officials were worried that political interference from the Nixon White House was undermining their independence.

“During the summer and early fall of 1972,” Mann writes, “Woodward spoke to me repeatedly of ‘my source at the FBI,’ or, alternatively, of ‘my friend at the FBI’--each time making it plain that this was a special, and unusually well-placed, source.”

Mann recalls Woodward telling him in September, 1972, the day after the first indictments were returned against the burglars who broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex: “I just talked to my friend at the FBI. I think we’re on to a whole new level on this thing.”

Mann dismissed suggestions that he may have violated a confidence by quoting his private conversations with Woodward.

“It’s been 20 years,” Mann said. “I don’t see what possible harm there could be to a source after 20 years. I think this is a matter of history. The motivations of the person who became known as Deep Throat are a matter of history.”