WASHINGTON – The Washington Post yesterday confirmed that a former no. 2 official at the FBI, Mark Felt, was “Deep Throat,” the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of President Nixon.

The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their former top editor, Benjamin Bradlee. The three spoke after Mr. Felt’s family and Vanity Fair magazine identified the 91-year-old Mr. Felt, now a retiree in California, as the long-anonymous source who provided crucial guidance for some of the newspaper’s groundbreaking Watergate stories.

The Vanity Fair story said Mr. Felt had admitted his “historic, anonymous role” following years of denial.

In a statement yesterday, Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein said, “W. Mark Felt was ‘Deep Throat’ and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage. However, as the record shows, many other sources and officials assisted us and other reporters for the hundreds of stories that were written in the Washington Post about Watergate.”

Mr. Felt’s guidance to Mr. Woodward – provided on “deep background” in secret meetings – helped keep public attention focused on the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate office and apartment complex, and on a subsequent cover-up effort. This ultimately led to a congressional investigation that revealed the role of Nixon and a number of his top aides. Under threat of impeachment, Nixon resigned in 1974.

Messrs. Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee had kept the identity of “Deep Throat” secret at the source’s request, saying his name would be revealed upon his death.” We’ve kept that secret because we keep our word,” Mr. Woodward said.

But with the Vanity Fair article and the family’s statement, the three decided yesterday to break their silence.

Mr. Bradlee, who was the Post’s executive editor during Watergate, said yesterday, “The thing that stuns me is that the … secret has lasted this long.”

Mr. Woodward went ahead despite skepticism that the former FBI official was competent to decide to change the ground rules of their secret relationship. Mr. Felt has been in declining health since suffering a stroke in 2001.

Mr. Woodward, now a Post assistant managing editor, said he is writing an article for tomorrow’s newspaper that will provide a personal account of his and Mr. Bernstein’s experience in covering Watergate. Mr. Bernstein is now a freelance writer and lecturer.

Mr. Woodward said Mr. Felt helped the Post at a time of tense relations between the White House and much of the FBI hierarchy. He said the Watergate break-in came shortly after the death of legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Mr. Felt’s mentor, and that Mr. Felt and other bureau officials wanted to see an FBI veteran promoted to succeed Hoover.

Mr. Felt himself had hopes that he would be the next FBI director, but Nixon instead appointed an administration insider, assistant attorney general, Patrick Gray, to the post.

Mr. Bradlee, in an interview yesterday afternoon, said that knowing that “Deep Throat” was a high-ranking FBI official helped him feel confident about the information that the paper was publishing about Watergate. He said that he knew the “positional identity” of “Deep Throat” as the Post was breaking its Watergate stories and that he learned his name within a couple of weeks after Nixon’s resignation.

“The no. 2 guy at the FBI, that was a pretty good source,” he said.

“I knew the paper was on the right track,” Mr. Bradlee said. The “quality of the source” and the soundness of his guidance made him sure of that, he said.

“We made only one mistake … and that had nothing to do with ‘Deep Throat,”‘ Mr. Bradlee said, referring to an error in reporting grand jury testimony.

Mr. Bradlee said that over the years, “it was interesting to watch people flounder around with odd choices” about the identity of “Deep Throat,” a nickname borrowed from the title of a pornographic film. Although he knew the source’s identity, Mr. Bradlee said, “I’ve never met Felt. I wouldn’t know him if I fell on him.”

In a family statement released yesterday, Mr. Felt’s grandson, Nick Jones, said, “The family believes my grandfather, Mark Felt Sr., is a great American hero who went well above and beyond the call of duty at much risk to himself to save his country from a horrible injustice.” The statement added, “We all sincerely hope the country will see him this way as well.”

Mr. Jones said in the statement, “My grandfather is pleased he is being honored for his role as ‘Deep Throat’ with his friend Bob Woodward. As he recently told my mother, ‘I guess people used to think “Deep Throat” was a criminal, but now they think he was a hero.”‘

The Vanity Fair article, by a California attorney, John D. O’Connor, described Mr. Felt as conflicted over his role in the Watergate revelations and over whether he should publicly reveal that he was the anonymous source whose identity has been a closely guarded secret for more than three decades.

“On several occasions he confided to me, ‘I’m the guy they used to call ‘Deep Throat,'” Mr. O’Connor wrote. The author wrote that Mr. Felt “still has qualms about his actions, but he also knows that historic events compelled him to behave as he did: standing up to an executive branch intent on obstructing his agency’s pursuit of the truth.”

The article concluded: “Felt, having long harbored the ambivalent emotions of pride and self-reproach, has lived for more than 30 years in a prison of his own making, a prison built upon his strong moral principles and his un wavering loyalty to country and cause. But now, buoyed by his family’s revelations and support, he need feel imprisoned no longer.”