SPIEGEL Surfs the Web Bob Woodward Tells All
Perhaps this is one of those stories that only journalists are really interested in. But Deep Throat -- Bob Woodward's well-placed source that helped bring down US President Richard Nixon -- has that touch of cloak and dagger that everyone is (or at least is thought to be) interested in. So, just days after our first Deep Throat link, we bring you Bob Woodward's article in the Washington Post outlining how he managed to end up with such a well-placed source (second-in-command at the FBI, no less) and about some of the methods he used to protect his informer's identity once the story began to break. It's the chapter that was missing from "All the President's Men."
Space Travel's Silver Anniversary
Nowadays news of rockets firing through the Earth's stratosphere and into outer space have become almost commonplace. Robots on Mars and remote-controlled spaceships swooping through the tails of comets are all the stuff of daily headlines.
Half a century ago, however, space travel was still in its infancy. It all started exactly 50 years ago on June 2, 1955, when the Soviet Union set up its then top secret rocket base, the Baikonur Cosmodrome. It was three years before NASA was even created. Today, with the Soviet Union having crumbled to pieces, the cosmodrome lies in Kazakhstan . But thanks to a multi-million dollar lease, it will be under Russian control until 2050.
And it has a colorful history to look back on. The biggest launch party to take place was hosted on October 4, 1957, when the first artificial satellite, the famous Sputnik I, was shot into orbit. Later, other space firsts sprang out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome: on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the world's first man in space. The first woman in space, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, followed two years later with a trip which lasted just over 70 hours.
More recently, the world's oldest working space facility saw the launch of the Mars Express on June 2, 2003. It released the Beagle 2, which went walkabout somewhere on Mars and hasn't been heard from since. The high resolution camera attached to the space orbiter, however, continues to send pictures of the Mars surface to earth.
Deep Throat Finds His Voice
After decades of speculation, guessing and cloak-and-dagger theorizing, the identity of the 20th century's most important journalistic source is finally known. "Deep Throat," the guy that helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein drag down US President Richard Nixon as a result of his involvement in the 1972 Watergate break-ins, has come forward. Many see the case as the birth of investigative journalism in the United States. But for all the sleuthing he inspired, Deep Throat himself -- now outed as W. Mark Felt, 91, the second-in-command at the FBI under Nixon, kept his identity secret despite numerous attempts to dredge it up. Interest in Felt's unmasking has been huge. But for the definitive article, head to Vanity Fair, the magazine that broke the story.
