I have to hand it to Mark Felt, who has recently admitted to being Deep Throat--the famous source for Woodward and Bernstein and their exposure of the Watergate scandal.  Felt was often named as a possible candidate for being the mysterious informant, but he was was able to throw people off the trail.

“I would have done better,” Felt told The Hartford Courant in 1999. “I would have been more effective. Deep Throat didn’t exactly bring the White House crashing down, did he?”

That’s just brilliant.  Whenever you’re trying to deny being a part of something, just indicate that you could have done better if you had, in fact, been involved.  Who would suspect you of contributing to something after you publicly mocked it?

“Greg, did you write this press release? It sucks.”

“No way. If I had written that press release, it would have been much more effective. I would never use an expression like ‘Onomatopoeia of the soul’ when the topic is miniature semiconductors.”

I also wonder if Deep Throat set a precedent.  I suspect that all informants now use dirty sounding code names.

“Look, Dirty Sanchez, I can’t believe this intel is accurate.  Are you sure about your sources?”

“Absolutely.  I heard it directly from Pearl Necklace.”