The Washington Post's Bob Woodward on his history with the FBI's Mark Felt, starting with a chance meeting at the White House in 1970, how it developed into a friendship and culminated with Felt assuming the role of Deep Throat in the Watergate investigations.

An excerpt -- it starts at the period after the Watergate story first broke:

I tried to call Felt, but he wouldn't take the call. I tried his home in Virginia and had no better luck. So one night I showed up at his Fairfax home. It was a plain-vanilla, perfectly kept, everything-in-its-place suburban house. His manner made me nervous. He said no more phone calls, no more visits to his home, nothing in the open.

I did not know then that in Felt's earliest days in the FBI, during World War II, he had been assigned to work on the general desk of the Espionage Section. Felt learned a great deal about German spying in the job, and after the war he spent time keeping suspected Soviet agents under surveillance.

So at his home in Virginia that summer, Felt said that if we were to talk it would have to be face to face where no one could observe us.

I said anything would be fine with me.

(Woodward then details all the spooky stuff they did to avoid detection.)

In the course of this and other discussions, I was somewhat apologetic for plaguing him and being such a nag, but I explained that we had nowhere else to turn. Carl and I had obtained a list of everyone who worked for Nixon's reelection committee and were frequently going out into the night knocking on the doors of these people to try to interview them. I explained to Felt that we were getting lots of doors slammed in our faces. There also were lots of frightened looks. I was frustrated.

Felt said I should not worry about pushing him. He had done his time as a street agent, interviewing people. The FBI, like the press, had to rely on voluntary cooperation. Most people wanted to help the FBI, but the FBI knew about rejection. Felt perhaps tolerated my aggressiveness and pushy approach because he had been the same way himself when he was younger, once talking his way into an interview with Hoover and telling him of his ambition to become a special agent in charge of an FBI field office.

It was an unusual message, emphatically encouraging me to get in his face.

If you read the whole story (and you should) and it's truce, one lesson to take away from it as a reporter is talk to everybody.

Felt's and Woodward's relationship started when they were both hanging out in a waiting room near the White House's Situation Room in 1970.

Had Woodward not struck up a conversation with Felt then, it's possible Felt might never have become Deep Throat -- although that might be overstating it. He was pissed at being passed over as director of the FBI for a Nixon loyalist and considered the Nixonians a bunch of crypto-Nazis who were politicizing his bureau. Since Felt obviously knew how to play the Washington game, he might have found another reporter to work with.

Or not. If nothing else, Woodward has shown over his career he knows how to make people in power open up to him.

Anyways, for much, much more, go to the WaPo special report page.