Carter took the call himself. On the other end of the phone was John O'Connor, the lawyer friend of the Felt family who was representing them and who finally wrote the piece for Vanity Fair. "He sounded reasonably credible," says Carter. "But you get a lot of calls like this. I told him I'd get someone to get back to him right away."

He asked David Friend, a senior editor on the magazine, to "see how serious this is." Not long afterward O'Connor flew out to New York. Carter paints a picture of naifs on a mission to make money. The Felt family had a secret that they knew was valuable. But they knew neither how valuable it was nor how to realize that value.

"The family were all new to this part of the American circus," says Carter. "They were talking about book deals and film rights. I told them that we wouldn't be able to pay them anything apart from the writer. But I also told them that if you do it in Vanity Fair you will have a great launching pad to explore the next level. This will bring it worldwide attention."

Vanity Fair, a glossy general-interest monthly, certainly has an international reach. Its combination of soft-pat celebrity interviews, stunning photographs, an eclectic stable of accomplished writers and the occasional political feature has a British readership that stretches from Guardian regulars to Daily Mail buyers.

The family considered their options. "It went cold for six months," says Carter. "Then it would come up every two months and then go on the back burner. They were making up their mind."

They took it to HarperCollins, where Judith Regan, publisher of the Regan Books imprint, said the possibility of a deal collapsed because of serious concerns about 91-year-old Felt's state of mind. Carter did not regard this as a serious concern. The Time stable also passed on the story. For a while it seemed as though the Holy Grail was up for the highest bidder and everyone was passing on it.

O'Connor came back to Vanity Fair, where he was finally paid $10,000. "The money is not that much," says Carter. But if getting the story was tricky, keeping it would be even more so. "We just thought, how the hell do we keep this a secret for two years?" he says. "It is a very transparent organization. There are no closed doors here. But there was about this. I was worried that people would feel they'd been kept in the dark, but when they did find out they understood absolutely."

Carter started with an inner circle of two -- him and Friend -- and then expanded the circle on a need-to-know basis from the art director and fact checker to an eventual group of just 15. The story had a code name -- WIG -- and on the dummy copies as it moved toward publication it also had a dummy cover line -- "The Car Door Slams." The photographer was not even allowed to tell his wife where he was going -- a particularly odd state of affairs because his wife is the photo director of Vanity Fair.

Given the current journalistic climate in the United States -- two reporters face prison time for refusing to reveal an anonymous source and the relationship between the press and the Bush administration remains at best tense -- Carter believes the timing of the story couldn't have been better. "All administrations are out to intimidate journalists," he says. "But none has had such a particularly antagonistic view of the press since Nixon."

His magazine has done its part, but Carter thinks Deep Throat will continue to be a story. "It will go on for a little while," he says. "Particularly if Woodward gets together with Carl. That would be great marketing," says the editor, with one eye on celebrity and the other on politics. "That would be like the Beatles."

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