Washington insiders and armchair pundits alike were stunned today when Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of The Washington Post, revealed the identity of Deep Throat, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's secret source whose leaks helped expose the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s.

Most experts assumed that Deep Throat was a member of Richard Nixon's inner circle who was troubled by corruption and lawlessness in the Administration. No one imagined that the answer to one of the 20th Century's greatest mysteries would be diminutive, yet larger-than-life poultry entrepreneur Frank Perdue.

Perdue died Thursday at his home in Maryland after a brief illness. He was 84.

This shocking revelation about Perdue catapults the chicken magnate into much higher echelons of history than could have been imagined for a curiously chicken-faced pitchman and entrepreneur who turned a backyard egg business into a $2.8 billion empire.

Details of how Perdue might have been in a position to learn the secrets that unseated a U.S. president are sketchy, but the buzz inside the Beltway has been focusing on a possible connection between Perdue and the chickens that came home to roost following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and have been living on White House grounds ever since.

There has been no official statement from the Bush Administration on this bizarre revelation, but one White House source who spoke on the condition of anonymity was quoted as saying, "How the hell do I know what happened? It's a clucking mystery!"

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