The early 1970s scandal, which turned the two Washington Post reporters who exposed it into journalism icons, was revealed in part to two Times reporters before the rival Post got it -- but they it slip.

In 1972 Times reporter Robert Smith, in his last days at the newspaper, heard aspects of the tale of intrigue and corruption that reached all the way to the White House from then acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray.

"He told me the attorney general was involved in a cover-up," Smith recalled of the meeting, according to the Times.

"I said, 'How high does it go? To the president?' And he sat there and looked at me and he didn?t answer. His answer was in the look."

Smith repeated Gray's disclosures to a Times editor, Robert Phelps, but the story died as the newspaper was consumed with other political stories and Smith left the paper to study at Yale Law School, the Times said.

In a series of investigative scoops Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Nixon administration's involvement in the June 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in the US capital.

The burglars, who were seeking to plant listening devices to spy on the Democrats during an election campaign, were tried and found guilty.

And the scandal -- including the White House's attempts at cover-up -- ultimately led to Nixon becoming the first US president to resign in disgrace in August 1974.

If the Times report now is accurate, then it means the two top officials at Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at the time were leaking the story to news outlets.

Mark Felt, FBI associate director, died in December, three years after revealing his identity as Deep Throat, the secret informant who supplied information on the scandal to Woodward and Bernstein.

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