L. Patrick Gray, the Watergate-era FBI chief whose turbulent year at the agency was sullied by the scandal that led to President Nixon’s resignation, died Wednesday. He was 88.

Gray died at his home in Atlantic Beach of complications from pancreatic cancer, said his son, Ed Gray.

With the recent revelation that his former deputy, W. Mark Felt, was the secret Washington Post source known as Deep Throat, Gray ended more than three decades of silence about his role in the scandal.

“He fooled me,” Gray told ABC’s “This Week.” “It was like I was hit with a tremendous sledgehammer.”

The former Justice Department official and Navy captain was appointed by Nixon as acting FBI director in 1972 after the death of J. Edgar Hoover. At first, his tenure seemed a breath of fresh air at the bureau, which had been run by Hoover since he founded it, in 1924. Gray quickly allowed women and minorities to be hired, and relaxed the dress code to allow nonwhite shirts and longer hair.

Six weeks later, on June 17, five burglars broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington.

With ties to the burglars reaching into the White House, Gray’s FBI investigated the burglary – but Gray later acknowledged handing over FBI files to the Nixon White House.

The disclosure led to his resignation in 1973 and provoked Nixon aide John D. Ehrlichman to utter his famous phrase that Gray would be left to “twist slowly, slowly in the wind.” His nomination to be permanent FBI director was withdrawn.

Gray was never indicted for any Watergate-related misdeeds, but descriptions of him as a Nixon loyalist who helped thwart the investigation and as someone the White House thought could be pushed around dogged him in the years following the scandal. He vigorously disputed the depiction.

Ed Gray said his father “certainly was not in cahoots with Nixon. His entire purpose all the time was to get to the bottom of it.”

When Mr. Felt was unmasked as Bob Woodward’s source more than 30 years later, Gray said he believed the trusted deputy had been unhappy at being passed over for the top job and had talked to the Post in order to sabotage him.

“I think there was a sense of revenge in his heart, and a sense of dumping my candidacy, if you will,” he said.

In the ABC interview, Gray defended his cooperation with the White House during the Watergate investigation. He said he burned files from the safe of E. Howard Hunt, a member of the White House “plumbers,” in his home fireplace because he had been ordered to do so and the files were unrelated to Watergate.

He said he provided internal FBI files to the White House only after he had been cleared to do so by the bureau’s general counsel.

Gray also said he refused White House demands to fire Mr. Felt or order a lie-detector test because he trusted the man so completely that he put him in charge of investigating FBI leaks.

Gray was working on compiling his files from Watergate when he died, and his son said the family plans to release a book.

Born in St. Louis in 1916, Gray left Rice University in 1936 to enter the U.S. Naval Academy. During a 20-year career in the Navy, he served aboard submarines in World War II and the Korean War and earned a law degree from George Washington University.

Before entering private practice in Connecticut, he worked for then-Vice President Nixon in his failed bid for president in 1960. He was awaiting Senate confirmation as deputy attorney general in 1972 when Hoover died and Nixon asked him to lead the FBI.