US: A New York Times reporter has told a grand jury that a senior White House official discussed on three occasions the fact that the wife of one of the administration's critics worked for the CIA.
In an account of her testimony published in the New York Times yesterday, Judith Miller said vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, told her the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who criticised US policy in Iraq, worked on unconventional weapons at the CIA.
Ms Miller said Mr Libby may not have identified Mr Wilson's wife by name, although a version of her maiden name, Valerie Plame, appears in the reporter's interview notes.
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is investigating how Ms Plame's identity as a CIA agent was leaked to Washington reporters and whether the leak was part of an attempt to discredit her husband. He has interviewed a number of senior White House figures, including Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser.
Ms Miller spent 85 days in jail earlier this year rather than identify Mr Libby as a source. She testified before a grand jury this month after Mr Libby wrote to her releasing her from her promise of confidentiality.
The New York Times published Ms Miller's account of her testimony yesterday, alongside a lengthy analysis of the paper's own reporting of the CIA leak story and its management's handling of Ms Miller's role.
It acknowledged that editors suppressed stories that could be embarrassing to Ms Miller or Mr Libby and failed to keep readers fully informed about developments in the case.
The paper said: "Neither the Times nor its cause has emerged unbruised. Three courts, including the Supreme Court, declined to back Ms Miller. Critics said the Times was protecting not a whistle-blower but an administration campaign intended to squelch dissent.
"The Times's coverage of itself was under assault: while the editorial page had crusaded on Ms Miller's behalf, the news department had more than once been scooped on the paper's own story, even including the news of Ms Miller's release from jail."
Asked what she regretted about the New York Times handling of the matter, Jill Abramson, a managing editor, said: "The entire thing."
According to yesterday's report, editor Bill Keller and publisher Arthur Sulzberger were so eager to defend Ms Miller on the principle of not revealing her source that they left most of the key decisions to the reporter herself and did not ask to see her interview notes. This was despite Ms Miller's controversial reputation as a robust supporter of the administration's policy in Iraq who published a series of articles on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction before the war which turned out to be untrue.
Ms Miller told the newspaper yesterday she was proud of her journalism career, including her work on al-Qaeda, biological warfare and Islamic militancy. But she acknowledged serious flaws in her articles on Iraqi weapons.
"WMD - I got it totally wrong. The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them - we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could," she said.
A number of journalists secured confidentiality waivers from their sources on the CIA leak last year, but Ms Miller wanted to be sure that Mr Libby really wished her to testify.
It was not until he wrote her a personal letter and spoke to her on the telephone while she was in prison that she accepted he was not acting under duress in granting the waiver.
In his letter, however, Mr Libby told Ms Miller that every other reporter's testimony made clear he had not discussed Ms Plame's name or identity.
"The prosecutor asked my reaction to those words. I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms Plame's identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job," Ms Miller wrote yesterday.
New York Times editors have defended their protective stance towards Ms Miller as a defence of a fundamental principle of press freedom. But critics inside and outside the paper have pointed out that Mr Libby was not a conventional whistle-blower and may have been part of a high-level conspiracy to smear a political opponent.
Mr Keller, who took over the editorship after a scandal over the fabrication of stories by a young reporter, said yesterday it was too early to judge whether the paper had done the right thing in the CIA leak case.
"I hope that people will remember that this institution stood behind a reporter, and the principle, when it wasn't easy to do that, or popular to do that," he said.