Reporter Tells About Grand Jury Testimony

Notebooks used by New York Times reporter Judith Miller during interviews with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff contain variations of the name of an undercover CIA officer whose identity might have been illegally leaked, the newspaper reported in today’s editions.

Miller, in a first-person account of her interviews with top Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and of her subsequent testimony before a federal grand jury, said she believed it was through Libby she learned that the wife of a Bush administration critic was employed by the agency. But Miller said she could not remember whether she learned the name of the undercover CIA operative from Libby. The operative was Valerie Plame.

Miller’s account also indicated that the prosecutor leading the federal investigation had sought to determine what role Cheney himself had played -- if any -- in the White House’s effort to discredit an outspoken critic of the justifications used to invade Iraq.

And it revealed that the prosecutor had asked whether she felt Libby was attempting to influence her testimony in a letter he sent to her last month releasing her from a confidentiality pledge. Miller said that she had been surprised by some of Libby’s statements.

The disclosures provide potentially significant new details on the key developments in a federal probe that is focused on determining whether senior administration officials deliberately exposed the name of Plame in retaliation for her husband’s criticism of the war.

While not identifying Libby as the source for the CIA operative’s name, Miller makes it clear that the two discussed Plame’s job in several conversations.

Plame’s husband, former U.S. envoy Joseph C. Wilson IV, had written a July 6, 2003, op-ed piece for the New York Times that attacked the intelligence used by the administration for going to war in Iraq. Eight days later, Plame was identified in a column by Robert Novak, who disclosed her role as a CIA operative.

Miller spent 85 days in jail while refusing to reveal the name of her source, but reversed course and agreed to testify before the grand jury last month after obtaining what she described as a personal waiver from Libby.

Karl Rove, White House deputy chief of staff and Bush’s top political advisor, also has testified before the grand jury. He appeared for the fourth time Friday as the 22-month probe appeared to be coming to a close.

The New York Times posted two stories on the case on its website Saturday. One titled “The Miller Case: A Notebook, a Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal” was reported by three staff writers; the other, a first-person account by Miller, was titled “My Four Hours Testifying in the Federal Grand Jury Room.”

In her first public account of her testimony before the grand jury, Miller said that she was asked by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor leading the investigation, why a variation of the CIA officer’s name appeared in a notebook that also contained notes from her interviews with Libby.

“I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall,” Miller said in her account.

Miller described three separate conversations with Libby between June 23 and July 12, 2003 -- a time when the administration was under mounting pressure to defend its decision to invade Iraq because it was becoming clear that the country had no stockpiles of banned weapons.

She said that it was at the June 23 meeting -- almost two weeks before the Wilson op-ed article appeared -- that she first learned his wife might work for the CIA. She said she wrote in her notes of the meeting, “Wife works in bureau?” She said she told Fitzgerald that she could not explain the question mark. “Maybe it meant I found the statement interesting. Maybe Mr. Libby was not certain whether Mr. Wilson’s wife actually worked there,” Miller said.

One of Miller’s notebooks, from a second meeting with Libby on July 8 -- two days after Wilson publicly attacked the administration -- contains a reference to the name “Valerie Flame,” a misspelling of Plame. But Miller said the reference appears in a different section of the notebook than she used during her interview with Libby.

“As I told Mr. Fitzgerald,” Miller said, “I simply could not recall where that name came from, when I wrote it or why the name was misspelled.”

Another notebook -- from a third Miller-Libby conversation, on July 12 -- refers to “Victoria Wilson,” an erroneous variation of Plame’s married name. Miller said she could not be sure that the name had been provided by Libby.

“I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I was not sure whether Mr. Libby had used this name or whether I just made a mistake in writing it on my own. Another possibility, I said, is that I gave Mr. Libby the wrong name on purpose to see whether he would correct me and confirm her identity,” Miller said.

Miller said that Libby had been sharply critical of Wilson during their conversations, and indicated that Libby did say that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. Her notes from the July 8 meeting, a breakfast with Libby, include the comment that Wilson’s “wife works at Winpac,” a reference to the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control section, a unit that tracks the spread of unconventional arms.

One of Libby’s main purposes during his meetings with Miller was to defend Cheney from allegations that the vice president had exaggerated intelligence or ignored evidence that didn’t fit the administration’s case for war.

Wilson, the former ambassador, had emerged as a particularly troubling figure for the White House that summer because of the July 6 op-ed piece in which he said he had been asked to travel to Africa to investigate allegations that Iraq was seeking uranium yellowcake from Niger. Wilson said he had reported that he had found no evidence of any such effort by Iraq and was stunned when President Bush included the uranium claim in his State of the Union address.

Miller testified before the grand jury on Sept. 30, the day after she was released from jail, and again last Wednesday.

At first, she refused to cooperate, saying that she could not talk about conversations she had with a confidential source, and that the source, now known to be Libby, had not given her permission to testify.

Joseph Tate, a lawyer for Libby, has strongly disputed that version of events, and has said that Libby gave Miller and her lawyers a waiver more than a year ago.

Last month, while she was in jail, and following renewed efforts by Miller’s lawyers to gain her release, Libby wrote a letter encouraging her to tell her to appear before the grand jury.

During her grand jury appearance Wednesday, Miller said, Fitzgerald asked her to read aloud the final three paragraphs of the letter from Libby, in which he stated that “the public report of every other reporter’s testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame’s name or identity with me.”

“The prosecutor asked my reaction to those words,” Miller wrote. “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.”

Miller said Fitzgerald also focused on the closing lines of the letter. “Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning,” Libby wrote. “They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them.”

Asked by Fitzgerald to interpret this cryptic message, Miller said, she recounted attending a rodeo in Jackson Hole, Wyo., two years ago, and being approached by a stranger wearing jeans, a cowboy hat and sunglasses. It turned out to be Libby. She did not explain further.

Miller’s account provided additional evidence that administration officials were actively talking with reporters about Plame in the days and weeks before she was publicly named by Novak. Rove also has acknowledged talking about Plame, although apparently without identifying her by name.

It is a felony to leak the identity of a covert operative to someone who is not cleared to receive classified information. But the law is ambiguous on whether it is a crime to release information without a name.

During the grand jury hearing, Miller said, Fitzgerald asked questions about Cheney, including whether Libby had indicated that the interviews he had given her had been authorized by the vice president.

Fitzgerald “asked, for example, if Mr. Libby ever indicated whether Mr. Cheney had approved of his interviews with me or was aware of them,” Miller said. “The answer was no.”

In an interview Saturday, Plame’s husband said that the idea that Cheney might have played a role in the release of information about his wife was disturbing.

“It makes me sick to my stomach to think that a tawdry political dirty trick that may have strayed into illegality might actually implicate the senior reaches of our elected leadership,” Wilson said. “I would hope that is not the case, and anyone who cares about the governance of this country should also hope that’s not the case.”

The grand jury that Fitzgerald has been using to investigate the case expires Oct. 28, and many believe that the prosecutor is unlikely to seek an extension. In addition to looking into how Plame’s name was made public, Fitzgerald reportedly is examining whether crimes including perjury, obstruction of justice and mishandling of classified information were committed.

Times staff writer Tom Hamburger contributed to this report.