WASHINGTON, Oct 1: After 85 days in jail for refusing to name her source, New York Times reporter Judith Miller testified on Friday about conversations with a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney to a grand jury investigating who leaked the name of a CIA operative.

Legal sources close to the case said Judith Miller, who was freed on Thursday, gave the federal grand jury in Washington a detailed account of two conversations she had in July 2003 with Mr Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Plame’s diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, said the administration had leaked her name, damaging her ability to work undercover, to get back at him for criticizing President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy.

Ms Miller said she agreed to testify about the conversations only after receiving what she called a “personal, voluntary” waiver of confidentiality from her source.

Miller said the source had conveyed the waiver in the form of a letter and a phone call to her in jail.

Though Ms Miller declined to publicly name Libby outside of the grand jury room, attorneys in the case said he was her source. During her testimony, one source said, “she walked them through those conversations.”

After obtaining her waiver, Miller said her lawyers secured an agreement with Fitzgerald to narrow the scope of her testimony to her conversations with that single source.—Reuters