WASHINGTON, Sept 8: Former deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage confirmed in newspaper interviews published on Friday that he unwittingly outed a secret CIA agent three years ago and expressed remorse for doing so.
“It was a terrible error on my part,” Armitage, 61, told The New York Times.
“There wasn’t a day when I didn’t feel like I had let down the president, the secretary of state, my colleagues, my family and the Wilsons,” he said referring to Valerie Plame, the CIA agent, and her husband Joseph Wilson.
“I value my ability to keep state secrets. This was bad, and I really felt badly about this,” added Armitage, who served as second-in-command at the State Department from 2001 to 2005.
Mr Armitage had been identified as the source of the leak by a former colleague in a Washington Post report a week ago.
The outing of Plame as a CIA agent prompted President George W. Bush, at one point, to threaten punitive actions if it was discovered that a government official was the source.
Despite an investigation — under US law it is illegal to publicly identify covert intelligence agents — and Mr Armitage’s admission to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Armitage was never charged in the case because he was unaware he had done anything wrong, his former colleague said.
Mr Armitage said in his interviews that he testified three times to Fitzgerald’s grand jury about his actions and that he did not feel he needed an attorney.
“I had made an inadvertent mistake, but a mistake in any event,” he told the Times. “I deserved whatever was coming to me. And I didnt need an attorney to tell the truth.”
Mr Armitage said he did not disclose his role in the leak case until this week, because Fitzgerald, shortly after he was appointed to investigate the case in 2003, had asked him not to.
The New York Times said Fitzgerald is being criticized now for having kept his investigation open for two years when he knew all the time who the source of the leak was.
Armitage said he mentioned Plame’s name in an offhand way in a conversation with Washington Post reporter Robert Novak, who then identified the CIA agent in his newspaper column on July 2003, after getting indirect confirmation of her role from senior presidential adviser Karl Rove.
“Novak asked me, ‘Hey, why did the CIA send Mr. Wilson to Niger?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but I think his wife worked out there’, “ Armitage said in a separate interview with The Washington Post, also published Friday.
He said he learned about Plame’s employment from a State Department memo that did not reveal her covert status.
The leak investigation centered on Plame, whose husband, a retired ambassador, made a 2002 trip to Niger to check on reports that Iraq had secretly tried to purchase uranium ore there.
The Bush administration had used those reports to accuse the government of then-Iraq president Saddam Hussein of trying to secretly build a nuclear arsenal — charges that were used to help justify the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
The Niger report was later discredited.
Following the invasion Wilson accused the Bush administration in a newspaper article of “exaggerating the Iraqi threat.” In July 2003 Novak disclosed Plame’s identity in a article criticizing her husband.
Wilson and other Bush critics charged that senior officials deliberately leaked Plame’s name to reporters to punish her husband for criticising the White House’s war rationale.
Fitzgerald was then named to lead an investigation into the outing of an undercover US spy, which carries felony charges. So far, only one White House official, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, has been indicted for lying to investigators.
Recently Fitzgerald said he did not plan to indict Rove.
