July 17 (Bloomberg) -- White House adviser Karl Rove and vice presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby provided information to a Time magazine reporter about a CIA officer married to a Bush administration critic, though neither man identified her by name, the journalist, Matthew Cooper, said.

Cooper said Rove told him on July 11, 2003, that the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who publicly criticized President George W. Bush's rationale for the invasion of Iraq, worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and sent Wilson to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein's regime was seeking uranium to make nuclear weapons. Libby confirmed that he had heard that Wilson's wife was behind the Niger mission, Cooper said today on NBC's ``Meet the Press.''

Cooper revealed Rove and Libby as two of the unidentified sources he used for a Time report after a special prosecutor investigating how the agent's name was leaked threatened him with jail and the two administration officials released him from a pledge of confidentiality.

``For two years, I have protected the identity of my sources,'' said Cooper, who testified before a grand jury this week in Washington. The battle to keep the information confidential ``went through all the courts in Washington, right up to the Supreme Court, and we lost there.''

Knowingly revealing a covert agent's identity is a federal crime and the role of Rove and other administration officials in the case has stirred a political fight in Washington. Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman said Cooper's statements and other reports vindicate Rove, while Representative Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, renewed calls for revoking the security clearance of Bush's deputy chief of staff and top political adviser until the investigation is over.

No Comment

White House spokesman David Almacy declined to comment. Representatives from Vice President Dick Cheney's press office didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.

Cooper, citing the investigation and confidentiality pledges, refused to say whether other White House officials talked to him about the CIA agent, Valerie Plame. ``I don't want to get into it, but it's possible,'' he said.

Wilson, a former diplomat who served in Iraq and in African countries, wrote an opinion article published in the July 6, 2003, edition of the New York Times saying the administration ``twisted'' some of the intelligence about Iraq's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Cooper wrote in this week's edition of Time that he called Rove, Bush's longtime political adviser, to find out why the administration was disparaging Wilson after it had already acknowledged that statements about Iraq and uranium from Africa shouldn't have been included in the president's January 2003 state of the union address.

Disclosure

Plame's name first was made public July 14, 2003, in an article by syndicated columnist Robert Novak. Novak cited two unidentified administration officials as the source of the information. Cooper said he first learned Plame's name through Novak's column or on the Internet.

Rove said that Wilson's wife worked on the issue of weapons of mass destruction and that she, not the CIA director or Cheney, ``was responsible for sending Wilson'' to Niger to find out if Hussein was seeking uranium there, Cooper wrote.

He wrote he later called Libby and asked ``if he had heard anything about Wilson's wife sending her husband to Niger. Libby replied, `Yeah, I've heard that too,' or words to that effect.''

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said in October 2003 that Rove and Libby had denied naming the CIA operative to journalists. This week McClellan said prosecutors asked him not to comment on the case.

Mehlman, also interviewed on the NBC program, called the controversy over Rove's involvement a Democratic ``smear campaign'' and said Cooper's information ``actually vindicates and exonerates him.''

Harman, of California, said Rove still deserves to lose his security clearance.

``He was either careless or deliberate,'' Harman said on ``Fox News Sunday.'' ``Someone who is that casual about classified information needs to have his clearance lifted at least until the Fitzgerald inquiry is complete.''

Other Democrats, including Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the party's 2004 presidential nominee, have called on Bush to fire Rove.

Wilson, appearing on CBS's ``Face the Nation,'' said Rove's statement that his wife worked for the CIA amounted to disclosure of her identity.

``That is her name,'' Wilson said. ``She is Mrs. Wilson.''

Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the third ranking Republican in the House, suggested Plame's identity was widely known, a contention disputed by Wilson.

``This was a job that the ambassador's wife had that she went to every day,'' Blunt said, echoing the theme used by other Republican defenders of Rove in the past week. ``I think many people in Washington understood that her employment was at the CIA, and she went to that office every day.''

Although Wilson would not say whether his wife had worked overseas in the past five years, he said friends and neighbors knew her under a cover identity as an energy consultant.

The spy agency wouldn't have asked the Justice Department to investigate the leaking of her name ``if they did not believe a possible crime had been committed,'' Wilson said.

Time Inc. agreed on June 30 to hand over Cooper's notes and e-mails in response to a court order after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected its appeal.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been in jail since July 6 for refusing to disclose her sources in the case.

To contact the reporter on this story: Catherine Larkin in Princeton at clarkin4@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 17, 2005 15:53 EDT