"WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Newspaper columnist Robert Novak said Monday that no one in the administration called him to identify the wife of Bush critic Joe Wilson as a CIA operative.
Wilson, who was acting U.S. ambassador to Iraq just before the Persian Gulf War of 1991, has said White House officials revealed his wife's identity to Novak in retaliation for his exposing flaws in prewar intelligence on Iraq.
Novak, a nationally syndicated columnist who writes for the Chicago Sun-Times, said he learned the identity of Wilson's wife as he was preparing an article to be published July 14 on Wilson's report to the CIA in early 2002 that questioned whether Iraq tried to buy yellowcake -- uranium ore -- in Niger and elsewhere in Africa.
President Bush made the assertion in his 2003 State of the Union address as part of the rationale for going to war, attributing the report to British intelligence. The information was later discredited as being based at least in part on forged documents, and Bush has since backed off the statement.
"Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this," Novak said on CNN's "Crossfire," of which he is a co-host. "There is no great crime here."
"They asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative and not in charge of undercover operators," Novak said.
The Washington Post quoted a "senior administration official" in a story Sunday as saying that two top White House officials disclosed the identity of Wilson's wife in calls to at least six Washington journalists. Novak was the only recipient of the information who published it, the Post reported.
Wilson at one point suggested that senior Bush adviser Karl Rove could have been behind the leak, which the White House denied. He backed off that assertion somewhat Monday, accusing Rove of at least condoning it.
Wilson still contended that Novak's source was someone in the administration.
"I think it comes out of the White House political office," Wilson said, adding that the publication of his wife's identity came one week after he had written an article in The New York Times that was critical of the administration's handling of intelligence on Iraq.
Novak revealed the name of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, in a July column about Wilson's yellowcake report to the CIA.
Novak said Monday that he was working on the column when a senior administration official told him the CIA asked Wilson to go to Niger in early 2002 at the suggestion of his wife, whom the source described as "a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction."
Another senior administration official gave him the same information, Novak said, and the CIA confirmed her involvement in her husband's mission.
In his column, Novak attributed the information about Plame's involvement in Wilson's trip to Africa to two unnamed senior administration officials.
However, in the July 14 article, Novak wrote that Plame "is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."
Novak said Monday that he will not reveal the names of his sources.
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