One of the Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward, has been entangled in the CIA leak case probe which has already triggered the indictment of one senior Bush administration official.

"It certainly gives the appearance of a conflict of interest. He was taking an advocacy position when he was a party to it," said Joseph Wilson, the husband of outed CIA operative Valerie Plame, joining media critics in questioning the role of one of the best-known investigative reporters in the United States.

Mr Woodward was unexpectedly called as a witness this week before special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury and made the bombshell disclosure that he had in fact been caught up in the revelation of a covert CIA operative's cover from the beginning.

Woodward disclosed that he testified under oath on Monday to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that a senior Bush administration official casually told him in mid-June 2003 about Plame's position at the CIA.

The surprise testimony appeared to contradict Fitzgerald's assertion that Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, was the first government official to divulge information to reporters about Plame.

"Woodward's disclosures are a bombshell to Mr. Fitzgerald's case," Ted Wells, an attorney for Libby, said in a statement.

Libby's lawyers jumped on the Woodward disclosure as helpful to their client and hurtful to the prosecution's case.

"First, the disclosure shows that Mr. Fitzgerald's statement at his press conference of Oct. 28, 2005, that Mr. Libby was the first government official to tell a reporter about Mr. Wilson's wife was totally inaccurate," said a statement released by Wells.

"Second, Woodward's disclosure that he talked to Mr. Libby during this period and that Libby didn't discuss Plame undermines the prosecution's claim that Libby was actively seeking to discredit Wilson by leaking information about his wife." he said.

As one of the two Post reporters who led the newspaper's coverage of the 1970s Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, Woodward apologized to Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie on Wednesday for failing to tell him for more than two years about his involvement in the Plame matter.

It also cast a deep shadow on the reputation of a man widely regarded as a white knight of the Fourth Estate for his work, alongside his colleague Carl Bernstein, in bringing down the Nixon presidency more than 30 years ago.

"That hardly undoes the damage," Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review, said of Woodward's apology. In an online column, Rieder said Woodward's belated disclosure "raises huge questions about his role at The Washington Post."

The first published reference to Plame was in July 2003 in a syndicated column by Robert. D. Novak, days after Wilson wrote an article in The Times criticizing the Bush administration for twisting intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The timing of Wilson's article embarrassed the White House, which had failed to find the so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that President George W. Bush had used as the main justification for going to war.

New details about the case made public in recent months showed Karl Rove, Bush's senior political strategist, and Libby both discussed Plame with reporters, according The Times report.

Source: Xinhua/agencies