http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1646247,00.htmlWoodward under fire after giving evidence to CIA leak inquiry
Jamie Wilson in Washington
Saturday November 19, 2005
The Guardian
Bob Woodward, the journalist usually treated in America with a reverence reserved for elder statesmen, found himself under siege inside his own newspaper yesterday over his role in the CIA leak inquiry.
Mr Woodward, who was able to keep secret the identity of his most famous source - Deep Throat - for more than 30 years, was forced to give evidence to the special prosecutor investigating who leaked the identity of a CIA operative. It emerged that the man whose reporting on the Watergate scandal helped bring down President Richard Nixon was the first journalist to learn from an administration official that Valerie Plame, the wife of former US ambassador and Bush critic Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA.
Woodward was then forced to apologise to the editor of the Washington Post for keeping his bosses in the dark for more than two years over his role in the story, even as it grew into a scandal in which Lewis "Scooter" Libby, vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff, has been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice.
Yesterday a Washington Post internal critique, leaked to the website mediabistro, highlighted the friction the Woodward disclosures have caused within the newspaper. "I feel like we're ignoring the 800lb elephant
on our front page," wrote Charles Babington, one of the Post's political writers. Columnist Jonathan Yardley was even more damning: "This is the logical and perhaps inevitable outcome when an institution permits an individual to become larger than the institution itself."
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