A Split Between The Times & Miller?

"At one point Judy agreed to do what I recommended. But she was under tremendous pressure by the New York Times to write the story" as a condition of her employment.

While Keller and Abramson argued that the Times had a responsibility to level with its readers once Miller was no longer in legal jeopardy, Bennett contended that the waiver from Libby and agreement with Fitzgerald applied only to Miller's grand jury testimony and not to telling the world about her private conversations with Cheney's top aide. If revealing everything to readers "were the trumping principle," Bennett said, "you shouldn't respect confidential sources." It is not illegal, however, for grand jury witnesses to discuss their testimony.

Bennett said he insisted that Miller not provide her notes to the Times reporters conducting the inquiry, a decision that has subjected the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent to considerable criticism.

"They were documents which had been subpoenaed by the grand jury, and I didn't think it was appropriate to share them," he said. "But even if it wasn't illegal, there was a pending criminal investigation."

What Miller told the grand jury has also come under scrutiny. A lawyer familiar with her testimony, who asked not to be identified because grand jury proceedings are secret, said Miller volunteered information about two conversations with Libby in July 2003, but did not mention a June 23 discussion in Libby's office until Fitzgerald told her there were White House records of the visit. Miller testified that she did not recall the meeting, but later found references to it in another notebook that had not been subpoenaed, and she testified a second time.

Bennett said it was "absolutely false" to suggest that his client was withholding information, noting that it was a two-year-old conversation that did not seem like "a big deal at the time."

Miller has confirmed that Libby discussed Plame with her in the two July conversations and possibly in the earlier meeting, but said she cannot remember who told her in another instance about the woman she recorded in her notebook as "Valerie Flame."

During the Times inquiry, Bennett said, the reporters also asked for his notes debriefing Miller after her grand jury appearance, but he insisted that she not turn them over.

In his memo, Keller said that although he wishes he had pressed much earlier for more information about Miller's encounters with Libby, "in the end, I'm pretty sure I would have concluded that we had to fight this case in court. For one thing, we were facing an insidious new menace in these blanket waivers, ostensibly voluntary, that administration officials had been compelled to sign."

As a hard-charging investigative reporter who joshed that her nickname was "Miss Run Amok," Miller drew fierce criticism for reporting stories from 2001 to 2003, based on administration and Iraqi sources, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. These carried headlines such as "An Iraqi Defector Tells of Work on at Least 20 Hidden Weapons Sites" and "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." Miller now admits these stories were wrong, and Keller, who succeeded Howell Raines in the summer of 2003 after the Jayson Blair fabrication scandal, corrected some of them in an editor's note last year.

"I wish we had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as I became executive editor," Keller wrote. "At the time, we thought we had compelling reasons for kicking the issue down the road. The paper had just been through a major trauma, the Jayson Blair episode, and needed to regain its equilibrium. It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors . . . and I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction."

But, he added, "by waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, we allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, we fear, we fostered an impression that the Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers. If we had lanced the WMD boil earlier, we might have damped any suspicion that THIS time, the paper was putting the defense of a reporter above the duty to its readers."

In a sign of how deeply the Miller drama has roiled the Times newsroom, Keller endorsed an e-mail by White House correspondent Richard Stevenson, who said the paper should "go to the mat" for its reporters "but only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her end of the bargain, specifically to have conducted him or herself in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards, to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like."

Asked about Keller's criticism of Miller, Bennett said: "I am very concerned now that there are people trying to even old scores and undercut her as a heroic journalist."