US President George W. Bush met with federal investigators for more than an hour on Thursday over the leak of the identity of a secret agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the White House said.  

The president was questioned for 70 minutes by US Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who heads the Justice Department investigation and members of his team, who are charged with finding out whether any administration staff member leaked to the media last year the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative.

Revealing a CIA agent's identity is a crime in the United States.

"No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the president of the United States," McClellan said.

"And he has said on more than one occasion that if anyone, inside or outside the government, has information that can help the investigators get to the bottom of this, they should provide that information to the officials in charge," he said.

The investigators are trying to determine the sources for columnist Robert Novak's revelation in 2002 that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Plame, was a covert CIA agent.

Wilson was sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to investigate allegations that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium ore from the country, and reported back that he found no basis for the allegations.

In his State of the Union address in January 2003, however, Bush repeated the Iraq-Niger allegations to bolster his argument that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. Wilson denounced the Bush administration's claim and has said he believes his wife's identity was disclosed to undermine his credibility.

Several journalists and administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and McClellan, have been questioned in the investigation.

(Xinhua News Agency June 25, 2004)