WASHINGTON – Vice President Dick Cheney told the FBI in 2004 that he had no idea who leaked to the news media that Valerie Plame, wife of a Bush administration critic, worked for the CIA.

An FBI summary of Cheney's interview reflects that the vice president had deep concern about Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador in Africa who said the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI in the investigation of who leaked Plame's identity. At the end of Libby's trial, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said that "there is a cloud over the vice president" in the leaking of Plame's identity.

After Libby's conviction, President George W. Bush commuted Libby's 30-month prison sentence but rejected Cheney's vehement appeals to pardon Libby.

The 28-page FBI interview summary was released Friday to a watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sued to get the material under the Freedom of Information Act.

In the interview, whose participants included Fitzgerald, Cheney told agents that he did not recall having a conversation about either Plame or her husband with Bush.

Cheney said he probably discussed Wilson with Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, but told the FBI he would not have talked to Rove about Wilson's wife.

In the lengthy interview with the FBI, Cheney repeatedly said he could not recall key events. Among them, he said he did not recall discussing Wilson's wife with Libby before her CIA employment was publicly revealed by columnist Robert Novak in July 2003.

Evidence at Libby's criminal trial showed that Cheney had told Libby about Wilson's wife in mid-June 2003.

According to courtroom testimony, Rove was one of Novak's sources for his column disclosing Plame's CIA identity, and Rove and Libby were sources for Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper, who also wrote a story identifying Plame.

The vice president advised the agents that he had no idea what Libby knew on the days before Plame's CIA identity was publicly revealed.

Cheney said he did not recall if he told Libby about Wilson's wife and her employment at the CIA or if Libby revealed to the vice president his independent knowledge about that fact.

Plame was outed in Novak's column as a CIA employee eight days after Wilson attacked the administration in a New York Times opinion piece.

Pete Yost,

The Associated Press