Robert Novak should be sitting in a prison cell.

WASHINGTON: The newspaper columnist Robert Novak testified Monday that two high officials in the Bush administration told him the identity of a CIA agent whose unmasking touched off a scandal, but that Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., did not.

Novak recalled in Federal District Court how Richard Armitage, then a deputy secretary of state, and Karl Rove, the White House political adviser, told him the identity of the covert agent, Valerie Wilson. But, Novak said, “I got no help or no confirmation from Mr. Libby on that issue.”

Nor was Armitage helpful early on, Novak said, recalling how Armitage refused his requests for an interview again and again. “He just didn’t want to see me,” Novak said.

But finally Armitage relented, confirming the agent’s identity in a one-on- one interview on July 8, 2003, Novak said. A day later, Novak said, Rove provided additional confirmation.

Novak’s appearance at Libby’s criminal trial was at once dramatic and anticlimactic, since the roles of Armitage and Rove have been known for many months. But the columnist provided insights into how news is gathered in Washington.

Libby is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors maintain he tried to thwart an investigation into who leaked the name of Wilson, whose husband, the former diplomat Joseph Wilson 4th, had traveled to Africa to investigate rumors that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger.

Some critics of the Bush administration have asserted that Valerie Wilson was unmasked in retaliation against her husband, who wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times on July 6, 2003, that cast doubt on the uranium rumors and the administration’s rationale for going to war against Iraq.

Novak’s column of July 14, 2003, first revealed to the public that Wilson was “an agency operative” specializing in weapons of mass destruction.

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