New York Times reporter Judith Miller speaks outside the US Federal District Court in Washington D.C. Sept. 30. (Photo: Xinhua/Reuters)

    BEIJING, Nov. 10 (Xinhuanet) -- New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who was jailed for refusing to reveal the source during the CIA leak case probe, has retired, the newspaper announced Wednesday.

    Ms Miller, 57, who joined the paper in 1977 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for reporting on global terrorism, had been negotiating with the paper about her future for several weeks.

    In documents posted on media websites, Executive Editor Bill Keller praised Miller, who went to jail for 85 days to protect a source in the CIA leak probe. The source, I. Lewis Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is awaiting trial on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

    "In her 28 years at The Times, Judy participated in some great, prize-winning journalism," Keller wrote to the staff. "She displayed fierce determination and personal courage both in pursuit of the news and in resisting assaults on the freedom of news organizations to report. We wish her well in the next phase of her career."

    In that letter, Miller said she was leaving partly because some of her colleagues disagreed with her decision to testify in the CIA leak case.

    "But mainly," she wrote, "I have chosen to resign because over the last few months, I have become the news, something a New York Times reporter never wants to be."

    She was released from jail in September after her source signed a waiver allowing her to testify.

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    The source was I. Lewis Libby, US Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, whom Miller met with on July 8, 2003, and talked with on the phone later that week, according a report in Friday's edition of The New York Times.

    Discussions between officials and journalists that week that may have disclosed the identity of Plame, who was married to Joseph C. Wilson, a former ambassador, have been a central focus of the investigation.

    The probe, led by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the case, has centered on whether anyone in the Bush administration illegally disclosed Plame's identity to the news media.

    The first published reference to Plame was in July 2003 in a syndicated column by Robert. D. Novak, days after Wilson wrote an article in The Times criticizing the Bush administration for twisting intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

    The timing of Wilson's article embarrassed the White House, which had failed to find the so-called weapons of mass destructionin Iraq that President George W. Bush had used as the main justification for going to war.

    New details about the case made public in recent months showed Karl Rove, Bush's senior political strategist, and Libby both discussed Plame with reporters, according The Times report. Enditem

    (Agencies)