Washington: A former White House press secretary has accused President George W Bush of misleading the public over a CIA leak which blew the cover of one of their spies and rocked the US administration.

Scott McClellan, who was Bush's chief spokesman between 2003-2006,says in an excerpt from his upcoming book that he unknowingly gave wrong information about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame in 2003.

He told reporters in October 2003 that top White House aides Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby were not involved in leaking her name to the media. "The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," McClellan says in he book, according to a short excerpt on the website of his publisher, Public Affairs "So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights or the better part of two week and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

"There was one problem. It was not true," he writes. In "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What s Wrong with Washington" due to published on April 21, McClellan goes on to name Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney as among the officials responsible for allowing him to disseminate false information.

"I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff, and the president himself," he writes. Andrew Card was Bush s chief of staff at the time.

Source : PTI