The White House leak scandal that has already triggered the indictment of one senior Bush administration official has sucked in a startling and wholly unexpected new player, the Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, one of the heroes of Watergate and arguably the closest thing in American journalism to a national institution. Mr Woodward was unexpectedly called as a witness this week before special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury and made the bombshell disclosure that he had in fact been caught up in the revelation of a covert CIA operative's cover from the beginning. That, in turn, has cast a deep shadow on the reputation of a man widely regarded as a white knight of the Fourth Estate for his work, alongside his colleague Carl Bernstein, in bringing down the Nixon presidency more than 30 years ago.It turns out Mr Woodward was the first journalist to be given the name of the CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in what appears to have been a low act of official revenge against Ms Plame's diplomat husband Joe Wilson.Ambassador Wilson publicly challenged the administration's rationale for war in Iraq in the months after the US invasion, saying he had been sent on an official mission to Africa before the war to check out reports that Saddam Hussein was buying yellowcake uranium from Niger and found them to be bogus.Not only did Mr Woodward not go public with the fact that he had been given Ms Plame's name for almost 30 months; he did not even inform his superiors at the Washington Post that he was a key player in a scandal that, in recent months, has systematically eaten away at the integrity and public popularity of the Bush presidency.Worse still, transcripts of Mr Woodward's recent television appearances show that he has wasted few opportunities to denigrate Mr Fitzgerald, calling him a "junkyard dog" chasing down trivia, and describing his decision to jail New York Times reporter Judith Miller for failing to co-operate with his investigation as "disgraceful".Ms Miller has since been disgraced herself, for writing a slew of erroneous stories about Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction and for seeming being more interested in protecting the integrity of her sources within the Bush administration than in protecting the integrity of a deeply embarrassed New York Times.Now it is Mr Woodward's turn to come under suspicion that his powerful friends mean more to him than his professional obligation to his readers. * He has questioned the use of large-scale gas chambers to exterminate the Jews, and has claimed that the numbers of those who perished are far lower than those generally accepted. At his trial, Irving insisted that he had never claimed that the Holocaust did not occur. He maintained that he had simply questioned the number of Jews killed under Hitler's regime and denied that they had been systematically exterminated in gas chambers in Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz. History of the history man * Set up Samisdat Publishing in the 1970s, one of the world's main distributors of Nazi propaganda * In 1992, a judge in Germany fined Irving £4,000 for publicly insisting the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz were a hoax. * He sued Lipstadt for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier but his lawsuit was dismissed in 2000 by a British court, which ruled that Irving was anti-Semitic and racist and misrepresented historical information * His film, 'The Search for the Truth in History', triggered protests in Australia that led a film festival to cancel a screening.

Irving faced £3m in costs as a result of his court defeat and was forced to sell his Mayfair home. He has since been reduced to selling his books on the internet and going on speaking tours in the United States where Holocaust denial does not constitute a criminal offence. The British judge cleared Mrs Lipstadt and described Irving as an "active Holocaust denier " who was "an anti-Semitic racist who associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism". Irving was disgraced at a libel trial in London in 2000 when he attempted to sue the American academic Deborah Lipstadt for having described him as a "Holocaust denier" in her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Irving claimed during the trial that the Nazi gas chambers were "completely fictitious".

State prosecutors in Graz said it was unclear whether there were sufficient legal grounds to continue holding Irving as the offences, allegedly committed during a speaking tour in Austria in 1989, took place so long ago They said they were likely to reach a decision next week. It said that Irving had managed to visit his friend Rolf Hochhuth, a controversial German playwright whom he had not been able to meet for more than 20 years because of travel bans imposed on the author. The website claimed that "Austrian political police" had tracked down the "expert on the Third Reich" by tapping his phone and intercepting his e-mails. He has also appeared as a speaker at far-right political rallies in Germany, where he is now banned from speaking.