NYT September 30, 2005
Have I Got a Fund for You

By ERIC DASH

Hedge funds are not meant to be for everyone. But that has not stopped Christian Baha from using the mass media to promote his fund.

A new commercial for his fund, Superfund, which is technically not a hedge fund but a managed futures fund, is expected to make its debut in a number of large markets.

But there is just one problem, Mr. Baha concedes halfway through the 30-second spot. As a pitchman for a product that is really not supposed to be publicly pitched, he is severely limited in what he can say. "I would love to tell you more about Superfund, but regulations prevent me from describing it on television," Mr. Baha, 36, explains in an Austrian accent that makes him sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger channeling Peter Lynch of Fidelity Investments. Instead, he flashes a Web site address and a wink.

His fund company, based in Monte Carlo and recently renamed Superfund Group, offers hedge funds in more than a half-dozen countries in Europe and Asia. But here they are carefully referred to by their technical name - managed futures funds that are publicly registered partnerships - to appease regulators in the United States. Hedge funds, after all, are private capital placements, and are forbidden by federal regulators from advertising their offerings to the general public.

His grand visions of giving the little investor a piece of the action is at the very least tempered by Superfund's extraordinarily high fees. Superfund is guaranteed at least 8.75 percent in brokerage and management fees, and can take up to a 25 percent cut of any profits after expenses in any month when a fund reaches a new high.

But a television commercial (that can't really advertise anything) for a hedge fund (that is not technically not a hedge fund) may take the cake.

The spot, scheduled to start running next month in San Francisco, South Florida and metropolitan New York, comes after a similar commercial broadcast this spring on cable stations like CNBC, CNN and ESPN. Filmed on a shoestring budget by Strong Academix, a small New York production company, it is awaiting the blessing of federal regulators, who must scrutinize the proposal and videotape for compliance with securities marketing laws.

"Typically, you think of alternative investments and hedge funds as being very secretive and not wanting a lot of attention," said Aaron Smith, Superfund's managing director for North America. "But our experience has been, if you are good at what you do, why wouldn't you market yourself?"

Superfund uses proprietary computer software to make trading decisions on scores of futures contracts, from soybeans to Swiss bonds, and its performance has fluctuated wildly in recent years. Despite strong double-digit net returns in 2002 and 2003, this year Superfund's Series A shares are down 14.7 percent and its Series B shares, which offer higher returns along with higher risk, are down almost 20 percent. And so far, the American funds have attracted only $90 million of the $200 million it hoped to raise since 2002.

Mr. Baha defends Superfund's recent struggles in the United States, suggesting that the last few months obscure the company's long-term results around the globe. He admits his fees, which rival those of the top hedge fund traders, are expensive but says "good things are not cheap and cheap things are not good."

Mr. Baha says that he is simply offering ordinary investors, with as little as $45,000 in income, the same products that high-net-worth individuals and institutional investors use. The aggressive marketing, he suggests, goes part and parcel with this approach.

In Manhattan, Superfund opened an investment center this spring across from the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.

Meanwhile, Mr. Baha has started lining up sports sponsorships in Europe, the first place where the television commercials for his hedge funds were broadcast. In January, Superfund signed Grand Prix racing champion Niki Lauda as a pitchman and it has plans for a Formula Superfund racing series. It already sponsors a professional soccer team, FC Superfund, and a basketball club that has won the Austrian league three years in a row.

Mr. Baha remains coy about any plans to own a major league sports team in the United States. After all, John W. Henry, a managed futures trader, holds a large stake in the Boston Red Sox. Would the New York Yankees be Superfund's next prize?

"That would be great," Mr. Baha said, "but we don't have enough volume acquired here."

NYT

September 30, 2005

Way North of the Border

By EDUARDO PORTER and ELISABETH MALKIN

ST. PAUL - At first blush, Mexico's newest American consulate might appear out of place. Far from the Mexican border, this prosperous state capital, along with Minneapolis and the surrounding suburbs, form a sprawling metropolis with Scandinavian overtones.

Yet by the time the Mexican government opened its 46th consulate in the United States here in June, it was already a latecomer to a bustling Mexican-American community that includes, according to consular officials, 22 churches offering services in Spanish, 9 Spanish-language newspapers, 3 tortilla makers and 9 Hispanic - mostly Mexican - soccer leagues.

"We are responding to the needs of the Mexican community," said Nathan Wolf, the new consul. "We are just following the movement of people."

The location of Mexico's latest American consulate provides a stark illustration of how economically improving groups of Mexican immigrants are establishing themselves across the country, in ways that experts say point to the futility of current attempts to plug the border and stem the flow of illegal migrants in search of a better life.

[Indeed, while overall migration to the United States peaked in 2000, according to a new study by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center, the number of illegal immigrants - mostly from Mexico - rose sharply last year after three years of decline that started with the 2001 recession.]

When the governors of New Mexico and Arizona declared states of emergency in August and called on the federal government to help stop the tide of illegal immigrants coming across the border, their move did nothing to interrupt the consulate's busy preparations to start four Mexican "hometown associations," linking immigrants with their home states.

"They call Minneapolis the new Axochiapan," said Ramiro Hernández, a successful businessman who arrived in the United States illegally 20 years ago from Axochiapan, a small town in the central Mexican state of Morelos. "Ninety percent of the population there has people over here. Kids come here as soon as they come of age."

The 2000 census recorded 41,600 Mexican-born people in Minnesota, up from 3,500 counted in 1990. Locals in Minneapolis say that new arrivals have multiplied even faster over the last five years, coming from Mexico and from Mexican hubs in the United States, notably Chicago. "We think there are around 200,000," Mr. Wolf said.

A strong local economy helps pull Mexicans from steamy Morelos to the chilly Minnesota plain. The state's unemployment rate is among the lowest in the nation; at 3.3 percent, the jobless rate for Minneapolis-St. Paul is the lowest among big metropolitan areas. The forces driving migrants into the United States are even broader, however, and are increasing the supply of working-age Mexicans willing to do whatever it takes to cross the border.

"Immigration trends are virtually unaffected by spending on border enforcement," said J. Edward Taylor, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who has surveyed migrants in Mexico about their experiences. "It means the things driving migration are too big to be counteracted by enforcement."

Demography plays the biggest role. The Mexican government projects that the 11- to 40-year-old population - the prime age for migration - will continue to grow over the next decade, by roughly 6 percent, to 59 million people, before starting to decline over the subsequent 35 years as Mexico ages.

Economic dynamics also contribute to the flow. Mexico's backward rural economy, which produces only 5 percent of Mexico's output but employs more than a fifth of its labor force of 40 million, is poised to remain a plentiful source of migrants.

"There's an unexpectedly high share of workers still in agriculture," Professor Taylor said. "That's like a fault line."

While Mexican demographics are pushing, American demand for cheap labor is pulling just as hard. Gordon H. Hanson, an economics professor at the University of California, San Diego, argues the immigration boom of the last 20 years resulted from two factors: the growth in the Mexican working-age population and the decline in high school dropout rates in the United States, which reduced the domestic supply of low-skilled workers. "It was a match made in heaven," he said.

A Mexican government agency, the National Population Council, forecasts that about 400,000 Mexicans will migrate to the United States every year for the next decade and that the flow should then decline gradually to an estimated 325,000 a year by 2050. Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center, argues that at least in the near term, even this estimate seems low.

To try to stem the flow, the United States government has increased annual spending on border policing in the last 10 years by more than fivefold in real terms. The Border Patrol has swollen to 10,000 agents, equipped with sensors and cameras, planes and drones.

Yet if the border has become tougher, so, too, have migrants. These days, only a third make it into the United States on their first try, according to a survey by the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies of the University of California, San Diego. But 59 percent make it across on their second to fifth attempts. Only 8 percent give up and go home.

"Once I was caught five times," said Arnulfo Pliego, 44, a migrant from Axochiapan who first came to the United States in 1989 and has shuttled between Morelos and Minnesota for the last nine years. "I said to myself, 'I must pass, I must pass,' and I passed."

From 1991 to 1994, some 450,000 illegal immigrants were coming to the United States annually, mostly from Mexico. In the first four years of this decade, the average exceeded 600,000, according to the Pew Hispanic Center report.

Mr. Passel estimates that the Mexican-born population in the United States has swollen to 11 million people, some 60 percent of them here illegally. "If you look at the numbers," he said, "it seems that anybody that wants to get in does."

Indeed, the stepped-up border policing is deterring immigrants from returning home and encouraging them to settle in the United States indefinitely. Meanwhile, the sheer numbers provide new incentives to migrate, as strong networks of immigrants emerge, linking communities on both sides of the border, making migration somewhat easier and effectively transforming it to a routine.

Consider Rosalba Cano. When she followed her husband north, leaving Axochiapan with her 2-year-old child 10 years ago, there were very few of her compatriots in Minneapolis. "I only came because my husband said he was leaving and wouldn't be back in a while," said Ms. Cano, 33, a former preschool teacher. "I was all alone here for a long time."

But then one of Ms. Cano's sisters arrived, followed by her brother and a couple of cousins. She now has three uncles in town. Ms. Cano's husband, Osvaldo García, a former farmworker from Axochiapan, has two brothers and two sisters living in the Twin Cities.

The latest arrival is Ms. Cano's sister-in-law, Obsidiana Enríquez Navarro, 25, who quit her job with the Axochiapan municipal government last year, paid a smuggler $2,000 to get her across the border, then trudged through the Arizona desert before catching transportation to Minneapolis.

There are so many men from Axochiapan in the area that the village priest came to visit. "Father Miguel came to look for the husbands and take them back, but he didn't manage to get any," Ms. Enríquez Navarro said.

Migration is leaving a deep mark on Axochiapan, a county seat at the center of a cluster of villages with a population of some 30,000. In one village, Quebrantadero, people talk of closing the primary school because there are so few young children left.

In Tlalayo, another village, the streets are paved and lined with two-story concrete houses, the product of a construction boomlet financed by remittances from the United States. But with crop prices low and government subsidies limited, the traditional agricultural economy has withered, leaving only elderly men to till the fields.

Municipal officials in Axochiapan estimate that at least a third of the population has moved. The mayor wants to honor the migrants with a 10-foot statue of a man carrying a bag and leaving his wife and two children behind. That may seem paradoxical but he has his reasons.

"I realize that Mexico has moved ahead thanks to remittances," said the mayor, Leopoldo Rodríguez Galarza. "In part, they have helped reduce poverty."

The human flow is changing the Twin Cities, too. East Lake Street in Minneapolis, formerly gang-ridden and drug-infested, has become a lively Mexican commercial center.

Mr. Hernández, who is now a legal resident in the United States, first went into business bringing in Mexican cuts of meat like the salt-cured cecina steak and the heavily spiced pork al pastor from Chicago, and Mexican videos he bought from a bankrupt Blockbuster in California.

He now owns several jewelry shops, a money remittance business, three cowboy-wear stores and a video-rental shop. He is a partner in a local Spanish-language radio station and a supermarket.

And in an echo of the planned Axochiapan monument, he is working with other local community leaders to persuade the governor of Morelos to donate a statue of Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary hero.

These cross-border connections have become so strong, officials say, that nothing is likely to stop Axochiapan's citizens from continuing to seek jobs in the Twin Cities.

In the Cano-García household, Mr. García earns $15 an hour driving a dump truck for a landscaping business and Ms. Cano makes $11 an hour as a supervisor at a taco grill. It is money they could never dream of earning in Mexico.

With two more children, they now own a house, a small duplex in a leafy neighborhood across from a park. The state government has provided extensive help to care for their second son, who is autistic.

"I am very happy with Minnesota," Ms. Cano said. "I have done very well here. It's the best for the future of my children."

Meanwhile, the Mexican government is making plans for its next consulate. According to Mr. Wolf, it should open in Little Rock, Ark., before the end of the year.

Eduardo Porter reported from Minnesota for this article, and Elisabeth Malkin from Axochiapan, Mexico.

NYT September 30, 2005
EU Tries to Unblock Internet Impasse

By TOM WRIGHT

International Herald Tribune

The United States and Europe clashed here Thursday in one of their sharpest public disagreements in months, after European Union negotiators proposed stripping the Americans of their effective control of the Internet.

The European decision to back the rest of the world in demanding the creation of a new international body to govern the Internet clearly caught the Americans off balance and left them largely isolated at talks designed to come up with a new way of regulating the digital traffic of the 21st century.

"It's a very shocking and profound change of the EU's position," said David Gross, the State Department official in charge of America's international communications policy. "The EU's proposal seems to represent an historic shift in the regulatory approach to the Internet from one that is based on private sector leadership to a government, top-down control of the Internet."

Delegates meeting in Geneva for the past two weeks had been hoping to reach consensus for a draft document by Friday after two years of debate. The talks on international digital issues, called the World Summit on the Information Society and organized by the United Nations, were scheduled to conclude in November at a meeting in Tunisia. Instead, the talks have deadlocked, with the United States fighting a solitary battle against countries that want to see a global body take over supervision of the Internet.

The United States lost its only ally late Wednesday when the EU made a surprise proposal to create an intergovernmental body that would set principles for running the Internet. Currently, the U.S. Commerce Department approves changes to the Internet's "root zone files," which are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, a nonprofit organization based in Marina del Rey, California.

Political unease with the U.S. approach, symbolized by opposition to the war in Iraq, has spilled over into these technical discussions, delegates said. The EU and developing nations, they added, wanted to send a signal to America that it could not run things alone. Opposition to Washington's continued dominance of the Internet was illustrated by a statement released last week by the Brazilian delegation to the talks. "On Internet governance, three words tend to come to mind: lack of legitimacy. In our digital world, only one nation decides for all of us."

In its new proposal, the EU said the new body could set guidelines on who gets control of what Internet address - the main mechanism for finding information across the global network - and could play a role in helping to set up a system for resolving disputes.

"The role of governments in the new cooperation model should be mainly focused on principle issues of public policy, excluding any involvement in the day-to-day operations," the proposal said. The new model "should not replace existing mechanisms or institutions," it added. The proposal was vague but left open the possibility, fiercely opposed by Washington, that the United Nations itself could have some future governing role.

The United States has sharply criticized demands, like one made last week by Iran, for a UN body to govern the Internet, Gross said. "No intergovernmental body should control the Internet," he said, "whether it's the UN or any other." U.S. officials argue that a system like the one proposed by the EU would lead to unwanted bureaucratization of the Internet.

"I think the U.S. is overreacting," said David Hendon, a spokesman for the EU delegation.

"But I think it's a tactical overreaction for the negotiations," he added.

"We expected this proposal to move the summit along from the stalemate," Hendon said. "It is unreasonable to leave in the hands of the U.S. the power to decide what happens with the Internet in other countries."

Various groups, including the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency based in Geneva, have suggested that the U.S. government has too much control over the Internet.

Under the terms of a 1998 memorandum of understanding, Icann was to gain its independence from the Commerce Department by September 2006.

But the Bush administration said in July that the United States would "maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file." In so doing, the government "intends to preserve the security and stability" of the technical underpinnings of the Internet.

Without consensus, some experts say that countries might move ahead with setting up their own domain name system, or DNS, as a way of bypassing Icann.

The United States argues that a single addressing system is what makes the Internet so powerful, and moves to set up multiple Internets would be in no one's interest.

"It's not just working," said Michael Gallagher, an assistant secretary at the Commerce Department who heads communication policy. "It's working spectacularly." Paul Twomey, chief executive of Icann, said fears of U.S. government influence on the Internet were overstated.

Delegates say the conference has made much better progress on issues like dealing with spam e-mail messages and identity theft since it began in 2003. But they said they did not expect to be able to complete a document on Friday, as had been planned, and that further talks would be needed before the Tunisia meeting Nov. 16 to 18.

NYT September 30, 2005
Trying to Imprint 'That's Classic' in Younger TV Viewers' Minds

A CABLE network specializing in vintage movies known for classic lines like "Here's looking at you, kid," is hoping to get more kids looking at it.

The network is TCM, formally Turner Classic Movies, which since its introduction in 1994 has presented films like "Casablanca," the source of the line above, in uncut and commercial-free form. Long a favorite of older viewers drawn to its movies from the golden age of Hollywood, TCM is now trying to appeal to younger film fans.

The intended audience is not kids in the sense of say, the children who watch cable channels like Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network. Rather, the goal is to attract additional viewers around the age that Ingrid Bergman was when Humphrey Bogart called her "kid" (just shy of her 27th birthday) - or even some the same age Bogart was (42).

TCM is seeking more youthful viewers through an extensive campaign with a budget estimated at more than $10 million, its largest ever. The ads are appearing on television, in movie theaters, on the network's Web site (turnerclassicmovies.com) and in magazines. The humorous campaign, which tries to redefine "classic" in a more contemporary way, is the first work created for TCM by Leo Burnett USA in Chicago, part of the Leo Burnett Worldwide division of the Publicis Groupe.

Burnett was coincidentally the agency that a decade ago undertook a similar mission for another client, Dewar's, aimed at making Scotch whiskey more palatable to consumers ages 21 to 34. There were cheeky print advertisements that carried headlines like "O.K., you've done the goatee thing. Now can we all just move on" and "It's not so much the 'chat room' as it is the sitting-home-alone-by-yourself part that concerns us."

Selling a product to a more youthful audience, while at the same time not alienating older core customers, is among the trickiest tasks in marketing. And the failure rate is high.

For instance, the Dewar's ads never gained the traction that the agency or client hoped to achieve. It was only more recently, when the so-called cocktail culture began to catch on with younger drinkers, that they started increasing their purchases of distilled spirits. Still, many brands try to cultivate less stodgy images to remain relevant in competitive categories. Other current examples include Cadillac, Miller High Life beer and Camel and Kool cigarettes.

TCM is facing increasing competition from other cable networks that also specialize in movies. Among them are IFC and Sundance Channel, which do not run commercials, and AMC, Bravo and Trio, which do. TCM, being commercial-free, does not live or die by the Nielsen ratings. But it does want to remain popular with cable viewers to ensure that operators of cable systems, which pay fees to carry TCM, keep it among the channels they provide to 70 million cable households.

"We know TCM has a loyal fan base among people who grew up with our movies and film buffs," said Katherine Evans, senior vice president for marketing and enterprises at TCM in Atlanta, part of the Turner Broadcasting System unit of Time Warner. "Our previous advertising was reinforcing the existing audience, but wasn't working hard enough to reach beyond."

"The challenge is, how do we generate a broader fan base" among TV watchers ages 35 to 54, she added, "to make sure they know we exist and get them to tune in and give us a try."

A promising avenue was discovered through research among cable viewers, which found that "about 40 percent say they are somewhat to very interested in 'classic' films," Ms. Evans said. "So we had to figure out creatively how do we get on their radar."

Enter Burnett, which among the agencies TCM talked to "was the one that came to us and said, You have to embrace 'classic'; be the arbiter of 'classic,' " she added.

The Burnett campaign does that in a manner that spins "classic" in an updated direction by offering tongue-in-cheek reinterpretations of the plot lines of TCM movies. To signal younger viewers that TCM is not just for golden oldies, the ads use a mix of titles from "King Kong" (1933) to "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968).

For instance, the ad for "Psycho" (1960) declares: "When a grown man lives with his mother, that's pathetic. When a grown man lives with his dead mother, that's classic." The ad for "Mildred Pierce" (1945) asserts: "When a mother shares everything with her daughter, that's precious. When 'everything' includes her husband, that's classic."

Here is how an ad describes "Lolita" (1962): "When a middle-aged man's girlfriend is Size 14, that's chunky. When a middle-aged man's girlfriend is age 14, that's classic." And this is how an ad retells the plot of "North by Northwest" (1959): "When you barely miss your plane, that's frustrating. When your plane barely misses you, that's classic."

The idea from the research that the definition of a classic film could be extended beyond the stereotype of a musty chestnut "became fascinating to us," said Scott English, a creative director at Burnett who produced the campaign along with his colleague Victor LaPorte.

The focus on specific TCM movies is meant to suggest "that current movie plot lines have nothing on classic movie plot lines for being relevant and timeless," Mr. English said, adding: "We want to blow the dust off 'classic.' With a different perspective, the classics take on a modern sheen."

The magazine ads are running in publications like Men's Health, The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine, Premiere and Vanity Fair. They also appear in magazines owned by the Time Inc. division of Time Warner like Entertainment Weekly, People and Time.

Commercials in movie theaters are scheduled to start today in Landmark Theaters in 22 markets. They include Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington.

Commercials for TV are to begin running Monday on four cable networks that are also part of Turner Broadcasting: CNN, Headline News, TBS and TNT.

NYT September 30, 2005
Times Reporter Free From Jail; She Will Testify

By DAVID JOHNSTON and DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 - Judith Miller, the reporter for The New York Times who has been jailed since July 6 for refusing to testify in the C.I.A. leak case, was released Thursday from a Virginia detention center after she and her lawyers reached an agreement with a federal prosecutor in which she would testify before a grand jury investigating the case, the publisher and the executive editor of the paper said.

Ms. Miller was freed after spending more than 12 weeks in jail, during which she refused to cooperate with the inquiry. Her decision to testify was made after she had obtained what she described as a waiver offered "voluntarily and personally" by a source who said she was no longer bound by any pledge of confidentiality she had made to him. Ms. Miller said the source had made clear that he genuinely wanted her to testify.

That source was I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, according to people who have been officially briefed on the case. Ms. Miller met with Mr. Libby on July 8, 2003, and talked with him by telephone later that week, they said.

Discussions between officials and journalists that week that may have disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, Valerie Wilson, have been a central focus of the investigation.

Ms. Miller said in a statement that she expected to appear before the grand jury on Friday. Ms. Miller was released after she and her lawyers met at the jail with Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the case, to discuss her testimony.

The publisher of The Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., said in a statement that the newspaper supported Ms. Miller's decision, just as it had backed her refusal to testify.

"Judy has been unwavering in her commitment to protect the confidentiality of her source," Mr. Sulzberger said. "We are very pleased that she has finally received a direct and uncoerced waiver, both by phone and in writing, releasing her from any claim of confidentiality and enabling her to testify."

For more than a year, Mr. Fitzgerald has sought testimony from Ms. Miller about conversations she had with Mr. Libby. Her willingness to testify now was in part based on personal assurances given by Mr. Libby this month that he had no objection to her discussing their conversations with the grand jury, according to those officials briefed on the case.

Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation has centered on whether anyone in the Bush administration illegally disclosed to the news media the identity of Ms. Wilson, a C.I.A. employee. The first published reference to Ms. Wilson was in July 2003 in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak, who referred to her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame.

Another important question has been whether officials were truthful in their testimony to investigators and the grand jury.

Ms. Miller never wrote an article about Ms. Wilson. Mr. Fitzgerald has said that obtaining Ms. Miller's testimony was one of the last remaining objectives of his inquiry, and the deal with her suggests that the prosecutor may soon end the long-running investigation. It is unknown whether prosecutors will charge anyone in the Bush administration with wrongdoing.

The agreement that led to Ms. Miller's release followed intense negotiations among her; her lawyer, Robert Bennett; Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate; and Mr. Fitzgerald.

The talks began with a telephone call from Mr. Bennett to Mr. Tate in late August. Ms. Miller spoke with Mr. Libby by telephone this month as their lawyers listened, according to people who have been briefed on the case. It was then that Mr. Libby told Ms. Miller that she had his personal and voluntary waiver.

The discussions were at times strained, with Mr. Libby and Mr. Tate's asserting that they communicated their voluntary waiver to another lawyer for Ms. Miller, Floyd Abrams, more than year ago, according to those briefed on the case.

Other people involved in the case have said Ms. Miller did not understand that the waiver had been freely given and did not accept it until she had heard from Mr. Libby directly.

Ms. Miller authorized her lawyers to seek further clarification from Mr. Libby's representatives in late August, after she had been in jail for more than a month. Mr. Libby wrote to Ms. Miller in mid-September saying he believed that her lawyers understood during discussions last year that his waiver was voluntary.

On Sept. 16, Mr. Tate wrote to Mr. Fitzgerald saying his conversations with Mr. Abrams last year were meant to assure Ms. Miller that a broad waiver that Mr. Libby signed in late 2003 was not coerced and applied specifically to Ms. Miller.

On Thursday, Mr. Abrams wrote to Mr. Tate disputing parts of Mr. Tate's account. His letter said although Mr. Tate had said the waiver was voluntary, Mr. Tate had also said any waiver sought as a condition of employment was inherently coercive.

Mr. Tate said in an interview on Thursday, "Her lawyers were provided with a waiver that we said was voluntary more than a year ago." Mr. Abrams would not discuss the question in a brief telephone conversation on Thursday.

As part of the agreement, Mr. Bennett gave Mr. Fitzgerald edited versions of notes taken by Ms. Miller about her conversations with Mr. Libby.

In statements on Thursday, Ms. Miller and executives of The Times did not identify the source who had urged Ms. Miller to testify. Bill Keller, the executive editor, said Mr. Fitzgerald had assured Ms. Miller's lawyer that "he intended to limit his grand jury interrogation so that it would not implicate other sources of hers."

Ms. Miller's lawyers had sought such an assurance as a condition of her testimony.

Mr. Keller said Mr. Fitzgerald cleared the way to an agreement by assuring Ms. Miller and her source that he would not regard a conversation between the two about a possible waiver as an obstruction of justice.

According to someone who has been briefed on Mr. Libby's testimony and who believes that his statements show he did nothing wrong, Ms. Miller asked Mr. Libby during their conversations in July 2003 whether he knew Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former ambassador who wrote an Op-Ed article in The Times on July 6, 2003, criticizing the Bush administration. Ms. Miller's lawyers declined to discuss the conversations.

Mr. Libby said that he did not know Mr. Wilson but that he had heard from the C.I.A. that the former ambassador's wife, an agency employee, might have had a role in arranging a trip that Mr. Wilson took to Africa on behalf of the agency to investigate reports of Iraq's efforts to obtain nuclear material. Mr. Wilson's wife is Ms. Wilson.

Mr. Libby did not know her name or her position at the agency and therefore did not discuss these matters with Ms. Miller, the person who had been briefed on the matter said. Ms. Miller said she believed that the agreement between her lawyers and Mr. Fitzgerald "satisfies my obligation as a reporter to keep faith with my sources."

"I went to jail," she added, "to preserve the time-honored principle that a journalist must respect a promise not to reveal the identity of a confidential source. I chose to take the consequences, 85 days in prison, rather than violate that promise. The principle was more important to uphold than my personal freedom. "

Ms. Miller said she was grateful for the "unwavering support" shown by her husband, family and friends and The Times. She said that she would say nothing more publicly about the case until after her grand jury testimony.

Mr. Fitzgerald declined to comment, a spokesman, Randall Samborn, said.

The case has been the most significant test in decades of whether reporters can refuse to disclose to prosecutors their discussions with confidential sources. Many journalists say those sources would refuse to provide information if their anonymity could not be protected.

At least four other reporters are known to have provided information to Mr. Fitzgerald. But Ms. Miller had until refused to do so. In July, the Supreme Court refused to hear her appeal of a lower court order that she be jailed for contempt for her refusal to testify.

When Mr. Wilson emerged as a critic of the Bush administration in July 2003, administration officials questioned his credibility. The column by Mr. Novak said Mr. Wilson's wife, who worked for the agency, had suggested the trip.

New details about the case have emerged in recent months. Karl Rove, the president's senior political strategist, and Mr. Libby both discussed Ms. Wilson with reporters, according to testimony provided by Matthew Cooper, a Time magazine reporter, and by others.

But neither White House official is known to have mentioned Ms. Wilson by name or to have mentioned her status at the C.I.A.

Mr. Cooper testified in August 2004 about a conversation with Mr. Libby conducted in 2003. But Mr. Cooper had resisted a subpoena to appear before the grand jury to discuss a conversation with Mr. Rove.

In July, after his employer, Time Inc., part of Time-Warner, complied with a subpoena seeking his notes from the period, Mr. Cooper agreed to testify, after seeking and obtaining what he called a specific waiver from Mr. Rove, releasing him from a pledge of confidentiality.

That decision left Ms. Miller alone in resisting the prosecutors' demand to testify. Much about Ms. Miler's role remains unclear. Mr. Keller, the executive editor, has declined to say whether she was assigned to report about Mr. Wilson's trip, whether she tried to write an article about it or whether she ever told editors or colleagues at The Times that she had obtained information about Ms. Wilson's role.

Under the terms of her jailing, Ms. Miller faced incarceration through the duration of the current term of the grand jury hearing the case, and that is due to expire on Oct. 28. Had Ms. Miller continued to resist, lawyers involved in the case said they believed that it was highly likely that Mr. Fitzgerald would have tried to keep her in jail by extending the grand jury term or convening a new grand jury.

Ms. Miller had been housed at the Alexandria Detention Center, a county jail in suburban Virginia. As a federal prisoner, Ms. Miller was an exceptional case. But a spokesman for the sheriff's office, which administers the center, said she had been granted no special privileges.