After triggering a huge controversy, senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Jaswant Singh said on Tuesday night that he did not know the name of the mole in the Prime Minister's Office who had leaked nuclear secrets in 1995.
"I don't. I have never claimed that I knew the name of the mole. It is the media which has claimed that I knew it and I was hiding," Singh told NDTV.
He was replying to a question whether he had the name of the mole in the PMO during P V Narasimha Rao's tenure.
But when questioned as to on what basis he had ruled out V S Arunachalam, a former scientific adviser to the defence minister and some others as the mole, Singh said because he thought Arunachalam was not by any account a mole.
About his statement at a press conference that the mole no longer lived in India, he said he had said that about the person who had written the letter to a former US Ambassador in India. "The media misinterpreted me. Perhaps I did not communicate this in the din," Singh said.