he online magazine Salon has removed an article charging Thomas E. White, secretary of the Army, with participating in accounting practices that led to the collapse of Enron while he was vice chairman of Enron Energy Services.

The editors of Salon said one reason they removed the article was that a critical piece of evidence, an e-mail message attributed to Mr. White, could not be authenticated.

Paul Krugman, the economics columnist for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, used the article as evidence in a column on Sept. 17, critical of Mr. White. In a column today he writes that he cannot be sure that Mr. White wrote the e-mail message.

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"As long as the authenticity of the message remains in doubt, it should be considered unsubstantiated," Mr. Krugman writes. "I erred by citing it in my column."

Gail Collins, the editorial page editor of The Times, described Mr. Krugman's comments as a retraction last night and said, "One of the important things about being a good reporter or columnist is to acknowledge when you failed to connect a dot, and I think that's what Paul is saying."

In the Sept. 17 column, Mr. Krugman said the evidence in Salon indicated that Mr. White was "a corporate evildoer."

The Salon article, published on Aug. 29 and written by Jason Leopold, a freelancer, accused Mr. White of having tried to obscure losses at Enron by sending an e-mail message to someone he supervised at Enron instructing him: "Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q."

Salon editors removed the article on Tuesday, saying they could "no longer stand by the story in its entirety." Salon editors began investigating the article after an editor at The Financial Times told them that seven paragraphs of Mr. Leopold's article were copied directly from an article in The Financial Times. On Sept. 28, Salon published a correction concerning Mr. Leopold's failure to attribute the material to The Financial Times.

Mr. Leopold said yesterday that he stood by the authenticity of the e-mail message and the facts of his article. He said he was "hung out to dry" by Salon. "There is an enormous amount of political pressure on Salon," he said.

In an interview this week, Mr. Krugman said that Mr. Leopold provided documents that convinced him that Mr. White had played a role in accounting manipulations at Enron.

"Initially, I asked Leopold for background on White's dealings," Mr. Krugman said in an interview. "All of that appeared genuine." As for the e-mail exchange, Mr. Krugman said, "I didn't press for validation because it was consistent with everything else."

A copy of the e-mail message that Mr. Krugman said he used for the information in his column purports to show that Mr. White was corresponding with Jeff Forbis, a former executive at Enron Energy Services, whose name is in the address line, although his name is partially crossed out.

Robert J. Higgins, a lawyer for Mr. White, said Mr. White did not recall ever receiving any e-mail from Mr. Forbis.

"He doesn't recall ever sending any e-mail to Jeff," Mr. Higgins added.

Mr. Forbis did not return several calls seeking comment.

Until April, Mr. Leopold was a Los Angeles correspondent for Dow Jones Newswires. He said he resigned from Dow Jones to write a book about the energy crisis.

His resignation came about a week before Dow Jones published the second of two extensive corrections of a March 18 article by Mr. Leopold and another reporter. The corrections there and in The Wall Street Journal, which also published the article, invalidated virtually all of the major points of the article, which accused Enron of compensating several executives excessively.

Mr. Leopold said he believed he was being singled out because of his aggressive reporting.

"I don't think there's any reporter out there who has skirted the edge like I have and really tried to obtain information about Enron," he said.