At his appearance on Friday at the security conference, General Thomas was asked whether American forces had ever been close to capturing or killing Mr. Baghdadi.

“There were points in time when we were particularly close to him,” he responded. “Unfortunately, there were some leaks about what we were up to about that time. When we went after Abu Sayyaf, the oil minister who was very close to him, one of his personal confidants, he didn’t live, but his wife did. And she gave us a treasure trove of information about where she had just been with Baghdadi in Raqqa, days, if not within days, prior. And so that was a very good lead. Unfortunately, it was leaked in a prominent national newspaper about a week later and that lead went dead.”

The account by General Thomas — who at the time of the raid was the head of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, whose commandos target Islamic State leaders in Syria and Iraq — was imprecise in two aspects.

The Pentagon itself provided the confirmation on May 16, 2015, that Abu Sayyaf’s wife had been captured.

And the Times account was published not a week later, but 23 days after the Pentagon statement.

That gap matters because Mr. Baghdadi is almost certain to have taken precautionary steps, such as changing his pattern of behavior, shifting his location and adopting new procedures for communicating with other Islamic State commanders, in the days after the May 16 raid and the capture of a close associate — that is, well before the publication of the Times article on June 8.

The Pentagon raised no objections with The Times before the article was published, and no senior American official had complained publicly about it until now. Some officials expressed hope at the time that some of the details in the article would sow fear in the ranks of the Islamic State by demonstrating that the United States could penetrate the group’s secrecy.