Asked today to square her recent descriptions with these accounts, Howard Wolfson, her spokesman, referred to several contemporaneous news accounts that described the region as hostile. He then added: “It is possible in the most recent instance in which she discussed this that she misspoke in regard to the exit from the plane, but there is no question if you look at contemporaneous accounts that she was going to a potential combat zone, that she was on the front lines.”

Asked at a later point in the call to clarify his comment, Mr. Wolfson said that news accounts at the time made clear that the area in which she was landing was “a potential combat zone and was hazardous.”

He said that in her memoir, “Living History,” she wrote about sniper fire in the hills and “clearly meant to say that” when she brought it up last week. He said she had described the event many times the same way and that “in one instance she said it slightly differently.”