How does State fit in the Plame outting mix?

Prosecutors in the C.I.A. leak case have shown intense interest in a 2003 State Department memorandum that explained how a former diplomat came to be dispatched on an intelligence-gathering mission and the role of his wife, a C.I.A. officer, in the trip, people who have been officially briefed on the case said.

Investigators in the case have been trying to learn whether officials at the White House and elsewhere in the administration learned of the C.I.A. officer's identity from the memorandum. They are seeking to determine if any officials then passed the name along to journalists and if officials were truthful in testifying about whether they had read the memorandum, the people who have been briefed said, asking not to be named because the special prosecutor heading the investigation had requested that no one discuss the case.

The memo was sent to Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, just before or as he traveled with President Bush and other senior officials to Africa starting on July 7, 2003, when the White House was scrambling to defend itself from a blast of criticism a few days earlier from the former diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson IV, current and former government officials said.

Mr. Powell was seen walking around Air Force One during the trip with the memo in hand, said a person involved in the case who also requested anonymity because of the prosecutor's admonitions about talking about the investigation.

Investigators are also trying to determine whether the gist of the information in the memo, including the name of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, Mr. Wilson's wife, had been provided to the White House even earlier, said another person who has been involved in the case. Investigators have been looking at whether the State Department provided the information to the White House before July 6, 2003, when her husband publicly criticized the way the administration used intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, the person said...

The memo was dated June 10, 2003, nearly four weeks before Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in which he recounted his mission and accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq. The memo was written for Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs, and it referred explicitly to Valerie Wilson as Mr. Wilson's wife, according to a government official who reread the memo on Friday.

When Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article appeared on July 6, 2003, a Sunday, Richard L. Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, called Carl W. Ford Jr., the assistant secretary for intelligence and research, at home, a former State Department official said. Mr. Armitage asked Mr. Ford to send a copy of the memo to Mr. Powell, who was preparing to leave for Africa with Mr. Bush, the former official said. Mr. Ford sent the memo to the White House for transmission to Mr. Powell.

It is not clear who asked for the memo, but in the weeks before it was written, there were several accounts in newspapers about an unnamed former diplomat's trip to Africa seeking intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program...

The information contained in the State Department memo generally tracked the information Mr. Novak laid out for Mr. Rove in their conversation about the matter, according to the account of their exchange provided by the person briefed on what Mr. Rove has told investigators.

But it appears to differ in at least one way, raising questions about whether it was the original source of the material that ultimately made its way to Mr. Novak. In his July 14, 2003, column, Mr. Novak referred to Ms. Wilson as Valerie Plame. The State Department memo referred to her as Valerie Wilson, according to the government official who reread the memo on Friday.

The chain of custody of the Bush administration's information about Wilson's wife's identity gets more complicated. State brings to mind several interesting possibilities but they may be dead ends. What is worth noting here is the timing - the fact that State had prepared a memo about Wilson's fact finding trip to Niger and his connection to Plame a full month before Wilson's oped appeared.

Meantime this NYT piece explores the question of who told what to whom, raising the theory that has been ricocheting around the Internet this week tht the White House may have learned of Wilson's wife's work from reporters. The story above would seem to possibly cast doubt on that.

And stay tuned. Matt Cooper plans to tell his story in Time and on CNN on Sunday.

Posted by Laura at July 15, 2005 11:02 PM