Yesterday the New York Sun reported:
A top State Department official, Richard Armitage, disclosed the identity of a CIA officer, Valerie Plame, to at least two prominent reporters and failed to tell prosecutors about one of those contacts for more than two years, according to an account in Newsweek magazine.
Today's Washington Post chips in with confirmation from an unidentified former colleague that the disclosure of CIA agent Valerie Plame's covert identity was really an inadvertent slip by Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State at the time. You may recall that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald charged Scooter Libby, Vice President Richard Cheney's former chief of staff, with lying and obstructing his investigation of that disclosure.
The leak of information about an undercover CIA employee that provoked a special prosecutor's investigation of senior White House officials came from then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, according to a former Armitage colleague at the department.
Armitage told newspaper columnist Robert D. Novak in the summer of 2003 that Valerie Plame, the wife of a prominent critic of the Iraq war, worked for the CIA, the colleague said. In October of that year, Armitage admitted to senior State Department officials that he had made the remark, which was based on a classified report he had read.
And how about this for a fine bit of understatement:
Armitage's involvement in the matter does not fit neatly into the assertions of Bush administration critics that Plame's employment was disclosed as part of a White House conspiracy to besmirch Wilson by suggesting his Niger trip stemmed from nepotism at the CIA. Wilson and Plame have sued top administration officials, alleging that the leak was meant as retaliation.
The Post is being too kind here. Administration critics accused the White House of deliberately revealing Plame's identity and imperiling her life in an act of revenge against her husband Joseph C. Wilson because of his lame story about a trip to Africa. What the Post euphemistically calls "a conspiracy to besmirch Wilson" was in reality the ordinarily acceptable practice of pointing out when a critic is utterly full of BS, as the partisan Joe Wilson is. The real conspiracy here involves the press and the CIA in a war on the White House in which anything goes, and sensitive national security information is just another weapon in the fight.
Comments