Over the last few days I’ve done several <$NoAd$>posts on how that classified State Department memo in the Plame case made its way through the State Department and then to then-Secy. Powell on the president’s trip to Africa. Last night I got an email from a longtime reader who is a retired US ambassador, a career foreign service officer and Asia specialist …
Josh, in your posting on talking points, you asked about the briefing books for Presidential trips. For your background info:
The State Department is responsible for preparing the briefing books for the President. The NSC often boils the big briefing books (very thick, usually one or two volumes) down into more concise memos and talking points for the President.
The Secretary of State has additional briefing books that consist of memos for any meetings that are his/her own and separate from the President.
In addition, the Secretary’s staff often puts together an informal collection of materials for the Secretary to read while on the plane.
As you noted, on July 6 Rich Armitage asked Carl Ford to send a copy of the June INR memo to Powell. I read that the original memo in June was from INR to Marc Grossman. The way State works, someone on the 7th floor could have made a copy of the June memo for Armitage, or Grossman could have brought it to Armitage’s attention. That’s how he learned about it, and when he read Joe’s op-ed on that July Sunday, he immediately remembered about it and called Ford and said to send Powell a copy.
The question is, did that memo end up in the President’s briefing book, the Secretary’s briefing book, or the Secretary’s pile of reading material?
It doesn’t really matter. When you’re on Air Force One, you are in a confined space. If someone — anyone — read that memo, they could have walked 10 feet and shared it with anyone else. All the bureaucratic boundaries of Washington break down when you’re in one of those situations. You’re all together. Bloomberg said that Ari Fleischer was seen reading it. Plus according to other accounts, he started telling reporters on board that they should ask about how it was that Wilson got to go on the trip. Plus we know that Ari made phone calls from the plane — they could have been to Rove, Libby, Novak, or whoever, to alert them to what he had just read. When Rove says “I never read anything/saw any memo,” he could very well be right. But someone should have asked him, “did you hear about the memo? Did someone describe its contents to you?”
There is another way that Rove could have heard about Valerie Plame, and that is via Scooter Libby. I haven’t seen anyone suggest this route, but we all know that Scooter and Cheney were deep into the intelligence. They went out to the Agency to meet with the analysts (and allegedly harrassed them). I am sure that Scooter participated in meetings in the White House/EOB where CIA analysts on WMD and Iraq were present. As we know, Valerie was one such analyst. Is it not possible that Scooter had met her on one or more occasions before Joe Wilson started going public? Since she’s a looker, he certainly would have remembered her face and name. And then, once Joe writes his op-ed, Scooter realizes the connection between Valerie and Joe, or he asks around and quickly finds out. He then informs Rove. This is all speculation on my part. Joe would know whether Valerie had met Scooter before.
The third possibility is Bolton or his staff. (Remember that his chief of staff was from the CIA.) Again, Bolton was deeply into the intelligence on Iraq and WMD. When INR sent the memo to Grossman in June, Bolton’s office no doubt got a copy of it, given the way the Department works. Given the neo-con circle in the Administration, it would not have taken long for Bolton to tip off Libby to the Wilson-Plame-CIA connection.
(ed.note: Later he added the following.)
As I reread my email, my guess is that the INR memo to Powell would have been put in his reading folder and not in the president’s briefing book — that’s because the briefing books are usually printed up one week in advance, so if the memo was sent on July 6 or whatever, and they were flying to africa the next day or so, it would have been too late to put it in the official briefing book.
