The newly-enterprising New York Sun got its hands on a key State Department memo from 2003 that identifies Valerie (Plame) Wilson as the wife of Joe Wilson. It’s an informative new piece of the Plame puzzle — only the Sun uses it to prove pretty much the exact opposite of what it shows. At least that’s what an high-ranking intel source familiar with the memo tells us.
Here are the basic details.
Every graf of the three-page doc was marked “Secret,” including the one that mentions Valerie Plame. The Sun comes to the up-is-down conclusion that her identity, therefore, wasn’t a secret.
“[The memo] appears to offer no particular indication that Ms. Plame’s role at the agency was classified or covert,” wrote Sun reporter Josh Gerstein. He quotes Karl Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin:
“The fact that the whole memo was marked this way further substantiates that nobody involved in discussions of her or her role in sending Mr. Wilson had the slightest inkling she was in classified status.”
The logic doesn’t make sense on its face. The memo’s author classified the information as secret, but thought the information wasn’t secret?
Carl Ford, the former chief of State’s intelligence bureau, wrote the document, and it turns out he’s still kicking around Washington. I gave him a ring.
Ford didn’t want to comment on the matter — although he did tell me that Gerstein had not contacted him to ask about the document, or what he was thinking.
I did speak to a former senior intelligence official who was familiar with the memo and others like it, and ran Luskin’s thinking past him. “Since the memo’s classified secret, that’s hard to understand,” he said. “The paragraph [Valerie Plame] is mentioned in is classified secret.
“The notion the Sun has is just not correct,” he continued. “For someone in the media, [Luskin’s reasoning] may make a whole lot of sense. But the fact is that in the intelligence community, it’s just assumed that somebody might be undercover. You always classify. . . you don’t assume that they’re not. Never.”
