Washington – A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked “(S)” for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.
Plame – who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo – is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.
The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the “secret” level, two sources said. The CIA classifies the names of officers whose identities are covert as “secret,” according to former senior agency officials.
But that designation was not specifically attached to Plame’s name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. Knowingly disclosing a covert CIA official’s identity is a federal crime.
Prosecutors attempting to determine whether senior government officials knowingly leaked Plame’s identity to the media are investigating whether White House officials gained access to information about her from the memo, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.
The memo may be important to answering: Who in the Bush administration knew about Plame’s CIA role? Did they know the agency was trying to protect her identity? And who leaked it to the media?
Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger.
Only two sentences in the seven-sentence paragraph mention Wilson’s wife.
