Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Plame leak has now gone off on so many different tangents that if you’re trying to follow his line of inquiry, you probably need a scorecard to keep track of the players. Does this activity, as Donald Lambro suggests in today’s WA Times, mean that Fitzgerald is desperately casting about for someone’s scalp to hang on his wall for any transgression?

Possibilities include lying to the FBI, lying to him, lying to the grand jury, trying to cover up the lying, or trying to cover up something else of which at present, we’re unaware.

One thing is almost certain; even if Plame was on covert status as the Walter Pincus piece in today’s Washington Post suggests, Fitzgerald will still have a very hard time charging someone with violating the Intelligence Identities act.

Today’s controversy centers around a State Department memo written on June 10, 2003 almost a month before Wilson’s Op-Ed appeared in the New York Times after which Wilson’s wife was identified by Bob Novak in a subsequent column. Since Pincus doesn’t have the memo, there is no way to judge in what context Mrs. Wilson’s name came up. What’s important, according to Pincus, is that the paragraph that names her is preceded by the letter “S” – an indication that what’s contained in the paragraph is “secret.”

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 (INR), 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 as “secret” the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.

After raising the specter of a violation of the law, Pincus adds this:

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame’s name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret

In other words, in what would have to be described as a sensitive document dealing with the Iraq-Niger uranium issue, Mrs. Wilson’s name (not her maiden name) was used in connection with…what? Pincus doesn’t know but that doesn’t stop him from using “former government officials” (the same “officials” who have been leaking information damaging to the Administration?) to tell us how anyone who read this memo and used any information contained in the paragraph marked “S” for “secret” is in trouble.

Rove has denied seeing the memo although according to Pincus, Colin Powell brought the memo aboard Air Force I for the President’s trip to Africa. Others who may have seen it include Ari Fleisher, the President’s former Press Secretary who some have been speculating was primarily responsible for shopping the Wilson-Plame connection to reporters around town in the days following Wilson’s Times Op-Ed. Fleisher has remained unavailable for comment on the issue which may in fact indicate that he is a target of Fitzgerald’s investigation.

What continues to bother me about the reporting of this story is the failure of the mainstream press to highlight the all out war going on at the time (and still going on to this day) between the White House and a faction at the CIA who were trying to shift blame for the failure to find WMD’s from the agency to the warhawks in the Administration. For the life of me, I can’t see how you can give this story any context at all if you pretend this conflict didn’t exist or ignore it as Pincus has done since he talked to Wilson back in June of 2003 about his Niger mission.

Joe Wilson’s attempt to cover-up his wife’s role in getting him the Niger assignment has to be seen as an effort by Wilson to cover his tracks. He would have us believe that the reason he got the CIA assignment was because of his “extensive contacts” in the area. More basic than that, he would have us believe the entire Niger adventure was in response to a question from the Vice President’s office. To believe that, you would have to acknowledge that the CIA didn’t have any assets in Niger to carry out what on its face was a routine investigation. If Joe Wilson could sit by a pool sipping mint tea and talk with a few officials, why couldn’t such an inquiry be handled by agency personnel already in country? Why a “special mission?”

The answer is that the CIA wanted to make sure they got the right answers from the “investigation.” So they send glory boy Wilson on a made up errand to insure that the intelligence is “fixed” to absolve the Niger government of colluding with the Iraqis in what two separate inquiries have concluded was a real attempt to circumvent sanctions to purchase uranium. And to obscure that fact, Wilson has to make it appear that his talent and contacts alone were the reason he was sent to Niger not that his wife was part of a faction out to discredit the Administration’s WMD claims prior to going to war with Iraq.

This may in fact be the real cover-up. What started as a policy dispute between WMD experts at CIA and the “Neocons” in the Bush Administration may have escalated to include the CIA selective leaking of classified information in order to swing an election. And right in the middle of this cover up may be the Wilson-Plame connection regarding the Niger mission.

UPDATE

John Cole shamelessly steals the title to one of my previous posts on the Rovian mess (“Drip…Drip…Drip) while linking to the Pincus piece in WAPO. The alliteration in the title of his post is sublime as is his observation that ” Things will be fast and furious tomorrow, though, as the spinning goes into high gear.” My spin, of course, is that the spooks are guilty of trying to sway an election while selectively leaking a heap of classified documents to show how clever they were.

If they were so clever, why’d they send such a clown as Wilson on such an “important” mission?

UPDATE II

The definitive word comes, of course, via Tom Maguire who believes a case is building against Rove. He also points to Ari Fleisher’s name being bandied about more as well as Steve Hadley.

Here’s Tom’s take on possible Rove exposure:

A quick summing up – it is getting easier to make the case that Rove knew, or should have know, that the info he passed to Cooper was sensitive. In other words (his words, actually), Rove had said too much. But the IIPA looks like the wrong statute.

Sidebar – Ari Fleischer’s name is appearing in more articles. He and Steve Hadley are the forgotten men here.

In other words, Rove’s trouble may hinge on when he told authorities he knew of the Wilson-Plame connection. If he heard about it from the memo, he may be cooked. If he heard about it from another journalist, he may be guilty of nothing more than confirming gossip.

Either way, I don’t think he can survive. The press will not let go of this. And Fitzgerald may not indict him but will certainly single him out for some stinging criticism. In short, he’s now damaged goods and needs to go.

James Joyner makes some interesting observations about the State Department memo:

It’s rather unlikely that Rove or Libby saw a memo for the eyes of an Undersecretary of State, let alone read the footnotes. It’s also unclear to me why her name would be classified “Secret,” given that she had not worked in a covert capacity or overseas for years. It’s rather odd for the fact that someone who works at CIA headquarters under their own name to be classified.

Of course, that won’t stop the conspiracy theorists. Kos and John of AmericaBlog think this thwarts the administration’s plan to divert attention from the Rove affair by rushing the appointment of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. Because, goodness knows, trying to get a new Justice to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, who is often the deciding vote against their interests, in place by October would not be something the Administration was interested in.

James makes an excellent point. The way the left is spinning this, it’s like Bush’s inner circle sat around passing a secret document back and forth trying to figure out how to smear Joe Wilson. I doubt if Powell let the darn thing out of his possesion however, he may have shared the tidbit about Mrs. Wilson with a few key people.

Tom Bowler agrees with my conclusion that the CIA may be undermining policies they disagree with by leaking classified material. Whether or not it would be within the scope of Fitzgerald’s mandate to investigate is another question.

UPDATE III

Ace’s post on this warrants its own update. First, he educates us about classifications:

I should note that “secret” is just about the lowest, if not the lowest, level of classified information. Not sure, but I think only “confidential” is lower on the scale. And the three classic categories—Confidential, Secret, Top Secret—don’t even cover real secrets. Those are bullshit classifications. Real secret stuff is protected by codeword-clearance, where only a limited number of folks are allowed to see the information, and you have to be cleared specifically to view information designated by a particular codeword.

Then he gives the most logical explanation for Plame’s continued “covert” classification:

But… there is the possibility that, while she was known by her neighbors as being a CIA officer (and of course known to every foreign intelligence service worth a damn, since she drove to Langely every day for the last five years), her identinty was still technically classified, owing to bureaucratic inertia and incompetence, and so it’s possible that someone is technically guilty of revealing classified information.

Assuming they read the memo at all, and did not in fact simply hear this from reporters

And finally, he jibes our memory about Sandy “The Burgler” Berger:

PS: The stuff Sandy Berger stole from the archives? Codeword-clearance. The press didn’t seem particularly interested in his theft (and admitted DESTRUCTION!) of original copies of genuine secret documents from the archives.

But some State Department memo has an (S) on it and Walter Pincus gets a dangerous erection lasting more than four hours.

He also makes the point via two of his commenters that they wouldn’t classify one paragraph of a document without classifying the rest.

Gee…do ya think those “former government officials” who’ve been leaking to Pincus for two years in order to damage the Administration may have taken Walter for a ride?

UPDATE IV

The Captain makes the same point I do in the main post – that Pincus only casually mentions that the “S” designation might not mean that Plame’s identity was covert.

That sounds pretty damning—and it might still be, but this description and the rest of the article doesn’t establish this as dispositive at all. In any classified document, each paragraph has to carry a label indicating the level of classification for the information contained within. Later in the article by Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei, we find out that the paragraph contains seven sentences, and that Plame only gets mentioned in two of them. That doesn’t establish that her identity was classified, although it could. It could just as easily mean that other information in the same paragraph carried that classification.

Again, we have to remember Pincus’ sourcing here. These are former CIA “officials” who have been passing on selective, damaging leaks to Pincus for more than two years. And Pincus, for whatever reason, is playing along.

The war continues.