There’s long been speculation about Richard Armitage’s role in the ongoing Valerie Plame saga, which has already forced the resignation of Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and, to an extent, ensnared the Veep himself. In the past two weeks, though, the former deputy secretary of state has emerged not just as a bit player in the leak case but as a central figure. Last week the AP reported that an entry in Armitage’s State Department calendar reflects a one-hour appointment with Bob Woodward (who has acknowledged having an informal discussion about Plame with an administration official) on June 13, 2003, not long before Plame’s status as a covert CIA operative was blown in a column by Robert Novak. Today Newsweek, plugging a new book by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, is reporting that Armitage was Novak’s primary source, the “senior administration official” Novak has previously referred to as “not a partisan gunslinger.” According to the story:
Armitage, a well-known gossip who loves to dish and receive juicy tidbits about Washington characters, apparently hadn’t thought through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame’s identity. “I’m afraid I may be the guy that caused this whole thing,” he later told Carl Ford Jr., State’s intelligence chief. Ford says Armitage admitted to him that he had “slipped up” and told Novak more than he should have. “He was basically beside himself that he was the guy that f—ed up. My sense from Rich is that it was just chitchat,” Ford recalls….
While Armitage’s disclosure of Plame’s identity may have come about during a bull session with Novak and perhaps Woodward too, there is certainly evidence to suggest that in the hands of White House officials this information was not dispensed accidentally, but rather used in an effort to discredit Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, for his criticism of the Bush administration’s use of pre-war intel on Iraq. Expect many more interesting revelations about the Plame affair with the publication of Isikoff and Corn’s book, “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,” which will be out in October.
