Informed Speculation

Richard Armitage has confessed again to being the Plame leaker:

A former top official in the State Department acknowledges he was the source who outed a CIA operative to reporters, but he says it was an accident and he’s sorry.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, the former No. 2 official in the department, said he inadvertently disclosed Valerie Plame’s identity in conversations with syndicated columnist Robert Novak and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.

”I made a terrible mistake, not maliciously, but I made a terrible mistake,” Armitage said in a telephone interview from his home Thursday night. He said he did not realize Plame’s job was covert.

”I did what I did,” Armitage said. ”I embarrassed my president, my secretary, my department, my family and I embarrassed the Wilsons. And for that I’m very sorry.”

For almost three years, an investigation led by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has tried to determine whether Bush administration officials intentionally revealed Plame’s identity as a covert operative as a way to punish her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for criticizing the Bush administration’s march to war with Iraq.

Armitage’s admission suggested that the leak did not originate at the White House as retribution for Wilson’s comments about the Iraq war. Wilson, a former ambassador, discounted reports that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon — claims that wound up in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address.

Note that last paragraph, oh ye who still try to keep the Fitzmas flame alive. Armitage gives a little more detail to his conversations with Novak and Woodward:

Armitage said he was not a part of a conspiracy to reveal Plame’s identity and did not know whether one existed.

He described his June 2003 conversation with Woodward as an afterthought at the end of a lengthy interview.

”He said, ‘Hey, what’s the deal with Wilson?’ and I said, ‘I think his wife works out there,”’ Armitage recalled.

He described a more direct conversation with Novak, who was the first to report on the issue: ”He said to me, ‘Why did the CIA send Ambassador Wilson to Niger?’ I said, as I remember, ‘I don’t know, but his wife works out there.”’

Tune in next week, when the original Plame leak is revealed to have come from – gasp! – Richard Armitage…

UPDATE 8:28 a.m.: The MinuteMan (but of course!) has more, including this nugget:

The circumstances of the Plame leak were this, from CBS:

“At the end of a wide-ranging interview he asked me, ‘Why did the CIA send Ambassador (Wilson) to Africa?’ I said I didn’t know, but that she worked out at the agency,” Armitage says.

Armitage says he told Novak because it was “just an offhand question.” “I didn’t put any big import on it and I just answered and it was the last question we had,” he says.

Armitage adds that while the document was classified, “it doesn’t mean that every sentence in the document is classified.

“I had never seen a covered agent’s name in any memo in, I think, 28 years of government,” he says.

He adds that he thinks he referred to Wilson’s wife as such, or possibly as “Mrs. Wilson.” He never referred to her as Valerie Plame, he adds.

“I didn’t know the woman’s name was Plame. I didn’t know she was an operative,” he says.

OK. We can score a big “We told you so” about how unlikely it would be to see a covered agent’s name bandied about in a memo (barring an error, as happened here.)