Memo With Plame's Name Marked Secret

Found this off the CNN website:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A classified State Department memorandum that has been the subject of questioning in a federal leak probe identifies a CIA agent by name in a paragraph marked "S" for secret, sources told CNN Thursday.

The paragraph, they said, did not indicate that she was undercover or that her identity was protected.

Nevertheless, a former homeland security adviser to President Bush said the rules on such matters are clear.

"Anything in a paragraph marked 'secret' needs to be deemed secret, and revealing it to someone without proper security clearance or without a need to know is not authorized and is a violation," said Richard Falkenrath, a CNN security analyst who has not seen the memo.

Disclosure of an undercover intelligence officer's identity can be a federal crime if prosecutors can show the leak was intentional and the person who released the information knew of the officer's secret status.

Valerie Plame was not some simple CIA analyst, reading and writing reports. Her identity was to be protected. She may have been an undercover operative. What is especially interesting is that this memo is the memo that Secretary of State Colin Powell took with him aboard Air Force One as he accompanied President Bush to Africa. The CNN story says the contents of the memo:

discussed allegations that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Africa, notes that Plame attended a meeting about sending her husband, a retired career diplomat with a background in African and Iraqi affairs, to look into the claims, according to the government sources.

Now if Rove and Libby were working together to contain the damage caused by Joe Wilson's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, and the criticism surrounding Bush's arguments for going to war with Iraq, and if either of them came into contact with this memo, they--Rove especially--could have easily seen the political value that this memo has in deflecting the press away from the Bush arguments for the war, towards a story where Wilson was sent by his wife to investigate the claims that Iraq was purchasing uranium from Africa--the same claims that Wilson was criticizing the Bush White House as being false. The problem here was that probably both Rove and Libby did not realize or discounted the fact that Valerie Plame was a top intelligence official whose identity had to be protected.

More to come.