The Smoking Gun Pointing at Plame Emerges -- A Third Leaker?

The WAPost reported on Sunday Oct 12 that two days before Robert Novak's July 14 column, which revealed Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent, an administration official told the same thing to an un-named Washington Post reporter.

This is the first confirmed report of a journalist having that information revealed to them prior to the appearance of Novak's column. It means that the revelation was deliberate and repeated, as was claimed by a senior administration official in a Sept 27 WaPost article . That same official expanded their comments last week, quoted in the Sunday WAPost piece.

This means that the identity of the official is perhaps widely known -- perhaps as widely known as the six journalists the senior administration official had previously claimed had received the leak. However, there's a difference between "an administration official" (who leaked to the WAPost reporter July 12) and "two senior administration officials" (who the WAPost's source says were doing the leaking).

This means that either the WAPost source doesn't know the difference between a senior and non-senior administration official; or the WAPost reporter received the leak from a third leaker, perhaps in one senior official's office. This would imply a wide effort to throw Valerie Plame's CIA identity out to the winds.

Perhaps the winds will now carry back to us the names of those officials involved.