July 20, 2005: State Department Memo Treated Plame Wilson’s Identity as ‘Incidental’

Former State Department official Marc Grossman, who has testified that he is one of the officials who divulged former CIA covert official Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity to former White House aide Lewis Libby (see 12:00 p.m. June 11, 2003), tells reporters that former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger (see March 4-5, 2002) had nothing to do with Plame Wilson being Wilson’s wife, as many of Libby’s defenders assert. Grossman wrote a memo detailing Wilson’s trip to Niger (see June 10, 2003) that was given to Libby and other White House officials. Grossman, speaking anonymously, says: “It wasn’t a Wilson-Wilson wife memo. It was a memo on uranium in Niger and focused principally on our [the State Department’s] disagreement” with the White House. The memo noted, erroneously, that Plame Wilson helped engineer Wilson’s trip to Niger (see February 19, 2002, July 22, 2003, and October 17, 2003), but Grossman says it did not identify her as an undercover CIA agent, nor did it identify her as Valerie Plame, which was her maiden name and cover name at the CIA. Grossman says the fact that the CIA official and Wilson were a married couple was largely an incidental reference. [Associated Press, 7/20/2005] Grossman will be revealed as the anonymous source who speaks to reporters at this time in April 2006. [Truthout (.org), 4/14/2006]