Time: Administration Knew Weeks Ahead

Weeks before Joseph Wilson penned his July 6, 2003 op-ed column for The New York Times

sources tell TIME some White House officials may have learned [Valerie Plame] was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson …

That prospect increases the chances that White House official Karl Rove and others learned about Plame from within the Administration rather than from media contacts. Rove has told investigators he believes he learned of her directly or indirectly from reporters, according to his lawyer.

Today’s new story in Time (sub. only) — “When They Knew” — states that “[t]he previously undisclosed fact gathering began in the first week of June 2003 at the CIA, when its public-affairs office received an inquiry about Wilson’s trip to Africa from veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus.”

That office then contacted Plame’s unit, which had sent Wilson to Niger, but stopped short of drafting an internal report. The same week, Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman asked for and received a memo on the Wilson trip from Carl Ford, head of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Sources familiar with the memo, which disclosed Plame’s relationship to Wilson, say Secretary of State Colin Powell read it in mid-June. Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage may have received a copy then too.

When Pincus’ article ran on June 12, the circle of senior officials who knew about the identity of Wilson’s wife expanded. “After Pincus,” a former intelligence officer says, “there was general discussion with the National Security Council and the White House and State Department and others” about Wilson’s trip and its origins.