Forget follow the money, follow the alibi.
Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
That's the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. That's the act that was broken when Valerie Plame was outed. Failed TV pundit and right-winger Vicky Toejam told Richard Stevenson ("At White House, a Day of Silence on Rove's Role in C.I.A. Leak") for a New York Times report published July 12, 2005:
"She had a desk job in Langley," said Ms. Toensing, who also signed the supporting brief in the appeals court, referring to the C.I.A.'s headquarters. "When you want someone in deep cover, they don't go back and forth to Langley."
Toejam's talking point back then was that there was a 'five-year rule' and Toejam repeatedly stated that Valerie Plame wasn't an undercover agent. From David Corn's "What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA" (The Nation):
Valerie Plame was recruited into the CIA in 1985, straight out of Pennsylvania State University. After two years of training to be a covert case officer, she served a stint on the Greece desk, according to Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who supervised her then. Next she was posted to Athens and posed as a State Department employee. Her job was to spot and recruit agents for the agency. In the early 1990s, she became what's known as a nonofficial cover officer. NOCs are the most clandestine of the CIA's frontline officers. They do not pretend to work for the US government; they do not have the protection of diplomatic immunity. They might claim to be a businessperson. She told people she was with an energy firm. Her main mission remained the same: to gather agents for the CIA.
[. . .]
When the Novak column ran, Valerie Wilson was in the process of changing her clandestine status from NOC to official cover, as she prepared for a new job in personnel management. Her aim, she told colleagues, was to put in time as an administrator--to rise up a notch or two--and then return to secret operations. But with her cover blown, she could never be undercover again. Moreover, she would now be pulled into the partisan warfare of Washington. As a CIA employee still sworn to secrecy, she wasn't able to explain publicly that she had spent nearly two years searching for evidence to support the Administration's justification for war and had come up empty.
Does it matter? Yeah, it does. Her status mattered enough for Toejam to go on and on about 'five-year rule! five-year rule!' But you don't hear about that now.
You also don't hear a great deal about Armitage and Bob Woodward. Woodward being the other one Armitage "gossiped" to. Armitage deliberately gave out the name of an undercover CIA agent. That's why the media has to sugar coat it with the laughable portrait of Armitage as one of the gals gossiping as they hang out the laundry.
Robert Parry (who's done some of the strongest work on the Armitage angle) recently outlined the close ties betweens Karl Rove and Richard Armitage. Earlier last week, Parry also analyzed the latest on the topic from Robert Novak:
Novak wrote that Armitage "told me unequivocally that Mrs. Wilson worked in the CIA's Counter-proliferation Division and that she had suggested her husband's mission. As for his current implication that he [Armitage] never expected this to be published, he noted that the story of Mrs. Wilson's role fit the style of the old Evans-Novak column -- implying to me that it continued reporting Washington inside information."
In other words, Novak acknowledges two significant points: that he asked why Ambassador Wilson was chosen and that Armitage knew that Plame held a sensitive CIA position, yet still wanted her exposed.
There are two points we'll make to the conventional wisdom in the mainstream.
1) Armitage is seen as non-partisan and it's noted that Robert Novak defined him as such. Novak, a partisan, probably isn't the one to be setting the terms on that topic.
2) Parry's already noted that Armitage and Rove are much closer than coventional wisdom lets on. Another issue conventional wisdom tries to bandy about is that Armitage was State and worked for Colin Powell so, due to that, and their opposition over tactics regarding the Iraq war (not the war itself, just opposed over tactics), Armitage wouldn't take part in the outing of Plame to provide cover for the war. [The way the mainstream tells it, Armitage is marching behind Joan Baez in peace parades.] The problem with that bit of conventional wisdom is that Colin Powell went to the United Nations and sold the war. Remember that, his "blot"?
There have been press accounts of his not wanting to do it (both at the time and after). There have been press accounts of Dick Cheney telling him that he [Powell] could afford to lose a few (favorable) polling points. There have been press accounts of Colin Powell swearing and refusing to include some of the bigger lies in his presentation.
But the reality is, that when called to serve his Bully Boy (if not his country), Collie Powell marched along. So the notion that any division (over tactics, not over going to war) between State and the administration means that Armitage would refuse to go along with an effort to smear Joe Wilson is laughable. Press accounts have also noted that Collie may have been a little loose with the lips as well regarding Valerie Plame.
John Dickerson's "Where's My Subpoena? Valerie Plame, Scooter Libby, and me" (Slate) tells the tale of being primed/pumped by two senior administration officials (Colin Powell and Condi Rice were traveling with the Bully Boy on the trip Dickerson was covering for Time magazine) to pursue who in the CIA sent Joseph Wilson to Niger to determine whether or not there had been an attempt to purchase yellow-cake at the same time that Karl Rove told Matt Cooper (back in the United States) that Valerie Plame was the one. Dickerson writes that the first administration offical told him, "I was told I should go ask the CIA who sent Wilson" and that the second administration official "encouraged me to follow that angle." The two officials spoke to Dickerson in Uganda and he states they did so an hour apart.
It appears many signed up for the outing of Valerie Plame and Colin Powell may very well have been one. Armitage's excuse ("gossip") is laughable and not recognizable under law. He was vetted for his position. He was entrusted with state secrets. Conventional wisdom may attempt to pass him off as a flibberty-gibbet but the sound you hear isn't music, it's an attempt to downplay the fact that he betrayed the office he held and that he broke the law.
Nowhere in the law is the "gossip exception" noted. When someone gossips, if that's the cover he wants to stick to, they intend to gossip. He intended to out Valerie Plame.