The Smoking Notes

I somewhat regrettably waded into the minutia of the Rove case last week-end and am now stuck with revising what I said everytime I become aware that I got something wrong in order to hold up the honor of the self-correcting blogosphere. So here goes.

I wrote that I thought the person who wrote the June 10th classified memo was the same INR analyst who had been quoted liberally in the SSCI report and who was evidently the one who noted that “it appeared that she [Plame] had arranged the trip” in his notes of the meeting. I won’t go into it here — if you need a nap you can read my whole post.

Anyway, I was challenged by emptywheel at The Next Hurrah (who wrote this excellent post called “Anatomy of the WH Smear defense” and this one, called “About That INR Memo”) who was working the same angle, but who concluded that the memo may have been based on this INR’s notes but that it appeared it was written by someone else. (We are interested in this because it might have been someone juicy from Bolton’s gang, for instance.) Anyway, I said I preferred the simple explanation that the one who wrote the notes probably wrote the memo.

I was wrong because I think I know who wrote the notes and he was long gone from the State Department when the memo was written. I’m pretty sure that the INR analyst was Greg Thielman, one of the good guys. He’s one of the few people who went on the record that they administration was cooking intelligence.

I had written in a draft of the post that I thought it was ironic that the INR analyst who apparently spilled the beans on Plame in his notes (which was picked up in the “work-up” later done on Wilson in May of 2003) was also the guy in the SSCI report who was most skeptical of the Niger connection and who backed Wilson’s interpretation of events. (You should read how tortured the analysis was to come up with some factual basis for the Niger connection. It’s shockingly thin.)

Anyway, here’s the gist. Greg Thielman left the State Department in September of 2002. But he left his notes behind. When Wilson’s story started to surface in the press, the white house or somebody ordered someone to put together a file on how Wilson was sent on the trip. (Although Wilson never said Cheney directly sent him, the inference was that he knew.) So the INR went through its files on the matter and put together a report. (I suspect the other agencies did the same thing.) This report contained a nugget of information that nobody else had — that Wilson’s wife had sent him on the trip.

That was seized upon as a good smear and the rest is history.

The reason I believe it was Greg Thielman who wrote the notes in question is because the SSCI report indicates that the same person who wrote the report Niger: Sale of Uranium Unlikely is the same person who noted that “it appeared” Wilson’s wife arranged the trip. Greg Thielman wrote that report.

If you are at all interested in this subject, check out this PBS interview with Thielman. Has anybody talked to him lately?

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