[quote]In a strange twist in the investigation, the grand jury -- acting on a tip from Wilson -- has questioned a person who approached Novak on Pennsylvania Avenue on July 8, 2003, six days before his column appeared in The Post and other publications, Wilson said in an interview. The person, whom Wilson declined to identify to The Post, asked Novak about the "yellow cake" uranium matter and then about Wilson, Wilson said. He first revealed that conversation in a book he wrote last year. In the book, he said that he tried to reach Novak on July 8, and that they finally connected on July 10. In that conversation, Wilson said that he did not confirm his wife worked for the CIA but that Novak told him he had obtained the information from a "CIA source."

Novak told the person that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA as a specialist in weapons of mass destruction and had arranged her husband's trip to Niger, Wilson said. Unknown to Novak, the person was a friend of Wilson and reported the conversation to him, Wilson said."[/quote]

What we have known up until now is that Richard Armitage forwarded a State Department memo to Colin Powell on July 7. Powell took the document aboard AF-1 for the famous trip to Africa. On board were Bush, Powell, Bartlett, Fleischer, perhaps Rice and a cast of other characters.

This memo falsely, probably in error, not maliciously, stated that Valerie Plame had arranged Wilson's trip to Africa. There is no other source for that claim that I am aware of.

Joe Wilson's damning op-ed appeared on July 6, the day before the Africa trip. According to the above paragraphs, Robert Novak knew about the false claim in the State Department memo by July 8, at the latest, since he told a friend of Wilson's the story, as he knew it, on that date.

It seems very likely that either someone on AF-1 called Novak directly, or gave the information to someone else [Rove, Libby, Cheney?] who called him with it.

According to an earlier WaPo article, and a claim by a WSJ editor on television, the paragraph concerning Valerie Plame in that memo, her status and her rôle in the Niger trip were marked secret, no foreign eyes. This classification level is very sensitive. Whoever divulged that information to persons without proper clearance created a significant security breach.