[Enchante]

Marc Grossman is also an excellent candidate for the unnamed senior State Dept. official who, by Wilson's own account (in first Vanity Fair article) urged Wilson to pour oil on the embers of the early controversy (May - July 2003) about WMDs and the SOU address. Was Grossman the one who urged Wilson to go public? My best guess at this time was that it was either Grossman or his immediate superior, Armitage. Both are now known to hate people in the WH and to have worked hard to block Bush initiatives in foreign policy.

[VANITY FAIR}: "Wilson immediately called a couple of people in the government, whose identities he will not divulge—”They are close to certain people in the administration,” he says—and warned them that if Rice would not correct the record he would. One of them, he says, told him to write the story. So at the beginning of July he sat down to write “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”

[Fedora]

Another State Department member Wilson was in contact with during the SOTU timeframe was Walter Kansteiner from the African division, who had been involved in arranging Wilson's trip to Niger.