last night, I'm in a boat along side Laura...except I'm thinking his source is Powell. He told King the context of the discloure.
A few points from the interview:
(transcripts here:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0511/21/lkl.01.html)
1) It is definitely a "him".
2) His account of the source's reaction when he called him was: "I then went into incredibly aggressive reporting mode and called the source the beginning of the next week and said "Do you realize when we talked about this and exactly what was said?"
And the source in this case at this moment, it's a very interesting moment in all of this, said "I have to go to the prosecutor. I have to go to the prosecutor. I have to tell the truth."
3) It came toward the end of a long (several hours) interview discussing in detail the run up to the war (giving the impression of specifics on presenting evidence as in Powell's presentation to the UN)
"KING: OK. Your source, did the source indicate whether Mrs. Plame was an undercover agent or a desk analyst?
WOODWARD: Good question. And specifically said that -- the source did -- that she was a WMD, weapons of mass destruction, analyst. Now, I've been covering the CIA for over three decades, and analysts, except -- in fact, I don't even know of a case. Maybe there are cases. But they're not undercover. They are people who take other information and analyze it.
And so -- and if you were there at this moment in mid-June when this was said, there was no suggestion that it was sensitive, that it was secret.
KING: How did it even come up?
WOODWARD: Came up because I asked about Joe Wilson, because a few days before, my colleague at the "Washington Post," Walter Pincus, had a front-page story, saying there was an unnamed envoy -- there was no name given -- who had gone to Niger the year before to investigate for the CIA if there was some Niger-Iraq uranium deal or yellow cake deal.
I learned that that ambassador's name was Joe Wilson, which was, you know, Wilson eventually surfaced...
KING: I see.
WOODWARD: ... I guess a few weeks later.
So I said to this source, long substantive interview about the road to war. You know, at the end of an interview like this, after you're doing an interview on television, you might just shoot the breeze for a little while. And so, I asked about Wilson, and he said this.KING: I see.
WOODWARD: Most kind of off-hand.
KING: All right.
WOODWARD: One of those things. And so I -- I didn't think much of it."
4) He talks/references quite a lot about 'Powell's position' more than once. I haven't read Plan of Attack, but IIRC, some of the reviews I've read from others is that Powell tried to be more cautionary and was put outside of the loop for doing so. The "You break it, you own it" phrase from Powell came from Woodward's book.
Anyway, from these little snippets, I can envision a conversation with Powell that was open and
confidential. I can imagine Powell relating that "Cheney's cabal thinks it was Joe Wilson's wife that's involved with the 16 words fiasco. They're paranoid of the CIA and his wife works at the CIA as a WMD analyst. Personally, I don't think there's anything to it."
JMVHO. :)