That’s the name that appears in Judith Miller’s notebook — not Plame, which was the maiden name of Joseph Wilson’s CIA employee wife, but Flame. At the same time, Miller says she just can’t remember who gave her Plame’s name. This sounds like an outrageous lie. After all, how could she somehow “forget” the detail that turned the pursuit of this story into a potential crime that got a special prosecutor on the case? But it may not be a lie.

Here’s a theory:

Joseph Wilson was shopping around his story about his 2002 trip to Niger in May and early June of 2003. He got two bites. One was from Nicholas Kristof, who wrote a column about it in the New York Times. The other was Walter Pincus, who wrote a story in the Washington Post. These two stories are the subject of a withering assault on Wilson’s honesty in the Senate Intelligence Committee report on what went wrong with the hunt for Saddam’s weapons programs.

What if Miller got wind of Wilson’s effort to get his (false) story out? What if, in the course of normal events, somebody told her that Wilson was well-connected and knew what he was talking about because his wife worked for the CIA? What if she then went to Google to look up stuff about Wilson and found his bio online at the Middle East Institute? That bio (which is no longer available on line–gee, I wonder why) featured the line: “He is married to the former Valerie Plame and has two sons and two daughters.”

As I recall, the type on that bio was incredibly small and in sans-serif type. She may simply have misread the surname “Plame” as “Flame.”

What if, therefore, she learned about Valerie Plame in part because of Wilson’s own efforts to publicize his story from his own bio — and then, as she was talking to Scooter Libby, threw the name “Valerie Flame” at him? Evidently he did not react to the name, either because he was being discreet or because he had never heard her referred to as anything other than “Wilson’s wife.”

What if, therefore, Judy Miller’s source for the name “Valerie Plame” was….Google?