Vice (26 page)

Lawrence Wilkerson was Colin Powell's assistant for the four years Powell served as secretary of state. In the Army and at State, Colonel Wilkerson has paid careful attention to bureaucratic structure and power. Watching the White House from the perspective of the State Department, and trying to cover his boss's back, Wilkerson figured out who was in charge.

It wasn't George Bush.

Within the largest vice presidential staff in the history of the office, Dick Cheney set up his own shadow National Security Council staff— something no vice president had ever done before. In this unprecedented arrangement was another glaring peculiarity. The vice president's national security staffers read all the e-mail traffic "in, out, and between" the president's NSC staffers, Wilkerson says. Yet the president's staff isn't allowed to read the communication of Cheney's staffers.

"Members of the president's staff sometimes walk from office to office to avoid Cheney's people monitoring their discussions," says Wilkerson. "Or they use the phone." The arrangement provides a clear demonstration of who is running foreign policy.

During the administration of George H. W. Bush, when Secretary of Defense Cheney reached the end of his tether, he would hear from the president, or the president's secretary of state and friend James Baker. An angry Baker called National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft on one occasion in 1989 to complain about Cheney's open criticism of Mikhail Gorbachev.

"Dump on Dick with all possible alacrity," Baker demanded.

No one in the current White House is willing to play that role. If someone did, Cheney's staff would devour that person. "Bush's staff is terrified of Cheney's people," says a former White House staffer. To maintain tight control of the national security portfolio, Cheney brought in his loyalists to fill positions on his staff—and on the president's staff. It was a gathering of intellectual and ideological firepower the Texans could never equal. Stephen Hadley became the White House's deputy national security advisor, after working for years with Wolfowitz. Zal Khalilzad was the National Security Council's Middle East agent, until he was shipped to Baghdad to try to salvage the disaster in Iraq. Both foreign policy experts had a long history with Cheney, going back as far as Bush I. Libby, who had been Wolfowitz's deputy, became
Cheney's chief of staff
. Cheney saw to it that Libby was also special assistant to the president, thus insinuating his chief of staff into the White House staff. Aides from Cheney's NSC staff sat in with White House staff on all major foreign policy deliberations. Cheney had George Bush surrounded. Not only was the president outsmarted by the man he calls "Vice"—he was outstaffed.

At the top of Cheney's staff hierarchy sat the vice president's legal counsel, David Addington, a tall, paunchy workaholic with a gray beard and thatch of gray hair. He would replace Scooter Libby as chief of staff after Libby was indicted in the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame. Addington, who had been with Cheney since their days together on the House Intelligence Committee, was always the power center in Cheney's office. "Addington would have been [Cheney's] chief of staff from the beginning," says a military officer who worked with both men. "But he didn't want to be tied down. [Addington] is always involved in the issues. But he's always in the background. They are too smart, too powerful for Bush and his team. There's nothing new in this town. There are a lot of smart people who know how to run things. But none of them I've ever seen compare to Addington. Al Gonzales is not going to stand up to him."

Indeed, the attorney general, who followed Bush from Texas, has nowhere near the experience, or, it appears, the intellectual capacity, of David Addington. Gonzales was a Hispanic tabula rasa working in the property rights division of Vinson & Elkins, a Houston-based law firm, when Karl Rove made him Bush's general counsel, then Texas secretary of state in 1997. At that moment, Addington was on his sole brief hiatus from government service, after having worked at the CIA, the House Intelligence Committee, the Iran-Contra Joint Committee, and the Department of Defense. Addington and the team he and Libby directed, the general said, were eating the Bush people alive.

While Cheney was pushing Bush toward war with Iraq, Cheney's cabal in the Office of the Vice President and at the Pentagon were laying the groundwork for that war. They were the nation's best and brightest right-wing policy intellectuals while Bill Clinton was president. Many of them had attended the Saturday policy salon Wolfowitz and Cheney held at the Pentagon, then moved on to the American Enterprise Institute, the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy
, and the
Hudson Institute
. Cheney himself spent some time at AEI after he left the administration of Bush père. Lynne Cheney also found a home there, and stayed. The collection of
think tanks
served as a shadow administration, filled with policy wonks waiting for their return to power.

The think tanks also served as a nexus for Cheney's policy cabal to cultivate their relationship with Iraqi expatriate
Ahmed Chalabi
and others from the exiled
Iraqi National Congress
. Those relationships proved to be useful when the administration began preparing for war. Wolfowitz and Libby were often the INC's principal protagonists inside the White House. Wolfowitz was hostile to the CIA because, among other reasons, they did not trust Chalabi, a reservation that seemed reasonable when Chalabi's promises on Iraq didn't materialize. An INC source who worked with Chalabi while he was trying to sell regime change explained the heart-and-head dichotomy that members of his organization came to understand existed in the Bush-Cheney White House.

"Bush believed the democracy part," the INC official said. "That's where his head was. For Cheney, it was the threat—we cannot live with the threat. Democracy was an afterthought.

"The issue was to take Saddam out. There was a debt to us by the U.S. The spring '91 uprising,
chemical weapons
sold in the eighties, sanctions that were really hurting the Iraqi people but not Saddam." It was a legitimate and uniquely Iraqi perspective. Americans had sold Hussein feed stock to make chemical weapons during Iran's war with Iraq and failed to live up to promises made after the Gulf War.

"My interest," he said, "was Iraq, not America."

The INC's access to the Office of the Vice President was facilitated
by Cheney's
NSC director,
John Hannah
. The argument INC leader Ahmed Chalabi would lay out was appealing and useful for Cheney and his cabal of neocons, who now were convinced that U.S. forces had to go back into Iraq and finish what was left undone by the administration of Bush père ten years earlier. Support for Hussein in Iraq would evaporate after a U.S. invasion. Iraqi exiles returning to govern would be embraced as they began building a democratic system. It provided a large part of the justification for going back into Iraq and getting it right.

George Bush's war was being planned by Dick Cheney's staff and loyalists.

It was predictable that Bush would be displaced by Cheney, who at thirty-four was known to Gerald Ford's security detail as
"Backseat"
—the chief of staff sitting behind the president and leaning into the deal. Twenty-five years later, "Backseat" would become the vice president whom White House staffers humorously call "Edgar"—a reference to Edgar Bergen, the vaudeville comic who did the talking (and thinking) for the celebrated ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy.

A year before the September 11 attacks, Bush had been engaged in statehouse policy fights over property tax reduction bills and mandatory testing in public schools in Texas. In Washington he found himself confronting what six years as governor of Texas had least prepared him for: a room full of intelligent advisers steeped in the political culture of Washington pressing him for a decision on war.

As formidable as Bush's "Iron Triangle" might have appeared, the war was not so much the work of the Bush White House, but rather what Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson refers to as "the cabal" running American foreign policy out of the vice president's office and the DOD: men who had been working together, in and out of government, for almost thirty years. Cheney, Addington, and Libby, working with Wolfowitz in the Pentagon and several moles in the State Department, drove
Iraq War policy
.

Cheney and Scooter Libby also shaped the
intelligence to justify the Iraq War
, and when the moment came to sell the conflict to a reluctant United Nations, the vice president's staff prepared the forty-eight-page backgrounder for Colin
Powell's disastrous February 2002 speech
to the Security Council. John Hannah wrote the material, and Scooter Libby massaged it. The background paper has not yet been declassified (and few expect to see it declassified any time soon). Wilkerson describes what was handed to Powell as a "movie script." Libby had called it a "Chinese smorgasbord." Powell looked at it, declared it "bullshit," and tossed the entire document. He and his staff turned instead to the
National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq
as a foundation for the
U.N. speech
. Wilkerson has since come to believe Libby's smorgasbord was a setup, designed to direct Powell to the NIE—which was better sourced, but almost as flawed as the "bullshit" he had rejected. "These are facts, not allegations," Powell would tell the United Nations and the world. Yet before he announced he wasn't staying on for Bush's second term, each of the foundational "facts" he included in his Security Council speech had been disproved.

"These guys planned to spend ninety days in Baghdad, then move on to Tehran," says a retired general who stays in contact with the Pentagon. "Then Rumsfeld's plan fell apart in Iraq."

Wilkerson also suspects that generals breaking ranks and protocol in 2006 to speak openly against Rumsfeld's
failed Iraq war plan
had a great deal to do with a
planned bombing
campaign to take out Iran's nuclear research and development facilities. The generals knew the armed forces were overextended to the point of being broken in Iraq, yet the neocons were planning to move on to the neighboring country. So upon retirement, the generals broke with precedent and publicly criticized the conduct of the Iraq War. Iran was a subtext, and the notion that the United States would bomb rather than negotiate, a serious concern. Even if the administration's position was no more than saber-rattling and coercive diplomacy, which didn't seem likely in Washington in early 2006, the proposed bombing campaign represented a further overextension of the already worn-out military.

"Everybody seems to believe that we'll be bombing Iran after the November elections," said a source at the State Department in April 2006. "It feels like the decision has been made."

The existence of
plans to bomb Iran
were revealed by
The New Yorker's
Seymour Hersh. Hersh reported that "the U.S. Strategic Command, supported by the Air Force, had been drawing up plans at the President's direction for a major bombing campaign in Iran." The White House even wanted a nuclear weapon in the mix, to destroy Iran's uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz. Marine General
Peter Pace
, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talked Bush and Cheney out of the nuclear option. Hersh's reporting also supports Wilkerson's thesis that the generals publicly challenging Bush and Cheney on
Iraq
in April were trying to slow the momentum for the campaign to bomb
Iran.
At the Pentagon the campaign was known as "the
April Revolution
," reports Hersh. By June, it appeared that the generals had stopped, at least for the moment, the administration's
plans for preemptive attack on Iran
.

The plan to bomb Iran, the centerpiece for the coercive foreign policy that the Cheney cabal had in the works, was complemented by a specific project at the Department of State. The plan, run out of the
Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs
, involved spending at least $85 million in 2006, much of it distributed to Iranian and Syrian dissidents in their countries and in exile. It bore similarities to the program to support Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress in the run-up to the war in Iraq. The program was widely perceived to be supported by the vice president because it was directed by thirty-nine-year-old Elizabeth Cheney.

The older Cheney daughter is smart, competent, hard-working, and engaging, according to sources who have worked with her. She's also completely unqualified for the job she held: Principal Deputy Assistant for Near Eastern Affairs (known by the acronym PDAS).
Liz Cheney
was a political appointee to the
PDAS position
she held until the spring of 2006, just as she was a political appointee to a lower position in the bureau in 2002, when she arrived with a rather thin CV and no prior experience in Middle Eastern affairs. (Prior to hiring on at State, Liz Cheney turned her family name and her University of Chicago law degree into a $170,000-a-year position in the Washington office of the White & Case law firm. Her husband earned $53,000 at another law firm.)

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs
David Welch
was Liz Cheney's boss. "But she's the vice president's daughter," says a source who recently worked at State. "There was kind of a parallel universe over there, where David had his projects and Liz had hers. There were some things that David didn't touch." Before returning home to care for her five children, Liz Cheney leveraged her influence by bringing in her own people and changing the character of Near Eastern Affairs: "Until she came in, the NEA bureau always had a variety of people and a variety of perspectives. Under Powell, anyone could voice their opinion, make dissenting arguments, even if it wasn't the policy of the administration. That changed when Liz came to be PDAS. It's now understood that it does you no good to make your views known. In fact, it can hurt you professionally."

The source continued, "She filled a big space here. There's always a fear of the DOD hawks associated with her father, and she's obviously talking to her father and his people."