Perspective

A black box

By BARTON GELLMAN and JO BECKER Washington Post
Published July 1, 2007

Just past the Oval Office, in the private dining room overlooking the South Lawn, Vice President Dick Cheney joined President Bush at a round parquet table they shared once a week. Cheney brought a four-page text, written in strict secrecy by his lawyer. He carried it back out with him after lunch. In less than an hour, the document traversed a West Wing circuit that gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times, according to witnesses, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff review. When it returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text.

Cheney's proposal had become a military order from the commander in chief. Foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States were stripped of access to any court - civilian or military. They could be confined indefinitely without charges and would be tried, if at all, in closed "military commissions."

"What the hell just happened?" Secretary of State Colin Powell demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played any part.

The episode was a defining moment in Cheney's tenure as the 46th vice president of the United States, a post the Constitution left all but devoid of formal authority. "Angler, " as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.

Over the past six years, Cheney has changed history more than once, earning his reputation as the nation's most powerful vice president. His impact has been on display in the arenas of foreign policy and homeland security, and in a long-running battle to broaden presidential authority. But he has also been the unseen hand behind some of the president's major domestic initiatives.

On some subjects, officials said, he has displayed a strong pragmatic streak. On others he has served as enforcer of ideological principle, come what may.

Cheney is not, by nearly every inside account, the shadow president of popular lore. The president is "the decider, " as Bush puts it, but the vice president often serves up his menu of choices.

Cheney led a group that winnowed the president's list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Cheney resolved a crisis in the space program after the Columbia shuttle disaster. Cheney fashioned a controversial truce between the legislative and executive branches - and averted resignations at the top of the Justice Department and the FBI - over the right of law enforcement authorities to investigate corruption in Congress.

And it was Cheney who served as the guardian of conservative orthodoxy on budget and tax matters. He shaped and pushed through Bush's tax cuts, blunting the influence of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, a longtime friend. He managed to overcome the president's "compassionate conservative" resistance to multiple breaks for the wealthy. He even orchestrated a decision to let a GOP senator switch parties - giving control of the chamber to Democrats - rather than meet the senator's demand for billions of dollars in new spending.

On the home front, the vice president is well known for leading a secretive task force on energy policy. But in a town where politicians routinely scurry for credit, Cheney more often kept his role concealed, even from top Bush advisers.

"A lot of it was a black box, and I think designedly so, " said former Bush speechwriter David Frum. "It was like - you know that experiment where you pass a magnet under the table and you see the iron filings on the top of the table move? You know there's a magnet there because of what you see happening, but you never see the magnet."

The vice president's reputation and, some say, his influence, have suffered in the past year and a half. Cheney lost his closest aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to a perjury conviction, and his onetime mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, in a Cabinet purge. A shooting accident in Texas, and increasing gaps between his rhetoric and events in Iraq, have exposed him to ridicule and approval ratings in the teens. Cheney expresses indifference, in public and private, to any verdict but history's, and those close to him say he means it.

And there is this long-standing fact: Before the president casts the only vote that counts, the final words of counsel nearly always come from Cheney.

A different understanding

In his Park Avenue corner suite at Cerberus Global Investments, Dan Quayle recalled the moment he learned how much his old job had changed. Cheney had just taken the oath of office, and Quayle paid a visit to offer advice from one vice president to another.

"I said, 'Dick, you know, you're going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you're going to be doing all this political fundraising ... you'll be going to the funerals, ' " Quayle said in an interview earlier this year. "I mean, this is what vice presidents do."

Cheney "got that little smile, " Quayle said, and replied, "I have a different understanding with the president."

Cheney, 66, grew up in Lincoln, Neb., and Casper, Wyo., acquiring a Westerner's passion for hunting and fishing but not for the Democratic politics of his parents. Cheney flunked out of Yale but became a highly regarded Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Wyoming - avoiding the Vietnam War draft with five deferments along the way - before abandoning the doctoral program and heading to Washington.

He went on to build an unmatched Washington resume as White House chief of staff, House minority whip and secretary of defense. He knows the system. As vice president, Cheney has found pressure points and changed the course of events by "reaching down, " a phrase recurring often in interviews with aides.

A prodigious appetite for work, officials said, prepares Cheney to shape the president's conversations with others. Aides said that Cheney insists on joining Bush by secure video link, no matter how many time zones divide them.

Stealth is among Cheney's most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI."

Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel has asserted that "the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch, " and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. All of this thinking would be on clear display when the "war on terror" began for Cheney after eight months in office.

Inside the bunker

In a bunker beneath the East Wing, Cheney locked his eyes on CNN. He was about to watch, in real time, as thousands were killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Previous accounts have described Cheney's adrenaline-charged evacuation to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center that morning, a Secret Service agent on each arm. They have not detailed his reaction, 22 minutes later, when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.

"There was a groan in the room that I won't forget, ever, " one witness said. "It seemed like one groan from everyone" - among them Rice; her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley; economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey; counselor Mary Matalin; Cheney's chief of staff, Libby; and the vice president's wife.

Cheney made no sound. "I remember turning my head and looking at the vice president, and his expression never changed, " said the witness, reading from a notebook of observations written that day. Cheney closed his eyes against the image for one long, slow blink.

Three people who were present, not all of them admirers, said they saw no sign then or later of the profound psychological transformation that has often been imputed to Cheney. What they saw, they said, was extraordinary self-containment and a rapid shift of focus to the machinery of power. While others assessed casualties and the work of "first responders, " Cheney began planning for a conflict that would call upon lawyers as often as soldiers and spies.

In the months to come, Cheney freed Bush to fight the "war on terror" as he saw fit, animated by their shared belief that al-Qaida's destruction would require what the vice president called "robust interrogation" to extract intelligence from captured suspects.

The way he did it - adhering steadfastly to principle, freezing out dissent and discounting the risks of blow-back - turned tactical victory into strategic defeat. By late last year, the Supreme Court had dealt three consecutive rebuffs to his claim of nearly unchecked authority for the commander in chief, setting precedents that will bind Bush's successors.

Yet even as Bush was forced into public retreats, an examination of subsequent events suggests that Cheney has quietly held his ground. Most of his operational agenda, in practice if not in principle, remains in place.

Down in the bunker, Cheney and David Addington, his formidable general counsel and legal adviser of many years, began contemplating the founding question of the legal revolution to come: What extraordinary powers will the president need for his response?

Before the day ended, Cheney's lawyer joined forces with Timothy Flanigan, the deputy White House counsel, linked by secure video from the Situation Room. Flanigan patched in John Yoo at the Justice Department's fourth-floor command center. White House counsel Alberto Gonzales joined later.

A major bypass

Flanigan, with advice from Yoo, drafted the authorization for use of military force that Congress approved on Sept. 18. Yoo said they used the broadest possible language because "this war was so different, you can't predict what might come up."

In fact, the triumvirate knew very well what would come next: the interception - without a warrant - of communications to and from the United States. Forbidden by federal law since 1978, the surveillance would soon be justified, in secret, as "incident to" the authority Congress had just granted. Yoo was already working on that memo, completing it on Sept. 25.

It was an extraordinary step, bypassing Congress and the courts, and its authors kept it secret from officials who were likely to object. On Oct. 25, 2001, the chairmen and ranking minority members of the intelligence committees were summoned to the White House for their first briefing on the eavesdropping and were told that it was one of the government's most closely compartmented secrets.

Under Presidents George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton, officials said, a conversation of that gravity would involve the commander in chief. But when the four lawmakers arrived in the West Wing lobby, an aide led them away from the Oval Office.

"We met in the vice president's office, " recalled former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla. Bush had told Graham already, when the senator assumed the intelligence panel chairmanship, that "the vice president should be your point of contact in the White House." Cheney, the president said, "has the portfolio for intelligence activities."

Oh, by the way

By late October, the vice president and his allies were losing patience with the Bush administration's review of a critical question facing U.S. forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere: What should be done with captured fighters from al-Qaida and the Taliban?

Flanigan recalled a conversation with Addington at the time in which the two discussed the salutary effect of showing bureaucrats that the president could act "without their blessing - and without the interminable process that goes along with getting that blessing."

Throughout his long government career, Cheney had counseled against that kind of policy surprise, insisting that unvetted decisions lead presidents to costly mistakes.

When James A. Baker III was tapped to be White House chief of staff in 1980, he interviewed most of his living predecessors. Advice from Cheney filled four pages of a yellow legal pad. Among the tidbits: It's not in anyone's interest to get an 'oh by the way decision' - & all have to understand that. Can hurt the Pres. Bring it up at a Cab. mtg. Make sure everyone understands this.

At his Nov. 13, 2001, lunch with Bush, Cheney brought the president the ultimate "oh, by the way" choice - a far-reaching military order that most of Bush's top advisers had not seen.

A one-way valve

When Cheney brought the order for military commissions to Bush, no one told Rice or Powell.

After leaving Bush's private dining room, the vice president took no chances on a last-minute objection. He sent the order on a swift path to execution that left no sign of his role. After Addington and Flanigan, the text passed to Bradford Berenson, the associate White House counsel. Cheney's link to the document broke there: Berenson was not told of its provenance.

Berenson rushed the order to deputy staff secretary Stuart W. Bowen Jr., bearing instructions to prepare it for signature - without advance distribution to the president's top advisers. Bowen objected, he told colleagues later, saying he had handled thousands of presidential documents without ever bypassing strict procedures of coordination and review. He relented, one White House official said, only after "urgent persuasion" that Bush was standing by to sign.

On Nov. 14, 2001, the day after Bush signed the commissions order, Cheney took the next big step. He told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that terrorists do not "deserve to be treated as prisoners of war." The president had not yet made that decision. Ten weeks passed, and the Bush administration fought one of its fiercest internal brawls, before Bush ratified the policy that Cheney had declared: The Geneva Conventions would not apply to al-Qaida or Taliban fighters captured on the battlefield.

John Bellinger, the ranking national security lawyer at the White House, sent Rice a blunt - and, he thought, private - legal warning. This policy would place the president indisputably in breach of international law and would undermine cooperation from allied governments.

One lawyer in his office said Bellinger was chagrined to learn, indirectly, that Cheney had read the confidential memo. Thus Bellinger discovered an unannounced standing order: Documents to the national security adviser, another White House official said, were "routed outside the formal process" to Cheney, too. The reverse did not apply.

Just past the Oval Office, in the private dining room overlooking the South Lawn, Vice President Dick Cheney joined President Bush at a round parquet table they shared once a week. Cheney brought a four-page text, written in strict secrecy by his lawyer. He carried it back out with him after lunch. In less than an hour, the document traversed a West Wing circuit that gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times, according to witnesses, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff review. When it returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text.

Cheney's proposal had become a military order from the commander in chief. Foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States were stripped of access to any court - civilian or military. They could be confined indefinitely without charges and would be tried, if at all, in closed "military commissions."

"What the hell just happened?" Secretary of State Colin Powell demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played any part.

The episode was a defining moment in Cheney's tenure as the 46th vice president of the United States, a post the Constitution left all but devoid of formal authority. "Angler, " as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.

Over the past six years, Cheney has changed history more than once, earning his reputation as the nation's most powerful vice president. His impact has been on display in the arenas of foreign policy and homeland security, and in a long-running battle to broaden presidential authority. But he has also been the unseen hand behind some of the president's major domestic initiatives.

On some subjects, officials said, he has displayed a strong pragmatic streak. On others he has served as enforcer of ideological principle, come what may.

Cheney is not, by nearly every inside account, the shadow president of popular lore. The president is "the decider, " as Bush puts it, but the vice president often serves up his menu of choices.

Cheney led a group that winnowed the president's list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Cheney resolved a crisis in the space program after the Columbia shuttle disaster. Cheney fashioned a controversial truce between the legislative and executive branches - and averted resignations at the top of the Justice Department and the FBI - over the right of law enforcement authorities to investigate corruption in Congress.

And it was Cheney who served as the guardian of conservative orthodoxy on budget and tax matters. He shaped and pushed through Bush's tax cuts, blunting the influence of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a longtime friend. He managed to overcome the president's "compassionate conservative" resistance to multiple breaks for the wealthy. He even orchestrated a decision to let a GOP senator switch parties - giving control of the chamber to Democrats - rather than meet the senator's demand for billions of dollars in new spending.

On the home front, the vice president is well known for leading a secretive task force on energy policy. But in a town where politicians routinely scurry for credit, Cheney more often kept his role concealed, even from top Bush advisers.

"A lot of it was a black box, and I think designedly so, " said former Bush speechwriter David Frum. "It was like - you know that experiment where you pass a magnet under the table and you see the iron filings on the top of the table move? You know there's a magnet there because of what you see happening, but you never see the magnet."

The vice president's reputation and, some say, his influence, have suffered in the past year and a half. Cheney lost his closest aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to a perjury conviction, and his onetime mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, in a Cabinet purge. A shooting accident in Texas, and increasing gaps between his rhetoric and events in Iraq, have exposed him to ridicule and approval ratings in the teens. Cheney expresses indifference, in public and private, to any verdict but history's, and those close to him say he means it.

And there is this long-standing fact: Before the president casts the only vote that counts, the final words of counsel nearly always come from Cheney.

A different understanding

In his Park Avenue corner suite at Cerberus Global Investments, Dan Quayle recalled the moment he learned how much his old job had changed. Cheney had just taken the oath of office, and Quayle paid a visit to offer advice from one vice president to another.

"I said, 'Dick, you know, you're going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you're going to be doing all this political fundraising ... you'll be going to the funerals, ' " Quayle said in an interview earlier this year. "I mean, this is what vice presidents do."

Cheney "got that little smile, " Quayle said, and replied, "I have a different understanding with the president."

Cheney, 66, grew up in Lincoln, Neb., and Casper, Wyo., acquiring a Westerner's passion for hunting and fishing but not for the Democratic politics of his parents. Cheney flunked out of Yale but became a highly regarded Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Wyoming - avoiding the Vietnam War draft with five deferments along the way - before abandoning the doctoral program and heading to Washington as a junior congressional aide.

He went on to build an unmatched Washington resume as White House chief of staff, House minority whip and secretary of defense.

He knows the system. As vice president, Cheney has found pressure points and changed the course of events by "reaching down, " a phrase that recurs often in interviews with current and former aides.

A prodigious appetite for work, officials said, prepares Cheney to shape the president's conversations with others. Aides said that Cheney insists on joining Bush by secure video link, no matter how many time zones divide them.

Stealth is among Cheney's most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI."

Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel has asserted that "the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch, " and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. All of this thinking would be on clear display when the "war on terror" began for Cheney after eight months in office.

Inside the bunker

In a bunker beneath the East Wing, Cheney locked his eyes on CNN, chin resting on interlaced fingers. He was about to watch, in real time, as thousands were killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Previous accounts have described Cheney's adrenaline-charged evacuation to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center that morning, a Secret Service agent on each arm. They have not detailed his reaction, 22 minutes later, when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.

"There was a groan in the room that I won't forget, ever, " one witness said. "It seemed like one groan from everyone" - among them Rice; her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley; economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey; counselor Mary Matalin; Cheney's chief of staff, Libby; and the vice president's wife.

Cheney made no sound. "I remember turning my head and looking at the vice president, and his expression never changed, " said the witness, reading from a notebook of observations written that day. Cheney closed his eyes against the image for one long, slow blink.

Three people who were present, not all of them admirers, said they saw no sign then or later of the profound psychological transformation that has often been imputed to Cheney. What they saw, they said, was extraordinary self-containment and a rapid shift of focus to the machinery of power. While others assessed casualties and the work of "first responders, " Cheney began planning for a conflict that would call upon lawyers as often as soldiers and spies.

In the months to come, Cheney freed Bush to fight the "war on terror" as he saw fit, animated by their shared belief that al-Qaida's destruction would require what the vice president called "robust interrogation" to extract intelligence from captured suspects.

The way he did it - adhering steadfastly to principle, freezing out dissent and discounting the risks of blow-back - turned tactical victory into strategic defeat. By late last year, the Supreme Court had dealt three consecutive rebuffs to his claim of nearly unchecked authority for the commander in chief, setting precedents that will bind Bush's successors.

Yet even as Bush was forced into public retreats, an examination of subsequent events suggests that Cheney has quietly held his ground. Most of his operational agenda, in practice if not in principle, remains in place.

Down in the bunker, Cheney and David Addington, his formidable general counsel and legal adviser of many years, began contemplating the founding question of the legal revolution to come: What extraordinary powers will the president need for his response?

Before the day ended, Cheney's lawyer joined forces with Timothy Flanigan, the deputy White House counsel, linked by secure video from the Situation Room. Flanigan patched in John Yoo at the Justice Department's fourth-floor command center. White House counsel Alberto Gonzales joined later.

A major bypass

Flanigan, with advice from Yoo, drafted the authorization for use of military force that Congress approved on Sept. 18. Yoo said they used the broadest possible language because "this war was so different, you can't predict what might come up."

In fact, the triumvirate knew very well what would come next: the interception - without a warrant - of communications to and from the United States. Forbidden by federal law since 1978, the surveillance would soon be justified, in secret, as "incident to" the authority Congress had just granted. Yoo was already working on that memo, completing it on Sept. 25.

It was an extraordinary step, bypassing Congress and the courts, and its authors kept it secret from officials who were likely to object. On Oct. 25, 2001, the chairmen and ranking minority members of the intelligence committees were summoned to the White House for their first briefing on the eavesdropping and were told that it was one of the government's most closely compartmented secrets. Under Presidents George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton, officials said, a conversation of that gravity would involve the commander in chief. But when the four lawmakers arrived in the West Wing lobby, an aide led them away from the Oval Office.

"We met in the vice president's office, " recalled former senator Bob Graham, D-Fla. Bush had told Graham already, when the senator assumed the intelligence panel chairmanship, that "the vice president should be your point of contact in the White House." Cheney, the president said, "has the portfolio for intelligence activities."

Oh, by the way

By late October, the vice president and his allies were losing patience with the Bush administration's review of a critical question facing U.S. forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere: What should be done with captured fighters from al-Qaida and the Taliban?

Flanigan recalled a conversation with Addington at the time in which the two discussed the salutary effect of showing bureaucrats that the president could act "without their blessing - and without the interminable process that goes along with getting that blessing."

Throughout his long government career, Cheney had counseled against that kind of policy surprise, insisting that unvetted decisions lead presidents to costly mistakes.

When James A. Baker III was tapped to be White House chief of staff in 1980, he interviewed most of his living predecessors. Advice from Cheney filled four pages of a yellow legal pad. Cheney told Baker, according to the notes, that an "orderly paper flow is way you protect the Pres., " ensuring that any proposal has been tested against other views. Cheney added:

It's not in anyone's interest to get an 'oh by the way decision' - & all have to understand that. Can hurt the Pres. Bring it up at a Cab. mtg. Make sure everyone understands this.

At his Nov. 13, 2001, lunch with Bush, Cheney brought the president the ultimate "oh, by the way" choice - a far-reaching military order that most of Bush's top advisers had not seen.

A one-way valve

When Cheney brought the order for military commissions to Bush, no one told Rice or Powell.

After leaving Bush's private dining room, the vice president took no chances on a last-minute objection. He sent the order on a swift path to execution that left no sign of his role. After Addington and Flanigan, the text passed to Bradford Berenson, the associate White House counsel. Cheney's link to the document broke there: Berenson was not told of its provenance.

Berenson rushed the order to deputy staff secretary Stuart W. Bowen Jr., bearing instructions to prepare it for signature - without advance distribution to the president's top advisers. Bowen objected, he told colleagues later, saying he had handled thousands of presidential documents without ever bypassing strict procedures of coordination and review. He relented, one White House official said, only after "urgent persuasion" that Bush was standing by to sign and that the order was too sensitive to delay.

On Nov. 14, 2001, the day after Bush signed the commissions order, Cheney took the next big step. He told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that terrorists do not "deserve to be treated as prisoners of war." The president had not yet made that decision. Ten weeks passed, and the Bush administration fought one of its fiercest internal brawls, before Bush ratified the policy that Cheney had declared: The Geneva Conventions would not apply to al-Qaida or Taliban fighters captured on the battlefield.

John Bellinger, the ranking national security lawyer at the White House, sent Rice a blunt - and, he thought, private - legal warning. That policy would place the president indisputably in breach of international law and would undermine cooperation from allied governments.

One lawyer in his office said that Bellinger was chagrined to learn, indirectly, that Cheney had read the confidential memo. Thus Bellinger discovered an unannounced standing order: Documents prepared for the national security adviser, another White House official said, were "routed outside the formal process" to Cheney, too. The reverse did not apply.

[Last modified July 1, 2007, 01:59:37]