WASHINGTON, Oct 28: Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide, has been a quiet yet powerful force in shaping the Bush administration’s policies and helped build the case for the Iraq invasion.
Lewis Libby, indicted on Friday on charges of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice, has a scholar’s demeanour and is known among colleagues for his analytical approach honed during years of work as an attorney.
Toiling long hours in his office in the building next to the West Wing of the White House, Mr Libby steeps himself in subjects like counter-terrorism, bioweapons defence and energy.
But the vice president’s chief of staff also has a literary side — he published a mystery novel, ‘The Apprentice’, in 1996.
Set in rural Japan in 1903, the book was praised by Publishers Weekly for achieving ‘a sense of mystery and claustrophobia through pared-down prose and minimalist characterization’.
Mr Libby, 55, goes by his nickname, ‘Scooter’, but many people also refer to him as Dick Cheney’s Dick Cheney.
“He is to the vice president what the vice president is to the president,” said Mary Matalin, who worked with Mr Libby as an adviser to Mr Cheney during President Bush’s first term.
She described Mr Libby as a deep thinker and problem-solver who gives ‘discreet advice’.
Mr Libby shares the vice president’s hawkish views on national security and his penchant for operating behind the scenes.
“He doesn’t grandstand,” said World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, Mr Libby’s friend and mentor.
Mr Wolfowitz, former deputy defence secretary, said a major issue that Mr Libby has focused on the past four years is the threat of a biological or chemical attack on the United States, a risk Mr Cheney has often warned about in speeches.
REPORTER’S SOURCE: Mr Libby is known for a reluctance to being quoted in the press, but his private conversations with reporters caught the interest of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, lead investigator of the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
Ms Plame’s diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of outing his wife to discredit him for accusing the administration of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion in a New York Times opinion piece on July 6, 2003.
Times reporter Judith Miller, who recently testified in the leak investigation, spent 85 days in jail for refusing to reveal her source, who turned out to be Mr Libby.
In the Iraq invasion’s run-up, according to journalist Bob Woodward’s book, ‘Plan of Attack’, Mr Libby presented a document to top officials citing evidence of weapons of mass destruction and possible contacts between Iraqi officials and a ringleader of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.
Born in Connecticut, Lewis Libby attended Phillips Academy, an elite private school in Massachusetts. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale University in 1972 and got a law degree from Columbia University three years later.
At Yale, Mr Libby took a political-science course with Mr Wolfowitz, who tapped him in 1981 to serve in the State Department in Reagan administration. Mr Libby later served in the Pentagon under former President George Bush.—Reuters
