Cheney, CIA Long at Odds

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Cheney, CIA Long at Odds
The vice president's history of tension with the agency may help explain why his office is an area of interest in the blown-cover probe.


By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten
Times Staff Writers

October 20, 2005

WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, Dick Cheney has tussled with the CIA, first as secretary of Defense and later as vice president. Now that long and tortured history forms the backdrop of a federal probe into who named an undercover agency officer — an inquiry that is centering in part on Cheney's office.

Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has interviewed not only the vice president but also his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and several other current and former Cheney aides as he seeks to learn who told reporters about the agent and whether anyone obstructed his inquiry.


Cheney's long relationship with Libby, and their shared doubts about the CIA, help explain why the vice president and his staff would draw the prosecutor's interest. Fitzgerald is in the final stages of deciding whether to issue indictments, according to defense lawyers in the case, and his decision could roil a White House struggling with sinking poll numbers, a troubled Supreme Court nomination and other problems.

Fitzgerald is trying to determine who revealed the identity of Valerie Plame, an undercover officer and the wife of former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had publicly accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to rally support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cheney20oct20,0,1211058.story?coll=ny-leadnationalnews-headlines

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