Dick Cheney served as U.S. Vice President under George W. Bush (2001–2009).
”He really was the president”
John Kiriakou says Dick Cheney pushed the bounds of the Constitution “more than any other vice president,” and that a generation on it is clear “he really was the president” — holding primacy over foreign affairs, intelligence, defense and energy while George W. Bush, “a perfectly lovely man,” was “simply not in charge.” He cites the film Vice’s scene of Cheney negotiating exactly that portfolio as his price for taking the job.[1][2][3]
The same judgment recurs in his account of the intelligence itself: the CIA was handed political decisions made at the White House and told to justify them after the fact, and the Iraq War decision in particular was made by Cheney and imposed on the rest of the intelligence community.[4] Put more simply: “100% of the decision-making on these issues came from Cheney.”[5]
The presidential finding, intercepted in the anteroom
Kiriakou recounted the account from George Tenet’s memoir regarding the authorization of the enhanced interrogation program. Tenet had prepared the presidential finding — the formal document requiring the president’s signature to authorize the CIA program — and traveled to the White House to obtain that signature. While waiting in the anteroom of the Oval Office, Cheney walked in and said: “Hi, George. What are you doing here?” Tenet told him he had the presidential finding for Bush’s signature to approve the torture program. Cheney said: “Oh, I’ll take that.” Tenet replied: “Well, no — I need to get the president’s signature.” Cheney said: “No, I’ll get the president’s signature.”[6][7][8]
Tenet later speculated that the president never actually signed the finding — that it was autopen’d — and that when Bush subsequently said he had no idea the program was taking place, he was probably telling the truth. Kiriakou’s characterization: Cheney was the one running foreign policy, intelligence policy, and defense policy. Bush was the face.[8][9]
The road to Iraq
Richard Perle, 12 September 2001
Kiriakou relays the story that Richard Perle came to Cheney on September 12, 2001 to plant the idea of invading Iraq.[10]
The channel around the agency
Despite a CIA burn notice forbidding all contact with Ahmed Chalabi, Kiriakou says Cheney had the undersecretary of defense for intelligence secretly reopen a channel with him — and specifically instructed that officer not to tell the CIA.[11] He describes the Pentagon reporting channel as Cheney’s initiative rather than something he was offered: on his reading the informant did not approach Cheney; Cheney found him, and then set up a separate intelligence-gathering capability outside the intelligence community — which is how, in Kiriakou’s account, information came to be stovepiped.[12]
The effect inside the CIA was to remove the agency from its own subject. The Defense Department intelligence reports arriving from the channel were strikingly specific about Iraqi weapons, but never identified their source, and every request from Kiriakou’s office to speak to that source was refused as too sensitive. The agency, unable to test what it was being sent, took itself out of it.[13]
Counting on gullibility
On the attempt to link Saddam to al-Qaeda, Kiriakou’s verdict is that Cheney was not mistaken but calculating: he “counted correctly, as it turned out, on the American people being so stupid and so gullible that they would just go along with it."[14]
"We’re in charge now”
Kiriakou has offered a personal encounter as his evidence for how completely the Pentagon had been staffed. An intern who had worked for him in Bahrain in the mid-1990s, a Yale sophomore he describes as really very smart, stayed on for a master’s and a doctorate and then wrote to say he had taken a job at the Pentagon’s new under secretariat for intelligence. Kiriakou invited him to the agency to brief the deputy director on the Pentagon’s thinking about Iraq.[15][16]
Kiriakou describes himself as appalled by the briefing, and his boss as looking at him throughout as if to ask why he had brought the man in. Walking him to his car afterwards, Kiriakou asked: “Michael, I have to ask you, when did you become a fascist?” The answer was “We’re in charge now. We’re in charge and Saddam Hussein’s going to die.”[17]
Kiriakou declines to name the officials the man worked for, saying only that they were the people at the Pentagon who later became famous and appeared in magazine exposés about how the United States ended up at war in Iraq. His conclusion is about who was actually driving it: they had bided their time knowing they had a champion in Cheney, “that Dick Cheney was the one running the show.”[18]
The eve of the invasion
Cheney, not the president, chaired the Principals Committee meeting on the night of February 19–20, 2003 — the eve of the Iraq invasion — with Kiriakou taking notes in the secure video teleconference. At that meeting General Tommy Franks ended his order-of-battle briefing with: “If all goes as planned, we can be in Tehran by August.” George Tenet turned off his microphone and asked Kiriakou: “Did he say Tehran or did he say Baghdad?”[19][20][21] In another telling of the same eve-of-invasion episode, Kiriakou says responsibility for the invasion decision rested squarely on Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, with Condoleezza Rice a lesser factor because she was easily pushed around.[22]
Guantánamo
Kiriakou’s account has the detention camp created by a single reversal, taken after the policy it was built to serve was already running. The prisoners were flown out of Pakistan on the understanding that Cuba was a holding stage while Washington decided which federal district would try each man — Boston, New York, Washington or the Eastern District of Virginia — and a fleet of C-12s was doing the work.[23][24]
“As it turned out, as they were arriving and populating Guantanamo — which got up to over 700 people at one point — Dick Cheney said, ‘You know what? Let’s not send them to those federal districts.’ And that’s how Guantanamo became Guantanamo.”
Kiriakou recalls Cheney stating, while vice president, that he would rather keep a thousand innocent people locked up in Guantanamo than allow one guilty person to go free — a position Kiriakou says he holds in exact opposition to.[25] In another telling of the same remark, made when Cheney was confronted about Guantanamo, Kiriakou gives the figure as a hundred innocent men rather than a thousand.[26]
The man, in Kiriakou’s account
The method
On how Cheney handled intelligence that did not suit him, Kiriakou is specific about the workaround: “a liar, a manipulator. When he wasn’t getting the intelligence that he wanted from the CIA, he just had the Defense Department create its own intelligence through Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. They just made it up. The CIA said repeatedly that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and Cheney insisted that no, there were, and the CIA just hadn’t found them.”[27]
The op-ed comment
Kiriakou wrote a 2007 Los Angeles Times op-ed, titled by the paper “The Other War We’re Losing,” about Afghanistan being neglected while attention stayed fixed on Iraq. A few days after it ran, his editor told him the Office of the Vice President — Cheney’s office — had emailed with a comment on the piece. The entire email read: “This guy’s full of shit.”[28]
The personal impression
His personal impression is set against George W. Bush’s in the same breath — “mean, cold, sociopathic” against “warm and friendly” — and demonstrated by a briefing at which a joke reduced the president to helpless laughter and left the vice president expressionless. The summary: “he was just one of the most despicable figures I’ve ever encountered in government.”[29][30]
The Harris endorsement
Kiriakou says he declined to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 after she actively sought and then received the endorsement of the Cheney family, calling that endorsement something to be ashamed of rather than proud of, and Dick Cheney himself “a monster.”[31]