Devoid of well-known names and faces, the OVP was nearly invisible to the public until last fall. That's when "Scooter" Libby was indicted for lying to federal investigators in the Valerie Plame case, focusing the media spotlight on the vice president’s chief of staff and top national security adviser, who resigned immediately. Aside from Libby, however, virtually none of Cheney’s current aides has endured any scrutiny. Outside the Washington cognoscenti, it’s a safe bet that not one in a hundred Americans could name a single Cheney aide. Since 2001, the list has included David Addington, who replaced Libby; top national security advisers such as Eric Edelman and Victoria Nuland; radical-right Middle East specialists such as [John] Hannah, William J. Luti, and David Wurmser; anti-China, geopolitical Asia hands like Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich; an assortment of conservative apparatchiks and technocrats, often neoconservative-connected, including C. Dean McGrath, Aaron Friedberg, Karen Knutson, and Carol Kuntz; lobbyists and domestic policy gurus, such as Nancy Dorn, Jonathan Burks, Nina Shokraiil Rees, Cesar Conda, and Candida Wolf - and a host of communications directors, flacks, and spokespeople over the years, notably "Cheney’s angels": Mary Matalin, Juleanna Glover Weiss, Jennifer Millerwise, Catherine Martin, and Lee Anne McBride. (my emphasis)

Larry Wilkerson, formerly a top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, is a no-nonsense, ex-military man who has spoken out bluntly about what he calls a “cabal” led by Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their top aides. Time after time, in various interagency meetings, all the way up to the Cabinet-level “principals committee,” Wilkerson would watch in astonishment as Cheney’s staffers muscled everyone else.

“The staff that the vice president sent out made sure that those [committees] didn’t key anything up that wasn’t what the vice president wanted,” says Wilkerson. “Their style was simply to sit and listen, and take notes. And if things looked like they were going to go speedily to a decision that they knew that the vice president wasn’t going to like, generally they would, at the end of the meeting, in great bureaucratic style, they’d say: ‘We totally disagree. Meeting’s over.’” At that point, policymakers from the nsc, the State Department, the Defense Department, and elsewhere would have to go back to the drawing board. And if a policy option that Cheney opposed somehow got written up as a decision memorandum and sent to the Oval Office, he showed up to kill it. “The vice president’s second or third bite at the apple was when he’d walk in to see the president,” says Wilkerson. “And things would get reversed, because of the vice president’s meeting in the Oval Office with no one else there.” ...

Former Cheney aides tend to confirm Wilkerson’s version of how the OVP operates. Dean McGrath, who served as Cheney’s deputy chief of staff under Libby from 2001 until last year, says he didn’t hesitate to express the vice president’s views during the policy-making process. “I tried to convey at meetings where he would come down on issues,” says McGrath. An important mission of the OVP was to do battle with a resistant bureaucracy. “Often you’d have the permanent bureaucracy that was not on board, especially on all of the issues where you’re trying to change things,” he says.

Aaron Friedberg, who served as Cheney’s director of policy planning for three years, agrees that the bureaucracy was often an obstacle. “It’s not an active resistance. It’s a passive skepticism about the whole direction of policy.” Friedberg, who says that he worked on issues of “terrorism, Asia, Europe, Russia, North Korea, Iran, just about everything outside of Iraq,” suggested that the biggest issue on which Cheney had to confront the bureaucracy was over the administration’s push for democracy, especially in the Middle East. That program’s overseer is his daughter Liz Cheney, a top State Department official.

Wilkerson portrays the vice president’s office as the source of a zealous, almost messianic approach to foreign affairs. “There were several remarkable things about the vice president’s staff,” he says. “One was how empowered they were, and one was how in sync they were. In fact, we used to say about both [Rumsfeld’s office] and the vice president’s office that they were going to win nine out of ten battles, because they are ruthless, because they have a strategy, and because they never, ever deviate from that strategy ... They make a decision, and they make it in secret, and they make in a different way than the rest of the bureaucracy makes it, and then suddenly foist it on the government - and the rest of the government is all confused.”

Many Cheney staffers were obsessed with what they saw as a looming, long-term threat from China. Several of Cheney’s highest-ranking national security aides came out of Congresswoman Christopher Cox’s rather wild-eyed 1990s investigation of alleged Chinese spying in the United States, tied to the overblown allegations about Chinese contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign. Cox, a California Republican, chaired a highly partisan committee that issued a scathing report about China. According to The New York Times, his 700-page report portrayed China as “nothing less than a voracious, dangerous, and fully-equipped military rival of the United States.” Among the top Cheney aides who joined the OVP in 2001 from Cox’s staff were Libby, who served as legal adviser to the committee; McGrath, a key staffer for Cox; and Jonathan Burks, a senior Cox aide who became Cheney’s special assistant. Yates, who joined the team from The Heritage Foundation, is a China specialist who has long urged a more confrontational policy. In 2000, he wrote a Heritage paper offering advice to the Bush administration, and slamming Clinton for accommodating China. He urged a stronger, pro-Taiwan policy while predicting a Chinese attack. Charles W. Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to China and has known Yates for many years, puts him in the same category as former Defense Department officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who "all saw China as the solution to ‘enemy deprivation syndrome.’" ...

For the Cheneyites, Middle East policy is tied to China, and in their view China’s appetite for oil makes it a strategic competitor to the United States in the Persian Gulf region. Thus, they regard the control of the Gulf as a zero-sum game. They believe that the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military buildup in Central Asia, the invasion of Iraq, and the expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Gulf states have combined to check China’s role in the region. In particular, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the creation of a pro-American regime in Baghdad was, for at least 10 years before 2003, a top neoconservative goal, one that united both the anti-China crowd and far-right supporters of Israel’s Likud. Both saw the invasion of Iraq as the prelude to an assault on neighboring Iran. (my emphasis)