Cheney unclassified
According to author Barton Gellman, several top administration officials didn’t find out the true nature of programs they were working on until they read about it in his book on Vice President Cheney, “Angler.”
Speaking at the New America Foundation on Tuesday, Gellman, whose day job is as a special projects reporter at the Washington Post, said that such political players as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan found out they were lied to by Cheney based on the book’s revelations.
Gellman told Yeas & Nays that Greenspan “learned [Cheney] wasn’t the honest broker like he thought he was,” referring to the revelation that Cheney neglected to pass on documents from Greenspan to the president.
Gellman went on to call Cheney “the most influential and invisible” vice president in history. He was almost responsible for causing “a resignation of the five top levels of the Justice Department” in response to discovering his secret, warrantless domestic surveillance program, a program the president was in the dark about for three months.
And Gellman warns that this is not a new side of Cheney, dismissing claims from close friends who say he has not always been this shady. “They must have selective memory,” he said.
