New Book: Cheney almost got Wolfowitz top post @ CIA -- if not for Wolfowitz's zipper problem

How Cheney took control of Bush's foreign policy

The new veep installed crony Don Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, and would've won Paul Wolfowitz the top post at CIA -- if not for Wolfowitz's zipper problem.

Editor's note: This is Part 3 of an excerpt from "The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future." Part 1 ran on Nov. 7; Part 2 ran on Nov. 8. For more information on the book, visit craigunger.com

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According to the former Pentagon official, Cheney was convinced that even though Powell's presence was essential to the Bush administration, he "would have to be cornered bureaucratically and repeatedly reminded (even in ways involving public humiliation) that foreign policy was not something over which he presided." To accomplish that task, the official continued, Cheney "recruited Donald Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives to hammer Secretary of State Powell bureaucratically while Mr. Cheney took upon himself the task of managing the President of the United States."

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But in order to realize his ambitions, Cheney knew his team needed control of the entire national security apparatus. By this time, Paul Wolfowitz, a Cheney hand whose name had been widely bandied about as a potential secretary of defense, was now being touted as a possible pick to replace George Tenet as the next CIA director. If that happened, Cheney would have an ideal team in place.

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There was another problem, however, that threatened Wolfowitz's position in the new administration. His marriage was on the rocks. Worse, according to an article in the Daily Mail (London) by Sharon Churcher and Annette Witheridge, Wolfowitz was allegedly having an affair with a staffer at the School of Advanced International Studies. Clare Wolfowitz, his wife of more than thirty years and mother of his three children, was said to be so angry that she was taking actions that might jeopardize his career.

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According to a former State Department official, Wolfowitz was quite taken with the notion that he, a secular Jew, was dating a Muslim. Their relationship put a heady, modern, and romantic face on the entire neocon project of democratizing the Middle East. As the Bush-Cheney team prepared to take office, Wolfowitz and Riza, not his wife Clare, took in the neocon social circuit together. Riza was known to Cheney. She moved in the same circles with and was admired by Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile Wolfowitz backed as a successor to Saddam. "Shaha was the embodiment of the outcome of the modern Arab political system as the neocons saw it," said the State Department source. "She was the personification of the outcome they hoped for in Iraq. She was not theoretical. She was not in a burka. She was a modern Arab feminist."

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When Tenet returned, however, he was pleasantly surprised. " wants me to stay until he can find someone better," he said. It was not until six years later that The Nelson Report, a highly regarded newsletter for Washington foreign policy insiders, finally reported why Tenet had not been replaced by Wolfowitz. "A certain Ms. Riza was even then Wolfowitz's true love," the newsletter said. "The problem for the CIA wasn't just that she was a foreign national, although that was and is today an issue for anyone interested in CIA employment. The problem was that Wolfowitz was married to someone else, and that someone was really angry about it, and she found a way to bring her complaint directly to the President.