Libby was a go-to guy deep in the background

/WASHINGTON — Until Friday, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was the most powerful figure in Washington most people had never heard of.

Inside the White House, though, he was a member of the president's inner councils, the discreet-but-dogged go-to guy for the nation's most powerful vice president in history. Getting to Libby, said one person who watched him work in the White House, was almost as good as getting to Vice President Dick Cheney, because Libby had the vice president's trust and friendship as his chief of staff.

At Cheney's behest, Libby turned the vice president's office, usually a Washington backwater, into a large, formidable power center to influence foreign policy. Together they used it mainly for one purpose: to press the case to topple Saddam Hussein, a cause both men had pursued for years, since working together at the Pentagon when Cheney was defense secretary a decade earlier.

So when former Ambassador Joseph Wilson came forward in July 2003 to challenge the administration's case on Iraq's nuclear threat, it was Libby, prosecutors alleged, who set out to figure out who Wilson was and then leak to reporters the identity of his CIA-agent wife, Valerie Wilson, who was referred to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame. Libby was charged with lying to investigators and the grand jury about those efforts, including that one person who told him about Plame was Cheney himself, the indictment says.

Those who know Libby said he played for Cheney what the vice president plays for Bush: an unfailingly loyal but unassuming No. 2 person, ever willing to stand in the shadows.

Some people talked about a more colorful, private side to Libby, a daredevil skier who wrote a novel. The 55-year-old lawyer's most famous client was fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose pardon by President Clinton set off a Republican outcry.

Libby's relationship with Cheney goes back to when Cheney was defense secretary for Bush's father, and Libby crafted a post-Cold War defense strategy that many credit with setting out the groundwork for the possible use of pre-emptive force in deterring other nations. The idea was embraced by fellow neoconservatives to help justify the Iraq war.

Libby's boss at the Pentagon, and his former Yale professor, was Paul Wolfowitz, who recently left his post as deputy defense secretary under Donald Rumsfeld to become president of the World Bank.

Supporters saw a closeness between Libby and other Republican foreign-policy hawks that allowed them to move toward decisions more efficiently.

"It [was] one friend calls another friend," said one former Pentagon adviser with ties to Wolfowitz, speaking of Cheney and Libby. "The three of them didn't sit there and decide to invade Iraq alone ... but a lot of the behind-the-scenes debate would go on between these guys."

Critics saw a more dangerous force at work in the run-up to the Iraq war. Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, accused Cheney and Rumsfeld of heading a "cabal." As for Libby, "he's somebody who can personally be quite sociable, but when it comes to work, he shows a great deal of discretion and doesn't seek the limelight at all," said Gary Schmitt of the Project for a New American Century, who watched his friend's name move from obscurity to the headlines. "I'm sure this must be the last thing he would ever want."