To Baghdad and Back with Dick Cheney

Four countries in four days in the hottest spot on the globe with the most powerful VP in history. all aboard!

Am I in trouble?

That was my first question for Kim Hume, chief of Fox News's Washington bureau and my unfailingly discreet boss, when she stopped by my office this past December and asked me to walk with her. "No," Hume said, quite the opposite. In a few days Vice President Dick Cheney was going to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Oman, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The trip was still a secret. Did I want to go?

Having served as a Washington correspondent for Fox News for seven years--the past five covering the White House and the State Department--I knew well what was being asked: Are you ready to spend 50 of the next 96 hours in torturously uncomfortable seats aboard Air Force Two, a C-17 military cargo plane and some rickety Vietnam-era helicopters? Can you keep your wits about you while racing through a series of carefully orchestrated tours and mostly newsless speeches staged in remote villages and sprawling military bases in some of the world's most dangerous places? Can you survive irregular feedings, extreme sleep deprivation and excessive exposure to your fellow reporters, the kvetchingest traveling companions alive? Will you absorb the wrath of an unhappy wife, to whom, just two weeks before Christmas, all of this will have to be broken gently? Then again, do you want to observe up close the most influential vice president in modern times operating in the minefield that is the Middle East and report on it for the millions of viewers of the nation's top-rated cable news channel? Would you like, as my bureau chief likes to call it, a front-row seat for the unfolding of history?

There was only one answer. Covering VIP trips is part of the reason Washington correspondents become reporters in the first place. Beyond the access to senior officials and their staffs these assignments afford, there are also the satellite phones and cash advances, the expensive suites in exotic countries, the background-briefing binders and loyal local operatives ("runners" or "fixers") you have to rendezvous with once you hit the ground--all the accoutrements, in short, of a well-appointed man of the world. The stuff of espionage--of Le Carré and Ludlum! Or maybe just the means by which a workaday Walter Mitty can trot around the globe on someone else's dime and pretend, if he closes his eyes and avoids thinking about his meager per diem, that it's 1975 and that political journalism still offers the freedom, excitement and camaraderie of The Boys on the Bus and the international intrigue of The Boys From Brazil.

For me the locales of Afghanistan and Pakistan would be new, but the drill was not. In 2000 I had followed President Clinton across the United States and to Colombia, Portugal, Germany, Russia and Ukraine. Covering George W. Bush during the 2002 and 2004 elections, I logged tens of thousands more miles on official and campaign trips to the 48 continental states, sometimes hitting five cities in a single day. I traveled aboard Air Force One and, more often, aboard the noisier (and more fun) press charter plane that precedes the commander-in-chief everywhere he goes, to ensure that his spry jaunts up and down Air Force One's steps are dutifully recorded and fed out--transmitted via satellite--to news stations around the world. With President Bush I had also toured five African countries in four days (Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and Nigeria) and tagged along for an equally hectic European tour.

But the most grueling of these trips, the mother of all VIP marathons, was Vice President Cheney's swing through the Middle East and Europe in March 2002, which hit 12 countries in 10 days. Cheney was attempting to line up support for the Bush administration's plan for preemptive war in Iraq. But with the second Palestinian intifada in high gear and each suicide bombing provoking a lethal armored incursion by the Israeli Defense Forces, Cheney found his hosts wholly preoccupied with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of guarantees of overflight rights for the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the invasion of Baghdad, the vice president got earful after earful about Ariel Sharon and the West Bank.

Reporters on this trip enjoyed rare and extensive access to the VP himself. In an administration that has made a virtual science of message discipline, probably no official speaks more prudently, sticks more closely to the script or radiates more confidence in his infrequent exchanges with the press than Cheney (even when it pains him, as in the hunting-accident furor). These attributes--coveted among politicians, dreaded by reporters--emerged more clearly than ever in Cheney's frequent, if short, on-camera news conferences with the head of state in each country (three questions from each press corps) and in longer, more freewheeling briefings conducted on "background," meaning responses could be attributed only to a "senior administration official." Cheney's demeanor changed little, regardless of whether the cameras were running. What you saw was more or less what you got: a seasoned Washington operator, businesslike but not unpleasant; a self-made multimillionaire and unapologetic conservative who made his bones serving under presidents Nixon, Ford and Bush 41.

During a news conference with Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street, I watched Adam Bolton, one of the U.K.'s best-known political reporters, ask why Britons should support the U.S. on Iraq "when they feel that they can't trust the United States after the unilateral action taken last week over steel." Bolton was referring to the Bush administration's recent imposition of tariffs on steel imports, a blow to the U.K. steel industry; he was also insinuating, none too subtly, that Bush and Cheney were untrustworthy. Cheney simply lowered his eyes, cocked his head to one side in the disappointed-dad manner he's perfected in more than three decades of dealing with cheeky, sometimes inane questions, and reminded Bolton there were "enormous differences" between the two cases. To draw parallels between them was--and now came the hammer--"inappropriate." An understated yet unmistakable rebuke: classic Cheney.

This time, a few days before Christmas 2005, Cheney's mission in the Middle East was far different. Yasir Arafat and Hussein were both gone from the scene, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was more than two years old, and the cities of Baghdad and Ramadi had largely replaced Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as the world's prime loci for suicide bombings, kidnappings and other terrorist atrocities.

On December 15 an estimated 10 million Iraqi citizens defied the terrorists, insurgents and fanatical nihilists and headed to the polls, where, with ink-stained fingers, they chose the first democratically elected parliament under the country's new constitution. Despite this highly encouraging development, strong sectarian differences still divided the country's Shiite Muslim majority from the Sunni Arab minority, which ruled under Hussein, and both of (continued on page 76) Dick Cheney (continued from page 54) those groups from the Kurds in the north. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the respected Democratic congressman Jack Murtha had just called for the pullout of U.S. troops.

Neither Cheney's office nor my boss had mentioned Iraq as a stop on the vice president's itinerary, but in retrospect I should have seen it coming. With the Iraqi elections just behind us and echoes from the Murtha debate still reverberating in Washington, it was natural enough that Cheney would, en route to visiting troops in Afghanistan and Pakistan, also make a holiday stop in Iraq. He was by that point the only major figure in the Bush administration who hadn't been there since the invasion; his only previous visit had been in March 1991, shortly after the end of the Persian Gulf war, when he was secretary of defense under the first president Bush. A tour of the theater would help advance several critical goals: bucking up the morale of U.S. troops, demonstrating to Americans watching TV at home that progress was indeed being made in both the training of Iraqi forces and the gradual transfer of security responsibility from American to Iraqi hands, and perhaps manufacturing some positive press for Cheney himself.

He could have used some good press. The same day as the Iraqi elections, The New York Times revealed that President Bush had signed an executive order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to monitor wiretaps installed without a warrant. Amid the ensuing Beltway uproar over domestic spying and a flurry of Democratic charges alleging that Bush was exercising unchecked executive power, Cheney, as always, rose to the president's defense. The vice president also played the heavy in a recent debate over interrogation limits and the legal definition of torture when he sought to carve out exceptions for the CIA in pending legislation on the subject. Cheney's aides reckoned televised images of their man and the missus mingling with GIs in Iraq and Afghanistan at Christmastime would help dispel the popular caricature of the vice president as a ruthless backstage puppeteer of President Bush.

Queuing up to board Air Force Two at Andrews Air Force Base, the reporters circulated rumors about Cheney making a surprise visit to Iraq and steeled themselves for the survivalist exercise that lay ahead: We would be up for at least the next 30 hours. This was a smaller press contingent than on the 2002 trip; the only returning veterans were myself and Terry Moran, who had recently been elevated from the ranks of White House correspondents to become one of three anchors succeeding Ted Koppel on Nightline. The only other TV reporter was CNN's Dana Bash; the usual complement of wire service reporters--Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press, Toby Zakaria of Reuters--was joined by correspondents from The New York Times (the lanky, dry-witted Dick Stevenson), The Washington Times (the lanky, dry-witted Bill Sammon) and National Public Radio (the stocky, dry-witted David Greene). Also present was Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard. Cheney has occasionally touted the conservative magazine and the shrewd, affable, goateed Hayes in particular; Hayes is writing a biography of Cheney and is one of the few reporters still pursuing one of Cheney's favorite stories: documentary evidence of pre-9/11 links between Hussein and Al Qaeda.

Hayes's presence on the trip bespoke the influence Cheney's staff can have on what is otherwise a largely rote formula. The matter of which news organizations will fill the seats on a VIP trip fluctuates and rotates in accordance with arcane rites and rituals established after the Kennedy assassination and known only to designated White House staff members, D.C. bureau chiefs of the major news organizations and a handful of veteran news managers. These people specialize in running the pool, the collaborative entity through which the major news organizations share the costs and privileges associated with covering high-level Washington. (The wire services and print organizations each have their own rotating pools.) Tom Tillman of CBS, Vija Udenans of ABC, Wendy Dawson at Fox News--these names likely mean nothing to you, but in the obscure realm of poolology, they are revered figures, holy clerics, virtual gods! If you saw the president on the news last night, chances are one of these people, or their colleagues and counterparts at the other networks, arranged the satellite feed and other complex logistics that brought the footage to your TV set.

As Air Force Two descended into Royal Air Force Station Mildenhall in the U.K., a senior administration official, or SAO, formally informed us we would be making three stops in Iraq. None of that could be reported, however, until Cheney's staff gave the go-ahead for us to file at the third and last stop, and even then the location of the third stop could not be reported until we had arrived at the next stop, which was Muscat, Oman. The reporters barked out a number of clarifying questions, angling to make sure they would not be scooped by local media, but the SAO's implicit central assertion--that we were obligated to abide by the rules Cheney's people laid down--was not disputed. Breaking the rules of the house, in this case the White House, was unthinkable for a number of reasons. For one thing, we were at war, and the security concerns invoked to justify these mild restrictions on the press were undoubtedly legitimate. Second, the offending reporter and his organization could be blackballed from future VIP trips and face (even harsher) reprisals from other members of the pool. Last but not least, there was the unavoidable fact--also never mentioned in polite company--that Air Force Two was Cheney's plane, and if you ticked him off, or his peeps, finding your way home could prove problematic.

We reached Mildenhall in the dead of night. There the whole entourage deplaned and ran 100 yards across the chilly tarmac to clamber aboard a waiting C-17. Eight hours later we were at Baghdad International Airport, squinting at the sun, donning body armor and green Kevlar helmets and boarding Black Hawks.

Our aerial tour of Baghdad revealed a surprisingly busy city, a sprawling metropolis filled with palm trees, buildings and cars, her ruins scattered, not pervasive. We alighted in the Green Zone. There we boarded a convoy of security vans that snaked through a maze of concrete barriers and concertina wire, U.S. soldiers with automatic rifles seemingly every five feet. Finally we arrived at our first stop, the official residence of the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. Word had it the heavily fortified home, with tall Arabian archways and columns painted a sickly tapioca, used to belong to Uday Hussein's mother-in-law. Inside the sparsely furnished house, Cheney was to conduct an hour-long briefing with generals Abizaid and Casey, the war's top commanders, followed by separate meetings with Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, and its prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. At the beginning of each session, the media was allowed to "spray" the scene with cameras and record the inconsequential dialogue that often prevails in BOPSA (bunch of people sitting around) photo ops.

Pseudoevents like these underscore the uneasy relationship, at once adversarial and symbiotic, between public officials and the press. Kept at a physical distance, herded like cats, reporters are often made to feel like the kitchen help at a black-tie party: inferior, under-dressed, sometimes vexing creatures, present solely by dint of their hosts' (continued on page 128) Dick Cheney(continued from page 76)

sufferance, subject at all times to expulsion or lesser punishments but annoyingly integral to the success of the overall project. The tension arises from the fact that the goal of the public official and his staff is to produce unqualifiedly positive news coverage, while the goal of reporters is to produce informed, compelling news coverage. These two agendas do not regularly converge. Angling to surmount the obstacles imposed by each other, government and media people are forever engaging in cat-and-mouse games.

Since the rules are stacked in favor of those in government--it's their plane, their meeting, their show--the reporters are at a disadvantage. We are therefore forced, like guerrillas, to seize opportunities when we can. This I did in the opening photo op, which featured Khalilzad, the generals and two Cheney aides. Here I introduced the trip's first unscripted moment.

Ambassador Khalilzad, his right index finger still blackened with ink from his ceremonial participation in the previous week's elections, touted the dramatically increased turnout among Sunni Arabs. The postelection outreach to the Sunnis was under way: "Those conversations have started," he told Cheney quietly. The vice president said he was "delighted" to be in Baghdad and glad to learn "on the ground" of the "great many successes." Among them he listed, with evident pleasure, his staff's concealment from the media of this first destination.

"We wouldn't have told anyone," I interjected. Cheney's head tilted upward. "We'd have been good." The room chuckled, Cheney finished his remarks, and the journalists were soon hustled out of the spray and escorted to a nearby room to write, nap, kibitz or stare into space. But an important principle had been established: Reporters would not necessarily stand mute during the photo ops. Indeed, at the next one, where Cheney bade the generals good-bye while standing outside the house's front door, he happily responded to some basic but fruitful questions I threw out: How was the briefing, sir? "Excellent." Anything surprise you? "A huge change of attitude of the Sunni population.... The election was a major milestone." He took some follow-ups from my colleagues as well. Now we at least had usable sound.

As if on cue, a white SUV rolled up and disgorged President Talabani, a Humpty Dumpty figure in thick wool pinstripes, who laboriously chugged the 10 steps to greet Cheney, who wore a blue blazer and gray slacks. Inside the residence Talabani praised his visitor as "a hero of liberating Iraq," and Cheney forecast an "enormous impact" on the Middle East. A few minutes later Talabani waddled back to his SUV and drove off. If the schedule had been running like clockwork, the vice president and Khalilzad at that precise moment would have watched another SUV roll up bearing Prime Minister Al-Jaafari. Instead the minutes ticked by, and Cheney's pink, bald head began to glisten under Iraq's hot afternoon sun. For the next 15 minutes the vice president stood around uselessly, rocking back and forth on his feet. Khalilzad grew visibly nervous. The ambassador made small talk while the cameras kept rolling, and Cheney stiffened. It had probably been 15 years since he was last kept waiting like this! I thought about crying out, "This is an outrage, Mr. Vice President! Heads are going to roll, no?" but then thought better of the idea. The reporters snickered among themselves and watched with a mixture of pity and glee as poor Khalilzad struggled to fill the dead time. "This is quite an upward movement for me," he said, glancing back at Tapioca House. Then after a pause, "You going to take some time off when you get back?"

When Al-Jaafari finally arrived, he blurted out, "I thought only the ambassador would be here!" A balding, well-groomed man in beard and business suit, the prime minister could easily be mistaken for a dapper pharmacist; certainly he showed complete ignorance of the photo op etiquette known even to novice politicians. Most of them know intuitively to mutter a few banal words before ordering the media out of the room and getting down to business, but Al-Jaafari went on at length, addressing Cheney as "your excellency," thanking America for the "pressure" it brought to bear against Hussein's dictatorship and chastising UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for having opposed suffrage for Iraqi expatriates ("I insisted," said Al-Jaafari). It got to the point where Khalilzad, who'd had his hands clasped in his lap, started discreetly circling his finger in the universally understood motion that signifies "wrap it up," and Cheney politely suggested they could accomplish more with the media gone.

A chopper ride away at Taji Air Base, the former home of Saddam Hussein's elite Hammurabi division, Cheney struggled to hoist his hefty frame out of a pint-size armored Humvee. This stop was to be a crowning moment of the trip, a demonstration of the speed with which Iraqi security forces have taken the lead in the fight against terrorists and insurgents.

Now sporting combat boots and a customized navy-blue bomber jacket emblazoned with the words Multinational Force Iraq, the vice president shook hands with about 45 alternately nervous and nonplussed Iraqi soldiers, each standing at attention in front of 20 tanks belonging to the Iraqi army's Ninth Mechanized Infantry Division. None of the Iraqis spoke English. A Nebraska native, Cheney seemed to genuinely enjoy meeting the Americans on hand, asking each one where he was from. With a smile and a tilt of his head he was able to convey that although he'd never served in the armed forces, he too was a regular guy from real America, not New York, L.A. or D.C., and that he was grateful to have even a fleeting chance to reconnect with like souls. For the media, however, glimpses of these moments had to be stolen. Prodded by Cheney's aides to stay 10 feet ahead of him at all times, the reporters were constantly backpedaling in perpetual motion along the great column of men, gravel and tanks.

The genealogy of the Ninth's armored vehicles was complicated; many of the tanks were refurbished from the scrap heap. According to U.S. military officials interviewed on-site, six of the tanks were T-55s, the Soviet model used in the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. Four of the Iraqis' old-new tanks, U.S. military personnel said, were T-72s, which, according to online sources, were also developed in the USSR and exported to non-Soviet Warsaw Pact armies. There were also said to be four MTLBs, first introduced into the Soviet Army in 1964, and six BMP-3s, a 1990 Russian model sold in large numbers to the United Arab Emirates. If the Iraqi tanks were to be used in the advance of democracy, they had a history of ownership and action in the service of something quite different.

Cheney's tour guide was Major General Bashar Mahmoud Ayoub, a hairy, mustached oil burner of a man dressed in a beret and fatigues and wearing a Rolex. Once the top armored commander in the Hussein regime, Ayoub had run afoul of his patron and spent a year in Hussein's prisons. Now he was the proud commander of liberated Iraq's first tank unit. "Excuse my English," Ayoub apologized at the outset, "but maybe I can manage." First he explained his unit's crest, which emphasizes national unity. ("We think Iraq is above all of us.") Then the general told how his men patrolled 73 polling sites in the December elections and helped make Iraq safe for democracy. Frightened Iraqi citizens in Ramadi gazed on the tanks, Ayoub recalled, and "they were so delighted. They said, 'Will you stay with us?' And we said, 'Yes.' They were so proud to see Iraqis with tanks, securing them." Later an American officer took up this theme, asserting, "These tanks generated Iraqi votes."

"We will always protect against the terrorists," Ayoub assured Cheney, apparently unmindful of the unwelcome implication that protection from terrorists will "always" be required in Iraq. Despite minor gaffes like this, Ayoub possessed an undeniably commanding presence, and his men appeared sharp and impressive. The Iraqi Ninth consists of three brigades, each boasting between 1,500 to 3,000 soldiers and about 150 combat vehicles. In the first brigade, stood up in October 2004, two of three battalions now "own their own battle space," according to the Defense Department, which means they can fight without Americans guaranteeing their hide. The second brigade, stood up in July 2005, began conducting joint combat operations with American forces three months later and by December controlled 10 "fixed sites," including high-value infrastructure, during the Iraqi elections.,

At each point along the tour, Ayoub showed Cheney a multicolored chart. One was titled "Success Stories." This chart said the division had found or captured 77 improvised explosive devices (IEDs), six vehicle-borne IEDs, 16 weapons caches and 91 detainees. A final bullet point far down on the chart read that the Ninth had uncovered a "large unex-ploded ammunition site used by terrorist [sic]." Asked about this last claim, Brigadier General Daniel Bolger, the tall, birdlike commander of the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team, who was assigned on this day to brief the media, exclaimed, "Their intelligence figured it out!" The depot, Bolger said, was located four miles north of the base at a site "the bad guys" had disguised as a junkyard. "It was a hell of a find," Bolger beamed, "the most significant in the past six months." Asked which "terrorist" had been using the depot, he cited "local Ansar al-Sunna and Jaish-e-Muhammad." The latter is a Pakistani group not known to have operated inside Iraq.

Keep moving, people! By now Cheney was chatting up a storm with Major Scott Davis, American advisor to the third battalion of the Ninth's second brigade. Davis, who speaks fluent Arabic, exuded a kind of fraternal pride in the Iraqi division and its men. "We live with them. We sleep near them," he told Cheney. "It's an honor and a privilege." Davis introduced his Iraqi colleague, Major Minir, to the vice president as "my counterpart and my brother." Thick, bespectacled and red-cheeked, Major Davis was on his second tour of duty--he had spent 700 days in the Middle East, "about 299 of them" in Iraq. Wittingly or otherwise, he almost flawlessly parroted the Bush administration's rhetoric. "We have to be right every percent of the time; the terrorists have to be right once," he told Cheney, echoing one of President Bush's favorite lines. While the vice president bonded with Davis, a trio of Iraqi infantrymen ran their hands over the four open doors of a white SUV. Ostensibly this was to simulate the way they search for IEDs at a checkpoint, but they looked more like car-wash guys limply wiping off dashboard cleaner as part of the Ultra-Super Special ($16.99).

General Ayoub wanted to cap off Cheney's tour of the unit with a demonstration of the tanks' mobility, during which Iraqis would scramble atop the armored vehicles and send them rolling off in precise formation. However, the general evidently thought he possessed insufficient authority to trigger this exercise; either that or the Cheney aura simply got to him. So the general turned to the man he believed did have the requisite authority, the famously influential vice president of the United States, and asked obligingly, "Sir, may I have your permission to move the tanks?"

You could see Cheney blanch. Imperiously issuing orders to a decorated Iraqi general in front of the American press, giving him the authority to move his own tanks in his own country, was hardly the message the vice president wanted to send. Taji was supposed to be an exhibition of growing Iraqi strength and command control. An awkward moment lingered until Ayoub came to his senses and, invoking no one's authority but his own, commanded his men to mount their tanks and roll out, a helterskelter of shouted orders, victory cries and dust clouds.

Soon it was off to the chow line under a camouflaged tent, where the vice president, joined by rank-and-file American and Iraqi soldiers, held up a tray to receive fatty servings of lamb, hummus and some gelatinous dish of indeterminate origin that looked like vegetable lo mein. Those who'd spent time around Cheney could tell he was apprehensive about the meal; they could spot the muted expression on his face that showed him in anguished dialogue with his dutiful self: Do I really have to eat this? Once again the media was permitted to record the august event. No one spoke as Cheney inched down the line toward us, so when he was about a foot away I decided to break the silence. "Has Mrs. Cheney approved all this?" I asked. He smiled a mischievous grin and brought an index finger to his lips.

While Cheney lunched with the troops, reporters sat in an unmarked shed for a briefing by Lieutenant General Martin E. Dempsey, Bolger's boss and the top U.S. commander in charge of training Iraqi forces. To the reporters on these trips, photo ops are the trimmings, the briefings the meat. Here was where we could strut our stuff, show our knowledge, ask the brilliant questions that would unnerve the briefer and reduce him to stammering incoherence or, better yet, unwitting candor; only then would we penetrate all the carefully orchestrated imagery and bring ourselves and our viewers and readers to The Truth.

Lean, muscular, pigeon-toed, his pug face topped with cropped gray hair, Marty Dempsey could have kicked your ass in high school, and he can still kick it today. From June 2003 to July 2004, he began, "the issue was, How do we put an Iraqi face on this problem? We're way beyond that." He disputed as "nonsense" suggestions that Iraqi recruitment was declining or driven by unemployment. "There is no other delicate way to put it. It is nonsense. They come into the army out of a sense of--mean, it is a job, but they could get the same amount of money they get in the army. For pay and hazardous duty they get about $300 a month. They could get far more than that. They could probably get that for planting one IED. I don't know what the street value is. But the point is they don't have to come into the army, and they're not in the army purely because of money."

Gesturing at his own set of multicolored charts attended to by a silent aide, Dempsey described how the coalition forces' effort to stand up an indigenous force of 325,000 men, with 130,000 police officers, was mostly finished. "We're about two thirds built now, and by next summer--next fall, really--we'll be largely built out in the major muscle activities, combat power. But of course we'll have to fill in the blanks on the specialized side--logistics, intelligence, communications and so forth."

A reporter asked when American troops could start leaving Iraq in significant numbers. Dempsey demurred. "That's really out of my league," he said. But he insisted the process of training Iraqi security forces was "on track." On track how? "Against the metrics we've established, which are both quantitative and qualitative." The police force, he conceded, was about six months behind the army and would probably defer to the military in the great task of establishing "normalcy," or civil order. "I think you'll see that in 2006, the Iraqi army will, in fact, be in the lead and that the year afterward we will begin--maybe provincially, by province, or in some other way--restoring civil security. And I keep saying we, but truly it's them, with our assistance."

That some American soldiers in Iraq did not share Dempsey's optimism about the war effort was made clear at Cheney's third and final stop in Iraq. This was the Al Asad Air Base, 112 miles west of Baghdad, in the Al Anbar province, the nerve center of the Sunni insurgency. More than 600 Marines and other service members, dressed in camouflage, rifles hanging casually off their shoulders, stood waiting in a giant hangar and applauded ferociously when the vice president strode onstage to address them. Like Iraq's prime minister, the troops had no idea Cheney was coming. "We've got a good deal. Be here in camis tomorrow," they were told. Perhaps fearing he would disappoint the troops, Cheney opened with uncharacteristically whimsical words: "Well, I'm not Jessica Simpson."

Then the vice president bore down for a typical Cheney stump speech, read word for word in punishing monotone. All life drained instantly from the crowd, a group hungry only for a little entertainment, a little razzle-dazzle, the kind of crowd-pleasing swagger President Bush unfailingly delivers. At the end the Marines applauded politely, sapped of the energy with which they had greeted Cheney's entrance.

Next Cheney retreated to a small tent, where he was to have a private talk with 30 rank-and-file American soldiers. "If you've got any complaints, I can take 'em straight to the top," Cheney deadpanned. "Not sure it'll do any good, but...."

Marine Corporal Bradley P. Warren, a machine gunner from St. Louis, kicked things off in blunt fashion. "From our perspective we don't see much as far as gains," Warren said. "I was wondering what it looks like from the big side of the mountain--how Iraq's looking."

"Well, Iraq's looking good," Cheney replied. "It's hard sometimes, if you look at just the news, to have the good stories burn through. I think we've turned the corner, if you will. Ten years hence, we'll see that the year 2005 was in fact a watershed year here in Iraq."

Another Marine, Corporal R.P. Zapella, asked simply, "Sir, what are the benefits of doing all this work to get Iraq on its feet?" Cheney urged him to envision an Iraq that no longer offers safe haven to terrorists, a U.S. ally in the Middle East. He then predicted the troops would see "changes in our deployment patterns probably within this next year."

Now this was news! The line was quoted in wire reports around the world. Asked later what was meant by "changes in our deployment patterns," Cheney replied, "I didn't make a prediction in terms of 'By X date, such and such will happen.' I made it very clear we're not talking about timetables. You can see a lot of adjustments already being made. It's some 30 bases that we used to occupy that we no longer occupy, that we've turned over to Iraqis. That's a big deal. Go back and look at what we did in Fallujah a year ago. As I recall the numbers, we had something like 11 battalions, and the Iraqis had about five battalions. Our guys were basically in the lead, doing the heavy lifting. More recently, in the operation in Tal Afar a year later, it was almost exactly the reverse of that."

After spending another night in Oman, Cheney flew in the C-17 to Kabul. For the reporters, the Afghan leg of the trip was just shy of nightmarish. At one point, while Cheney and his convoy of black SUVs headed for the chopper that would take him to the residence of President Hamid Karzai, the press corps was nearly left behind. On our way into the parliament building we were has-sled and manhandled by the Afghan security team--skinny, bearded men with intense dark eyes and hair, bad teeth and submachine guns, sprinting around in 1970s polyester suits, agitated and frantic. A pushing match nearly ensued when a young military aide to the vice president, carrying a mysterious black knapsack for the entirety of the trip, refused to submit it for the Afghans' inspection. Women reporters searched by female guards reported being touched inappropriately.

At the parliament building, the vice president and his wife sat through two hours of stupefying nationalist speeches, heard through an earpiece in which the translator's voice, owing to an errant switch, competed with incessant chatter in Pashto. The ceremony's only interesting moment came when Karzai professed Afghanistan's desire to have "good neighborly relations" with Iran and vowed not to interfere in her "internal affairs." Such was the Afghan president's response to the tirades of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, who a few days earlier had labeled the Holocaust a "myth" and defended his country's right to produce weapons-grade uranium. It cannot have pleased Cheney to see Karzai, a moderate Muslim head of state whose ascension to power came on the strength of American military intervention, saying such decorous things about a fanatical disciple of the Islamic revolution who routinely denounced the United States and whose recent utterances included calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

Afterward the Cheneys signed the visitors' book, and the vice president glanced back at the press pool as if to invite questions. "Did you enjoy the ceremony, sir?" I asked, thinking Cheney was now accustomed to playing ball with us. This delusion he appeared pleased to dispel with a sly smile, a single word ("yes") and his abrupt departure in the opposite direction. In the trip's unspoken tug of wills, I had made a tactical error. I felt foolish and resolved never again to ask Cheney a yes-or-no question.

Now, as if by afterthought, the chopper assigned to ferry reporters to Cheney's next stop arrived 15 minutes late and almost descended on top of us, sending us scattering with our arms over our heads and our backs to the chopper, its whup-whup-whuping blades creating a blinding dust storm and whipping pebbles at our calves. We struggled to clear the dust from our hair, mouths, eyes, contact lenses and clothes. Later we heard--from where or whom I never discerned--that 75 percent of Kabul's dust consists of fecal matter from goats.

In Islamabad Cheney met with Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, then choppered 65 miles northeast to Muzaffarabad, near the epicenter of the earthquake that claimed more than 70,000 lives last October. With reporters on the trip averaging two hours of sleep a night, many used the half-hour Chinook ride to pass out. At the foot of a steep mountain, local villagers clad in motley rags and sneakers queued up for screening by members of the 212th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital and cast wary eyes on the exotic aliens arrayed before them, with their laptop computers, neckties and potbellies. Two days earlier the villagers had watched Ted Turner and his new squeeze drop by to see how his million dollars was being spent. In the remote world of Pakistani earthquake assistance, Muzaffarabad was the place to be.

Joined by U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker, a leathery-faced foreign-service lifer who had previously served as a diplomat to Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon, the Cheneys received a briefing in a tent from Rear Admiral Michael LeFever, commander of the Pentagon's disaster-assistance center in Pakistan. Thin and soft-spoken, LeFever raced through a PowerPoint presentation that showed how the U.S. military, on the scene within 48 hours of the quake, has helped administer America's $510 million relief program. "This is the most rugged terrain I've seen in my life," LeFever said.

"How do you get fuel in? By truck?" asked Cheney, the former energy executive. "By truck," LeFever nodded. Of course Cheney knew how you get fuel to Muzaffarabad after an earthquake. He's been dealing with energy supply disruptions for decades! You didn't really think there was an angle the old master--White House chief of staff at 34, Lord of Halliburton at 54--had missed, did you?

Then the Cheneys prowled the interconnected set of heated tents that served as the primary-care clinic, the emergency room, the intensive-care unit, the mental ward and the chapel. They met with recovering patients and some of the 350 U.S. personnel whose efforts have made this by far the best medical facility in northern Pakistan. With near unanimity the patients told Cheney, through an interpreter, that while they hated the United States because of Iraq, they could now see America wasn't so bad after all. To the consternation of her husband's aides--who thought she might be veering toward a moment like Barbara Bush's in Houston (wherein the former first lady suggested that because so many of the Hurricane Katrina evacuees "were underprivileged anyway," the Astrodome was "working very well for them")--Mrs. Cheney told a reporter "about the gratitude of the people we're helping. It's very touching. Some of them don't even--you know, they're living on a mountaintop and you don't even know what America is. And now you know what America is: help and mercy and love."

The entourage paused in the primary-care tent. Resolved to improve on my performance in Kabul, I shouted out an open-ended question. "Mr. Vice President, could you tell us very briefly, sir, what goes through your mind when you come to a place like this, what strikes you?" (Read: Give us some usable sound.) He and LeFever looked at each other and agreed--silently, instantly--that to ignore the question would be unnatural, bad for business. "It's been an amazing experience to see the extent of the devastation," Cheney allowed, adding how impressed he was by the performance of the MASH unit. "So you're satisfied with how much the United States has done?" asked The Washington Times' Bill Sammon. "We're doing a great deal here," Cheney snapped, irritated. "And it's a remarkable success."

By day's end, word spread among the reporters that still another unscripted moment--Cheney's required presence back in Washington to break a tie in a Senate vote--was going to cut the trip short. Saudi Arabia and Egypt, stops on Cheney's previous visit to the Middle East, would have to wait till next time. (Cheney returned to those countries in mid-January.) Aboard Air Force Two, where the narrow-waist, three-across, coach-class seating provided to the media was positively luxurious compared with the neck-breaking accommodations of the C-17, an aide ambled back to our section to announce some welcome news: The vice president would see us in his cabin, sans cameras, for a formal question-and-answer session, his first of the trip.

I was the first to arrive, and I found Cheney seated in a tall chair like Captain Kirk's, studying an enormous loose-leaf binder with the vice president's seal on its cover, red and black Sharpies within reach and a darkened plasma screen on the wall before him. Mrs. Cheney sat across from him, her feet propped on the small desk that separated them, her head buried in reading material. "You must be sick of my face, Mr. Vice President," I said, shaking his hand.

"Not at all, Jim. Come on in." I grabbed one of the three other seats and watched the bulk of my colleagues collapse into uncomfortable yoga positions at Cheney's feet, thrusting their portable tape recorders at his mouth. Cheney was wearing a windbreaker, gray slacks and heavy brown hiking boots.

Another awkward silence followed: We were in the sanctum sanctorum, Dick Cheney's cabin on Air Force Two. Once again I raced to fill the void. "Mr. Vice President," I said with mock hauteur, "I had heard there would be hors d'oeuvres served."

The crowd laughed nervously before Cheney said, "I can offer you a beer. Would you like a beer? Or a soda?" I reckoned the situation, in the service of mutual ease, required acceptance of the vice president's initial offer.

"I shall have a beer," I said grandly, and an aide was promptly dispatched to fetch Amstels and Cokes. Cheney, who was nursing an increasingly troublesome cold--at Bagram he brazenly interrupted his hangar speech to blow his nose--abstained.

Over the next half hour the reporters took their best shots at Cheney on a variety of topics: Iraq, the Middle East, the NSA wiretaps. Asked to identify the best news and worst news conveyed by generals Abizaid and Casey, he replied, "The vice president shows up, you're not necessarily going to get the down and dirty." Besides, the accent here was on cold-eyed, pragmatic management, not the application of adjectives: "You don't think of good news, bad news. Here's something that needs to be fixed. Here's something that's working well, and it doesn't need any further adjustment. Let them roll for a while."

Cheney grew most expansive in response to The New York Times' Dick Stevenson, who asked if the vice president was actively "reasserting" executive powers curtailed after Vietnam and Watergate. "Yes, I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of presidential power and authority," Cheney began. He denounced the 1973 War Powers Act and the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and urged his listeners to consult the minority report produced by the House Iran-Contra committee and drafted, he said, by his own aide. "Part of the argument in Iran-Contra was whether or not the president had the authority to do what was done in the Reagan years," Cheney said. "And those of us in the minority wrote minority views laying out a robust view of the president's prerogatives. I do believe that, especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats we face--it was true during the Cold War, as well as what I think is true now--the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy. That's my personal view."

Asked if the NSA controversy would reignite old debates about the limits of executive power, Cheney, one of the last veterans of the Watergate era still in government, said he was sure there would be a debate, an "important" one. But all the individuals under surveillance "are Al Qaeda or have an association with Al Qaeda," he emphasized. "It's not just random conversations. If you're calling Aunt Sadie in Paris, we're probably not interested. The criteria are very clear, very precise, very specific, very narrow. People running around, worrying about calling Mom in Chicago and somebody is listening in, no."

When Dana Bash, the CNN reporter, wondered whether the NSA wiretaps might cause a "backlash" against the administration, Cheney disagreed. "I think when the American people look at this, they will understand and appreciate what we're doing and why we're doing it," Cheney said. Then he delivered the rather succinct message his trip to the Middle East, chaotic and truncated though it was, was meant to underscore. "It's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years."