The sources of a source

WASHINGTON --I. Lewis ''Scooter" Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, has played many roles. He has been a Massachusetts preppie, a novelist, a ski bum, a lawyer for a billionaire fugitive, a leader of the neoconservative movement, and an architect of the US invasion of Iraq.

Now Libby is in perhaps his most difficult role: He's a key figure in the inquiry into whether someone at the White House leaked the identity of a CIA agent.

This week, a grand jury examining the case is scheduled to wrap up its work, meaning that Libby may find out if he will be indicted.

Whatever the outcome, the investigation has focused new attention on the role of the vice president and his top aides in the run-up to the war in Iraq. That has led to broader questions about Libby's involvement with the so-called White House Iraq Group, which came up with strategies to justify the war. The inquiry has raised questions about whether the strategy included leaking classified information.

It is just the kind of attention Libby has strived to avoid in his tours of high-level public service. In contrast to Karl Rove, the Bush deputy chief of staff and political adviser, who also is under investigation in the leak case, Libby has tried to stay anonymous.

His ambition has been to be ''so opaque you can't tell he is there," said Jackson Hogen, who is a longtime Libby friend.

Mary Matalin, who worked with Libby at the White House, said Libby has been unfairly caricatured as an ideologue trying to shape policy. She said he ''is more than a chief of staff to the vice president. Scooter does to the vice president what the vice president does to the president. Cheney trusts him explicitly, completely."

Like many neoconservatives, Libby, 55, started his political life as an antiwar Democrat, and he gradually came to believe in a need for a more forceful US presence in the world.

He was born in Connecticut, and he attended boarding schools in Massachusetts from an early age, first at Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, and then at Phillips Academy in Andover, the school that former President George H. W. Bush and the current President Bush attended. Then, like both Bushes, Libby went to Yale.

Libby had one of his first contacts with the Bush family as the Vietnam War was at its height. George H. W. Bush, then a US representative from Texas, came to campus to deliver a speech in favor of the US military action. But Libby, according to Hogen, was not buying Bush's rationale.

Libby, vice president of the student Democrats, was a supporter of Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar candidate, and, briefly, of Robert Kennedy, according to Hogen, who went to both Andover and Yale with Libby.

At Yale, Libby met the man who would influence much of his life. He was a professor named Paul D. Wolfowitz, who would eventually lure him to work in government. At the time, Wolfowitz was working on a doctoral thesis on the dangers posed by countries that have the capability to produce nuclear weapons.

''I knew that he was somewhat under the trance of Wolfowitz," Hogen said.

After graduating from Columbia Law School, and spending time on a novel and on the ski slopes of Colorado, Libby got a call in 1981 from Wolfowitz, who was in line to become assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Wolfowitz recruited Libby to be his top aide, and Libby remained at the State Department for the first four years of the Reagan presidency.

Libby then went into private law practice, working for Leonard Garment, who previously had been special counsel to President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Garment asked Libby to represent the billionaire fugitive Marc Rich. (Rich was eventually pardoned by then-President Bill Clinton, just before Clinton left office.)

With the election of George H. W. Bush in 1988, Libby returned to government, again working with Wolfowitz. Libby served as a deputy undersecretary for policy in a Defense Department headed by Cheney.

When the senior Bush decided to let Saddam Hussein remain in power after the Gulf War, partly to appease US allies, Libby and Wolfowitz reportedly disagreed.

They coauthored a policy paper asserting that the United States should act alone, if necessary, to deter nations from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

When Bush lost his reelection bid, Libby and Wolfowitz joined with other neoconservatives to form a group called Project for the New American Century, which advocated an aggressive US policy to spread democracy. It was widely seen as a launching pad for an invasion of Iraq.

William Kristol, who oversaw the project, said Libby had impressed him more as being cautious and in league with Wolfowitz than as a fiery ideologue in his own right.

''He was in sympathy with the argument, but not having fierce debates," Kristol said.

In 2000, Libby helped to prepare Cheney for his vice presidential debate. When the Bush-Cheney team was elected, Cheney installed Libby as his chief of staff. Wolfowitz became deputy defense secretary.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Libby was often involved in promoting the idea of invading Iraq, working with Wolfowitz, according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former counterterrorism chief at the CIA.

Libby and Cheney were skeptics of the CIA, in part because of its failure to detect the extent of Iraqi weapons programs before the 1991 Gulf War.

In the runup to the 2003 Iraq war, Libby and Cheney visited the CIA and, Cannistraro said, pressed for intelligence that would justify the decision to go to war.

''His actions by going out to the CIA, attempting to pressure analysts on the subject of weapons of mass destruction, all fall from his conviction that Saddam was an evil person who needed to be replaced by the US," Cannistraro said of Libby.

The White House has denied having twisted the intelligence. Libby has declined to be interviewed.

When questions were raised about that intelligence, Cannistraro said, Libby became part of the White House Iraq Group, which found strategies to explain the need for war.

One of Libby's roles was to speak to selected reporters on condition of anonymity, rarely showing up by name in press reports. But Libby could not resist a chance to go public in promoting the paperback edition of a novel that he had worked on for more than two decades, ''The Apprentice," a melodrama set in Japan in 1903, in which the central character ''cannot see that he is getting involved in political skulduggery," according to a plot summary on Amazon.com.

Libby appeared on CNN's ''Larry King Show" on Feb. 16, 2002, and made a comment about a need for reporters to keep confidential sources: ''Reporters claim a privilege to protect their sources," Libby said, ''not just what they said, but who said it.

''Why? Because we, in everyday common sense, believe that there are some people who won't come forward and tell you exactly what they think if either their identity or the content would be known," Libby said on the program.

More than a year later, on June 23, 2003, Libby met with a reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller.

Libby wanted to discuss a report by the CIA that raised doubts about Bush's assertion that Iraq had sought material for a nuclear weapon from Niger. The report was based in part by an assessment from Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador who had been sent by the CIA to Niger to check the assertion.

Two weeks later, Wilson wrote on the op-ed page of the Times that ''some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraq threat." Two days later, Libby and Miller met once again. Miller's notebook contains a reference to ''Victoria Flame," a misspelling of the last name of Wilson's wife, Victoria Plame. Miller has said the name is from a portion of the notebook separate from her notes of her conversation with Libby, leaving it unclear who gave her the name.

A week later, columnist Robert Novak reported that two unnamed administration officials said Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. That led Wilson to charge that administration officials had illegally told reporters the occupation of his wife.

Miller went to jail for 85 days to protect her source, until Libby assured her he wanted her to testify.

''Why? Because as I am sure will not be news to you, the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me, or knew about her before our call," Libby wrote to Miller.

Then, urging Miller to testify, Libby wrote in a style reminiscent of his novel. Some have questioned whether he was sending signals.

''You went to jail in the summer," Libby wrote. ''It is fall now. You will have stories to cover -- Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program.

''Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work -- and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers.

''With admiration, Scooter Libby."