WASHINGTON
IT was in early 2004, the beginning of President Bush's re-election campaign, that Lawrence B. Wilkerson first printed out a letter saying he wanted to quit as chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
"In essence it said, 'Dear Mr. President, I find myself at variance with a majority of your foreign policies and even your domestic policies and therefore I respectfully submit my resignation,' " Mr. Wilkerson recalled recently. But the letter remained in a desk drawer for the rest of Mr. Bush's first term.
Nearly two years later, Mr. Wilkerson, a 60-year-old retired United States Army colonel, has finally completed his journey from insider to apostate. Alone among those who surrounded Mr. Powell in the first term, he is speaking out critically, assailing the president as amateurish, especially compared to the first President Bush, and describing the administration as secretive, inept and courting disaster at home and abroad. Nor has he spared his former boss, whom he says was overly preoccupied with "damage control" for policies set by others.
"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made," Mr. Wilkerson said in a well-publicized speech at the New America Foundation in October. "And you've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either," he added in the speech.
Mr. Wilkerson has also attacked the Bush administration for allegedly condoning torture and setting lax policies on treatment of detainees that led, he charges, to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the black eye they gave to the United States Army.
SINCE starting to speak out a few months ago, Mr. Wilkerson has become something of a Washington celebrity. He has given interviews and speeches, appeared on television, written op-ed articles and taken telephone calls from journalists and senators.
He has juggled book offers but says he has no plans to write anything that would seem to exploit his newfound fame. Soon he will begin teaching jobs at George Washington University and the College of William and Mary, where he may write a book on presidential decision-making since World War II.
Though Mr. Powell has kept his silence about his former aide, he has let it be known through friends that he objects to the charges, especially the suggestion that he was overly loyal to President Bush. "It's very painful for me," Mr. Wilkerson says. "I've lost a friend of 16 years. I won't say I've lost him, but the estrangement is palpable." One e-mail message he says he got from Mr. Powell complained tersely, "Don't characterize my loyalty."
On the other hand, Mr. Wilkerson says that Mr. Powell won crucial policy battles in making sure that the issue of Iraq was taken to the United Nations and in battling Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney for the cause of improving relations with Europe, encouraging negotiations with North Korea and Iraq, and avoiding confrontations with Russia and China.
He says his decision to speak in the open about the policy wars of the first Bush term was slow in coming, but a major factor was the revelations about Abu Ghraib, which he said he realized, after studying the matter, had resulted from decisions on prisoner treatment and intelligence set shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.
Army discipline is something Mr. Wilkerson says he has understood since Vietnam, where he flew helicopters starting in 1969. "I've been there," he said. "I've stood on the hot parade ground as a pilot. I've cursed generals." He added, "I understood the bestiality that comes over men when they're asked to use force for the state."
He recalled that a battalion commander once declared an area a free-fire zone, "which means that anything that moves, you shoot it." One of his gunners killed a 13-year-old girl, Mr. Wilkerson says, adding, "I will always live with that for the rest of my life."
After the Wilkerson attacks, administration spokesmen avoided any official response. But many administration officials have acknowledged their displeasure. A half-dozen former colleagues of Mr. Wilkerson's at the State Department, none of whom wanted to be quoted by name out of deference to Mr. Powell's silence, said they were not especially surprised that he had begun to speak out, but that they found his criticisms unseemly. A former colleague said it seemed Mr. Wilkerson was motivated by his concern about what had happened to the Army as a result of allegations of prisoner mistreatment and poor decisions on the Iraq war. "Larry loves the Army, and he loves the people in the Army," said a former State Department official. "As somebody who thinks of himself as a leader of people, my sense is that he couldn't be silent anymore."
BORN in South Carolina, the son of a bombardier in the Army Air Corps in World War II, Mr. Wilkerson bounced around the country growing up while his father worked after the war as an insurance executive. Months before he was to graduate from Bucknell in 1966, he decided to enlist. But without a college degree, he found that only the Army would let him fly. After Vietnam, Mr. Wilkerson received advanced degrees in international relations and national security, and served on the faculty of the United States Naval War College at Newport, R.I., and as director of the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Va. In 1989 he was hired as a speechwriter and top aide by Mr. Powell, who had left the post of national security adviser under President Reagan and later became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"Larry has two qualities that Powell appreciated," recalls another top aide to the former secretary. "First, he could always find the big picture in whatever was going on. Second, he always tore things apart. He never takes things at face value, and what he's doing now is a kind of exaggeration of what he used to do internally." Mr. Powell turned to Mr. Wilkerson to go with him to the C.I.A. to sort through the mounds of material prepared to buttress the case against Saddam Hussein on the eve of the Iraq war, for the lengthy presentation the secretary gave on Feb. 5, 2003, at the United Nations Security Council.
"He found that the draft didn't have the sourcing and backing that we wanted and he tore the whole thing apart and put it back together," the former State Department official recalled. "He was Powell's internal iconoclast." Mr. Wilkerson recalls the preparation of the Feb. 5 presentation, which Mr. Powell has acknowledged will be remembered as a blot on his career because of its mistakes on intelligence, as an exercise in frustration.
It was an embittering experience for everyone at the State Department, Mr. Wilkerson says, to be saddled with presenting what turned out to be false information at the United Nations, and also to have been sidelined in the running of postwar Iraq by the Pentagon. "When I rationalize for myself not resigning, I did it by saying, 'This is the only sane member of this administration,' " Mr. Wilkerson said of Mr. Powell.
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