Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former secretary of state Colin Powell claimed yesterday.

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired colonel who was chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: "What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret but far more telling to me is, America is paying the consequences."