An Air Force lawyer has told Italy to lay off Col. Joseph L. Romano III, an officer caught up in a CIA counterterrorism kidnapping case.

Romano is one of 26 Americans being tried in absentia by Italy on kidnapping charges in connection with the abduction of an Al Qaeda suspect known as Abu Omar, in Feb. 2003.

According to charging papers and Italy's indictment, Romano helped a CIA "rendition" team spirit Omar out of Italy through the Aviano air base, after he had been snatched off a Milan street. All the rest of the defendants are alleged to be CIA operatives.

"The decision (to file the motion) was approved by the Secretary of Defense," a Pentagon spokesman said.

A former top CIA counterterrorism official today questioned the central tenet of the war in Afghanistan, saying a U.S. defeat and Al Qaeda's return to a safe haven there would not pose a grave threat to the United States.

Paul R. Pillar, a South Asia expert who was deputy chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center in the late 1990s, argued in a Washington Post Op-ed piece that Al Qaeda's haven in Afghanistan was not critical to the success of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and would be even less so today.

"How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven?"  Pillar asked.

With his slice of the $75 billion annual intelligence budget, top U.S. spymaster Adm. Dennis Blair today issued a thick report saying that a "deeper and broader understanding of threats and opportunities" is "necessary to ensure [success]."

We wish him luck.  After all, if understanding what's going on in the world can't be bought for $75 billion a year, what good is U.S. intelligence?

The fact is, there are plenty of bright people laboring away in the analytical bowels of the CIA, Pentagon, etc.  But what gets to the President too often is hyped and biased, according to another new report on U.S. intelligence, this one from the Brookings Institute.

The father of the Pakistani bomb says that helping the CIA fight the Russians in Afghanistan gave his country "the space" it needed to develop nuclear weapons.

"We were allying with the United States in the Afghan war. The aid was coming," nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan said in an Aug. 31 Pakistan television interview, an English translation of which surfaced Tuesday.

"I maintain that the war had provided us with space to enhance our nuclear capability," Khan  added.

"The credit goes to me and my team, because it was a very difficult task, which was next to impossible. But given the US and European pressure on our program, it is true that had the Afghan war not taken place at that time, we would not have been able to make the bomb as early as we did," Khan said.

Sabrina DeSousa, an alleged CIA agent charged with kidnapping in Italy, says that a Justice Department decision to pay her legal costs is much too little, much too late.

"Unbelievable!  The United States Department of Justice just 'approved' an attorney to defend me, a month after the trial ended, knowing full well that an attorney at this stage will make little or no difference to the outcome or verdict," DeSousa said via e-mail Friday.

The opening salvos on the partially declassified CIA Inspector General's report on detainee abuses included hair-raising anecdotes about threatening captives with power drills, guns to the head and the mock deaths of other prisoners.

Now the story is the dogs under the porch: what's beneath all those blacked-out paragraphs in the still heavily redacted, 2004 report by the spy agency's IG.

The National Security Archive, a nonprofit research center at George Washington University, today released a massive file of more than 83,000 pages of primary source documents "related to the detention and interrogation of individuals by the United States, in connection with the conduct of hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the broader context of the 'global war on terror.'"

It's hard to find any clear winners in the new interrogations set-up confirmed by the White House on Monday, but it's easy to spot the losers: Leon Panetta and Dennis Blair.

Already wrestling with a renewed controversy over contract killers, the CIA reacted angrily Thursday to a news organization's revelation of yet another secret interrogation center.

ABC News reported that the CIA had a secret site in Lithuania where interrogators grilled terrorist suspects,  "one of eight facilities the CIA set-up after 9/11 to detain and interrogate top al Qaeda operatives captured around the world."

CIA Director Leon Panetta told Congress about a counterterrorism assassination program run by the agency before knowing all the facts, a renowned writer on intelligence says.

Only three weeks after a federal judge ruled that CIA lawyers committed fraud in a lawsuit, another top agency lawyer is being accused of unethical conduct in another case.

Attorneys for a onetime CIA recruit who is embroiled in a contract dispute with the spy agency have asked a federal court to punish CIA Assistant General Counsel Daniel L. Pines for what they call "a pattern of troubling negligence if not outright deceit."

Recent jihadist attacks on Pakistan's nuclear facilities did not threaten the security of the weapons inside, an American intelligence official says.

When Steven Aftergood read Adm. Dennis C. Blair's written responses to a Senate Intelligence Committee questionnaire the other day, something looked familiar.

And indeed, it was.

The Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), had given the committee a statement about Russian attacks on American spy satellites that "was simply lifted, almost word for word," from a Moscow newspaper, Aftergood reported Thursday in Secrecy News, the must-read newsletter he's edited for many years.

Leon Panetta, the former congressman and White House staffer who runs the CIA, says people should forget about the past and move on.

I totally sympathize with him. The mistakes I've made - man, I'd like people to just forget about them!

The feds have been hyping their domestic terrorism cases for several years now, and the arrest of seven North Carolina men this week appears to be no exception.

The headliners in the case, of course, are ordinary folks Daniel Patrick Boyd and his two sons, who prosecutors say led three lives: good family men, likeable neighbors and secret terrorists.

The second installment of NBC's faux-reality, terrorist-tracking TV program, "The Wanted," focused Monday on a Syrian German whom U.S. authorities have long labeled a key al Qaeda operative.

But some intelligence insiders who have studied Mamoun Darkazanli's mysterious ability to stay out of jail wonder if he's really a double agent working for the West, perhaps the CIA.

The White House beat a strategic retreat last week on its ideas for a new multiagency interrogation unit, giving its task force another two months to come up with a plan everybody can live with.

But if initial reactions are any guide, the White House faces an uphill fight in creating an organization that can satisfy military, intelligence and law enforcement needs at once.

Several days ago I wrote a column that included a colorful anecdote about a drunken George Tenet railing against Bush administration officials, howling that they weren't going to get away with pinning lousy pre-war intelligence on Iraq on him and the CIA.

That prompted a note a few days later from Bill Harlow, still a spokesman for the former CIA Director, five years after both left the spy agency.

Harlow said virtually everyone involved in the incident denied it happened.

He may yet turn out to be the avatar of Iranian democracy, but three decades ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi was waging a terrorist war on the United States that included bloody attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.
 
Mousavi, prime minister for most of the 1980s, personally selected his point man for the Beirut terror campaign, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, and dispatched him to Damascus as Iran's ambassador, according to former CIA and military officials.

American and Israeli intelligence organizations, in cooperation with local security services, have scored notable recent successes against Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based terror organization, according to a new report.

The arrest of a northwest Washington couple on charges of spying for Cuba has put a spotlight on the career of Kendall Myers, a senior State Department intelligence analyst.
 
But if the charges are true, it's Myer's wife, Gwendolyn, a computer specialist at now-defunct Riggs National Bank, who could well have been in far better position to supply Cuba with sensitive information than her husband.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has taken to many stumps lately to proclaim that the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" saved the United States from another terrorist attack.

That leaves the question of what prevented another terrorist attack after the torture, as some call it, of terrorist suspects stopped.

A former deep-cover CIA operative says the spy agency's congressional briefers routinely shade the truth or hide facts altogether from congressional overseers.

"They mumble, they dissemble, and there's a lot of  'on the one hand . . .'" said the retired official, who spent 25 years as a CIA operations officer but now writes blistering, unauthorized critiques of the spy agency using the pen name "Ishmael Jones."

Sabrina DeSousa is as cool as you'd expect a CIA operative to be in a hot spot.

DeSousa's predicament is that she's wanted on kidnapping charges in Italy, along with two dozen other Americans connected to the CIA's "rendition" of an al Qaeda suspect from a Milan street to an Egyptian torture chamber in 2003.

Three years later, Italian authorities monitoring the missing man's home phone broke open the case, eventually filing kidnapping charges against DeSousa and the others, all but one CIA undercover operatives.

In spy-speak, it's called maintaining your cover.

A retired Pakistani general confided a deep worry to a friend in Washington last week: that some young officers in Pakistan's regular army have become increasingly sympathetic over the past few years to the Taliban and their brand of radical Islam.

While he had no numbers or percentages of officers sympathetic to the Taliban, the possibility of any defections raises questions about the reliability of these officers during any sort of push against the Taliban by the Pakistani army.

You'd think that the nation's number one domestic counterterrorism agency would have better things to do than yap at authors and publishers about using the bureau's official seal on their books.

But I.C. Smith, a retired senior FBI counterintelligence agent who wrote a very critical book about the bureau in 2004, just found out otherwise.

A few weeks ago an FBI lawyer instructed Smith that he had to remove the FBI seal from his Web site, including one on the jacket of his 2004 book, "INSIDE: A Top G Man Exposes Spies, Lies and Bureaucratic Bungling Inside the FBI."    

The G-lawyer also told Smith that the publisher of his book, Thomas Nelson, Inc., would also be instructed "that if the book is reprinted, the cover be redesigned to remove the FBI Seal."

A top private risk analysis firm gave embattled Pakistan a three-in-ten chance of a military coup even before the latest offensive by Taliban rebels.

New York-based Eurasiagroup, whose head of research is top former State Department, White House National Security Council and CIA official David F. Gordon, said in a little noticed, late April report that it was more than possible the Pakistani Army would step in to stabilize the rebel-threatened country.

The premise of  Eurasiagroup's "scenario" is that "the global economic crisis proves too much to handle for the political leadership in Pakistan."

The report was evidently written before Islamic Taliban rebels overran the Swat Valley this month, forcing the army into barricaded camps and threatening the viability of the Islamabad government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Presumably, the risk of a military coup is far greater now.

James Bond didn't fly home commercial, and neither does Leon Panetta.

On April 9, the CIA invited charter airline companies to bid on a contract to ferry its director home to Monterey, Calif., about a half dozen times a year.
 
The value of the contract, according to an airlines consultant familiar with CIA contracting, is about $325,000 a year.

Embattled California Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., shrugged off woes over a wiretapping controversy Wednesday and claimed "Best Team Name Honors" for this year's Capital Challenge mini-marathon race.

"Tapped Out," an obvious reference to revelations that Harman was overheard by government wiretappers in conversations with a suspected Israeli intelligence agent in 2005, evidently won the judges' hearts as best team moniker.  

Sponsored by the American Council of Life Insurers, the three-mile jog draws a large congressional turnout.  It begins and ends in southeast Washington's Anacostia Park

The eight term-Democrat took the occasion to throw a road-race challenge to SpyTalk, which has taken the lead in exposing the wiretapped conversations and allegations that Bush administration officials effectively blocked FBI agents from questioning her about promises she was said to have made to the target of a FBI foreign counterintelligence operation.

Sure, President Obama got a warm welcome at the CIA. Everybody saw that.

But according to the New York Daily News' James Gordon Meek, the spooks melted like teen girls at a rock concert. 

The case of former CIA contractor William Bennett, slain while out on a walk with his wife in rural Loudoun County, Va., gets interestinger and interestinger.  

Bennett, it turns out, was involved in the disastrously mistaken, May 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by NATO warplanes.

That, and other curious facets of the case, has prompted the attention of influential national security bloggers Laura Rozen, who writes The Cable for Foreign Policy.com, and Pat Lang, the former top Middle East analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

There are 14 names in the confidential Red Cross report that surfaced last week on the CIA's "ill treatment" of detainees.

But you will not find in it the name of Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi who was picked up by U.S. Navy SEALS in Baghdad and interrogated by the CIA.

That's because Jamadi died in the care of Mark Swanner, a 44-year-old CIA interrogator who battered the prisoner at the ghastly Abu Ghraib in 2003. 

The political momentum toward détente with Cuba may be moving so fast that the idea of a spy swap as the first step in a thaw may already be passé.

A former CIA Soviet expert says that one of the agency's top Russian spies in the Cold War was a double agent under the control of Moscow.

Benjamin  Fischer, who sued the agency for ruining his career because of his beliefs, argues that Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet electronics technician at a classified military research facility, was working for Moscow when he offered himself to the CIA as a spy in the 1980s and stayed under their control for the six years he worked for U.S. intelligence.

The CIA considered Tolkachev its greatest prize in the 1980s, "a worthy successor"  to Oleg Penkovsky, the infamous Soviet colonel two decades earlier who provided the U.S. with Russian secrets during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, in the words of an internal CIA paper.

A light-hearted piece in Sunday's New York Times, "Tips for the Sophisticated Fugitive," reminded me that Jacob "Kobi" Alexander, an Israeli businessman at the center of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, is still on the lam.

Many people would be shocked to learn that the two biggest contractors in the ultra-sophisticated NSA eavesdropping program are owned and run by Israelis, many of whom came from their country's own electronic spying services.

Interesting tidbits continue to shake out from the strange case of Andrew Warren, the erstwhile CIA station chief in Algeria accused of date rape.

A story over the weekend pinpointing the location of Osama Bin Laden in Chitral, a remote, snow blanketed valley high up in Pakistan's side of the Hindu Kush, has triggered another round of speculation on the whereabouts of the fugitive terrorist chief.

Andrew Warren,  the former CIA officer accused of date rape in Algiers late last year, caused such a ruckus over parking dispute at a Washington, D.C. hotel three years earlier that the matter was referred to the FBI.

The Italian prosecutor who has been trying two dozen CIA agents on kidnapping charges says he will continue the case, despite a high court decision Wednesday that excludes the use of wiretapped conversations among top Italian intelligence officials.

Armando Spataro, reached by telephone on a train between Rome and Milan, said,  "the trial will go on" despite the Constitutional Court's decision excluding transcripts in which intelligence officials discussed a CIA plan for the  "extraordinary rendition" of an al Qaeda suspect from a Milan street to an Egyptian prison in 2003.

Lost in the weekend hubbub over President Obama's judgment that the U.S. and NATO forces were losing the war in Afghanistan was his interesting remark on renditions.

In a New York Times interview aboard Air Force One, the president reaffirmed that the administration is reviewing the policy of renditions - the practice of capturing a terrorist suspect and "rendering" him (or her) to the United States or elsewhere for detention -- but he pondered out loud one particularly difficult situation:

Don't expect the CIA to turn over the family jewels on its interrogation videotapes to the American Civil Liberties Union, just because it lost a legal round this week.

It's not everyday that a new CIA chief of staff arrives at work having already been portrayed in a movie.

That comes later, if things go badly enough.

But Jeremy Bash is making his entrance as CIA boss Leon E. Panetta's new chief of staff with just that credit in his portfolio.

Kyle "Dusty" Foggo's CIA dossier included allegations that he was sharing a woman with a suspected Russian mole, according to a top former spy agency official and other sources.

CIA Director Porter J. Goss knew about the allegation when he hired Foggo to be the agency's executive director, its third highest official, an aide said Thursday.

Special Forces troops tend to think they carry the fate of the world in their rucksacks.

In Pakistan, they may be right.

Years from now we may look back at the "secret" deployment of some 70 U.S. military advisers to Pakistan as a turning point in the global war on terrorism, the moment when a daring idea and brilliant execution snatched victory from a looming disaster.

Or the opposite: a Pakistani version of Ia Drang, the 1965 battle when North Vietnamese regulars showed they could go toe-to-toe with American troops, signaling a long, devastating and -- in that case -- losing war.

Make no mistake about it: Pakistan hangs in the balance.

It's intermittently amazing to me that we managed to conquer Japan and Germany in four-plus years (with no small help from the Russians, of course), yet after almost twice that time we haven't been able to crush a raggedy band of 8th-century minded terrorists in an area no bigger than Montana.

We didn't even have a plan, as it turned out, as late as last spring, almost seven years after al Qaeda launched big hits on us from its mountain redoubts on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. Today it's said to be ensconced in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, loosely controlled by Islamabad in a regional autonomy arrangement.

John L. Helgerson, the CIA's controversial inspector general, may be finally leaving the spy agency after three decades, but he will not be fading back into the shadows.

American civilian advisers to Afghanistan's National Police, considered the linchpin in any successful effort against the Taliban, say restrictions on their movements are making their efforts basically worthless.

The advisers are not permitted to stay overnight in Afghan police installations or even go out on raids with their charges, two former CIA operatives who worked with the police in the past year say.

The grumbling about Afghan President Hamid Karzai has grown so loud you'd think the Obama administration has given up on him.

Indeed, you could almost hear the knees knocking in Karzai's embassy here when incoming Obama officials met privately during inauguration week with at least two Afghan politicians who would like to replace the president.

With the war going badly, criticism has grown of Karzai's seeming tolerance of endemic corruption in his government, which threatens to turn Afghanistan into a narco-state, if not grease the return of the Taliban to power.

Could his days be numbered?

The CIA officer arrested for credit card fraud worked in the spy agency's most sensitive seventh floor executive suite and had previously been a CIA station chief in an American embassy, reliable sources tell me.

The new details paint a portrait of Steven J. Levan as a far more important official at the agency than previously reported.

The former head of the CIA unit charged with liquidating Osama Bin Laden said that national security officials in the Clinton administration "had no qualms" about transferring al Qaeda suspects to countries with reputations for torture.

Michael F. Scheuer, who worked on finding Bin Laden from 1996 to his retirement in 2004, made the allegation during an April 17, 2007 House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing on the treatment of terrorism suspects picked up by the CIA.

"I know there was much more consideration under the Bush administration about how to handle these people than there was under the Clinton administration, sir," Scheuer maintained in response to a question from Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., the panel's chairman.

"There were no qualms at all about sending people to Cairo," he said, adding that there was a "kind of joking up our sleeves about what would happen to those people in Cairo in Egyptian prisons, sir."

Norman Ornstein is official Washington's version of Al Michaels and John Madden combined, not just tracking the power plays but assessing them as well.

So it's worth taking notice when Ornstein, the go-to guy for quotes on government and politics at the American Enterprise Institute, suggests that President Obama's next pick to run Health and Human Services will have to be a Tom Daschle without catsup on his tie, somebody so familiar with Capital Hill he (or she) could shepherd a health care reform beast through Congress.

Somebody like Leon Panetta, Ornstein said on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR this morning.

CIA ground teams operating on the vaguely determined Afghan-Pakistan frontier are well aware of  the presidential executive order banning assassinations, says a recent returnee from the region's fighting.

The problem is that al Qaeda suspects and their Taliban supporters don't wear what's normally considered a uniform, which puts American hit teams in potential legal jeopardy for violating Executive Order 12333, which bans the CIA from carrying out assassinations.

The order was signed by President Reagan in 1981 following congressional investigations into alleged CIA assassination plots targeting foreign leaders.

So the teams in Afghanistan have a simple rule of thumb:  If the target "looks military," i.e., carrying a weapon or walking in the company of other armed men, he's a legitimate target.

If there's an absence of same, the target is considered a civilian, and the decision gets bucked up the chain of command for further deliberation.

Of course, this may be a distinction without a difference. The CIA-administered Predator drones have been targeting al Qaeda "civilians" for some time now.

On Sept. 17, 2001, President Bush said Osama bin Laden was "wanted dead or alive," prompting a flurry of questions about U.S. assassination policy.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that E.O.12333 remained in effect, The Washington Post reported at the time, noting that Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter had issued their own executive orders on the subject, numbers 11905 and 12306, respectively.

While the directives forbid assassination, they do not define the term, Post reporter Barton Gellman noted.

Fleischer declined four times to interpret the text, he reported.

"I'm going to just repeat my words and others will figure out the exact implications of them, but it does not inhibit the nation's ability to act in self-defense," Fleischer said.

UPDATE: The CIA ground team veteran had emphasized that the agency and its operatives took care to operate within the law, a point that could have been made more clear in the first version of this story.

A CIA spokesman, for example, thought it had portrayed the agency badly. 

"This report is truly bizarre, an apparent part of the cottage industry dedicated to portraying the agency as careless and slapdash," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said late Thursday.

Word hasn't leaked yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if President-elect Barack Obama has already figured out that when he wants quick answers to what's going on in the world, the last person to ask is the head of U.S. intelligence.

The steady deterioration of personnel and standards of intelligence analysis, especially at the CIA, has been going on for decades, a number of former top intelligence officials I know say.

The tip of the rot surfaces from time to time, such as with the 9/11 surprise and the gimcrackery reports on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The dogs howl and the caravan moves on. Nothing changes, many well placed former intelligence officials have been telling me.  But the current, possibly fatal dangers we face demand the problems be fixed.

We've been spending too much time chattering about the operations side of intelligence lately, they say, in particular whether Leon Panetta, the former OMB head and chief of staff to President Clinton, is up to handling the spies and back-alley guys and gals.

But officials have been reminding me that it was the dismally poor analysis of intelligence that enabled President Bush to lead the nation into the disastrous invasion of Iraq -- not faulty espionage (such as it was).   

And it's the analysis served up by the CIA and other spy agencies, they point out, that will guide President Obama's decisions on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea, among other front-burner emergencies.

And that, say many rueful former officials, is where the agencies need a severe spanking.

Can Obama do it where so many of his predecessors have failed? One can only hope that the erstwhile professor, forged by the Socratic methods of his Harvard Law School instructors, will lay the lumber on his intelligence chiefs and briefers, asking them harder questions than they're used to.

Such as, "How do you know that?" 

Now, this is a staple of a good newsroom. It's a question editors ask reporters, and good reporters ask sources, all the time. I like to think that an old-fashioned city editor would have laughed the pre-war intelligence on Iraq out of their newsrooms.

But the melancholy truth, according to my well placed sources, is that even after the  intelligence disasters of 9/11 and Iraq, President Obama has a better chance of getting up-to-the-minute information on, say, Hamas, from newspapers than he does the PDB - the President's Daily Brief - served up by the Directorate of National Intelligence and CIA.

"So," I asked a former intelligence agency head over seafood this week, "if I'm President Obama, and I call Leon Panetta into the Oval office and ask him to tell me how Hamas leaders are holding up under the Israeli assault, will he be able to tell me?"

The former official shook his head, nearly blushing.   

No.  "That's not the kind of information" they focus on.

"Well, what do they focus on?" I asked.

If the viability of Hamas isn't important right now, what is?
 
He said the CIA, State Department and Pentagon intelligence agencies do have people specializing on the Palestinians, and even Hamas. But it's not likely they would have up-to-the-minute information on whether, say, in response to Israeli military pressure, its leaders are fighting among each other, unifying, or even where they are.

They just don't have that kind of stuff, he said.

Wow.

What about the NSA? I asked. Could the CIA's Hamas guy call his NSA counterpart and get cell phone intercepts from Gaza to help fill in some holes?

"They won't give it to him, because they don't want their information to help CIA look good."

Right.

And the National Intelligence Directorate, which was set up to put an end to that kind of horse play?

A work in progress, he smiled.  

Ok then: What can CIA briefers tell Obama about Hamas next Wednesday morning?

"They would tell them what they know," said, like squids squirting ink, until they could get back to headquarters and ask around.

But even then, said this former official, Panetta or Adm. Dennis Blair, the incoming head of National Intelligence, would probably not have anyone on staff to answer such specific questions.

Unbelievable, even to me.

He agreed: Unbelievable.

He nodded. "You tell people this and they don't believe it."

This from a man who has devoted his entire adult life to U.S. intelligence.

But doesn't the CIA have guys like Robert Redford in "Three Days of the Condor"? I asked, half joking, guys who read books, who specialize in more or less arcane things?

Doesn't it have people immersing themselves in subjects like Hamas, as intelligence intellectuals? A CIA version of New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman, to name just one of the better known?

Not so much any more, he said. There was a time when the CIA and other agencies hired and encouraged analysts to drill down deeply in, say, Chinese wheat harvests. 

But no longer, he insisted.  And there's little intellectual curiosity in the analyst ranks today, he maintained. A roguish kind of independence among the best journalists is neither sought, nor encouraged, in U.S. intelligence these days, he said.   

Everyone in the spy agencies is feverish about "current intelligence," writing reports that might get the attention of their bosses, maybe even the President of the United States, he said.

But isn't the current leadership structure of Hamas - I kept coming back to that - "current intelligence"?

No, not necessarily, he said. "Current intelligence" is the big-picture stuff that CIA chiefs like to show off to the president -- "what we know about Iran,"  usually larded with sexy secrets -- not necessarily what the president needs to know. 

It's quite likely that the analysts' bosses might not have asked them to track the state of Hamas, he said.  And when their bosses haven't tasked them with such a challenge, the analysts then to be "passive," fixating on a hot piece of secret information that came in over the transom, no matter how incidental to the more critical question: what's Hamas up to?

After much resistance, CIA and DNI finally did set up an Open Source Center with analysts, some of whom don't even have security clearances, working from unclassified material. And they've proved to be very good, some experts say, giving the spy agency a fresh view on developments ranging from Iran to North Korea. The final verdict is far from in, but one well informed former official said that on at least one subject he was familiar with, the regular CIA analysts "couldn't hold a candle" to the Open Source Center's product.

But of course, that begs the question of exactly what the 16 agencies of the so-called U.S. intelligence community -- who still hoard information like children at day care, according to most accounts -- are actually doing with $65 billion a year.

And what, especially, should be done to fix the CIA, with all those floors upon floors of people scattered across Northern Virgina gathering and analyzing secret information?  

"Blow up the place," my lunchtime guest said, "and start over."

Unfortunately, that's not a new idea, either.

CIA legend Charles E. Allen is departing the Department of Homeland Security on Jan. 20, according to a colleague, drawing an end to a 50-year career in government intelligence work.

"Charlie," as he is universally known, joined the CIA in 1958 and spent the next 47 years climbing the ladder through a variety of analytical and managerial roles, culminating in his appointment as the agency's assistant director for collection.

In 2005 he joined DHS with the title of chief intelligence officer, the department's first, reporting directly to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. He is also its undersecretary for intelligence and analysis.

A source close to Allen, 72, said he would be retiring Jan. 20 and immediately report back to the CIA for its 90-day retirement debriefing process. He disclosed the news to his staff.

DHS spokesman William R. Knocke initially said he was not aware of Allen's retirement plans, but late Friday confirmed his departure on Jan. 20.

"Every American has benefited from Charlie's remarkable service, and we all owe him a deep debt of gratitude,"  Knocke said in a statement.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., called Allen "an unsung American hero."
 
"Although he will be returning to the CIA, his departure from DHS is a great loss," said Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, in a statement.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif. who chairs the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence, also praised Allen.

"Charlie Allen was legendary at the CIA, and his extensive experience proved invaluable in putting DHS's Intelligence & Analysis function on the map," Harman said.

"Now that the office is established, his successor needs to do some heavy lifting to ensure real participation by state and local personnel and far better two-way information sharing." 

In Dec. 2007 Chertoff awarded Allen, a native of North Carolina, the Secretary's Gold Medal, DHS' top employee award.

Lieberman said the nation is safer because of Allen's work as DHS intelligence chief.

"Our nation is more secure today as a result of his lifetime of service," Lieberman said. "He ... leaves the (intelligence) division in excellent readiness for his successor. I wish him the best of luck and warmest regards for the future."

But John Rollins, the first chief of staff of intelligence under DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, said Allen's legacy would be mixed.

"In all fairness, Charlie inherited an organization lacking focus, personnel, and resources," Rollins said.

But "many detractors will point to the Office of Intelligence's inability to provide timely and relevant terrorism related information to state, local and private sector entities."

"With that said," Rollins added, "my biggest concern is the office's continued lack of progress in cultivating and assessing domestic threat information. As the primary customer and contributor to DHS' mission, my hope is that individuals with state, local, and private sector experience will assume senior leadership positions in the Department, thus improving the quality of the Office of Intelligence's products and services."

A Vietnam veterans group is suing the CIA for "thousands of secret experiments to test toxic chemical and biological substances under code names such as MKULTRA.," its attorneys said today.

The suit was filed in federal court in northern California on behalf of the Washington-based Vietnam Veterans of America, Inc., and six aging veterans with multiple diseases and ailments "tied to a diabolical and secret testing program, whereby U.S. military personnel were deliberately exposed, by government and military agencies, to chemical and biological weapons and other toxins without informed consent," the Morrison & Foerster law firm said in a press release.

The firm said the alleged CIA research program was launched in the early 1950s and continued through at least 1976 at the Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick, Md., as well as universities and hospitals across the country contracted by the CIA.

Defendants include the CIA, the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense and various government officials responsible for these agencies.  

"The CIA secretly provided financing, personnel, and direction for the experiments, which were mainly conducted or contracted by the Army," the suit says.

According to the veterans, the experiments, conducted over a 25 year period, included:

·    the use of troops to test nerve gas, psychochemicals, and thousands of other toxic chemical or biological substances, and ... the insertion of septal implants in the brains of subjects in ... mind control experiments that went awry, leaving many civilian and military subjects with permanent disabilities;

·    the failure to secure informed consent and other widespread failures to follow the precepts of U.S. and international law regarding the use of human subjects, including the 1953 Wilson Directive and the Nuremberg Code;

·    a ... refusal by the DoD, the CIA, and the Army to ... locate the victims of their ... experiments or to provide health care or compensation to them;

·    the  destruction by the CIA of evidence and files

The plaintiffs have scheduled a news conference Wednesday at the San Francisco offices of the Morrison & Foerster firm.

UPDATE: CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf said the agency would have no comment "on specific matters before the court."

But, she added, "CIA activities related to MK-ULTRA have been thoroughly investigated, and the CIA fully cooperated with each of the investigations. In addition, tens of thousands of pages from documents related to the program have been declassified and released to the public.

"MK-ULTRA was investigated in 1975 by the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, and in 1977 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research," Harf added.

Several books have been written about the CIA drug experiments, which began with a Korean War-era mind-control race with Soviet and Chinese scientists. The idea was to create an American version of "The Manchurian Candidate," or drug-controlled assassin.

"These are people who are sweating blood everyday to make things happen and living for the day that somebody is going to come in, institute real reform and turn the CIA into the vital, effective organization it should be.  To them this choice just says that no such changes are impending and that all they can look forward to is business as usual."

"I am a big supporter of President-Elect Obama," Faddis added, "but Panetta is not the guy we need to run CIA right now. He may be a very good man. (But) he knows nothing about intelligence, particularly human intelligence" -- recruiting and managing spies.

"To fix that you need to get down in the weeds and really address the nuts and bolts of how CIA is performing its mission.  You cannot do that unless you understand the business, and, frankly, you probably can't do it unless you have been out on the street doing the work yourself."

"Other qualities are capacity to make decisions when there are no easy options and to take responsibility for them, situational awareness about the secondary and tertiary consequences of those decisions, good judgment about what is right, true, or advisable when presented with conflicting assessments -- a common situation in a field where you are almost always dealing with incomplete information.  An instinct for dealing with people -- at the core of the job.  The capacity to communicate clearly to a work force that needs an understanding of the larger picture in order to fit their discrete jobs into the broader mission."

"No matter how well intentioned he is or how intelligent, he does not have the background.  He does not even speak their language. He will end up like Porter Goss did, sitting in an office, talking on the phone, and, at ground level, nothing will change," Faddis maintained.

Many CIA veterans and their friends in Congress are generally groaning over the choice of Leon Panetta over an "intelligence professional" to run the nation's premier spy agency.

"The message is, 'I don't want to hear anything out of the CIA. Make it go away. No scandals. Keep it quiet,'" a former senior CIA manager told Laura Rozen for her new  Foreign Policy.com blog.

"They put over there a guy who is a political loyalist, who will keep everything nice and quiet, but who won't know a good piece of intelligence from a shi**y piece of intelligence, and wouldn't know a good intelligence officer" from a bad one."

Lamented another former top CIA officer, one who was hoping to get Obama's nod: "So much for a professional at the top."

"I find the choice of Leon Panetta to head the CIA a curious one," another former spy told Wired's Noah Shachtman at the Danger Room. 
 

"On the one hand, if you are looking to pick a nation's top spook, it is generally a good idea to pick someone with more than a cursory exposure to the intelligence business. It is also more than a little annoying that we can't seem to find a CIA chief that hasn't spent all of their adult life playing politics."

Speaking of which, my CQ colleague Tim Starks drew frosty responses about Panetta from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the incoming chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the man she is replacing, John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV of West Virginia.

 "I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director. I know nothing about this, other than what I've read," she said in a written statement in response to a query from Starks. "My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time."

Likewise, Rockefeller was worried that Panetta "has no intelligence experience," an aide told Starks,  "because he has believed this has always been a position that should be outside of the political realm."

Panetta's limited intelligence experience demands that his deputy "be an insider and must have strong internal management skills," a senior retired operative told me.

I, too, was one of those who thought the president-elect should find someone who knows their way around the Langley labyrinths well enough to fend off self-serving bureaucrats and whip that place into shape, especially by getting rid of mid-level managers who are routinely described to me as unimaginative and overcautious.

But the public, and by extension, Obama, obviously doesn't share as high a regard for "intelligence professionals" as we inside-the-Beltwayers.  

Indeed, to many people, "intelligence" and "professional" hardly belong in the same sentence after the surprise attacks of 9/11, the Iraq WMD fiasco, the continuing success of Osama Bin Laden in eluding capture, and, of course, the false confessions of top bin Laden lieutenants under torture.

The infamous "Curveball" episode, in which CIA bosses took the word of a lone informant they never even talked to as the main basis for declaring Saddam Hussein had biological weapons, showed the agency's standards of accuracy "were lower than a tabloid newspaper's," in the words of one disgusted CIA operations veteran.    

Among Washington's big hitters, moreover, running the CIA was no longer considered a plum, I was told, since the creation of the National Intelligence Directorate displaced the agency as the President's daily briefer and primus inter pares in the spy community.

People who might've jumped at the chance to run it in the past now saw it as second seat in the violin section, some longtime intelligence observers were telling me.

"I wish I could say that I disagree, but I can't. It's spot on," said one top former intelligence agency head, reflecting a sentiment I heard from others.

"Everybody wants to run the whole show, especially since it gives them 'player' status in Washington, and the opportunity to hobnob with the President. Never mind that the [intelligence] community they preside over is broken, long overdue for an overhaul, and mainly turns out crap."

But if the "intelligence professionals" take a deep breath, they may find that Obama's choice is the best thing that could happen to the CIA, at least in one regard: the former White House budget director, chief of staff, congressman, onetime Republican (a Nixon appointee) and longtime Washington power broker is hardly likely to play second fiddle to a mere general or admiral occupying the DNI's chair.

One way to look at the not-yet-announced appointment is that Obama is putting his own man at the top of a very sensitive agency, one that could make or break his presidency, in the same way that JFK installed his brother Bobby at the Justice Department.

Adm. Dennis Blair, the all but officially announced DNI nominee, is not likely to miss that.

Harry B. "Skip" Brandon, a former deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI, compared Obama's selection of Panetta to Jimmy Carter's appointment of federal judge William H. Webster to run a troubled FBI in 1978. Nine years later, President Ronald Reagan turned to Webster to take over an even more troubled CIA, which was caught up in the so-called Iran-Contra, arms-for-hostages scandal.

"He could bring a bipartisan credibility to the CIA," Brandon said of Panetta, "and calm the troubled waters there." He could also be "an honest broker on Capitol Hill," Brandon said.

And as more than one close observer put it, "No one's saying Leon who?"

By all accounts, moreover, Panetta was a strong manager and effective chief of staff in the Clinton White House, "an honest, straight shooter," in the words of one Obama booster who asked not to be named.

And from his stints as OMB director, and before that, chairmanship of the House Budget Committee, "he knows the entire scope of the intelligence budget," this person added. As chief of staff, he also sat in on the President's daily intelligence brief.

More recently, Panetta was a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which  recommended a timetable with U.S. troop withdrawals.

But it's not likely he'll get a free pass in his confirmation hearings.

As I wrote earlier today, Panetta's nomination is likely to give Republicans fresh ammunition to reopen questions about the Clinton administration's counterterrorism record, which Republican critics maintain was lackluster at best after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993.

Panetta was budget director and later chief of staff during the first Clinton term.

Considering the Republicans had the White House when the 9/11 hijackers came calling, of course -- and by most accounts sloughed off warnings headlined "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" -- there's only so far they can take that line of attack.

But if only one thing is clear from the Panetta nomination, it's this: President Obama intends to make a clear break with the intelligence policies and personnel of the Bush administration.

"Having served in Congress in the wake of Watergate and the domestic surveillance abuses that surfaced during the 1970s, Mr. Panetta understands how a democratic government should operate," said Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., a member of the House Intelligence Committee and chair of its oversight Panel since 2007.

"We need the CIA to collect reliable, actionable intelligence in ways that respect American values and honor the Constitution," Holt added.

"Mr. Panetta's background and reputation indicate he would serve the intelligence community, the President, and the country well." 

President-elect Obama's selection of former congressman and White House official Leon E. Panetta to run the CIA is likely to give Republicans fresh ammunition to reopen questions about the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policies.

Critics have long maintained that Clinton was uninterested in intelligence issues and slow to come to grips with the threat of Islamist terrorism, even after the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993.

Panetta was budget director and later chief of staff during the first Clinton term.

In an interview three months after the 9/11 attacks, Panetta said that senior Clinton aides viewed terrorism as just one of many pressing global problems.

"Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it," Panetta told the New York Times. But the "big issues" in the president's first term, he said, were "Russia, Eastern bloc, Middle East peace, human rights, rogue nations and then terrorism."

"When it came to terrorism, Clinton administration officials continued the policy of their predecessors, who had viewed it primarily as a crime to be solved and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies," the Times said.

Information gathered through grand jury investigations by the Justice Department after the 1993 bombing pointed to overseas, but the information was not shared with the CIA because of the "wall" that existed then between intelligence and law enforcement operations.

As for Afghanistan, the CIA virtually abandoned the region in 1989 after defeating the Red Army, and the Clinton administration (and Congress) did nothing to reverse that policy, leaving the spy agency with few sources to follow the emergence of al Qaeda.

Another Clinton aide back then, George Stephanopoulos, said he believed the 1993 attack did not gain more attention because, in the end, it "wasn't a successful bombing."

"It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?" he added.

It wasn't until a truck bomb tore into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, that plans to reorganize the government's counterterrorism efforts were revived, Panetta said.

If Oklahoma City could be hit, a terrorist attack could "happen at the White House,"  Panetta said.

Two months after the bombing, the Times reported, "Mr. Clinton ordered the government to intensify the fight against terrorism. The order did not give agencies involved in the fight more money, nor did it end the bureaucratic turf battles among them."

Three years later, Clinton responded to the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa with cruise missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan, moves that drew caustic comments from Republican presidential aspirant George W. Bush   during the 2000 campaign.

Panetta was appointed chief of staff to Clinton in 1994, and served in that position until 1997.

In 1996 he was handed the duty of informing then-CIA Director John M. Deutch that his appointment would not be renewed in the second administration.

He was a Democratic congressman from California's 17th district from 1977 to 1993.

Panetta was also a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

He is firmly on the record against the use of torture to interrogate terrorist suspects.

"We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that," Panetta wrote in The Washington Monthly last spring.

In light of CIA Director Michael V. Hayden's virtual plea to be kept on in the Obama administration, it's interesting to look back at a similar instance in 1976, when George H.W. Bush tried to get President-elect Jimmy Carter to retain him as his spy chief.

Carter loved the CIA briefings he had been getting during his campaign against President Gerald R. Ford, according to the agency's official history of presidential transitions.

Sometimes the sessions, which usually took place at his modest home in Plains, Ga., went on for six hours.

"Carter was a very careful and interested listener and an active participant," writes longtime CIA official John L. Helgerson, the study's author.

"All who were present remember that he asked a great many questions, often in minute detail. He was especially interested in the nature of the Intelligence Community's evidence, including satellite photography of deployed Soviet weapons."

Later, after winning the election, Carter "seemed to enjoy and benefit from the substantive discussions held at Blair House during his visits to Washington in the transition period."

Not so, though, when Bush, a future president himself, came to Plains looking to keep his job as DCI.

Carter was cold, Helgerson writes.

"Carter was unambiguous in his response after Bush finished his discussion of the pros and cons of his staying on as Director. The DCI had finished with an observation that -- all things considered -- he probably should be replaced. The President-elect, according to Bush, 'simply said, okay, or something like this, with no discussion, no questions about any of the points I had made.... As in the rest of the briefing, Carter was very cold or cool, no editorializing, no niceties, very business-like."

During their talk, Bush described "more than a dozen sensitive CIA programs and issues" for Carter, the CIA history says.

In contrast to the lively sessions he'd been having with his regular CIA briefers, "Carter had virtually no comment and asked no questions during the whole session" with Bush, the CIA history says.

"He had not indicated whether he thought the operations were good or bad, or that he was surprised or not surprised. He asked for no follow-up action or information. Bush commented that Carter 'seemed a little impatient, he didn't say much but seemed to be a little turned off. He tended to moralize.'"

The former Navy submarine nuclear officer found some CIA operations not to his liking, according to the CIA history.

"In fact, Carter was 'turned off' and uncomfortable with many of the Agency's sensitive collection programs. He ordered some discontinued ..."

Carter's running mate, Minnesota Sen. Walter Mondale, tried to break the tension by complimenting Bush on his handling of the agency in the wake of a rash of revelations about CIA assassination plots and domestic spying carried out by his predecessors, "rather generously (saying) that things had gotten better since I'd been there."

But the three quickly moved on to "a discussion of the timing of the announcement of a new CIA Director-designate."

One of the reasons Carter cited for removing Bush, who had been a Republican congressman before being appointed as ambassador to the U.N. and later China by President Nixon, was that he wanted to "depoliticize" the CIA directorship.

Subsequently, "senior Agency officers later found it ironic that his first choice for CIA Director was Theodore Sorensen, the former Kennedy political adviser and speechwriter," Helgerson writes.

Sorensen was forced to withdraw his name within weeks of his nomination "because of mounting criticism that he had played a very political role in the [John F.] Kennedy administration."  His membership in a Harvard socialist club during the Great Depression also drew fire.

Sorenson was replaced by Adm. Stansfield Turner, whom many Agency veterans consider one of the worst CIA directors in its history, mostly because he fired legions of covert operatives in favor of greater reliance on technological means of spying, such as satellites.

Sorenson may have missed a bullet, his reputation sealed as a speech writer,  rather than soiled as a spy master.

Once referred to by Kennedy as his "intellectual blood bank," wrote probably the most famous line ever in a presidential inauguration: "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

Within months, Kennedy fired his CIA director, Allen W. Dulles, following the Bay of Pigs disaster.

In light of CIA Director Michael V. Hayden's virtual plea to be kept on in the Obama administration, it's interesting to look back at a similar instance in 1976, when George H.W. Bush tried to get President-elect Jimmy Carter to retain him as his spy chief.

Carter loved the CIA briefings he had been getting during his campaign against President Gerald R. Ford, according to the agency's official history of presidential transitions.

Sometimes the sessions, which usually took place at his modest home in Plains, Ga., went on for six hours.

"Carter was a very careful and interested listener and an active participant," writes longtime CIA official John L. Helgerson, the study's author.

"All who were present remember that he asked a great many questions, often in minute detail. He was especially interested in the nature of the Intelligence Community's evidence, including satellite photography of deployed Soviet weapons."

Later, after winning the election, Carter "seemed to enjoy and benefit from the substantive discussions held at Blair House during his visits to Washington in the transition period."

Not so, though, when Bush, a future president himself, came to Plains looking to keep his job as DCI.

Carter was cold, Helgerson writes.

"Carter was unambiguous in his response after Bush finished his discussion of the pros and cons of his staying on as Director. The DCI had finished with an observation that -- all things considered -- he probably should be replaced. The President-elect, according to Bush, 'simply said, okay, or something like this, with no discussion, no questions about any of the points I had made.... As in the rest of the briefing, Carter was very cold or cool, no editorializing, no niceties, very business-like."

During their talk, Bush described "more than a dozen sensitive CIA programs and issues" for Carter, the CIA history says.

In contrast to the lively sessions he'd been having with his regular CIA briefers, "Carter had virtually no comment and asked no questions during the whole session" with Bush, the CIA history says.

"He had not indicated whether he thought the operations were good or bad, or that he was surprised or not surprised. He asked for no follow-up action or information. Bush commented that Carter 'seemed a little impatient, he didn't say much but seemed to be a little turned off. He tended to moralize.'"

The former Navy submarine nuclear officer found some CIA operations not to his liking, according to the CIA history.

"In fact, Carter was 'turned off' and uncomfortable with many of the Agency's sensitive collection programs. He ordered some discontinued ..."

Carter's running mate, Minnesota Sen. Walter Mondale, tried to break the tension by complimenting Bush on his handling of the agency in the wake of a rash of revelations about CIA assassination plots and domestic spying carried out by his predecessors, "rather generously (saying) that things had gotten better since I'd been there."

But the three quickly moved on to "a discussion of the timing of the announcement of a new CIA Director-designate."

One of the reasons Carter cited for removing Bush, who had been a Republican congressman before being appointed as ambassador to the U.N. and later China by President Nixon, was that he wanted to "depoliticize" the CIA directorship.

Subsequently, "senior Agency officers later found it ironic that his first choice for CIA Director was Theodore Sorensen, the former Kennedy political adviser and speechwriter," Helgerson writes.

Sorensen was forced to withdraw his name within weeks of his nomination "because of mounting criticism that he had played a very political role in the [John F.] Kennedy administration."  His membership in a Harvard socialist club during the Great Depression also drew fire.

Sorenson was replaced by Adm. Stansfield Turner, whom many Agency veterans consider one of the worst CIA directors in its history, mostly because he fired legions of covert operatives in favor of greater reliance on technological means of spying, such as satellites.

But Sorenson may have missed a bullet, his reputation sealed as a speech writer,  rather than soiled as a spy master.

Once referred to by Kennedy as his "intellectual blood bank," Sorenson wrote probably the most famous line ever in a presidential inauguration: "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

Within months, Kennedy fired his CIA director, Allen W. Dulles, following the Bay of Pigs disaster.

Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the former Pacific forces commander who once coordinated military operations at the CIA, is still on tap to become the nation's next top intelligence officer, despite an unexplained delay of an official announcement from President-elect Obama, sources familiar with the process say.

Blair has been touted as a shoe-in for the nomination by unnamed congressional and other anonymous sources.

But weeks have passed since his name first surfaced as a cinch for the Obama administration's director of National Intelligence.

Even in the absence of a formal announcement, however, Blair is being prepped for confirmation hearings on his expected nomination.

 "I know he's being prepared for his hearing," said a top former intelligence official, who also asked for anonymity in exchange for talking freely about the process.  

In contrast, the president-elect's national security team has had trouble finding an appropriate candidate to become the CIA's next chief.

One knowledgeable source said that the Obama team was "back to zero" on finding a CIA chief, an assertion rejected by a transition official.

Running the spy agency has become less attractive to personalities who once might have sought the position, sources say, ever since it was subsumed by the new national intelligence directorate (ODNI), set up after the surprise 9/11 attacks.  

"A lot of people don't want the job," said the source, because the CIA chief is no longer top dog in the fractious, 16-agency intelligence community, and no longer gives the President his daily briefing.  The Obama team has gone down "some blind alleys" in finding the right person, the source said.

Whereas in pre-9/11 times the job might have been a springboard to bigger things, now "it's a career ender" because it requires direct supervision of such contentious policies as renditions and interrogations.

"You've got to just really love it," a former top CIA official said,  "because it's too painful otherwise."

In 1995, Blair was appointed associate director of the CIA for military support, "responsible for direction and coordination of Intelligence Community support to military operations," acording to the agency's Web site.

"[In] reality the risks to maritime flows of oil are far smaller than is commonly assumed," Blair and Kenneth Lieberthal wrote in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs. 

"First, tankers are much less vulnerable than conventional wisdom holds. Second, limited regional conflicts would be unlikely to seriously upset traffic, and terrorist attacks against shipping would have even less of an economic effect. Third, only a naval power of the United States' strength could seriously disrupt oil shipments."

"According to a participant who would speak only if he was not identified, that led Cambone to stalk over to Blair after the meeting, jab his finger into his chest and declare that he expected more out of him," Newsweek said.

"Blair worked on a report that helped the Air Force decide to pursue a multiyear contract for F-22 Raptor fighter jets. At the same time, he was on the board of EDO Corp., a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin on the F-22 project. After news reports about the apparent conflict of interest, Blair resigned as the head of IDA and his board seat at EDO."

* "Despite their reputation as plugged-in experts on other countries, many C.I.A. officers do not even have Internet access at their desks. Worse yet, they don't think they need it."

* "C.I.A. spies reported on several occasions that Al Qaeda had plans to attack American military bases overseas -- in countries that a quick Web search would have shown had no such bases."

"The expertise of academia, where decades of insight often go untouched, could be balanced with a seasoned detective or tough prosecutor adept at turning a crook. The more military the topic, the more military folks you would want on its pursuit."

The FBI agent who stands accused of accessing bureau computers for a notorious Hollywood private eye is no stranger to controversy.

Mark Rossini, 46, was a favorite go-to guy for national security reporters when he worked in the FBI's media relations office. He had come to the job after several years working with the CIA and other intelligence agents at the National Counterterrorism Center, in Virginia.

Tall, handsome and gregarious, Rossini enjoyed schmoozing with reporters over good cabernet and cigars at Les Halles, a French restaurant around the corner from the FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue.   

Over the past year the recently divorced counterterrorism specialist had also been squiring his raven-haired actress girlfriend, Linda Fiorentino, to the Palm and other top restaurants in Washington and New York.

The U.S. warned India, perhaps even twice, about impending attacks on Mumbai from Pakistan, according to anonymous senior officials.

But what about Pakistan?  If the reports are correct, did U.S. intelligence warn the Pakistan government that terrorists were about to launch the Mumbai assault from its territory?

If not, why not?

And if so, what did Pakistan do about it?

That seems to be the most obvious element missing from the story so far, that terrorists launched their assault from Pakistan.

The effect of saying that India was warned in advance is to portray its security officials as incompetent, if not derelict. (Some have already resigned.) 

In other words, it tends to spread at least some of the blame for the attacks to Indian officials, at least temporarily, and away from the growing conclusion that Pakistan is to blame for the tragedy.

I have no reason to doubt that a "senior U.S. official" - probably Condoleezza Rice, en route to India -- told the Associated Press that the "Bush administration warned India before last week's brutal attacks in Mumbai that terrorists appeared to be plotting a mostly waterborne assault on its financial capital."

Other unnamed officials, including "a senior counterterrorism official" and Pakstani intelligence sources, chimed in along the same lines, adding details to the allegation that at least some of the terrorists came by sea.

Some news organizations had already found Pakistanis who said they saw suspicious looking men come ashore.

"Waterborne" can only mean from Karachi, the sprawling Pakistani port teeming with al Qaeda-linked terrorists and groups backing armed assaults on India over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Were Pakistani security forces provided with the alleged U.S. warning as well, so they could hunt down the plotters?

Or did the U.S. withhold it, on grounds that Pakistani military, intelligence and security units, riddled with extremist Muslim spies, cannot be trusted?

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, aboard Air Force one with President Bush en route to North Carolina, declined to answer any questions about the affair.

"I'm not able to talk about any of our intelligence community -- any of their cooperation with any other country," she told reporters, according to the White House transcript.  "It would not be appropriate for me to do so, so I have to decline to comment on that."

Likewise, a CIA spokesman declined comment, saying the agency "does not, as a rule, publicly discuss exchanges with other intelligence services."

The National Intelligence Directorate did not immediately respond to e-mail inquiries.

A Pakistani spokesman said he would need more time to provide a definitive answer to the question.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, interviewed Tuesday by CNN's Larry King, said his government was "in no way responsible" for Mumbai.

"Even the White House and the American CIA have said that today," he asserted -- falsely -- according to an advance transcript.  "The state of Pakistan is of course not involved. We're part of the victims, Larry."

Zaradi also said he "would not know" if Lashkar-e-Toiba, the militant, Pakistan-based group fighting to end Indian dominance of Kashmir, was involved with the Mumbai suicide-massacre.
 

"If indeed they are involved, we would not know," he said.

"Again, they are people who operate outside the system. They operate like -- al Qaeda, for instance, is not state-oriented. They operate something on that mechanism, and we would love to -- I've already offered to India full cooperation on this incident, and we intend to do that."

Zadari also suggested no one found to be involved would be turned over to India.

"If we had the proof, we would try them in our courts, we would try them in our land and we would sentence them," he said.


(For more on this, see tonite's PBS show, WorldFocus.)

"As part of a joint U.S.-Peruvian anti-drug program that began in the mid-1990s, CIA officers helped Peruvian air force pilots identify aircraft suspected of carrying illegal drugs through the country's airspace. The program had succeeded in bringing down numerous suspected planes when, in April 2001, a Peruvian pilot mistakenly shot into a small plane carrying U.S. missionaries. Two of the Americans on board, Veronica 'Roni' Bowers and her infant daughter, Charity, were struck by bullets and killed. The pilot, although wounded, managed to land the plane. Bowers's husband and their 6-year-old son were not injured."

Remember Iran?

Not much has been heard about it lately. The not-so-long-ago urgent issue faded under the blinding media coverage of the campaigns, elections and, of course, the implosion on Wall Street.  The little time devoted to foreign affairs seems to be centered on what to do about Afghanistan.

But John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer last seen wringing his hands over the efficacy of water boarding, says the incoming administration needs to pay prompt attention to "Iran's Latin American Push."

Writing in the Los Angles Times, Kiriakou went beyond the usual singling out of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales as Iran's reputed agents in the hemisphere.

Kiriakou sugggested that Paraguay's new president, Fernando Lugo Mendez, is also palling around with terrorists.

"Then there's Paraguay's new president, Fernando Lugo Mendez, who was lauded in the Iranian media as 'an enemy of the Great Satan' after naming Hezbollah sympathizer and fundraiser Alejandro Hamed Franco as the country's new foreign minister. Hezbollah -- which is Iranian funded and supported -- already has a well-documented presence in Paraguay, and the U.S. State Department has banned the minister from entering the United States or from flying on a U.S. airline."

But former Washington Post and NPR editor John Dinges, who has written three books on Latin America, says Kiriakou, who served as a CIA interrogator in Pakistan, is off the mark.

"The president of Paraguay is a former Catholic bishop and hardly an extreme leftist," says Dinges, now a tenured journalism professor at Columbia University.

"He is applauded all over Latin America as doing for Paraguay what Vicente Fox did for Mexico: break more than a half century of one-party rule in Paraguay.

"I'm not familiar with his foreign minister pick. But have we entered a world in which a country's foreign minister can be branded a Hezbollah sympathizer and on that basis banned from international travel?"

Dinges also said Kiriakou needs to crank back his telescope to get a wider context on Iranian moves in Latin America.

"What is going on is competition for trade and influence in Latin America. Tehran, just as China and others, are taking advantage of the U.S. inattention over the past decade to fill the role of counterweight to the United States that used to be played by the Soviet Union. Countries like Venezuela and Bolivia want alternatives to trade and investment, and Iran is eager to break out of the U.S. quarantine."

 
But Kiriakou, who served as a CIA counter-terrorism official from 1998 through 2004. says the focus needs to remain tightly on Tehran.

"The real danger here doesn't have to do with an arcane diplomatic battle over who has more friends in Latin America," he wrote in the Los Angles Times.

"The problem is visa-free Iranian travel and the potential creation of a terrorist base of operations in the United States' backyard. If anyone with an Iranian passport may enter Bolivia without a visa or any further documentation, the country will soon be open to covert officers of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, its Islamic Revolutionary Guard, which the State Department recently declared a terrorist organization, and the Quds Force, an Iranian military group whose mandate is to spread Islamic revolution around the world."

But here again,  Dinges says Kiriakou needs to take a deep breath.

 "This is a lot of huffing and puffing from a [former] counterterrorism official, in which otherwise benign international activities are portrayed as tantamount to preparations for terrorist acts," he said by e-mail.

"But if you look at the actual activities Iran is engaged in in these countries, it is a stretch to see them as anything but normal diplomatic and economic relations.

"It is an enormous stretch to say that a gas factory in Bolivia together with loosening visa restrictions is setting the stage for Hezbollah terrorism directed from Latin America," he said.

And so it goes. 

At some point in the new administration, I suppose Washington will start paying attention to Latin America again. I suspect President Obama and his national security team will look at the region as a piece of the puzzle they face in the Middle East. 

The Great Mentioner is busy, busy, busy these days, feeding the media frenzy for names of people "under consideration," as they say, for top positions in the Obama administration - including the spy agencies.

The Wall Street Journal's estimable Siobhan Gorman weighed in Tuesday with her own interesting mentionables to lead the CIA and the National Intelligence Directorate, making the point that none of them could be accused of palling around with terrorists.

Bill Ayers, in other words, is not on the list.

"Most of those being discussed as candidates for director of national intelligence and director of the CIA have staked out a middle ground between safeguarding civil liberties and aggressively pursuing nontraditional adversaries,"  wrote Gorman, singling out former CIA official John Brennan as a leading candidate to return to the spy agency as its boss.

"Mr. Brennan is a leading contender for one of the two jobs, say some advisers. He declined to comment on personnel matters. Gen. James L. Jones, a former North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander; Thomas Fingar, the chief of analysis for the [national] intelligence director; Joan A. Dempsey, who served in top intelligence and Pentagon posts; former Rep. Tim Roemer of Indiana, who served on the 9/11 Commission; and [California Democratic Rep. Jane] Harman have also been mentioned. Ms. Harman has also been cited as a potential secretary of homeland security."

Liberals would swoon over Fingar, I suspect. As head of State Department intelligence in the first Bush administration, he was the only intelligence official who called it right on Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. And he oversaw the writing of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program that many credit - or blame - for blunting what seemed like an imminent Bush administration attack on Iran.  

None of the others mentioned are likely to upset Obamamaniacs too much, either.

But Brennan shouldn't be a slam dunk, caution some intelligence insiders, who say Brennan's operational dossier is too thin for the post.

Brennan got the Terrorist Threat Analysis Center (now the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) up and running after 9/11, they acknowledge, but he wouldn't have gotten the job if he hadn't been then-CIA Director George Tenet's executive assistant. He has no counterterrorism field experience.

One CIA official who absolutely should be back in Washington running something, say some, is David Cohen, who left Langley after 9/11 to join the NYPD as Deputy Director for Intelligence. 
 
Cohen hates publicity. The NYPD's hiring statement was brief:

"From 1995 to 1997, Cohen directed the CIA's Directorate of Operations, where he oversaw the agency's worldwide operations, managed the CIA's global network of offices and personnel, and maintained agency relationships with foreign intelligence and security services. From 1991 to 1995, Cohen was deputy director of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, where he guided the agency's analysis program, which reviewed every political, economic, and military assessment prepared by the CIA for the President and his senior national security advisors. Cohen's career at the CIA was marked by his leadership in combating global terrorism, international organized crime, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

One intelligence insider said Cohen should replace Charlie Allen as chief of Information and Analysis (IA) at the Homeland Security Department.  When Allen came to DHS in  2005, he'd already spent a half century at CIA.

"Cohen has built the best homeland security Intel organization in the country" at the NYPD, this person said,  "much better than DHS/IA and comparable with both the DI and DO [the CIA's directorates of Intelligence and Operations] but at a localized level."

Many would agree.