Who can forget Victor Mature as Interpol secret agent Charles Sturgis?

Almost everybody, it turns out. The 1957 B-movie was almost immediately consigned to the crime noir dustbin.

But the popular image of the International Criminal Police Organization as a global network of brilliant sleuths has never dimmed - no matter that Interpol doesn't really do any policing itself.

It "facilitates the exchange of information to assist law enforcement agencies in the United States and throughout the world in detecting and deterring international crime and terrorism through a network of 187 member countries," in the words of the Justice Department's Inspector General.

Washington's node on the Interpol network is the U.S. National Central Bureau.

And it's apparently clueless, the IG said in a stinging audit report Monday.

Sibel Edmonds may never get her day in court - or at least the kind she wants.

The former FBI translator has spent seven years trying to get a court to hear her allegations that foreign agents, in particular Turkish intelligence, had penetrated her unit, the State Department, the Pentagon and Congress.

This weekend she's going to try again.

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 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.

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.

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."

Saying she still has no idea who sent her a box of dead fish, former top homeland security bioweapons official Maureen McCarthy says she has resigned from the department and begun legal action to clear her name.

Occasionally breaking into tears during a 45-minute telephone interview, McCarthy called her resignation "involuntary" and said she had suffered severe financial distress since being suspended without pay in February over the incident.

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.

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.

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:

Evidently $30 million and 10 years wasn't enough to finish the job of declassifying records on the involvement of U.S. intelligence agencies with Nazi and Japanese war criminals.

Congress has just budgeted another $650,000 to finish the job - really, they're serious this time -- of poring through some 8 million postwar pages.

"There's a million pages of Army and CIA documents left" to read and catalog, said Miriam Kleiman, a spokeswoman for the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA.

With the latest attempt to resettle Guantanamo prisoners stymied in court, a group of prominent American law enforcement, military, diplomatic, judicial and religious figures is urging President Obama to appoint a non-partisan commission to study the detention, treatment, and transfer of terrorist suspects.

The Justice Department's Inspector General gigged the FBI today for allowing its agents in Iraq and Afghanistan to do some creative writing on their time sheets.

Give me a break.  As soon as I read the headline on the 88-page scolding, I thought of Frank Burns, M*A*S*H's lovably feckless martinet, and his handwringing sidekick, Hotlips Houlihan. The Army lifers revelled in uncovering minor rules violations amid the hell of war.   

Can anyone here spell Green Zone? 

 "The OIG found that the FBI inappropriately permitted employees to regularly claim overtime for activities that are not compensable as 'work,' such as time spent eating meals, exercising more than 3 hours per week, and socializing," a press release accompanying the report said.

Imagine the party-hearty life in Afghanistan.

It also said the FBI had "adjusted the work week" for its underfire agents and technicians, giving them extra pay for Sundays, etc.

Gee, these guys must be millionaires by now.

And "socializing," for anyone who knows anything about Iraq after five years there, amounts to heavy drinking, playing video games and watching DVDs, with maybe a little regretful sex thrown in, cooped up in the cheek-to-jowl enclave known as the Green Zone.

Shocking.  

"I agree, big deal," said a former top FBI official with plenty of experience investigating overseas terrorism, who also happens to be a decorated Vietnam vet.

"We were sending civilians to a war zone.  With regard to shifting the formal work week, does the IG have a freaking clue?  By that I mean that, as you well know, the work week in a Muslim country is Sunday through Thursday. Geez."

The FBI's response reminded me of Hawkeye and B.J. standing contrite before Colonel Potter.

"We accept that Headquarters management, in an effort to quickly develop a simple system to compensate FBI employees who volunteered to leave their domestic assignments and serve in war zones, allowed a flawed system to develop and remain in place too long," said top spokesman John Miller, in a prepared statement.
 "Early in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq ...FBI employees lived with sniper attacks, mortar fire, and roadside bombs as part of their daily work environment. They attempted to adapt a long established, domestic pay system for domestic law enforcement to unprecedented wartime assignments for FBI personnel."

It won't happen again, sir.

Here at SpyTalk HQ, we eagerly await the Justice Department's rigorous prosecution of American war profiteers.

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.

Speaking at his high school alma mater in Greenville, S.C., Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell claimed Sunday that "dozens" of terrorist plots against the U.S. have been thwarted since 9/11.

Privately, many serious analysts of terrorist threats, both in and outside of U.S. spy agencies, question whether the figure is exaggerated -- while at the same time confirming that al Qaeda-associated terrorists continue to pose  a mortal threat to the U.S. homeland.

"As we are today - post 9/11 - just some seven short years ago, we have not suffered a similar attack. That is not because people aren't trying," said McConnell in a speech during his induction into Wade Hampton High School's "Legion of Honor," a roster of distinguished graduates. 

"My community and the community of military, and law enforcement, and intelligence officials around the globe are working every day to prevent another attack on the United States. And we have been successful dozens of times."

Responding to a request for clarification, a spokesperson for McConnell today cited four documents, including a Justice Department report on counterterrorism issued on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. 

The report listed eight "notable" prosecutions, but suggested other plots had been disrupted by covert counterterrorism operations that did not -- or may not have been intended to -- result in arrests.

"In each of these cases, the Department has faced critical decisions on when to bring criminal charges, given that a decision to prosecute a suspect exposes the government's interest in that person and effectively ends covert intelligence investigation," it said.

Such determinations require the careful balancing of competing interests, including the immediate incapacitation of a suspect and disruption of terrorist activities through prosecution, on the one hand; and the continuation of intelligence collection about the suspect's plans, capabilities, and confederates, on the other; as well as the inherent risk that a suspect could carry out a violent act while investigators and prosecutors attempt to perfect their evidence.

An FBI spokesman declined to comment, beyond referring me to past reports on terrorist plots, including one which cited 24 incidents between 2002 and 2005 that included attacks by animal rights and white supremacist groups

A White House Fact Sheet released in Oct. 2005 named "10 plots" that had been disrupted and five "casings and infiltrations" that were either detected or disrupted.  

Such figures suggest that at least two dozen more plots had to have been thwarted in the past three years to reach McConnell's "dozens"  threshold.

A recently retired senior CIA counterterrorism officer expressed skepticism about McConnell's figure, saying it came down to "word games."

Perhaps a half dozen "serious" terrorist plots against the U.S. homeland had been disrupted by Western intelligence, he said on condition of anonymity, because the information is classified, such as the 2006 London-based plot to sabotage nine commercial airliners en route to the United States. 

But he was skeptical of McConnell's claim that "dozens" of attacks had been thwarted.

"I suppose every time they arrest a guy who had an idea for an attack and put him in jail they can claim they 'stopped an attack'," he said. 

"After all, the FBI arrested some guys and charged them with conspiracy to blow up the Sears Tower, and the closest they ever got to doing anything was driving around the building with a video camera - which the FBI gave them."

But author Ronald Kessler, a longtime intelligence specialist with close contacts in the spy agencies and White House, made the same "dozens" claim as McConnell in a recent book, "The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack." 

Responding to a query Monday, Kessler cited the White House and Justice Department reports and expressed a weariness about questioning "what was a real planned attack."

"If something was not blown up, it was not a real attack," according to critics, Kessler said.

"Many more have been rolled up since then. Beyond that, because the FBI and CIA have rolled up more than 5,000 terrorists worldwide since 9/11, most of the attacks were never hatched in the first place," he said.

The FBI made an unusual public appeal Thursday for citizen help with finding out who is sending threatening letters in envelopes sprinkled with white powder to financial institutions across the country.

 

"(W) e're releasing photographs of one of the letters and its envelope in the hopes that you might be able to help us solve the case." The FBI said.

 

 "Study the images, and see if you recognize the phrasing of the letter, the envelope label, or any other clue that you think might help investigators."

 

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service, it added, is offering a reward of up to $100,000 for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible.

 

"What you just breathed in will kill you within 10 days," the letters say, in large, machine-printed type.

 

But so far the powder, which apparently is designed to look like anthrax, "appears to be harmless," the FBI said.

 

"So far, we've identified more than 50 letters, nearly all of which use threatening language identical to the text shown above." the FBI appeal said. "The letters have all been mailed from Texas and postmarked at Amarillo."

 

"The letters have been sent to at least 11 states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia," it said.

 

Institutions receiving the letters have included the Chase Bank; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision, which regulates all federal and many state thrift institutions.

The FBI has blocked two of its veteran counterterrorism agents from going public with accusations that the CIA deliberately withheld crucial intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

FBI Special Agents Mark Rossini and Douglas Miller have asked for permission to appear in an upcoming public television documentary, scheduled to air in January, on pre-9/11 rivalries between the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.

The program is a spin-off from The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by acclaimed investigative reporter James Bamford, due out in a matter of days.

The FBI denied Rossini and Miller permission to participate in the book or the PBS "NOVA" documentary, which is also being written and produced by Bamford, on grounds that the FBI "doesn't want to stir up old conflicts with the CIA," according to multiple reliable sources.

The FBI Wednesday dumped a load of documents on the family of Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, supposedly showing that the late Army bioweapons researcher was behind the deadly anthrax mailings of 2001.

It's the latest step that should leave a bigger stain on the government than Ivins' suffering kin and friends.

Hardly a month had passed since Steven Hatfill won a $5.8 million slander suit against the Justice Department that the government began leaking details on its case against Ivins, which, by many accounts, probably drove him over the edge.  Even after his suicide, the leaks continued.

For what purpose? To convince the public that the feds really -- no, really, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die -- had a case against him?

Whatever happened to due process? Even the dead should be allowed that.

I have no idea whether Ivins was guilty, but the point is that he, unlike Hatfill, will never get a his day in court, and his family must bear the brunt of the government's cowardly, anonymous accusations forever.

UPDATE: 

Democratic Rep. Rush Holt, who represents the central New Jersey area when the anthrax envelopes evidently were mailed, issued similar sentiments after a private briefing Wednesday by FBI Director Mueller.

"I am pleased the FBI finally has begun to answer the questions that the families of the victims have had for nearly seven years," Holt said in a statement.

"While the circumstantial evidence pointing to Dr. Ivins that the Department of Justice released today is compelling, a number of important questions remain unanswered, such as why investigators remained focused on Dr. Hatfill long after they had begun to suspect Dr. Ivins of the crime and why investigators are so certain that Ivins acted alone. In addition, there are important policy questions for handling any future incidents of bioterrorism.  I will continue to conduct additional oversight on this issue over the course of the next several months."

"There's nothing wrong with the government seeking to do a better job of properly sharing legitimately acquired information about law enforcement investigations -- indeed, that is one of the things that 9/11 tragically showed is very much needed," the report's executive summary states.

"But in a democracy, the collection and sharing of intelligence information--especially information about American citizens and other residents--need to be carried out with the utmost care. That is because more and more, the amount of information available on each one of us is enough to assemble a very detailed portrait of our lives. And because security agencies are moving toward using such portraits to profile how 'suspicious' we look."

"There are a couple of ways to look at the issue," Rollins told me. "The first is that the centers are efficiently organized and capable of undertaking domestic intelligence collection activities -- they are not.

"Second, nefarious intentions are afoot by the leaders within these centers with the desire to sacrifice civil liberty protections in the name of thwarting a possible terrorist attack -- I don't believe this is the case." 

"The lack of a clear national strategy and undefined federal-state expectations, roles, and responsibilities," he said, "has led to instances where state and local employees have drifted outside the bounds of acceptable law enforcement activities."

A study last February, obtained by my colleague Dan Fowler, identified several problems with DHS's fusion-center efforts.

Retired FBI Special Agent Robert Levinson vanished on Kish Island, a duty-free Iranian resort just off its coast in the Persian Gulf, on March 8, 2007.

The FBI has obtained information that Mr. Levinson arrived on Iran's Kish Island on March 8, 2007, had several meetings at the Maryam Hotel, and then checked out the next day, a bureau bulletin late Tuesday said. 

"However, Mr. Levinson did not fly to Dubai on a previously scheduled flight. There is no record of Mr. Levinson leaving Kish Island. Nor is there any record of Mr. Levinson using his passport or credit cards after March 9, 2007," the FBI said.

"Anyone with information about Mr. Levinson's disappearance should contact their local FBI field office, or if outside the U.S., the legal attaché at the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate."

    The FBI added that people with information could also submit information at its Web site.

Levinson was a Russian organized crime expert who worked as a consultant since his retirement, according to several reports.  
  
The Iranians have said they have no information on Levinson.

Present and former FBI officials say there's nothing really new coming in the bureau's domestic counterterrorism program, despite headlines this week about new "ethnic profiling" measures in the works.

"The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups," the Associated Press reported in an exclusive story.

The FBI already takes into account a person's national origins, particularly if he or she is a native Pakistani, Iranian, or other nationality of high interest to U.S. intelligence, when opening preliminary investigations into potential terrorist conspiracies, the officials say.

And as the A.P. itself reported,  among the factors that spur an FBI investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person's race or ethnicity.

But national origin alone is not enough to trigger an investigation, officials say.

For awhile in the South San Francisco-San Jose area, which have large numbers of Iranian exiles, the FBI did run a pilot program sifting through grocery store sales records in search of "ethnic food" purchasing patterns, sources told me last year.

But the FBI denied it was trying to follow a "falafel trail" to potential terrorists.  

However, because the FBI's aggressive new "domain management" program, in which bureau field offices are expected to gather intelligence about immigrant groups of interest in their territory, has left investigators unsure of their limits, the Justice Department is working on guidlines to codify existing practices.

This does not amount to a new "ethnic profiling" program, officials insisted.

The American Civil Liberties Union was not convinced.

"This country should not abandon the presumption of innocence," said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office. "If the FBI is allowed to investigate based on racial or ethnic characteristics, it will make everyone of a certain color or creed a suspect. That stands our traditional presumption of innocent until proven guilty on its head," she said.

Harry B. "Skip" Brandon, a former deputy assistant  director of the FBI for counterintelligence, said the headlines about racial profiling may be overblown.

"It does not seem unreasonable for a preliminary look at someone if you combine some of the factors above," Brandon told me. 

While it does not include everyone, and there are certainly exceptions, it seems to me that the majority of those involved in acts of terrorism here or abroad have traveled to "regions of the world known for terrorist activity,"   for training and some have had weapons or military training and the vast majority have been of a certain ethnicity.  

 Of course people always make the argument, what about (Timothy) McVeigh etc.? And there is no question that terrorists are not limited by race or ethnicity. But anyone with any sense at all has to look at the big picture and see what fits a majority.  From a practical standpoint, you can't look at everyone so you have to go where your facts and experience tell you a prospective operative or terrorist have a common background -- and that can include race and ethnicity. 
 

The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. 

I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. 

Lots of spook literature these days: Especially noteworthy are two new ones -- two! -- by former CIA operative Gary Berntsen, whose memoir of leading the first agency team into Afghanistan after 9/11 and cornering Osama bin Laden, Jawbreaker,  read like a true-life thriller.  

Now comes The Walk-In (written with novelist Ralph Pezzullo), a fictional thriller involving an Iranian defector that seems awfully close to reality, even as it follows conventional plot lines -- renegade CIA agent saves the world and all that.  Pub date is Aug. 12.