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 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 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.

Italy's former spy chief, on trial for participating with the CIA in the abduction of a Muslim cleric, says he wants Condoleezza Rice to testify in the case.

Niccolo Pollari, former head of the Italian military intelligence service SISMI, and eight other Italians participated in the 2003 "extraordinary rendition" of an al Qaeda suspect known as Abu Omar, prosecutors allege. They say Pollari worked with U.S. agents to snatch Omar, whose real name is Hassan Mustafa Omar Nasr, off a Milan street and whisk him to Egypt for interrogation.

Pollari says he wants Rice, the current U.S. secretary of state and U.S. national security adviser in 2003, to testify for him as a defense witness, the Italian news agency ANSA reported Wednesday.

If lying to FBI agents was enough to send Scooter Libby to jail, why isn't it enough to prosecute Alberto Gonzales?

Despite strong evidence in a today's Justice Department report that the former attorney general lied to federal investigators probing his careless handling of highly classified documents, the department declined to prosecute.

Indeed, initial news reports on the Inspector General's findings didn't even mention the evidence of perjury, focusing instead on Gonzales's "mishandling" of notes and more-than-Top Secret documents relating to the administration's secret wiretapping and terrorist detention programs,

Who's going to get upset about that?

Who doesn't "mishandle" -- i.e., misplace, loose, forget where they left -- the tuition check, the gas bill, keys, glasses, the grocery list, and yes, even take-home work  -- at least once in awhile?

To be sure, the kind of information Gonzales was shlepping between his office, home, limousines, airplanes and, for all we know, the local Safeway and the dry cleaner (or maybe he left it in the car?) was so sensitive its loss "could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to advantage by a foreign nation," according to the IG report.

At one point, according to White House counsel Fred Fielding, quoted in the IG report, Gonzales "wasn't sure where they were."  The AG duly confessed to the IG that he was "a little confused about where the notes were."  His briefcase wasn't always locked, he told investigators, and he didn't use a government safe in his house because . . .he had forgotten the combination.
    
He's only human.

For such trifles, the Justice Department "scolded" Gonzales, as the Associated Press characterized the IG's finger-wagging, and left it at that.

But the IG report shows that Gonzales did more than "mishandle" his notes, which included operational details on what he himself, somewhat ironically, called -- after it had leaked -- "one of the most highly protected [programs] in the United States ... a very, very secretive, protected program," and correspondence between congressional Intelligence Committee leaders and CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden. 

In a statement that doesn't pass the laugh test, Gonzales told IG investigators he didn't know the documents were secret.

Gonzales said that he was unaware of the classification level and compartmented nature of the NSA program he referenced in the notes. Gonzales also stated he did not recall thinking that the notes themselves were classified.

But the IG found the smoking gun -- in Gonzales's hand, no less.

The envelope containing documents related to the NSA surveillance program bore the handwritten markings, "TOP SECRET - EYES ONLY - ARG" [the attorney general's initials] followed by an abbreviation for the SCI codeword for the program.

Inside the envelope, moreover, were "documents relating to a detainee interrogation program," which were all classified with cover sheets and markings in the top and bottom margins, as Top Secret/Sensitive Classified Information.

And yet Gonzales told the IG investigators "that he was unaware of the classification level and compartmented nature of the NSA program he referenced in the notes."

That is patently absurd.

Poor Scooter Libby, the national security aide to Vice President Cheney, who suffered million-dollar legal bills and lifetime disbarment for a perjury conviction related to the relatively trifling Valerie Plame affair, only to be snatched from the jaws of prison by a pardon from President Bush.   

Today, the Justice Department revealed that it had saved everybody the bother in the case of Alberto Gonzales.

It just let him skate.

(UPDATE: Inspector General Office spokesman Paul Martin called back late Wednesday afternoon after this blog item was filed and left a voice mail message to call back. Because of a medical appointment, I was not able to retrieve his message for almost 24 hours. When I finally reached him Thursday, he said he would have "no comment" for this story. I regret the delay, which had left the misimpression that the department had not bothered to reply.-js)