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.

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."

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 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 lawyer for a defendant in the trial of more than two dozen CIA operatives charged with kidnapping in Italy is trying to stir up interest in his client's plight just as President Obama arrives in Rome for a G8 summit meeting of the world's industrialized nations.

Mark Zaid represents Sabrina Desousa, who was listed as a diplomat at the American embassy in Rome and U.S. consulate in Milan at the time of the 2003 kidnapping of an al Qaeda suspect known as Abu Omar.

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.

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.

It sounds like a sequel to "The Italian Job": a band of ex-CIA operatives sets up a consulting firm to investigate corporate fraud -- then gets ripped off in a con job by one of their own.

But the facts surrounding a suit filed in D.C. Superior Court this week are all too true.

The partners of TD International, led by a former CIA agent expelled from France in a 1995 spy scandal, have filed suit against a partner who they say embezzled over a million dollars out of them through a false billing scam.

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.

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.

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.

* "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."

Iraqi officials are howling about Bob Woodward's new book like Captain Renault in Casablanca: They are shocked that the CIA has been spying on them.

What a hoot. 

Maybe here, some Americans will truly be shocked, of course, and outraged.

Attention, K-Mart shoppers: Iraq is in the Middle East.

The Baghdad government is an Iranian Trojan Horse, bulging with Tehran agents, including, perhaps, the Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself.

His government is a viper's nest of intrigue, as befits a remnant of the Byzantine Empire. It owes its existence to Iran and Syria.

"The prime minister spent long years of exile in Syria and his most important ally in Iraq is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq," notes the respected British military journalist, Patrick Coburn, "which was founded on Iran's initiative in Tehran in 1982."

They're used to spies.

"They will be used to Syrian and Iranian security monitoring their activities," Cockburn observes. 

But he makes a more salient point.

"Overall, the extent of U.S. surveillance of its Shia and Kurdish allies in Iraq reveals a deep anxiety in Washington that, in supporting a government in Baghdad dominated by Shia Islamic parties, it has promoted a government that is closer to Iran than the U.S."

So of course we're spying on them!

The only surprise is whether it's true, as Woodward alleges, that the CIA has been proficient enough to plant spies -- and eavsdropping technology -- amid the prime minister's inner circle.

To date, most accounts from intelligence sources and former CIA officers who have served in Baghdad paint the agency's spy operations there as extremely limited.

The CIA has only itself to blame for further erosion of its authority in the intelligence overhaul order signed by President Bush today.

"I don't see a lot of change here," said Mark Lowenthal, a former CIA assistant director. He described the revised order as an "organizational update" that seemed "underwhelming" after months of speculation inside the government about how the powers of various agencies might shift.

The next time you're asked to give information to a government agency or official, you not only won't know where that information might go, you may not even know who's really asking the question in the first place. What effect these changes ultimately will have is unclear because the Department of Justice has previously issued a secret legal opinion saying the President does not have to follow executive orders. This kind of concentrated power, exercised in secret, is a lit fuse with our Constitution likely in danger of being burned.

UPDATE: DNI chief Mike McConnell called the order, "truly a historic day for our Community and the nation."

This Executive Order is the next, necessary step in intelligence reform and upholds the key themes of intelligence reform, namely: that the sum of our parts will produce better intelligence than each intelligence element individually; that we need a dedicated official - the DNI - with the responsibility and authority to lead and integrate this Community; and that the decentralized structure of the Community should remain intact, with most IC elements remaining embedded in cabinet departments.

Chinese intelligence has ordered hotel chains to wiretap the internet communications of foreign visitors in Beijing during the Olympics Games, a U.S. Senator charged today.

At a news conference in the Capitol, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan, produced orders to the hotels chains, allegedly originating with the Chinese Public Security Bureau, or PSB.

"The Chinese government has put in place a system to spy on and gather information about every guest at hotels where Olympic visitors are staying," Brownback told reporters.

"This means journalists, athletes' families, human rights advocates and other visitors will be subjected to invasive intelligence gathering by the Chinese Public Security Bureau."

Brownback said the hotel chains had provided him with additional documentation since he first heard about the eavesdropping demand "several months ago."

"Over the past few months, we've had the chance to gather more information directly from the source, the sources," Brownback told reporters. "As it stands now, separate international hotel chains have confirmed the existence of this order. More significantly, we received separate copies of the text of this order translated."

Aides handed out translations of the purported PSB documents.

Brownback called on China to reverse its plans and said he would introduce a resolution condemning them.

We reported here over the weekend that China was preparing a well-organized espionage campaign against foreign visitors.

The major espionage activity at this year's games will take place far from the fields of play, in Beijing's hotels, with China's agents shadowing important foreign officials and businessmen and women. They have already shown a penchant for targeting the laptops and Blackberries of Western officials. See the whole story today in my weekly SpyTalk column.

U.S. security officials are worried that China's spy services will have a Olympics field day next month stealing the Blackberrys of  American officials and businessman.

Yet another e-spy case has surfaced in the London Times, which detailed the seduction of a top aide to Prime Minister Gordon Brown by a "Chinese temptress." They met at a discotheque last January, according to the Times. When she left his room, his Blackberry was gone.

Chinese hacking expert Shawn Carpenter told me the newspaper's acccount rings all too true.

"I wouldn't be surprised in the least if this senior aide was targeted. . .The PRC Ministry of State Security / PLA (Peoples Liberation Army) have very high technical capabilities in the realm of hardware hacking and reverse engineering."

A former CIA operative's account of how the spy agency wreaked vengeance on him for his unauthorized expose of American bungling during the fall of Saigon is heading to the flat screen.

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.