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.

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.

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.

"But a 2007 government study found that 61 percent of the office's investigations since 2000 had been aimed at just one target: Cuba," Bardach reports. "Between 2000 and 2005, OFAC penalties for violations of the Cuban embargo represented more than 70 percent of all the penalties the office imposed."

"At the hearing, OFAC acknowledged that it had just four employees searching for the funds of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, as opposed to more than 20 full-time investigators charged with hunting down suspected violators of the embargo."

"Iranian banks illegally shifted billions of dollars through American financial institutions in recent years, and authorities suspect some of the money may have been used to finance Iran's nuclear and missile programs."

"It 'stripped' information that would have identified the transfers in order to deceive American financial institutions, which are barred from doing business with Iranian banks ..."

"This is the pipeline at its best. One simply has to shift addresses, at least on paper, the companies go again, and the pipeline is unclogged and continues to carry its vital products. The flexibility of the pipeline and its ability to adapt and reroute itself in a very short period of time is one of its greatest strengths." 

It had to happen someday:  A Middle Eastern oil exporter glimpsing the bottom of the barrels.

The booming United Arab Emirates, facing declining oil reserves, will be issuing a call for bids early next year for the construction of "several" nuclear power plants, the Paris-based Intelligence Online (IO) newsletter is reporting.
 
Westinghouse (now a U.S.-Japanese company) and France's Areva "are geared up to bid for the huge contract," it said.

The Bush administration has favored the deal, arguing that it's an object lesson on U.S. support for peaceful nuclear power development in the region.    

"This is a real counter-example to what Iran is doing," a senior US official was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. "We're seeking commitments from nations within the Middle East."

The clock's running out for the Bushies, however. As my CQ colleague Matt Korade pointed out Dec. 9:

"Under Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (PL 83-703), Congress must be given 90 days to approve this kind of nuclear trade deal. Because there is not enough time left in the current session, the Bush administration has indicated it probably will not submit the agreement for approval before the next Congress takes office, a congressional aide said."

There are other hurdles.

Last week Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced a resolution (HR 7316)  "that would bar any agreement or the issuing of licenses to export nuclear technology unless the president certifies to Congress that the UAE has met certain requirements," as Korade described it.

They include "taking effective action to prohibit the transfer of sensitive technology to Iran for a one-year period and enforcing U.S. sanctions and non-proliferation law."

But an earlier effort isn't working very well, Intelligence Online says.

Under pressure from the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, the UAE last year adopted a law on export controls designed to prevent the transfer of classified American technology to Iran.

But the law "has failed by far to put a halt to trade between Dubai and Tehran," despite U.N. sanctions, IO reported.

As for the Obama team, it's not commenting on the issue.

But it's interesting to note that the French company in the running for the UAE's business, Areva, is represented by Covington & Burling, the Washington superlawyer firm where Obama's attorney general-designate, Eric Holder, worked until recently.

On the other hand, Areva is competing for major contracts here, IO reported, and can't afford to alienate members of Congress

Victor Comras, a longtime State Department diplomat and trade expert, argues that plunging oil prices and chaos in the international finance system could force Iran back to the bargaining table over its nuclear program.

Economic sanctions have also begun to show results, Comras said, as reports surfaced that the Bush administration was forcing Israel to stand down from plans to attack the Islamic republic.

"Iran's economy is already in shambles," Comras wrote for the widely read Counterterrorism Blog Tuesday.

"The downturn in the price of oil has left Iran's government with serious budget shortfalls and significantly reduced its ability to support and subsidize its extensive ongoing energy sector and other infrastructure projects," he said.

"It has also significantly reduced the profit incentives that previously enticed foreign businesses and banks to compete for Iran's business, even when that meant irritating their American relationships.

"Iran's cost of doing business is soaring, and the stepped up measures adopted by the U.S. Treasury Department, and the US campaign to dissuade financial dealings with Iran, are now actually having a significant impact! More and more Western banks are reducing their Iran exposure and pulling out of the Iran marketplace. Even non Western banks in Dubai are beginning to view triangular transactions with Iran more cautiously. These factors may serve to enhance the chances of engaging Iran in a more constructive dialogue on its nuclear program than previously."

Read the rest here.

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.

Ahmed Chalabi, the erstwhile Iraqi exile who intrigued with Pentagon officials and the media to create a casus belli for toppling Saddam Hussein, is up to his old tricks.

Chalabi's star plunged when it turned out Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, as the steady stream of informants he served up to the U.S. media maintained.  

After the 2003 occupation, the crafty Shiite's effort to play a leading, if not top, role in Iraqi politics ended in humility when he won few votes at the polls. He did snag fleeting positions, as a deputy prime minister, oil minister and then the official in charge of rebuilding the capital's utilities.

But in part because of suspicions that he was an Iranian secret agent, U.S. defense officials, American commanders in Iraq, and even his neoconservative champions began to shun him.

A Pentagon investigation did not end in charges being filed, but in May, NBC reported that U.S. officials had "cut off all contact with controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, the former favorite of Washington's once powerful neoconservatives," because of "unauthorized contacts with Iran's government."

Chalabi faded from the international spotlight, but now he's back in action big time, says Aram Roston, an NBC investigative reporter and author of "The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi." 

Tell me Ray Odierno is pulling a Halloween stunt.

He can't be serious: Does the general really think that by shouting "Boo!" in The Washington Post that Iran and its agents in Baghdad are going to run away?

The joke's on him. Baghdad politicians have gone into high Inspector Renault mode over the U.S. commander's charge that some Iraqi politicians are on the payroll of Iran.

Well, what a shock. Next you'll tell us mullahs wear turbans.

Ray, Ray, Ray: Think this through.  Bribes are beside the point. Most Iraqi Shia politicians don't need to be paid. That's just hummus.

Many of them, including our handpicked Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, welcome what sometimes looks like a slow-motion anschluss by their Iranian co-religionists.

Others say the Iraqis -- Arabs -- will never forfeit their patriotism to the Persian-Iranians in the interest of advancing shia hegemony. The two fought each other to a bloody pulp for most of the 1980s.

Still, it's a powerful force. To many shia, it's 1,400 years overdue: The Sunnis kept them down for centuries. Now the Shiites finally have the Sunni boot off their necks, thanks in no small measure to us, and they're not going to lie down under it again.

Iran is going to have a powerful say in Iraqi affairs, no less than we have a say in Mexico's -- and probably a lot more. 

Too bad for you, General, that Maliki & Co. were made a "sovereign" power by the Bush administration. Now they're taking it seriously. They're threatening to throw us out if we don't drop our insistence on prohibiting the Iraqi prosecution of Americans accused of criminal wrongdoing.

Odierno, in response, threatened that $6.3 billion in U.S. bilateral aid and $10 billion worth of military sales could be cut off without a finalized status-of-forces agreement by the end of the year.

Another big "boo." The Iraqis could call Odierno's bluff without breaking a sweat.

What a mess. The current kerfuffle is just the latest manifestation of the Bush administration's strategic blunder in so quickly toppling Iran's archenemy, the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, after chasing the Sunni Taliban from power in Afghanistan.

Now the Iranians are poised to make Baghdad into their satrap via their U.S.-backed mates.  Does that define terrible irony or what?

And there's not much Ray Odierno can do about it. Like King Canute, he's shouting at the incoming tide.

Lawrence Di Rita, former spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, escalated his attack today on a CIA officer's charge that Pentagon dithering wasted a chance to wipe out top al Qaeda figures in northern Iraq back in 2002.

In my original story, published late last night, I quoted Di Rita's objection to the allegation by Charles "Sam" Faddis, who led a CIA team into northern Iraq following the 9/11 attacks, that  the Pentagon's "endless planning and delays" foiled a chance to wipe out a band of al Qaeda leaders who were fleeing American bombs in Afghanistan.

After reading that piece online, Di Rita had this further comment:

A few days ago I wrote a column trying to clear up the campaign debate over the value of having "direct talks" with Iran, North Korea, etc.  

The Obama-Biden team, I wrote, had not been clear about what it means, which I thought opened them to phony charges of "appeasement."

What both sides should agree on is what "direct talks" mean, for the good of the country, if not themselves. It does not mean, as Obama has carelessly implied in some interviews, sitting down with, say, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, without pre-summit talks.

Of course, there are always pre-summit talks, also called "preparation," and these are done -- Yes, Virginia - without preconditions.  Given all the e-mail I've gotten,  I guess I didn't make that clear.

As Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who refined "direct talks" with their secret dialogue with China, have often said, you cannot find out what the other guy wants, and tell him what you want, without first sitting down "without preconditions."

Think of it in terms of  Tony and Phil, in The Sopranos. First they send emissaries to lay out their position. If they still have problems, then they have the sit-down. If that doesn't work, then they apply a little pressure.

If that doesn't work, then they whack the guy. But hey, ya gotta try to tawk first. 

A bipartisan study commission headed by two former U.S. senators is recommending that the United States tell Iran in no uncertain terms that it will suffer a nuclear attack if it launches a nuclear attack on anybody else.

"A nuclear deterrent strategy would require moving to a declared U.S. stance threatening the potential use of nuclear weapons should Iran ever use a nuclear weapon or allow its proxies to do so," said the report from The Bipartisan Policy Center, which is co-chaired by former senators Charles Robb, D-Va., and Dan Coats, R-Ind.

The attack on the American Embassy in Yemen serves notice that the recent claims of al Qaeda's demise were premature.

Only two days ago, the State Department's top counter-terrorism official claimed that al Qaeda was "imploding" and had "no popular appeal." 

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.

If it's hard to imagine Sarah Palin touting her foreign policy experience tonight, it's even harder to imagine her taking up where Dick Cheney left off at the CIA.

Cheney famously visited the spy agency to quiz its analysts about Iraq, Afghanistan and terrorist threats, and took a leading role in formulating the administration's national security policies and tools, from warrantless wiretaps to waterboarding.

But whether you agreed with him or not -- and many at the CIA did not -- Cheney brought heavyweight foreign policy credentials to the table as a former White House chief of staff, a Secretary of Defense (who oversaw the 100-hour war to evict Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1991), and as chairman and CEO of Haliburton, which has extensive business in the Middle East, during the five years before he was elected Vice President.

But Palin, it hardly needs saying, would be starting at ground zero when it comes to intelligence and foreign policy experience, notwithstanding Alaska's geographic proximity to Russia and her nominal command of the Alaska National Guard, which her most fervent supporters count as national security credentials.

As Vice President, she's not likely to rush out to CIA headquarters to challenge its analysis of Sunni splinter groups in Iraq. But if she did, it's fun to picture senior CIA officials greeting her while grinning through gritted teeth.

Of course, her reception there would be far different it came as President of the United States. 

In the face of such qualms, Palin may well take a swing tonight at critics of her foreign police experise, according to John McCain's strategist Steve Schmidt.

"People will hear about her reform-and-change message" and about energy and its links to national security, Schmidt told USA Today.

In stark contrast to Palin, it's easy to foresee Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, picking up where Cheney left off.

As my CQ colleague Jonathan Broder wrote back in January:

"Unlike many lawmakers who can't tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite, Biden is a man who not only knows the difference, but also can speak knowledgeably about the allegiances of different Iraqi tribes, the shifting demographics in the northern city of Kirkuk, and the finer points of the Iraq constitution."

Indeed, Biden may well play Al Gore to Obama's Bill Clinton, another president who had little interest in national security, to the extent that he eventually abolished his daily CIA briefing.

Despite Barack Obama's chairmanship of a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Europe, the first-term Illinois legislator has shown neglible interest in national security, as opposed to domestic, issues during his political career, which began with anti-poverty work in Chicago's South Side.

As for finding a parallel to a McCain-Palin administration, you have to go all the way back to Richard Nixon's choice of Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate.

Like Palin, Agnew had no foreign policy credentials to speak of, either. But Nixon, a two-time Vice President under World War Two hero Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, had a long and deep involvement in national security affairs, particularly in regard to the Soviet Union -- which evidently made the issue moot.

In any event, Agnew wasn't hired to play the role of statesman. He was dropped onto the electorate like a torpedo, with the single duty of blowing the Democrats out of the water, which he did with obvious relish until his resignation in disgrace over corruption allegations in 1974.

Considering Palin's likewise meager acquaintance with foreign policy, it looks like she's being positioned to follow in Agnew's wake, starting tonite.

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.

David Ignatius has the gem down low in today's Washington Post column, which describes a half-hearted, even feckless U.S. covert action program to send operatives from Iraq into Iran.

He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.

Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.

Even the most successful bombing raid would leave Iran with some nuclear capability. At best, proponents of this option admit, bombing would set back the [nuclear] program five years. During that time the [White House] expectation is that the Iranian people miraculously would unseat the country's ruling clergy and dismantle the nuclear program permanently.

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.

When Hoskinson listened to the interview, broadcast only in Arabic, he was startled to discover that ElBaradei had suddenly sliced years off his previous estimates of how long it would take Iran, if left alone, to build a bomb.

Nobody seemed to notice that ElBaradei said Saturday Iran would need only six months to a year to produce a nuclear weapon if it broke off talks and expelled IAEA inspectors. 

This seems like a huge shift: ElBaradei has consistently said that it could take Iran from three to eight years to make a weapon. Or sometimes, demurring on personal estimates but seeking to knock down the more inflammatory statements by some Bush administration figures, ElBaradei took refuge in the softer estimates on Iran by U.S. intelligence chief Mike McConnell and Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte. In October, for example, he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that Iran was "a few years" away from a bomb.   

Of course, last fall's controversial National Intelligence Estimate. also gave ElBaradei cover to throw cold water on the hawks' itching for an attack on Iran.   

But now it looks like ElBaradei's gone off the reservation. By the sound of last Saturday's interview, he's pulled much closer to what Israel is saying about the immediacy of the Iranian threat. 

Here's what he said on Al-Arabiya, the Saudi-owned station based in Dubai:

ELBaradei: "If Iran wants to turn to the production of nuclear weapons, it must leave the NPT [Nuclear Proliferation Treaty], expel the IAEA inspectors, and then it would need at least -- "

Interviewer: "How much time would it need?"

ElBaradei: "It would need at least six months to one year. Therefore, Iran will not be able to reach the point where we would wake up onemorning to an Iran with a nuclear weapon."

Six months is a lot better than a week, or overnight. But what happened to the eight-years estimated lag?

The interviewer seemed shocked by the sudden evaporation of seven years in ElBaradei's thinking, too. 

Interviewer: "Excuse me, I would like to clarify this for our viewers. If Iran decides today to expel the IAEA from the country, it will need six months..."

ElBaradei: "Or one year, at least --"

Interviewer: "-- to produce [nuclear] weapons?"

ElBaradei: "It would need this period to produce a weapon, and to obtain highly-enriched uranium in sufficient quantities for a single nuclear weapon." [...]

What's going on here?

My guess is that the IAEA chief may well be sick of recent Iranian behavior and wanted to send a message to Tehran (while cautioning Washington that Iran has the wherewithal to respond with fire).  

But the English-language media missed the first part.

In retrospect, ElBaradei's toughening -- if that's what it is -- should not come as such a surprise: Last month's IAEA report, after all, was tougher than previous ones, with a complaint that Iran was holding back on the inspectors.

ElBaradei, the most patient of diplomats, may be running out of patience with Iran.