Embattled Sen. John Ensign's admission of an affair with the wife of a staff aide made him vulnerable to blackmail by hostile spy services or other interests eager to pry secrets from his position on sensitive national security committees, veteran counterintelligence officials say.

Ensign is a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, including its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, giving him and his staff access to extremely sensitive national defense information.

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.

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.

* "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."

It's not every day that a traitor writes a memoir.  

Kim Philby, the notorious Soviet agent in the senior ranks of the British secret service, did. But that was from the safety of his Moscow apartment. 

John Walker ranks himself above Philby, not to mention American turncoats Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen and Jonathan Pollard, in a new memoir, "My Life as a Spy."

And he may be right. A chief warrant officer in the Navy, in 1968 Walker began selling the Russians communications codes that allowed Moscow to track U.S. warships, including nuclear submarines. Eventually, he dragged his wife, brother, son and best friend into the scheme.

Walker was arrested in 1985, the so-called "Year of the Spy," and is serving a life sentence at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, in Springfield, Mo.

Why did he do it?

"I cannot classify myself as a visionary or idealist, but just a simple citizen who became angry by the government lies," he writes.

"I did conclude that the US system of government was broken, so I felt justified in breaking some rules in order to help save it.... Why did I feel responsible or qualified to end the pattern of perpetual war? I cannot answer my own questions. But then, my insane stunt seemed to have worked. By the admission of both the US and the USSR, I provided the most extensive intelligence ever to the Soviets.

"With my material in hand, the Soviet government eventually realized the US planned no attack upon them, so my actions have contributed greatly to the Soviet Union's decision to end the Cold War."   

Or so he says.

I figured my friend Pete Earley would be in a good position to evaluate Walker's claims. A former reporter at The Washington Post, Earley is the author of "Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring,"  the definitive work on the case, which became a New York Times bestseller and much-watched TV miniseries.

Here's what he had to say.
 

"If nothing else, John Walker Jr. is consistent.

"More than 20 years ago when I interviewed him, he argued that Time magazine and other U.S. media regularly revealed top secrets and damaged our nation's security, so why should he be blamed for damage he did by selling the KGB classified information for nearly eighteen years?

"After making the same tired excuse of, "We were not at war with the Soviet Union" and the "Cold War is a game played by politicians and generals," Walker explains that he simply decided to cash in and do what anyone with any sense was doing.

"He takes delight in bragging how "K-Mart had better security than the U.S. Navy," and proudly describes how his policy of K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple Stupid - enabled him to steal the keylists and schematics for every major code machine used by the U.S. military and deliver them to our enemies during the height of the Cold War.

"Just as he did in his jail house interviews with me, he blames his alcoholic and emotionally distraught wife, Barbara, for driving him into the KGB arms, and claims that he was simply trying to help out his hapless brother, Arthur, his hollow best friend, Jerry Whitworth, and his own dim-witted son, Michael, by drawing them into what became our nation's most damaging spy ring.

"In a mean-spirited final chapter, he claims his brother Arthur would have gone free if he had not cowed to his wife and had insisted that they sell their house to pay for a better defense team, concluding that Arthur has only himself to blame.

"The only new revelations in this autobiography are a sympathetic portrait that he attempts to draw of himself by claiming his life would have been markedly different - though nevertheless just as exciting - if he had married better.

"He also drops names, such as the great Soviet Cold Warrior, Gen. Boris Solomatin, and former KGB great and Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov.

"Walker makes it sound as if they sought him out personally for advice when, in fact, during our interviews, he chuckled when I asked him if he knew any of his KGB handlers, explaining that he had no idea who they were and stating that one didn't ask for resumes when committing treason. At the time, he had no idea who Andropov was and, in his own words, he explained that he did not see himself as an intelligence source, but simply as a thief. 

"'Look, I don't know why people make such a big deal of me committing espionage,'" he told me. "'If I had worked in a bank, I would have stolen money. If I had access to drugs, I would have sold them.'"

Earley says Walker thinks he did us a favor.

"In what has to be the most revealing rationalization of all, Walker explains that his treachery actually did the U.S. a huge favor. By sharing vital military secrets with the KGB, Walker argues that the Kremlin realized just how badly it was losing the arms race and how pitiful Soviet forces would be if challenged by the U.S. It was one of the key reasons, he insists, the Cold War ended."

"My Life as a Spy" was published to little notice on Oct. 28.

Child's file shows that in her OSS application, she included a note expressing regret she left an earlier department store job hastily because she did not get along with her boss, said William Cunliffe, an archivist who has worked extensively with the OSS records at the National Archives.

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."

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.