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.

What do you call a tsunami that falls on a deserted island?

A seismic event.

George Will's call for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, which surfaced on Aug. 31, seems to fit that category. It hit Washington when the chattering classes were at the beach, toughing out stay-cations or busy putting their kids in school.

So let's take another look.

The release of Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi from a Scottish jail has opened cash spigots from Tripoli to London, but a Justice Department spokesman says the Libyan Pan Am 103 bomber could be arrested again, along with other unnamed conspirators.

"There remains an open indictment in the District of Columbia and an open investigation," Richard Kolko, an FBI agent and Justice Department spokesman, told SpyTalk Thursday.

You can imagine the conversation Tom Ridge had with his literary agent last year.

"Governor, I've just finished your manuscript. Wonderful -- all that fascinating stuff about how the government works -- or doesn't!"  (Laughs.)

"All those alphabet agencies - NSC, ODNI, NCTC - my God. How did you keep all of them straight?" (Chuckles.)

Pakistan denied Wednesday that any of its nuclear facilities had been attacked, while the author of the original allegation said his words were being ripped out of context.

Shaun Gregory, a U.K.-based expert on Pakistan, reported in a prestigious West Point, N.Y. counterterrorism journal that extremist militants had attacked nuclear arms facilities three times over the past two years.

Former Air Force Maj. Matthew Alexander, whose questioning of a captured terrorist led to the elimination al Qaeda's top man in Iraq, said a pervasive "intolerance" of Arabs and Muslims among American interrogators led to abuses at Abu Ghraib and other prisons.

"Soldiers referred to them as rag heads and so on," Alexander said during a Monday talk at the International Spy Museum, in Washington, D.C. to promote his book, "How To Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq."

Recent jihadist attacks on Pakistan's nuclear facilities did not threaten the security of the weapons inside, an American intelligence official says.

Speculation mounted Wednesday about the imminent release of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the lone Libyan convicted in connection with the 1989 terrorist bombing of PanAmerican flight 103, following a prison visit by the Scottish Justice Secretary.

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.

Most people probably think of terrorists as natural born killers.

But in the confession of Ajmal Lasab, the only Pakistani gunman to survive the terror attack on Mumbai last November, a more complex picture emerges.

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.

School visits seem to have a strange effect on Condoleezza Rice's brain.

The former secretary of state and White House national security advisor has made more controversial remarks in the few months since she's been out of office than the eight years she was in it.

Last week was her attention-getting elocution on torture at Stanford. Now comes a transcript of her remarks on Sunday, May 3, at an event sponsored by Jewish Primary Day School in the nation's capital.

Revisiting the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Rice said top Bush administration officials were ignorant about al Qaeda when the terrorists struck the World Trade Center towers and Pentagon. 

The feds finally got their hombre.

This week's indictment of the famously elusive anti-Castro terrorist Luis Carriles Posada, a onetime CIA agent and professional counterrevolutionary, is the legal equivalent of driving a wooden stake into his heart.

But maybe it's wrong.

Fingers are pointing every which way in the wake of Monday's blood-soaked assault on a police academy in Lahore, Pakistan, that left 27 cadets dead and twice that number wounded.  

But according to the usually reliable Asia Times Online, the attack represented an ominous development in the already perilous Pakistan security situation.

Quoting "militant sources," the magazine said the raid was "the first major operation of the new nexus comprising al-Qaeda, Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud and Punjabi militants."

A story in Sunday's Washington Post depicting Guantanamo prisoner files in "disarray" is wrong, says the former Pentagon official in charge of terrorist detainee affairs.

According to the Jan. 25 account, Charles D. "Cully" Stimson, who served as deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs in 2006-2007, "said he had persistent problems in attempts to assemble all information on individual cases."

Only "threats to recommend the release or transfer of a detainee" persuaded the CIA to "cough up a sentence or two," Stimson was quoted as saying.

But in a brief interview to double-check his statement Monday afternoon, Stimson maintained, "I never said they were in disarray."

"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." 

A little over a decade ago I sat in the living room of Hamid Gul, a still-powerful former head of Pakistani intelligence, listening to him rail in cold fury about the United States.

A hawk-like man with laser black eyes, Gul was known as the "father of the Taliban" for his role in midwifing the fundamentalist Afghan coalition into a fighting force that took Kabul and ruled the country with a puritanical zeal until ousted by the U.S. in the wake of 9/11.

Now he's been fingered by the U.S. as one of four former top Pakistani intelligence officers supporting Islamic terrorism.

The U.S. warned India, perhaps even twice, about impending attacks on Mumbai from Pakistan, according to anonymous senior officials.

But what about Pakistan?  If the reports are correct, did U.S. intelligence warn the Pakistan government that terrorists were about to launch the Mumbai assault from its territory?

If not, why not?

And if so, what did Pakistan do about it?

That seems to be the most obvious element missing from the story so far, that terrorists launched their assault from Pakistan.

The effect of saying that India was warned in advance is to portray its security officials as incompetent, if not derelict. (Some have already resigned.) 

In other words, it tends to spread at least some of the blame for the attacks to Indian officials, at least temporarily, and away from the growing conclusion that Pakistan is to blame for the tragedy.

I have no reason to doubt that a "senior U.S. official" - probably Condoleezza Rice, en route to India -- told the Associated Press that the "Bush administration warned India before last week's brutal attacks in Mumbai that terrorists appeared to be plotting a mostly waterborne assault on its financial capital."

Other unnamed officials, including "a senior counterterrorism official" and Pakstani intelligence sources, chimed in along the same lines, adding details to the allegation that at least some of the terrorists came by sea.

Some news organizations had already found Pakistanis who said they saw suspicious looking men come ashore.

"Waterborne" can only mean from Karachi, the sprawling Pakistani port teeming with al Qaeda-linked terrorists and groups backing armed assaults on India over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Were Pakistani security forces provided with the alleged U.S. warning as well, so they could hunt down the plotters?

Or did the U.S. withhold it, on grounds that Pakistani military, intelligence and security units, riddled with extremist Muslim spies, cannot be trusted?

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, aboard Air Force one with President Bush en route to North Carolina, declined to answer any questions about the affair.

"I'm not able to talk about any of our intelligence community -- any of their cooperation with any other country," she told reporters, according to the White House transcript.  "It would not be appropriate for me to do so, so I have to decline to comment on that."

Likewise, a CIA spokesman declined comment, saying the agency "does not, as a rule, publicly discuss exchanges with other intelligence services."

The National Intelligence Directorate did not immediately respond to e-mail inquiries.

A Pakistani spokesman said he would need more time to provide a definitive answer to the question.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, interviewed Tuesday by CNN's Larry King, said his government was "in no way responsible" for Mumbai.

"Even the White House and the American CIA have said that today," he asserted -- falsely -- according to an advance transcript.  "The state of Pakistan is of course not involved. We're part of the victims, Larry."

Zaradi also said he "would not know" if Lashkar-e-Toiba, the militant, Pakistan-based group fighting to end Indian dominance of Kashmir, was involved with the Mumbai suicide-massacre.
 

"If indeed they are involved, we would not know," he said.

"Again, they are people who operate outside the system. They operate like -- al Qaeda, for instance, is not state-oriented. They operate something on that mechanism, and we would love to -- I've already offered to India full cooperation on this incident, and we intend to do that."

Zadari also suggested no one found to be involved would be turned over to India.

"If we had the proof, we would try them in our courts, we would try them in our land and we would sentence them," he said.


(For more on this, see tonite's PBS show, WorldFocus.)

"Look at their targets. The two hotels they attacked--the Taj and the Oberoi--are old, iconic Indian hotels. It used to be true that these places were affordable only by Westerners. But this is no longer true, and it's one of the big changes over the last ten years in India. The five-star hotels today are filled with Indians. Businessmen, wedding receptions, parties...these are real meeting places now, and even those who cannot afford to stay there often pass through the lobby."

"I think he is correct, and besides, the real business center of Mumbai is now out by the airport and this is where the 'Western' hotels he mentions are primarily located.  So in this sense, if their targets were Westerners, while many would be, and were, in the Taj and Oberoi, the real target-rich environment would be where Zakaria mentions."

"Indeed, Pakistan's intelligence service has waged a proxy war against India using terrorists for decades. The two nuclear powers have avoided a large-scale exchange, but the Pakistani ISI has repeatedly sponsored or aided terrorist groups targeting civilians in India. For example, Indian authorities were quite vocal in blaming Pakistan for the July 11, 2006 train bombings, which killed more than 200."

Pentagon Counterterror Teams Go Deep  

It's interesting to speculate on why the expanded operations of Pentagon counterterror teams surfaced in the New York Times today. But one of them has to be that the noses of CIA and State Department officials remain severely out of joint from an initiative launched right after the  9/11 attacks by President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe," write Times reporters Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti.

"By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda's extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military's vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan."

According to the Times, a 2004 order identified "15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said."  

Soon enough, American ambassadors, who are supposed to be the top U.S. official in a foreign country, grew increasingly annoyed by Pentagon "cowboys" zipping in and out, congressional committees heard.

But if only because the State Department, and the CIA, couldn't keep DoD out of their sandboxes, they have been supporting the operations, the Times said.

A number of CIA veterans, however, say that the military teams are too often ill equipped for the missions, in terms of language abilities and knowledge of local customs and mores.

And they wonder what will happen when - inevitably, they say - a solider in mufti is caught red-handed in a place like Pakistan or Turkey, where nationalist feelings run high. Show trials - and the threat of executions (not to mention waterboarding) - are not out of the question.

Not that CIA assassins or kidnappers would be treated any better - or  know their way around a foreign country better -- than a veteran Army Special Forces operative, they also concede.

In any event, there's plenty of work to go around to keep everybody busy.

"It is far too easy to criticize CIA," a longtime Special Forces and Delta operative told me last year, "but all their renditions have resulted in far less than 100 detentions.  For an outfit like al Qaeda, which trained tens of thousands in Afghanistan, that doesn't amount to many at all."

Manchurian Candidates, Saudi Style

Tucked into the back of Sunday's New York Times Magazine is a fascinating piece on the Saudi way of dealing with former al Qaeda operatives (some captures, some inherited from Guantanamo).

"Brainwashing lite," the Chinese might call it. Or "re-education," what the North Vietnamese termed the communist dogma they poured into the heads of the southern brethren they defeated in 1975, usually in brutal work camps.

The Saudies have a kinder, gentler way. They board their charges in comfortable seaside dormitories, give them electronic toys and stipends, and talk them out of jihad by challenging their religious rationales for choosing guns and bombs.   

It seems to work, by the students' accounts, anyway.

Writer Katherine Zoepf, who visited the classes, quotes Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, who says the methods are "consistent with Saudi history, in that you try through nonviolent means to cajole, to bribe, to buy off the opposition."

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.

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 lawyer for 38 American victims of a quarter century old Libyan terrorist attack says he's not joining the celebration over a Senate bill that seemed to open the door to a restoration of full diplomatic and business relations between Washington and the erstwhile rogue state.

Attorney Thomas  Fay, who represents victims of the La Belle discotheque attack carried out against GIs in West Germany by Libyan agents in 1986, says he will not remove the liens he filed against American companies who have budding business relations with the North African police state ruled by Muammar Qaddafi.

Last week Congress unanimously approved legislation, enthusiastically backed by the White House and an organization representing families of the 180 Americans killed in 1989 by Libyan agents' sabotage of PanAm Flight 103, which would establish a universal settlement mechanism to resolve all U.S. cases of Libya's terrorism.    

Kara Weipz, spokesperson for the Families of the Victims of Pan Am 103, applauded the legislation as "a final step toward resolving the last payment by Libya.  The Pan Am 103 families urge Secretary Rice to act swiftly and finalize an agreement with Libya that fairly resolves all claims against Libya."    

But Fay, who represents 38 of the La Belle victims, denounced a statement by Washington  superlawyer Jacob Stein, another lawyer representing Libyan victims, that seemed to speak for all the La Belle families as well as the PanAm 103 victims.

"Stein had no authority from my clients to make an announcement in which they purported to speak for all of the La Belle victims," Fay told me.

He added, "No liens will be released until all of our clients are paid."

In March, Fay filed liens that put such as firms as Blank & Rome, the Livingston Group and White & Case on notice that assets from Libyan contracts could be seized to compensate victims of terrorist attacks that have been linked to their new client, Libya.  
   

Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, who resigned last year after two years as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, today described the military commissions system as fatally "tainted" by politics and designed to produce guilty verdicts, no matter what the costs.       

The possibility of the system delivering "credible verdicts is doubtful," Davis said Tuesday in a remarkable interview on NPR's Diane Rehm Show.

"The process has been so tainted, such a black eye to the country, that we have to make every effort possible to have an open trial...

"I'm afraid that what has happened, though, is that we've had a rush, in order to get things done before the election, rather than taking the time -- and getting evidence declassified in order to have an open trial is a frustrating, time consuming process, but in my view a necessary step if these things are going to have credibility.

Morris said the politicization of the system began at the top, with the appointment of  Susan Crawford, a "political appointee" with no time in uniform, to run the military commissions.