A former deep-cover CIA operative says the spy agency's congressional briefers routinely shade the truth or hide facts altogether from congressional overseers.

"They mumble, they dissemble, and there's a lot of  'on the one hand . . .'" said the retired official, who spent 25 years as a CIA operations officer but now writes blistering, unauthorized critiques of the spy agency using the pen name "Ishmael Jones."

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.

Last September, when the military-media complex was all-atwitter with Bob Woodward's revelations of a revolution in counterterrorism methods, I found myself talking with a confidante of Gen. David Petraeus at an off-the-record cocktail hour.

Petraeus was then commander of coalition forces in Iraq, and was generally being credited with developing a breakthrough technology to find and track terrorist suspects that was so secret that Woodward couldn't reveal the details.

But according to my interlocutor, Petraeus, whom he had talked to hours earlier, gave complete credit for the counterterror revolution to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for developing and running the program, which is still shrouded in mystery.

A retired Pakistani general confided a deep worry to a friend in Washington last week: that some young officers in Pakistan's regular army have become increasingly sympathetic over the past few years to the Taliban and their brand of radical Islam.

While he had no numbers or percentages of officers sympathetic to the Taliban, the possibility of any defections raises questions about the reliability of these officers during any sort of push against the Taliban by the Pakistani army.

You'd think that the nation's number one domestic counterterrorism agency would have better things to do than yap at authors and publishers about using the bureau's official seal on their books.

But I.C. Smith, a retired senior FBI counterintelligence agent who wrote a very critical book about the bureau in 2004, just found out otherwise.

A few weeks ago an FBI lawyer instructed Smith that he had to remove the FBI seal from his Web site, including one on the jacket of his 2004 book, "INSIDE: A Top G Man Exposes Spies, Lies and Bureaucratic Bungling Inside the FBI."    

The G-lawyer also told Smith that the publisher of his book, Thomas Nelson, Inc., would also be instructed "that if the book is reprinted, the cover be redesigned to remove the FBI Seal."

A top private risk analysis firm gave embattled Pakistan a three-in-ten chance of a military coup even before the latest offensive by Taliban rebels.

New York-based Eurasiagroup, whose head of research is top former State Department, White House National Security Council and CIA official David F. Gordon, said in a little noticed, late April report that it was more than possible the Pakistani Army would step in to stabilize the rebel-threatened country.

The premise of  Eurasiagroup's "scenario" is that "the global economic crisis proves too much to handle for the political leadership in Pakistan."

The report was evidently written before Islamic Taliban rebels overran the Swat Valley this month, forcing the army into barricaded camps and threatening the viability of the Islamabad government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Presumably, the risk of a military coup is far greater now.

War reenactors, especially those who don the Blue and the Gray on weekends for play-action Civil War battles, are ubiquitous in the summertime, especially in the eastern United States.

But an enterprising college journalism student recently discovered young men in New Jersey, including veterans of Iraq and Somalia, practicing for an advanced counterinsurgency fantasy war game on a U.S. Army base in Upstate New York - with the blessing of military officials who've found the contests a good recruiting tool.

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. 

Saying she still has no idea who sent her a box of dead fish, former top homeland security bioweapons official Maureen McCarthy says she has resigned from the department and begun legal action to clear her name.

Occasionally breaking into tears during a 45-minute telephone interview, McCarthy called her resignation "involuntary" and said she had suffered severe financial distress since being suspended without pay in February over the incident.