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"I resigned against my will," she said. "I had no income, and I couldn't use my accrued annual leave" for cash. "By resigning I got that back," she said, and could begin to take steps to rebuild her shattered career, starting with retrieving her security clearance, yanked by DHS in March.

McCarthy, who holds a PhD in chemical physics, would be virtually unemployable as a weapons of mass destruction specialist without a security clearance. At DHS, she rose to the position of  intelligence advisor to Secretary Michael Chertoff on WMD. 

"There has been a lot of financial harm to her," said her lawyer, Jon L. Roberts, of Reston, Va., who said he has filed an appeal with the federal Merit Systems Protection Board to obtain McCarthy's back pay and expunge "unfounded allegations" from her security file.

DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa confirmed that McCarthy was "no longer an employee" but said federal privacy laws prevented her from commenting further.

McCarthy's travails began one night in early February when she found a box on the doorstep of her Fifteenth Street NW townhouse in the District. It had the return address of the Crystal City, Va., office of a former employer, the Battelle Memorial Institute, so she brought it inside and opened it without question.

Inside were two frozen fish in zip-locked bags --"big teeth, not very pleasant," she said -- and a threatening note: "Hey, I love you so much I just wanted to put food on your plate. Don't mock me. Ha, ha, ha."

McCarthy said yesterday she called the DHS Office of Security, which told her to bring the package in the next day.

"They said, 'Ok, bring it into the SCIF' -- the Secure Compartmented Intelligence Facility --  'in the morning.'"

She stored the fish in her freezer and, after "a sleepless night," recovered them in the morning, she said. That's when she noticed, "a film of powder mixed with ice crystals" inside the bags. 

"It never dawned on me that it wasn't baking powder or something to mask the smell" of the fish, she said, but took pictures of them.

But her troubles were just beginning.

She drove to work at a DHS office on Vermont Avenue downtown with the package in the trunk, she said, parked in the garage - under a ventilation shaft, it turned out - and notified security guards of what she had.

Not long after, she was suspended, and then, the following month, suspended without pay or a security clearance, over her handling of the incident.

She says she gave the FBI "a long statement," which included "the photos, possible leads and contacts" to follow up.

"They said 'We'll be in touch next week,' but I never heard from them again," she said.

On the FBI's advice she also reported the incident to the D.C. police.

"I have no idea" who sent the package," McCarthy said Thursday. Rumors flew that an ex-husband or boyfriend had sent it, but McCarthy said she was on "quite reasonable terms" with  her ex-husband and had had no personal relationship problems that might have triggered the dirty trick.

But even her allies concede that she had made a number of enemies during her time in DHS's Science and Technology  Directorate section with an imperious, demanding personality.

One supporter, even while defending McCarthy's scientific credentials and dedication to homeland security, said "she could be mean."

Another top former DHS official, speaking only on condition of anonymity, said McCarthy had "initiated a disastrous set of policies toward the National Labs" that had infuriated congressional overseers and resulted in "a mass exodus of talent and loss of funding."

But McCarthy, a political appointee who managed to become a federal senior executive service bureaucrat at DHS, continued to advance during Secretary Chertoff's tenure.

"Maureen was really good at stroking male egos and playing the wounded party," the top former DHS official maintained. "It seemed to work well on older guys. She also was pretty good at getting things done when (a) she wanted to and (b) was told exactly what to do."

He and two other former DHS officials called her "high maintenance," but a McCarthy defender, also pleading anonymity, called such comments "sexist."

McCarthy denied yesterday that she had caused "a mass exodus" during her watch, but acknowledged she had had "a really rough time" while taking part in "reorganizing" the Science and Technology Directorate.

High maintenance?

"Yeah," she sighed, "I have high standards."

"I had high enemies," she added. "I was passionate about the department."

None of which fully explains the cancellation of her security clearance, a draconian punishment more fit for the careless exposure of highly classified information or an act of moral turpitude.

Neither McCarthy nor her lawyer understands the reasons for the severity of her punishment, either.

Which only means the dead fish lady's story may be far from dead.