CIA operatives called him "the mailman," because he could always deliver supples.

But Kyle "Dusty" Foggo will answer to a number now, at least for a while.

Foggo went down Monday, pleading to one count of fraud stemming from the Randall "Duke" Cunningham bribery scandal and turning the last page on a strange and tumultuous chapter in the history of the CIA.

Foggo, a CIA logistics specialist, was catapulted into the agency's third-ranking slot by CIA Director Porter J. Goss, a Republican congressman from Florida who had headed the House Intelligence Committee.  Goss brought along a cadre of loyal aides who tried to remake the spy service along more hawkish lines.  

They called themselves "the revolutionaries," said Tyler Drumheller, a senior former CIA official, in an interview last year.

The Bush administration's plan for a quick resumption of relations with oil-rich Libya spent another day in limbo Thursday, idled by Muammar el-Qaddafi's failure to pony up the nearly $2 billion he still owes to the American victims of his terrorist plots in the 1980s.

The erratic dictator promised to pay the money in exchange for the resumption of full diplomatic relations in a deal negotiated last month with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Because of Qadaffi's failure to make deposit this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday refused to consider the nomination of State Department official Gene A. Cretz to be ambassador to Libya, the first U.S. envoy there since diplomatic relations were broken in 1980.

Italy's former spy chief, on trial for participating with the CIA in the abduction of a Muslim cleric, says he wants Condoleezza Rice to testify in the case.

Niccolo Pollari, former head of the Italian military intelligence service SISMI, and eight other Italians participated in the 2003 "extraordinary rendition" of an al Qaeda suspect known as Abu Omar, prosecutors allege. They say Pollari worked with U.S. agents to snatch Omar, whose real name is Hassan Mustafa Omar Nasr, off a Milan street and whisk him to Egypt for interrogation.

Pollari says he wants Rice, the current U.S. secretary of state and U.S. national security adviser in 2003, to testify for him as a defense witness, the Italian news agency ANSA reported Wednesday.

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.

Despite bilateral agreements to cooperate in criminal investigations, the U.S. Department of Justice has ignored requests from Italian authorities for documents related to the trial-in-absentia of 26 Americans, all but one CIA agents, on charges of kidnapping.

The case stems from the "extraordinary rendition" of a suspected key al Qaeda operative in Italy, known as Abu Omar, who was snatched off a Milan street in 2003 and flown secretly to Egypt for interrogation. Omar, who is now free and remains in Egypt, claims he was tortured and has shown visiting journalists extensive scars on his body.

The Italian prosecutor trying the case, Armando Spataro, has repeatedly asked the Justice Department for information on, and to serve summons on, the charged Americans.

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." 

Pakistan is beginning to remind me of Cambodia.

Just as Pakistan gives shelter to the Taliban attacking us in Afghanistan, not to mention Osama Bin Laden, Cambodia in the 1960s provided a haven for the North Vietnamese Army, which was killing us across the border.

Just as in Pakistan, we "secretly" bombed Cambodia to get the North Vietnamese, killing innocent peasants.

When Cambodia's prime minister resisted American pressure to oust the North Vietnamese, he was overthrown by U.S.-backed generals.   

When we next sent combat units into Cambodia, there was a quantum leap of death, havoc -- and radicalization -- in the countryside, just as in Pakistan today.

Cambodia's communists now found the peasants to eager to sign up, just as Muslim extremist leaders are finding today in Pakistan.

With Russian bombers making a provocative visit to Venezuela Thursday, it looks like Nicaragua's erstwhile Marxist president, Daniel Ortega, is chomping at the bit to reprise his brief, and disastrous, star role in the cold war three decades ago.

Last week Ortega became the only national leader outside of Moscow to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, invaded by Russian troops in early August.

And the reaction from Washington was swift, if low key.
 
On Wednesday, U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez cancelled a long-planned visit to Nicaragua, scheduled for later this month, because "circumstances have changed," according to the American ambassador in Managua.

"The secretary's office said that now is not an appropriate moment for the visit because circumstances have changed," U.S. ambassador Robert Callahan told reporters.

Callahan declined to link the cancellation directly to Ortega's recognition of the two Black sea provinces.

But he said, "We have have publicly said regarding ... the Russian occupation of these two entities and the Russian recognition, that this is a violation of some of the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council."

Ortega may also be angling to get Moscow re-involved militarily in Nicaragua, observers said.

As a leader of the Marxist-dominated Sandinistas who took power in 1979, Ortega allied himself with Cuba and the Soviet Union, which supplied him with small arms, Mi-24 combat helicopters and some 2,000 portable ground-to-air SA-7 missiles, called MANPADS.

Ortega recently reneged on an agreement with Washington to destroy the missiles. 

Since he returned to power in 2006, Ortega has also aligned himself with Venezuela's firebrand president Hugo Chavez, who this week welcomed the nonstop arrival of two Russian strategic bombers from across the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. A Russian Navy flotilla has also scheduled a port call in November.
 
Ortega has also irritated Washington by accepting Iran's offer to undertake large-scale infrastructure projects in Nicaragua, the hemisphere's second poorest country after Haiti, but Tehran has yet to show any signs of fulfilling its promises.

On March 18, 2008 interception systems were discovered on the telephone lines of the Spanish, German, French and British delegations to the Council of Europe, a gathering of the heads of European Union governments. Ever since that date, the permanent R Committee, which oversees the operations of Belgian intelligence, has been trying in vain to find the eavesdroppers.

One of the more provocative but little noticed passages in Bob Woodward's fascinating new book, The War Within, reports on a meeting between Defense Secretary Robert Gates and retired Army General Jack Keane, the White House's secret, backchannel conduit to the Iraq War commander, Gen. David Petraeus.

President Bush and Vice president Cheney were using Keane, a plain spoken Irishman with a boxer's face, to get around the Joint Chiefs of Staff and communicate directly with Petraeus, who'd presided over a dramatic reduction in violence in Iraq.  It didn't hurt that Petraeus welcomed more troops in Baghdad, while the Chiefs worried about U.S. forces being stretched too thin to handle emergencies elsewhere in the world. He'd also managed the Sunni tribes' U-turn on al Qaeda in Iraq

On April 7, the end of Petraeus's tour of duty was on the horizon, and Keane was working hard to convince the brainy general to take over CENTCOM, where he'd be responsible for U.S. military forces across the entire region, instead of the far more comfortable, and traditionally prestigious, slot as supreme commander of NATO.

Keane also wanted Gen. Ray Odierno, the highly regarded, "unsung hero" of the turnaround in U.S. fortunes in Iraq, to take Petraeus's job in Baghdad.

Both men opposed any withdrawal timetables of U.S. forces in Iraq while the situation remained dicey there.

An Obama administration would find it difficult to oust either of them, Keane argued to Gates.

"Let's be frank about what's happening here," Keane says.

    "We are going to have a new administration. Do we want these policies continued or not? Do we want the best guys in there who were involved in these policies, who were advocates for them?"

Keane presses Gates.

    "Let's assume we have a Democratic administration and they want to pull this thing out quickly, and now they have to deal with General Petraeus and General Odierno. There will be a price paid to override them."

After his July visit to Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama said he would listen to the senior military leadership on Iraq, but not be bound by their advice.

    "It is clear that Gen. David Petraeus, in his role as U.S. commander in Iraq, prefers 'maximum flexibility' over a timeline for troops withdrawal. The notion is that either I do exactly what my military commanders tell me to do, or I am ignoring their advice. No, I am factoring in their advice and placing it into this broader strategic framework."  

An Obama spokesperson could not be reached late in the afternoon, but it's safe to say that the Democratic candidate will replace, or keep, any general he wants to as commander-in-chief.

McKelvey: You liken Obama to Britney in your famous ad, while portraying yourself as the more serious candidate. Which celebrity would you like to be compared to? Bob Dylan? Jack Nicholson?

McCain: Kiefer Sutherland. [laughs, imitates a voice from the show 24] "It's Jack Bauer." We have a lot in common because he escapes all the time.

McKelvey: Um, he's also a torturer.

McCain: Yeah, that's right. That's where Jack and I disagree. He believes in torture, but I don't. He says, "Tell me where the weapons are." The person says, "I won't." Bam! "OK, I'll tell."

Despite all the warm fuzzies between Condoleezza Rice and Muammar el-Qaddafi in Tripoli  last week, there can be little optimism that Libya will make final payments to relatives of the hundreds of Americans killed in the PanAm 103 and LaBelle discotheque terrorist attacks anytime soon.

 

The Bush administration has said repeatedly that Libya's bizarre dictator must finish making promised payments to the families before normal relations can resume.

 

The Comprehensive Claims Settlement Agreement that Secretary of State Rice negotiated with the erstwhile rogue obligates Libya to put up $1 billion in compensation to the families in return for the normalization of relations with Washington.

 

But the agreement has no timetable or deadline. And none of the funds, which Libya originally promised to pay in 2003, have shown up.

 

There's little reason to be optimistic they will anytime soon. Qaddafi has a history of discarding his promises once he gets what he wants.

 

And now he's laughing about it.

 

After he renounced his nuclear weapons program in 2006 -- which a number of experts say was going nowhere anyway -- the Bush administration announced it was removing Libya from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Qaddafi promptly ditched a near-agreement with a lawyer for families of the LaBelle discotheque bombing for final payments.

 

When the State Department moved last summer to exempt Libya from suits filed by victims of its terrorist attacks, critics cried that the Bush administration was systematically removing incentives for Qaddafi to pay up.  

 

Meanwhile, even before Rice and Qaddafi were televised beaming at each other last week, the dictator's son, a powerful official in his own right, was denying any responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am 103, which was blasted out of the air over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1989, killing all 270 aboard, including 180 Americans.

 

Saif al-Islam Qaddafi said Libya had accepted responsibility for the attack -- but only to get international sanctions lifted.

 

"It doesn't mean that we did it, in fact," he told the BBC in a little-noted program broadcast Aug. 31, calling the victims' families "very greedy" for pursuing their claims.

 

"They were asking for more money and more money and more money," said Junior, who is expected to succeed his father on the throne someday.

 

Only months earlier Muammar Qaddafi himself had bragged publicly that he'd squeezed  as much money out of American oil companies for the rights to drill in Libya as he'd paid out in claims.

 

"We have paid off the compensations to the victims' families but the US oil companies, which wanted to enter our country had to pay such fees that they brought this money back to Libya," he said in a speech. "So, what we gave with the right hand was later taken with the left."

 

A State Department spokeswoman, Ann Somerset, told me Monday that the department remains "optimistic" that Qaddafi will pay up, emphasizing that the normalization of relations with Libya, with all its commercial and political benefits, will not go forward "until the entire amount" has been paid.

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.

For a Vice Presidential candidate who didn't own a passport until last year, Sarah Palin's brief passages on national security Thursday night were perfectly tailored to her lack of expertise or experience in foreign affairs.

But it hit the spot -- the oil spot, to be precise -- in a rollicking acceptance speech spent mostly ridiculing the Democratic ticket and extolling the expertise hockey moms bring to high office.

The Alaska governor's office floats in a sea of oil politics. During her 20 months in office, Palin threw herself into ramping up exports of North Slope supplies to the lower 48. In fact, she accelerated the construction of infrastructure to deliver fuel.  

It's hard to imagine an Alaska governor not knowing at least something about what's going on in the rest of world's energy markets.

But it's a sure bet that the average Alaskan is as familiar with the intricacies of crude futures as ordinary Iowans are with the price of ethanol or, for that matter, Third Worlders with the price of kerosene.

But otherwise, Palin has shown little interest in the world outside the United States.

Her first, and apparently only, foreign travel came last year, to visit members of the Alaska National Guard stationed in Kuwait, and wounded troops in Germany, according to her deputy communications director, Sharon Leighow.

That was roughly equal to the travels of George W. Bush when he entered the White House in 2001. The erstwhile Texas governor had visited China when his father was ambassador to Beijing in the 1980s, and Israel, and there were the famous "lost weekends" in Mexico  during his drinking years -- all of which, critics say, left him woefully unprepared for the rigors of the post-9/11 world.

Historians will have the final call on that.

Palin sounded authoritative when she mentioned "Russia wanting to control a vital pipeline in the Caucasus and to divide and intimidate our European allies by using energy as a weapon...."  

Critics have credited speechwriter Matthew Scully, late of the Bush White House, with writing the words Palin merely sang.  

But as tidy a line as that was, it's likely Palin had at least as much a hand in drafting it as Scully, considering her involvement with oil infrastructure during her term as governor, no matter how brief.

She went on to talk about the scary what-ifs:

To confront the threat that Iran might seek to cut off nearly a fifth of the world's energy supplies, or that terrorists might strike again at the Abqaiq facility in Saudi Arabia, or that Venezuela might shut off its oil discoveries and its deliveries of that source, Americans, we need to produce more of our own oil and gas . . . .

Big applause.

And take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: We've got lots of both.

More big applause.

If Palin didn't write that line, she sure had obvious fun delivering it.

The next lines, though, came right out of the Republican boilerplate for the past eight years.

Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we're going to lay more pipelines, and build more nuclear plants, and create jobs with clean coal, and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternative sources . . . .

The problem is, it's a script grounded more in the kind of kitchen-table, hockey-mom talk that makes so much sense to so many people, until it's tested against the complicated real world.
Washington has shown only fitful interest in alternative energy supplies (the technology for which, most energy economists say, doesn't exist yet to generate meaningful amounts of power) .

And nuclear is a non-starter, unless she and McCain win the election and the Republicans take both houses of Congress -  not -- unless we want to buy them from France; U.S. companies deserted the business years ago.

Nor is there's going to be any explosion of offshore drilling, which all the Republicans, except those who actually would have to look at them from their patios, seem to be for. (Likewise, look up Ted Kennedy's position on windmills in Nantucket Sound.)

Meanwhile, even capitalist icons, notably, T. Boone Pickens, have given to issuing Al Gore-like pronouncements that natural gas, not oil, is only a temporary solution to our energy problem.

So, like it or not -- and nobody outside Saudi Arabia does -- we'll be mired in global oil politics for decades to come, particularly in the Middle East

So when Palin falls back on right-wing red-meat rather than thoughtful alternatives, as she did Thursday night, she sounds like nothing more than an echo of Harry and Louise on the Republican ticket -- not a serious contender for the second highest post in the land.  

"Victory in Iraq is finally in sight, and he wants to forfeit," she said of Barrack Obama, in a disturbing slander. (Has anyone noticed that the Iraqis themselves have forced the Bush administration into adopting Obama's position?)  

She goes on, in a similar vein:

Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay; he wants to meet them without preconditions.

and:

Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America, and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights.

The Republicans lapped it up. 

Do they really believe it? Does she?

If so, God help us.

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.

If lying to FBI agents was enough to send Scooter Libby to jail, why isn't it enough to prosecute Alberto Gonzales?

Despite strong evidence in a today's Justice Department report that the former attorney general lied to federal investigators probing his careless handling of highly classified documents, the department declined to prosecute.

Indeed, initial news reports on the Inspector General's findings didn't even mention the evidence of perjury, focusing instead on Gonzales's "mishandling" of notes and more-than-Top Secret documents relating to the administration's secret wiretapping and terrorist detention programs,

Who's going to get upset about that?

Who doesn't "mishandle" -- i.e., misplace, loose, forget where they left -- the tuition check, the gas bill, keys, glasses, the grocery list, and yes, even take-home work  -- at least once in awhile?

To be sure, the kind of information Gonzales was shlepping between his office, home, limousines, airplanes and, for all we know, the local Safeway and the dry cleaner (or maybe he left it in the car?) was so sensitive its loss "could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to advantage by a foreign nation," according to the IG report.

At one point, according to White House counsel Fred Fielding, quoted in the IG report, Gonzales "wasn't sure where they were."  The AG duly confessed to the IG that he was "a little confused about where the notes were."  His briefcase wasn't always locked, he told investigators, and he didn't use a government safe in his house because . . .he had forgotten the combination.
    
He's only human.

For such trifles, the Justice Department "scolded" Gonzales, as the Associated Press characterized the IG's finger-wagging, and left it at that.

But the IG report shows that Gonzales did more than "mishandle" his notes, which included operational details on what he himself, somewhat ironically, called -- after it had leaked -- "one of the most highly protected [programs] in the United States ... a very, very secretive, protected program," and correspondence between congressional Intelligence Committee leaders and CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden. 

In a statement that doesn't pass the laugh test, Gonzales told IG investigators he didn't know the documents were secret.

Gonzales said that he was unaware of the classification level and compartmented nature of the NSA program he referenced in the notes. Gonzales also stated he did not recall thinking that the notes themselves were classified.

But the IG found the smoking gun -- in Gonzales's hand, no less.

The envelope containing documents related to the NSA surveillance program bore the handwritten markings, "TOP SECRET - EYES ONLY - ARG" [the attorney general's initials] followed by an abbreviation for the SCI codeword for the program.

Inside the envelope, moreover, were "documents relating to a detainee interrogation program," which were all classified with cover sheets and markings in the top and bottom margins, as Top Secret/Sensitive Classified Information.

And yet Gonzales told the IG investigators "that he was unaware of the classification level and compartmented nature of the NSA program he referenced in the notes."

That is patently absurd.

Poor Scooter Libby, the national security aide to Vice President Cheney, who suffered million-dollar legal bills and lifetime disbarment for a perjury conviction related to the relatively trifling Valerie Plame affair, only to be snatched from the jaws of prison by a pardon from President Bush.   

Today, the Justice Department revealed that it had saved everybody the bother in the case of Alberto Gonzales.

It just let him skate.

(UPDATE: Inspector General Office spokesman Paul Martin called back late Wednesday afternoon after this blog item was filed and left a voice mail message to call back. Because of a medical appointment, I was not able to retrieve his message for almost 24 hours. When I finally reached him Thursday, he said he would have "no comment" for this story. I regret the delay, which had left the misimpression that the department had not bothered to reply.-js)