Kyle "Dusty" Foggo's CIA dossier included allegations that he was sharing a woman with a suspected Russian mole, according to a top former spy agency official and other sources.

CIA Director Porter J. Goss knew about the allegation when he hired Foggo to be the agency's executive director, its third highest official, an aide said Thursday.

Special Forces troops tend to think they carry the fate of the world in their rucksacks.

In Pakistan, they may be right.

Years from now we may look back at the "secret" deployment of some 70 U.S. military advisers to Pakistan as a turning point in the global war on terrorism, the moment when a daring idea and brilliant execution snatched victory from a looming disaster.

Or the opposite: a Pakistani version of Ia Drang, the 1965 battle when North Vietnamese regulars showed they could go toe-to-toe with American troops, signaling a long, devastating and -- in that case -- losing war.

Make no mistake about it: Pakistan hangs in the balance.

It looks like Maureen McCarthy is dead in the water, at least for the moment.

McCarthy, the DHS bioweapons official who caused a minor sensation earlier this month when she brought a mystery fish and white powder to her downtown office, is "on leave for awhile," according to a woman answering the phone in her office today.

Asked when she might return, the woman in her office, who did not identify herself, said, "We really don't know."

It's intermittently amazing to me that we managed to conquer Japan and Germany in four-plus years (with no small help from the Russians, of course), yet after almost twice that time we haven't been able to crush a raggedy band of 8th-century minded terrorists in an area no bigger than Montana.

We didn't even have a plan, as it turned out, as late as last spring, almost seven years after al Qaeda launched big hits on us from its mountain redoubts on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. Today it's said to be ensconced in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, loosely controlled by Islamabad in a regional autonomy arrangement.

With the latest attempt to resettle Guantanamo prisoners stymied in court, a group of prominent American law enforcement, military, diplomatic, judicial and religious figures is urging President Obama to appoint a non-partisan commission to study the detention, treatment, and transfer of terrorist suspects.

John L. Helgerson, the CIA's controversial inspector general, may be finally leaving the spy agency after three decades, but he will not be fading back into the shadows.

American civilian advisers to Afghanistan's National Police, considered the linchpin in any successful effort against the Taliban, say restrictions on their movements are making their efforts basically worthless.

The advisers are not permitted to stay overnight in Afghan police installations or even go out on raids with their charges, two former CIA operatives who worked with the police in the past year say.

The grumbling about Afghan President Hamid Karzai has grown so loud you'd think the Obama administration has given up on him.

Indeed, you could almost hear the knees knocking in Karzai's embassy here when incoming Obama officials met privately during inauguration week with at least two Afghan politicians who would like to replace the president.

With the war going badly, criticism has grown of Karzai's seeming tolerance of endemic corruption in his government, which threatens to turn Afghanistan into a narco-state, if not grease the return of the Taliban to power.

Could his days be numbered?

The CIA officer arrested for credit card fraud worked in the spy agency's most sensitive seventh floor executive suite and had previously been a CIA station chief in an American embassy, reliable sources tell me.

The new details paint a portrait of Steven J. Levan as a far more important official at the agency than previously reported.

Maureen McCarthy certainly knows the difference between a prank and an anthrax attack, but she's getting a terrific ribbing about leaving a package of a dead fish and white powder in her car parked under a ventilation shaft in a Homeland Security Department garage.

The former head of the CIA unit charged with liquidating Osama Bin Laden said that national security officials in the Clinton administration "had no qualms" about transferring al Qaeda suspects to countries with reputations for torture.

Michael F. Scheuer, who worked on finding Bin Laden from 1996 to his retirement in 2004, made the allegation during an April 17, 2007 House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing on the treatment of terrorism suspects picked up by the CIA.

"I know there was much more consideration under the Bush administration about how to handle these people than there was under the Clinton administration, sir," Scheuer maintained in response to a question from Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., the panel's chairman.

"There were no qualms at all about sending people to Cairo," he said, adding that there was a "kind of joking up our sleeves about what would happen to those people in Cairo in Egyptian prisons, sir."

Norman Ornstein is official Washington's version of Al Michaels and John Madden combined, not just tracking the power plays but assessing them as well.

So it's worth taking notice when Ornstein, the go-to guy for quotes on government and politics at the American Enterprise Institute, suggests that President Obama's next pick to run Health and Human Services will have to be a Tom Daschle without catsup on his tie, somebody so familiar with Capital Hill he (or she) could shepherd a health care reform beast through Congress.

Somebody like Leon Panetta, Ornstein said on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR this morning.

Ivo Daalder, another former Clinton White House official in line for jobs in the new administration, is being tipped to be President Obama's ambassador to NATO, a repair job if there ever was one, considering the "old Europe" cracks that came out of the Bush administration.

But Daalder, a nuclear nonproliferation specialist who ran the Europe desk in Clinton's  National Security Council, is nothing if not diplomatic, as a new book he's coauthored shows.