And while the U.S. issued a flood of warnings this week about threats to American targets retrieved from al-Qaida facilities in Afghanistan, some of the information has come from bin Laden operatives arrested in the U.S., the official said -- including some apprehended at or near the target sites during their surveillance. "Some have been caught on the site [while spying in the U.S.] -- a good percentage," he added.

Salt Lake City is only one of many American targets of al-Qaida surveillance, U.S. officials announced this week. The terrorists had apparently targeted U.S. dams, reservoirs, nuclear power plants, and even the Seattle Space Needle. But while some of the surveillance evidence produced by U.S. officials has seemed relatively limited -- officials said they found photos of tourist spots like the Space Needle, for instance -- information about other sites, like Salt Lake City, was more detailed.

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The unprecedented meetings in early November and again last Friday, held under the auspices of the Middle East Institute, a private group headed by top former U.S. State Department officials, amount to a quiet effort by some former and present Washington officials to add military teeth to -- if not supplant -- the main exile organization supported by Washington for almost a decade, the Iraqi National Congress.

Indeed, the INC, led by Ahmad Chalabi, scion of a onetime Iraqi banking family, was not even invited to the first meeting on Nov. 1, which featured about a dozen former ranking Iraqi military officers plus a half dozen onetime civilian officials in the Baghdad regime. An assistant to Chalabi showed up at the conference visibly miffed, along with some Pentagon officials who have backed the INC, officials said.

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When the shock wears off, the Bush administration will be casting about for ways to retaliate against those responsible for Tuesday's hideous terrorist attack. No doubt it already is.

It will have to wait. And think. Because Washington will find hurling jets and missiles over the Middle East a lot easier than hitting the right target.

The Central Intelligence Agency, meanwhile, may be the last to know where to go or who to hit, much less who done it here.

According to some of its own former spies in the region, America's premier information-gathering agency is virtually "blind" in the Middle East. And while some Republicans blame the problem on cutbacks in intelligence budgets, in fact Washington has thrown piles of money at counter-terrorism programs since 1998, when U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were destroyed by Osama bin Laden's men.

Bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire who is Public Enemy No. 1 in the FBI's pantheon of thugs, is suspected of dispatching Arab kamikazes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon Tuesday morning. A fourth hijacked plane was headed to Washington when passengers reportedly wrestled control from the hijackers and brought it down in western Pennsylvania.

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"Burned once, you know, it's not my fault," she said. "Burned twice, it is my fault."

It's not difficult to understand why Pottker declined to be interviewed. For eight years, she had been subjected to a bizarre ordeal. A gregarious, prematurely graying man in his late 30s posing as a helpful book packager and promoter had led her on a wild goose chase. While reporting on her every movement, and even thoughts, he steered her toward other projects, feeding her disinformation and generally doing everything in his power to prevent her from publishing anything about Ringling Bros.

The life of a freelance writer can inspire paranoia even at the best of times. Story assignments inexplicably fall through, editors change their minds. But the surreal campaign of dirty tricks endlessly played on Jan Pottker by Ringling Bros. chief Ken Feld and his minions would be enough to persuade even the most stoic freelancer that their career path was being plotted by Franz Kafka.

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Smith wanted to see her, he said.

It had to have been startling news for Pottker, who had written a controversial, 11,000-word piece on the circus and its colorful owners, Washington's Feld family, for a local business magazine in 1990. Her piece had recounted the Feld family's Horatio Alger-like story, but it had also exposed some unpleasant secrets about the famously tight-lipped Felds -- such as a bitter feud that had broken out between the two chief heirs, and the bisexuality of the family's patriarch, Irvin Feld. The circus had refused to talk to her ever since.

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Maybe the most mysterious aspect of the plane's downing Friday was the role of a CIA drug surveillance team, which first notified the Peruvians that the Baptists' plane was flying in airspace frequented by drug traffickers. Though the CIA team insists it warned the Peruvian officer who was riding along on the flight not to attack the plane without more information about its mission, the officer apparently gave the order for a nearby fighter jet to shoot at the single-engine Cessna.

Bowers and her daughter were killed by a single bullet; her husband Jim and son were rescued from the downed plane and survived, as did the pilot. Their distraught families are demanding answers from the U.S., which announced it would suspend such surveillance flights pending an investigation of the shooting.

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U.S. efforts to stop the flow of Colombian cocaine, she complained, including her own nighttime electronic spying missions, hadnt amounted to "even a speed bump" against the surging illicit traffic. The flow of drugs north had doubled in the past year.

More worrisome, she said, her four-engine turboprop, crammed with sophisticated electronic gear to eavesdrop on cellphones and take infrared photos of cocaine factories, had been "lit up" -- tracked -- by hostile missile radar on recent flights.

That meant only one thing to Odom and her husband, retired Army Lt. Col. Charles Odom, an officer who'd had top secret clearances: Narco-guerrillas in the jungle below had obtained advanced ground-to-air missiles, the kind that emit pre-launch signals a plane like Odom's could pick up. The war in Colombia, the Odoms agreed, had entered a new stage, and Jennifer believed her plane could be blown out of the air at any time.

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John Deutch, the ex-CIA chief whose security clearance was stripped because he had 17,000 pages of classified documents on his home computer, also maintains a very un-spooklike visibility on the internet.

In his America Online profile, which AOL subscribers fill out at their own choice -- and risk -- Deutch lists his family status (married), occupation (scientist) and hobby (tennis). His residence is listed as Bethesda, Md. His AOL screen name is not much of a disguise, either -- JDeutch@aol.com.

According to CBS, someone using that account has visited porno sites on the Web.

But if he has other names for, say, tennis talk in AOL chat rooms, he's keeping that private. Otherwise, he's hiding in plain site -- not much of a James Bond.

All of which has apparently outraged an unlikely alliance of CIA malcontents and defenders of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, who charge that current agency chief George Tenet and his honchos adopted a double standard for Deutch after gumshoes brought his computer indiscretion to their attention.

He should have been prosecuted, they say, just like Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese scientist who's been jailed since nuclear documents were found on his computer.

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It was 1973. Abourezk, a fiery populist, held the seat Daschle now occupies, railing against oil companies, neglect of the Indians in his state and the war in Vietnam. Daschle was his skinny young legislative aide, fresh out of the Air Force.

"I had a bunch of hostile American Legionnaires in my office one day," Abourezk recalled over the telephone from Sioux Falls this week. "They were on my ass about the Vietnam War. The vote bell rang and I said, 'Tom, you speak to these folks and answer their questions until I get back.'"

He chuckles.

"I was so happy the vote bell rang. I came back later and they were almost hugging and kissing. Tom had them eating out of his hand."

Abourezk added, "He's been so good at that over the years. He's always been that way. Tom brings people to accommodation."

Ironically, it's something Tom Daschle and President Clinton, generational peers, share. In many ways, they are mirror images of each other. Both came from poor, hardscrabble homes. Both were the first college graduates in their families. Daschle's dad was a bookkeeper in a South Dakota auto parts dealership, Clinton's Arkansas father was famously absent.

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Salon News has learned that U.S. Army Delta team commando officers sat in on a meeting at CIA headquarters to discuss the ongoing Waco hostage situation in March 1993, according to a former CIA security officer. Such involvement by U.S. military personnel in a domestic conflict could be illegal.

Former CIA officer Gene Cullen told Salon News he attended a meeting at CIA headquarters on the Waco crisis where Army representatives were "mostly observers," but indicated they were prepared to step in and help if any more federal agents were killed. The standoff ended with the fiery deaths of 76 people at the Branch Davidian religious compound.

"My charter at the agency was facilities personnel, and operations worldwide. So we called this meeting [at CIA] during the Waco crisis ... to see how the [FBI's hostage rescue team] would respond if it was one of our buildings in this country, and if it were overseas, how Delta would respond.

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And for the foreseeable future, these experts say, Beijing won't stop targeting them for recruitment, thus provoking the attention of FBI gumshoes who run roughshod over the lives of Chinese-born scientists like Wen Ho Lee because they don't know what they're looking for.

Paul Moore, the FBI's top China hand from 1975 until he retired last year, called China's spy system "espionage without evidence," so impenetrable to U.S. counterspies and prosecutors that it was "bulletproof."

China's espionage operations are so subtle, he and others added, that scientists might not even know they were handing over valuable information. Thus the United States is wasting time pursuing Los Alamos espionage suspect Lee and turning its nuclear labs upside down in security sweeps.

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Now they have reason to grieve again, for the Navy has effectively suppressed the results of the lone independent investigation of the accident. That investigation lays blame for the deaths squarely where it belongs: on the Navy itself.

In April, W.W. Norton published "A Glimpse of Hell: The Explosion on the USS Iowa and Its Coverup" by Charles C. Thompson, a highly regarded Washington author and veteran investigative producer for CBS's "60 Minutes" and other network news programs. Among Thompson's past triumphs were discoveries that the Pentagon had paid $500 for toilets, that the $1 billion a copy B-2 Stealth bombers weren't invisible to radar, that the Bradley Fighting Vehicle could catch on fire and, ranging further afield, that Elvis died of a drug overdose, not a heart problem. As testimony to its accuracy, "A Glimpse of Hell" was praised by reviewers and chosen by the Military Book Club as its main selection last March.

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"They really believe 'The Turner Diaries' is the road map to their success," says J.D. Cash, an Oklahoma reporter with long associations among right-wing activists who broke stories about Timothy McVeigh's links to white-supremacist groups like Christian Identity.

"The Turner Diaries," an apocalyptic novel embraced by McVeigh and other Christian extremists, portrays a "patriot" who foments a right-wing backlash against the government's effort to crack down on guns by setting off bombs.

Police found Christian Identity literature in the van of Furrow, a 37-year-old Washington state man who turned himself into Las Vegas police after allegedly wounding three children, a teenager and an adult with bursts of automatic weapons fire at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb, Tuesday. Furrow is also suspected of the murder of a postal worker an hour after the community center shooting.

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Tripp had admitted to a federal grand jury that she taped her girlfriend Lewinsky even after she knew it was illegal under Maryland state law. But she also was eventually granted immunity from state or federal prosecution by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, as long as she agreed to tell the truth. This immunity grant presumably covered the tapes, raising the question Friday of what other evidence the Maryland prosecutor had used to secure his indictment.

"I can't answer that question," said Steve Halpert, an investigator in the Maryland State Prosecutor's Office. Speaking for prosecutor Stephen Montanarelli, Halpert said he could "neither confirm nor deny" that the grand jury saw or heard the tapes. Asked whether someone had testified that indeed tapes were made by Tripp, Halpert said, "That's correct."

"I'm not saying that we don't have these tapes. I'm saying that as part of the investigation, we certainly limit what we disclose because it's ongoing."

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The "Freepers" turned their cyberspace coffee klatch into the liveliest, if not the biggest, right-wing Web site on the net.

But Free Republic was more than just a Web site where red-meat conservatives could interact, as opposed to merely read. Freep sponsored anti-Clinton Washington rallies. It took out newspaper ads. It gave a dinner for the congressional managers of the impeachment drive. Freep clubs sprang up in some cities. Lucianne Goldberg, the New York literary agent and catalyst of Monicagate, joined the party, and Web Wunderkind Matt Drudge helped it out with publicity and links. Free Republic became the main soundstage for the anti-Clinton bandwagon, with its "latest posts" page drawing 50,000 individual visits per day.

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A close second on the irony-meter is official Washington's professed alarm over Beijing's espionage, when it was the CIA's own spy inside China who first showed up with evidence that U.S. nuclear arms laboratories may have been penetrated. In yet another twist, the CIA eventually decided that its Chinese spy was actually a double agent under Beijing's control.

Despite months of investigation and partisan recriminations over who's responsible for the alleged success of Chinese espionage, which extends over four administrations reaching back to Jimmy Carter, no one has yet been arrested. Only one outcome is already clear: Untold millions of dollars are going to be spent to bolster security at government arms labs -- well after China has already acquired U.S. weapons designs.

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Speaking on condition of anonymity Tuesday, the official said that no CIA officer with an up-to-date, walking familiarity with the Yugoslav capital was on the targeting team when China's embassy was mistakenly bombed Friday, killing three occupants and injuring 20 more. Nor, apparently, does the CIA have clandestine spotters in Belgrade helping verify targets picked from maps and satellite photos.

The issue has taken on added gravity because the CIA has admitted it used a partially updated 4-year-old street map and "educated guesses" to select the target, which was thought to be a Yugoslav arms agency. In this case, the maps did not show that China had vacated its old property and built a new embassy elsewhere in 1996, even though American officials, from the U.S. ambassador to the semi-public chief of the CIA mission, frequented the embassy for events. The U.S. embassy in Belgrade was closed and its staff evacuated March 24.

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James Kopp, a well known anti-abortion demonstrator, was charged Thursday with the murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian, director of Buffalo's most prominent abortion clinic, last October 23. Authorities said DNA tests linked a hair found near Slepian's house to the 44-year-old suspect, who vanished shortly after a rifle shot struck the doctor as he stood in his kitchen. Kopp's car was later found abandoned at the Newark, N.J., airport, but he remains at large. The investigation has been criticized for delay -- especially for a six-month lag time in finding a scoped rifle, buried in the woods behind Kopp's house, that investigators now believe was the murder weapon. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has yet to release any ballistic test results on the rifle.

One detail linking Kopp to the case was a report that Kopp was spotted cruising Slepian's neighborhood in the days leading up to the doctor's murder. And in a curious sidelight to the case, two other men were spotted in Kopp's neighborhood the night after his killing. Weeks later they were soon subjected -- wrongly -- to the intense, chilling, and perplexing attention of the FBI.

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The Clinton administration's top diplomats, who took a tepid step toward Cuba with baseball diplomacy last month, have turned Monday's exhibition matchup between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cuban national team into a fantasy-league replay of the Cold War, with Kennedy-style dirty tricks and the prospect of anti-Castro agitation in the stands.

Fans of baseball like to tout the game's seamless links to history, but this might be too much, even for nostalgia buffs. Bay of Pigs: Get over it.

Only days ago, with the State Department's blessing, the Miami Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue was threatening to boot the Cuban team's two jetliners when they landed, under authority of a court lien imposed after Cuban fighters downed a Brothers to the Rescue plane in 1996.

That plan was dodged when go-betweens persuaded Orioles owner Peter Angelos to charter his own planes for the Cubans, who hosted the Baltimore club in Havana last month.

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Any more victories like this one and it'll be dead.

Outnumbered by counter-demonstrators and police at every clinic, shunned by the high school students it tried to educate and ignored by the bookstore patrons it attempted to awaken to the threat of pornography, the pro-life organization Operation Rescue left in its wake a largely Catholic, conservative city that was remarkably glad to see it go.

"We're certainly relieved that it ended peacefully," said Peter Cutler, spokesman for Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello, who had given a cool welcome to the protesters the week earlier. Operation Rescue had chosen the city as an anti-abortion battleground only days after an abortion doctor had been slain there last October, a decision Masiello protested. The killer of Dr. Barnett Slepian is still at large, but indictments are expected to be handed down by a Buffalo grand jury any day.

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