Central Intelligence Agency

Snooping abroad for clues to illicit plots is one of the CIA's primary missions, but the agency disclosed Friday that it had discovered a criminal operation embarrassingly close to home. Joseph P. Romello, 41, an upper-management CIA veteran of 12 years, pleaded guilty Friday to charges that he conspired to defraud the agency and the U.S. government of about $1.2 million, the Justice Department and the CIA announced. Acting on an anonymous tip to CIA Inspector General Frederick P.

A senior Al Qaeda operative being hunted in the December bombing of a U.S. base used by the CIA in Afghanistan was among those killed in a missile strike in Pakistan's tribal area, U.S. officials said Wednesday. Hussein Yemeni, an Al Qaeda bomb expert and trainer, is believed to have been among more than a dozen people killed in the strike last week in Miram Shah, the largest town in North Waziristan, the officials said. Yemeni is thought to have had a major planning role in the Dec. 30 suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA employees and contractors and a Jordanian intelligence officer, a counter-terrorism official said.

At night, when the lawns are empty and the lamps along the walking paths are the only source of light, Topcider Park on the outskirts of Belgrade is a perfect meeting place for spies. It was here in 1992, as the former Yugoslavia was erupting in ethnic violence, that a wary CIA agent made his way toward the park's gazebo and shook hands with a Serbian intelligence officer. Jovica Stanisic had a cold gaze and a sinister reputation.

The CIA sequence for a Predator strike ends with a missile but begins with a memo. Usually no more than two or three pages long, it bears the name of a suspected terrorist, the latest intelligence on his activities, and a case for why he should be added to a list of people the agency is trying to kill. The list typically contains about two dozen names, a number that expands each time a new memo is signed by CIA executives on the seventh floor at agency headquarters, and contracts as targets thousands of miles away, in places including Pakistan and Yemen, seem to spontaneously explode.

Mike Baker Spy consultant Former occupation: Covert field operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, specializing in counterterrorism, counternarcotics and counterinsurgency operations. Current occupation: "My day job is that I am CEO of an organization called Veritas Global. That's an information and risk-management company. We provide intelligence and security assistance to multinational financial institutions, large law firms.

LATE IN FEBRUARY, THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY'S 80 MOST SENIOR OFFICIALS gathered at the Farm, a training facility in eastern Virginia whose very existence is classified. Robert M. Gates, the newly confirmed director of central intelligence, had summoned his top managers to the secret two-day conclave to force them to come to grips with the post-Cold-War era at the CIA.

Aline Romanones is staring her interviewer straight in the kisser and saying she's not at all sure the other woman is not a spy. "As I say," Romanones says with deadly sweetness, between dainty bites of berries and cream, "you could perfectly well be a top agent. You'd be a very good one, because your career enables you to write and ask people questions that other people couldn't ask." Though it is only lunchtime at the Polo Lounge, she's glittering with rubies, diamonds and emeralds.

One night last spring I lay sleepless and sweltering in the dying city of Haiphong, North Viet Nam, asking myself the question that has taunted so many young Americans caught in faraway places: "What in the hell am I doing here?" . . . Out there, in the makeshift refugee camp I had set up with U.S. Army tents, were more than 12,000 wretched, sick and horribly maimed Vietnamese, most of them either very young or very old.

The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.

CIA director R. James Woolsey, under fire for months for his handling of the Aldrich H. Ames spy case and lacking strong support in the White House and Congress, resigned abruptly on Wednesday. The nation's first post-Cold War spy chief never forcefully seized control of a sprawling, $30-billion-a-year intelligence bureaucracy and was not seen by his own employees or by his overseers on Capitol Hill as a strong advocate of intelligence programs.

A Pakistani television station aired a video Saturday allegedly showing the suicide bomber who hit a CIA outpost in Afghanistan telling the Pakistani Taliban leader that he had shared U.S. and Jordanian intelligence secrets with fellow militants. He also urged militants to strike other U.S. targets in retaliation for the killing of the leader's predecessor last year in a U.S. missile strike. Although its veracity could not be immediately determined, the video is a powerful recruiting tool and its content potentially embarrassing to the U.S. spy agency.

The suicide bomber who carried out an attack on a CIA firebase in Afghanistan detonated the device as he was about to be searched and used an explosive so powerful that it killed agency operatives who were as far as 50 feet away, a U.S. intelligence official said Friday. The details shed new light on how the attacker, a Jordanian physician thought to possess valuable intelligence on Al Qaeda's inner circle, was able to kill seven CIA employees and contractors and his Jordanian handler and injure six others despite a heavy security presence at the base.

The bomber who killed seven CIA employees at an agency forward base in Afghanistan had never been to the compound or met with agency operatives before the attack, U.S. officials said Tuesday. The absence of any previous encounter adds to the confusion over how the attacker -- posing as an informant with valuable information on Al Qaeda -- was able to make it past security with a bomb apparently strapped to his body and lure seasoned CIA operatives to their deaths last week. A U.S. intelligence official said that the bomber had provided a stream of useful information to the CIA after being presented by the Jordanian intelligence service as an Islamic militant who had switched sides and was now willing to work against Al Qaeda.

The suicide bomber who killed eight people at a CIA compound in Afghanistan was a Jordanian recruited by that nation's spy service who lured operatives to a meeting with a promise of important new information about Al Qaeda's inner circle, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official. The bombing last week killed seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer who is believed to have served as the main point of contact with the informant. The disclosure that the deadliest incident in recent CIA history may have been the work of a double agent suggests a new level of sophistication in Al Qaeda's efforts to retaliate against the agency, which is responsible for an intense campaign of Predator drone strikes on the terrorist network in Pakistan over the last two years.

The suicide bombing that killed seven CIA employees at a U.S. base will temporarily slow U.S. intelligence-gathering in eastern Afghanistan, but the agency will not retrench its ambitious buildup in the country while it conducts a security review, officials said Thursday. Military and intelligence officials were scrambling to determine how the bomber penetrated a forbidding network of barriers, barbed wire and watchtowers at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khowst province near the Pakistani border, and made his way deep inside to set off a thunderous blast.

The White House this month issued a classified order to resolve mounting frictions between the nation's intelligence director and the CIA over issues including how the agency conducts covert operations, U.S. officials said. The intervention reflects simmering tension between the two most powerful players in the U.S. intelligence community: Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair and CIA Director Leon E. Panetta. The memo maintains the CIA's status as the nation's lead spy service on covert missions, rejecting an attempt by Blair to assert more control.

A man in a pickup truck sped through the main checkpoint outside the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters last month and crashed onto the CIA's front steps, the spy agency revealed. Guards were unable to move quickly enough to activate pop-up metal barriers designed to halt intruders "due to the very high speed of the vehicle," the CIA said. The driver, David Crump, 37, of McLean, Va., is in a correctional facility for psychiatric evaluation.

The controversy over who knew what in the days and weeks before Sept. 11 has vaulted the rivalry between the FBI and CIA--one of the oldest back-fence feuds in the nation's capital--outside the bounds of conventional controversy. The question of why the deadliest terror plot in U.S. history went unstopped has exacerbated problems at the nation's already-troubled intelligence agencies.

The CIA is deploying teams of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives to Afghanistan, part of a broad intelligence "surge" that will make the agency's station there among the largest in CIA history, U.S. officials say. When complete, the CIA's presence in the country is expected to rival the size of its massive stations in Iraq and Vietnam at the height of those wars. Precise numbers are classified, but one U.S. official said the CIA already has nearly 700 employees in Afghanistan.

Their transformations took place in a sensory cocoon: aboard a CIA aircraft, shackled in place, deprived of sight and sound by blindfolds, headsets and hoods. They emerged into an existence that was hidden for most of the last eight years, but now is possible to glimpse through dozens of declassified files released by the Obama administration last week. Scattered throughout, in the CIA's clinical style, are descriptions of the prisoners' surroundings, the extraordinary security measures with which they were handled, the often brutal search for answers they were thought to possess, and what passed for everyday life.