Intelligence Services

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 two spies were allies and kindred spirits. Robert Seldon Lady, the CIA station chief in Milan, and Col. Stefano D'Ambrosio, the local head of the SISMI, Italy's intelligence agency, shared pride in their fight against terrorism and disdain for self-serving bosses. On a fall day in 2002, the American made an explosive revelation. He told D'Ambrosio that, over his objections, a CIA team was in Milan doing reconnaissance for the "rendition" of an Egyptian extremist ideologue.

A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner has accused British intelligence of feeding questions to the CIA that he says were put to him while he was tortured in Pakistani and Moroccan jails. The allegations by Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, are expected to fuel demands by human rights groups for a full investigation into whether Britain's support for the Bush administration's "war on terror" amounted in his case to complicity with torture.

After banning and then publicizing the most controversial interrogation practices employed by the CIA, President Obama called on the agency Monday to live up to its mission under its new marching orders. Obama called the CIA "an indispensable tool, the tip of the spear" in national security as he addressed its employees while standing before a marble wall with 89 stars representing, anonymously, agents who have died in the line of duty.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Iraqi officials on a visit Sunday to Baghdad that America would need to improve its intelligence in their country after U.S. troops pull out. "If we are going to have a diminished physical military presence, we have to have a strong intelligence presence," Pelosi said after discussions with her Iraqi counterpart and other members of parliament. Pelosi, a strong critic of the U.S.

Like many spy tales in fiction and reality, "Background to Danger" begins in a train station. A down-and-out freelance journalist awaits a night train alone on a platform in Nuremberg, Germany, hands in overcoat pockets, shoulders hunched against a November wind. Soon a frightened Russian offers him cash to smuggle documents across the Austrian border, and the plot steams into a labyrinth of treachery.

The U.S. military commander in Afghanistan says he has evidence that factions of Pakistani and Iranian spy services are supporting insurgent groups that carry out attacks on coalition troops. Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are being aided by "elements of some intelligence agencies," Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal wrote in a detailed analysis of the military situation delivered to the White House earlier this month. McChrystal went on to single out Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency as well as the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as contributing to the external forces working to undermine U.S. interests and destabilize the government in Kabul.

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.

Five years after undergoing sweeping reforms, the nation's spy agencies continue to be hobbled by turf battles, incompatible computer systems and uncertainty over their legal boundaries, according to a harshly critical report issued Wednesday by the intelligence community's internal watchdog.