United States Government Employees

Sparked by heightened security concerns since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Defense Department has begun laying the groundwork to ban non-U.S. citizens from a wide range of computer projects.

Incoming staffers of the Bush White House are apparently victims of a practical joke perpetrated by their predecessors. Bush aides settling into the Old Executive Office Building have discovered that many computer keyboards in their work spaces are missing the W key--as in President Bush's middle initial. "There are dozens, if not hundreds, of keyboards with these missing keys," a White House aide said Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

First the W keys were missing from some computer keyboards. A symbolic flak jacket was missing from the press secretary's office. And in much of the West Wing, chaos reigned. Welcome to the first couple of days in the Bush White House. President Bush's aides now are trying to determine how much of the chaos was the result of pranks, how much was malicious and how much was attributable to a hasty weekend renovation.

President Bush has about 6,000 jobs to fill, but a growing number of critics say the modern-day White House appointment process is no way to staff the offices of the leader of the free world. Presidential hiring embraces few of the innovative recruitment techniques pioneered by today's fast companies. And it probably isn't what Benjamin Franklin had in mind when he imagined the citizenry's ascent to what he called America's "posts of honor." "It's time-consuming. It's confusing. It's burdensome.

A former IRS worker and two Orange County tax preparers who duped delinquent taxpayers and the government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars were sentenced Wednesday to federal prison. The ruling caps a six-year federal investigation into the tax fraud, which included secretly recorded audiotapes in which the defendants openly discussed the scam. Former IRS agent Valerie Crawford, 41, was sentenced to three years in prison.

As if out of nowhere, on a fall day 15 years ago, came a letter to a Soviet KGB agent. The writer, identifying himself simply as "B," was promising to send a box of documents from "the most sensitive and highly compartmented projects of the U.S. intelligence community." For his services, "B" wanted $100,000. Thus began, according to his supervisors, the eventual undoing of FBI Agent Robert Philip Hanssen.

* George Trofimoff, a retired Army Reserve colonel, was arrested in Florida and charged last year with spying for the former Soviet Union and Russia for 25 years. He is the highest-ranking U.S. military officer ever charged with espionage. A civilian worker in Army intelligence in Germany, he allegedly was recruited into the KGB in 1969. He is accused of photographing U.S. documents and passed the film to KGB agents, and was later recruited into the KGB.

As she does each day, 13-year-old Hadley Greene planned to cut through her best friend's backyard Tuesday to get to her own home in this quiet Washington suburb. This time, however, it was surrounded by yellow police tape marking the scene of an investigation--one that the nation's top law enforcement officials say is uncovering one of the "most traitorous actions imaginable."

Former FBI and CIA chief William H. Webster said Wednesday that he plans to examine whether the FBI--long reluctant to require periodic polygraph testing of its agents--should use polygraphs more aggressively to ferret out possible spies. Webster, who will assess the fallout from one of the biggest cases of suspected espionage in recent U.S.

Near the end, Robert Philip Hanssen descended into a madness of his own making. Caution gone, he prowled the darkness of a neighborhood park with a penlight searching for a signal that wasn't there. A lumbering figure, he waved his arms and seemed to shout at the sky. "I have come about as close as I ever want to come to sacrificing myself to help you and I get silence. I hate silence," he had complained a few months earlier when communications with his Russian handlers had lapsed.