An item in the Washington Post business section two weeks ago caught our attention. It was about an intelligence agency that is building a new headquarters right on the campus of the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. (A place one of us is familiar with, if for no other reason than that's where we mail the tuition checks for one of our offspring).

The intel agency in question is the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or IARPA. Call us a bit slow, since IARPA was formed in 2006, but we were only vaguely aware of it.

IARPA, it turns out, is the U.S. intelligence community's counterpart to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been in business for more than 35 years and is meant to be a small, flexible R&D agency that funds high-risk, but potentially high-payoff technologies. DARPA helped develop the technologies that were important to the development of the Internet, and Artifical Intelligence, to name just a few.

IARPA reports to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell. As with all intel agencies, its Web site is unhelpfully bland. But it does state that the agency has three program offices that illustrate where its research is focused:  "Smart Collection," "Incisive Analysis," and "Safe & Secure Operations." That last one means keeping the bad guys out of U.S. government computer and information systems.

For the conspiracy minded--and who isn't these days?--IARPA's ancestry is a wee bit interesting:

In the beginning, there was Total Information Awareness, a DARPA information-gathering program run by noneother than former Iran-Contra figure and Reagan national security adviser John Poindexter. Critics saw the program as a major, post-9/11 intrusion on American's privacy and civil liberties, and Congress killed funding for it in 2003. But there were persistent reports--confirmed by yours truly in conversations with former U.S. intelligence officials--that portions of the Total Information Awareness research had simply been shunted off to other agencies.

One of the agencies that absorbed the work was the Advanced Research and Development Activity, affiliated with eavesdropping National Security Agency, and like NSA, located at Fort Meade, Maryland. ARDA was later renamed, given the ominous-sounding moniker, Disruptive Technology Office.

Hopefully, you've kept with us through all the name changes and acronyms. (Do intel agencies do this on purpose to confuse, or is it just bureaucracy at work?)  The point is that IARPA, according to Signal, the magazine of the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association, was formed by combining the Disruptive Technology Office with research programs underway at the CIA and other agencies.

So, IARPA was born. Did Total Information Awareness die?

We were trolling about the other day in the very useful federal contracting database, known as the Federal Procurement Data System.

Lo and behold, we came upon a MOST interesting-looking contract that the State Department signed in March with Alexandria, Virginia-based Cotton & Company LLP, a leading auditing firm.

Turns out, State has asked the firm--and is paying it $264, 554--to audit Blackwater Worldwide's huge contract with State to provide personal protection services to U.S. diplomats in Iraq and elsewhere. Blackwater has earned hundreds of millions of dollars as one of three firms participating in the Worldwide Personal Protection Services contract.

It also, as N&S readers surely recall, has loads of problems, which erupted when Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad square on September 16, 2007. The FBI is still investigating the killings, while another Blackwater employee is facing charges in the Christmas Eve 2006 killing of a bodyguard to Iraq's vice president.

Just this week, federal agents raided Blackwater's Moyock, N.C., compound in an investigation of whether the company sidestepped federal firearms laws. Our colleagues at McClatchy's Raleigh News & Observer first reported on June 22 how Blackwater had purchased 17 Romanian AK-47 automatic weapons and 17 Bushmaster rifles, gave ownership of the guns to the sheriff of tiny Camden County (population 9,271), but kept most of the weapons on its own compound.

The audit of the State Department contract is apparently looking at issues such as whether Blackwater's reimbursement rates are proper.

Ambassador Patrick Kennedy,  the Undersecretary of State for Management, tells us the audit--requested by State's Office of Acquistion Management--is nothing out of the ordinary, and was not prompted by any suspicion of malfeasance. It's normal for such a large contract to be audited, he says.

"It's not a special audit that we're doing," he said.

For readers who really get into this stuff, the contract # for Cotton & Company's audit is S-AQM-MA-08-F3953.

The contract # for the Blackwater contract in question is S-AQM-PD-05-D1098.

I am happy to share some exciting news about my two colleagues who complete the trifecta that is Nukes & Spooks. The latest issue of GQ magazine named Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel the "Best Reporters You've Never Heard Of." You of course, dear reader, are far more enlightened than most.

They were heralded for their Iraq coverage. How fantastic is that! As their colleague, it was lovely to see them get the recognition, not only for their extraordinary coverage in the run up to the Iraq War, but everyday since. 

Besides being worthy of being in GQ magazine, Jonathan and Warren are also humble. So I felt it was only appropriate that I post about it. Please check out page 127 of the latest issue of GQ Magazine. And on the off chance you gentlemen out there need another reason to pick up the magazine, Gisele Bundchen is the cover story.

More so than any other official in the Bush administration, the breakthrough with North Korea that was announced on Thursday is the handiwork of Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill. 

Hill, the bane of conservatives and hero of many at Foggy Bottom, has achieved a high profile for a mid-level diplomat in the Bush administration. He's pushed relentlessly for engagement with North Korea, with the backing of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He's known for skilfully and assiduously working the news media, and pushing to the edge of his diplomatic mandate--and even beyond.

Hill, a Red Sox fan and lacrosse player, has joking called himself the Assistant Secretary of State for North Korea, and he's frequently found traipsing in and out of hotels in Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul and elsewhere--always with a few moments to spare to chat with the assembled waiting press.

But the rumors--and we stress they are only rumors--have already begun that Hill might choose this as a good time to depart. The deal announced Thursday is the second phase in a process meant to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. Getting there was hard enough, as is any negotiation with the prickly North Koreans. But phase 3, in which the North is supposed to give up the plutonium it has produced for nuclear weapons, could be harder still. It's unlikely to get underway, much less be completed, in Bush's remaing time in office.

Hill's been in Asia this week, where Rice is also visiting.

Close associates tell us he has no plans to leave his post right now.

Two hundred leaders ranging from former secretaries of state and counter-terrorism experts to religious leaders and legal experts issued a call today for a presidential executive order that would ban torture and cruel treatment of detainees.

While President Bush has said the United States does not condone torture, CIA and U.S. military personnel have engaged in practices at the Guantanamo Bay prison, Iraq's Abu Ghraib, and detention sites in Afghanistan that are considered by many to be torture.

The declaration calls on Bush to adopt a Golden Rule: "We will not authorize or use any methods of interrogation that we would not find acceptable if used against Americans, be they civilians or soldiers."

It also calls for establishment of a national standard for interrogation practices, based on the U.S. Army Field Manual, that would apply to all U.S. personnel and agencies. Currently, the CIA has more authority to use harsh interrogation practices, although its precise guidelines and interrogation procedures remain classified.

Along with many former Democratic cabinet officials, the signers include George P. Shultz, President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State; Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state in Bush's first term; and Lorne Craner, who was Bush's assistant secretary of state for democracy and human rights, and a long-time aide to presumptive GOP presidential candidate John McCain.

Thirty-five retired flag officers also endorsed the call, as did two former senior officials from the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, and a variety of evangelicals from the Protestant, Catholic, Christian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh faiths.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the administration already has steps in place to address the issue. She cited the Detainee Treatment Act, the Military Commissions Act, and a Bush executive order interpreting Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Common Article 3 prohibits "cruel treatements and torture" as well as "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."

Asked about the endorsement of Shultz, a retired U.S. Marine, she said: "We take his position seriously, but we do think that we have the mechanisms in place to address the issue."

In a five-part series earlier this month, entitled Guantanamo: Beyond the Law, McClatchy Newspapers detailed how Guanatanamo and other prisons often held men who had posed no threat to the United States; that abuse was widespread, especially at sites in Afghanistan; and that the experience at Guantanamo radicalized Muslim men who had not been radicals before.

Last week, the group Physicians for Human Rights issued a report, based on an in-depth physical and psychological examination of 11 former detainees, that concluded they had been abused.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib, wrote in a preface to the report: "After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

The declaration issued Wednesday was organized by  The Center for Victims of Torture, in conjunction with The National Religious Campaign Against Torture and a third group, Evangelicals for Human Rights.

On Thursday, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington, and former Justice Department official John Yoo are to testify before a House Judiciary subcommittee on the role Bush administration lawyers played in crafting interrogation policy.

Besides housing many of the military’s academic and training centers, Fort Leavenworth holds the military’s largest correctional facility. And if Republican presidential candidate John McCain wins, that facility could become home to Guantanamo detainees.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and other key military leaders have said Guantanamo should be closed because it hurts the U.S. image. And there have been a litany of stories recently as the courts have weighed in on Gitmo practices. There is consensus that something should be done. The issue is: Where do you put the detainees (assuming the U.S. military keeps holding them)?

McCain has said they should come back to the mainland and onto a military facility. Fort Leavenworth, he says, is the most obvious choice.

I asked about the issue while here on base, and everyone here had a different reason why the detainees shouldn’t come here. There aren’t enough beds. Military prisoners and Guantanamo detainees shouldn’t mix. This is a family-driven community; what would happen if they got out? (One soldier said: “We have kids here!”) And scores of military policemen have guarded Guantanamo detainees so they could be in danger.

Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, IV, the commanding officer here said some congressional leaders have asked his opinion, and he has said he is against it.

The courts have raised several questions that put Guantanamo’s future in limbo. But even if the military settles those questions, it still must answer where to house them. If detainees can’t stay at Guantanamo or go the military's largest correctional facility, where else is left?

The State Department announced today that U.S. Ambassador to Albania John L. Withers II is under investigation by the Department's inspector general for his alleged role in the fast-broadening scandal over Pentagon contractor AEY, Inc., which supplied ammunition made in China decades ago to U.S.-allied Afghan military units.

A military attache has told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that Withers participated in a meeting with the Albanian defense minister where they discussed removing evidence of the Chinese origin of the ammunition before a visit by a reporter from the New York Times, which broke the AEY story earlier this year.

At the time, AEY already was under investigation for illegal trafficking in Chinese-made weaponry, according to the committee.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey disclosed the investigation of Withers at his daily press briefing, saying, "I think when someone has had a cloud placed over them publicly, as Chairman (Henry) Waxman has done through making these allegations, they deserve to have an independent body take a review of them and come to an appropriate conclusion."

Withers, he noted, is a 24-year veteran of the Foreign Service, with a distinguished record.

Withers, in a statement, said "the evidence in this matter, fully presented, will dissolve any and every assertion made against him, his staff, or his government."

At the time the Pentagon awarded the $300 million contract to AEY, it turns out, the company already was on a State Department watch list of suspect contractors, because of suspected arms export violations. The company's president was indicted last week on charges of illegally selling Chinese munitions.

Greetings from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas! I am visiting here for the first time, and I must say this base feels very different than other military installations. Instead of rows and rows of Humvees and Bradleys, Fort Leavenworth has a series of learning and training centers. It is in the military’s academic hub, home to the Counterinsurgency Center, United States Army Command and General Staff College, and the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center. And throughout, soldiers here talk about Iraq, Afghanistan and the future of the military in academic terms.

At its helm is Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who I first met in Baghdad. Through this base, Caldwell sets the tone for how the military trains and talks about its future. It’s a freedom few base commanders enjoy. Caldwell’s focus is stability operations, or how the military trains to stabilize nations. He picks who writes doctrine, what kind of classes are taught and on and on.

I assumed that his drive was shaped by Iraq or his colleagues’ experiences in Afghanistan. But as it turns out, it is based on his tours in Panama and Haiti and the first Gulf War, examples where he says the military figured out how to win the war, but not the peace.

In Panama, he was part of the U.S. effort to remove Manual Noriega, who surrendered. But then what? “All we ever planned for the initial assault takedown and transition of authority within the government. Nobody ever talked about picking up trash, reestablishing the police force, figuring out what do with their military. …So we go in, take down the government, then somebody turns around and said ‘How are we going to get the police back out on the street?’”

After the first Gulf War, he was at the Euphrates River when Saddam Hussein’s government began slaughtering the Shiites in the south. Caldwell watched the violence unleashed across the river, night after night. His unit was ordered to stay out, but was allowed to move a hospital nearby. They treated “lots and lots of causalities” until one day they were ordered to leave.

“We did a great military operation but didn’t think through the end state again.”

And in Haiti, the U.S. military helped put Jean-Bertrand Aristide in power. Afterward, “it was all the same stuff.”

With Iraq and Afghanistan, Caldwell fretted that if the military didn't talk about stability operations during those conflicts, it would not learn the importance of stability operations. Through Fort Leavenworth, he can lead the discussion, by deciding who writes the doctrine and leads the training.  “We’ve been learning the same lessons because we never codified it in writing.  We never wrote the doctrine that said stability operations were critical to winning the peace.

“We have to get it right this time. …We can’t afford to lose the lessons.”

We here at McClatchy like to think we've broken a lot of ground when it comes to the Bush administration's misuse of intelligence and policy mistakes in the war in Iraq.

But our colleagues over at the Los Angeles Times have done some amazing work over the years in ferreting out the story of the aptly-named Curveball, the Iraqi defector whose extravagant claims--including that Saddam Hussein had mobile biological weapons labs--the Bush administration used to make the case for war. Curveball's "intelligence" appeared in Bush's speeches and Colin Powell's infamous presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003.

Now, two reporters for the Times, John Goetz and Bob Drogin have tracked down Curveball, whose real name is Rafid Ahmed Alwan, in Germany, where he sought asylum in 1999 and soon began spinning fanciful tales about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

Alwan told the Times he has been maligned. "I never said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, never in my whole life," he's quoted as saying.

But the paper found that there were plenty of reasons to suspect Alwan was throwing a Curveball from the get-go:

He never told his handlers from the BND, the German intelligence service, that he had been fired twice for dishonesty and fled Iraq to avoid arrest.

Hilal Freah, who had been his supervisor at a warehouse complex near Baghdad, told the Times: "Rafid told five or 10 stories every day. ... I'd ask, 'Where have you been?' And he'd say, 'I had a problem with my car.' Or, 'My family was sick.' But I knew he was lying."

In early 2002, before the Iraq war, Alwan was working at Burger King in Germany:

"During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. "But he always lied. We never believed anything he said."

Another Iraqi friend, Ghazwan Adnan, remembers laughing when he applied for a job at a local Princess Garden Chinese Restaurant and discovered Alwan washing dishes in the back while claiming to be "a big deal" in Iraq. "How could America believe such a person?"

How, indeed?

This morning there were reports out of Afghanistan that the Taliban had swarmed towns near Kandahar and took them over. The Afghan Minister of Defense said 400 militants moved in. And residents reportedly were fleeing to neighboring towns after government leaflets reportedly urged them to leave. That the Taliban could be moving into towns, even with U.S., NATO and Afghan troops nearby would be an ominous sign that traditional military forces cannot contain the Taliban's influence. It appeared the Afghan government was concerned; it sent one of its battalions to the area after this morning’s report. 

And yet NATO and the U.S. military said it didn’t happen.

"Recent reports of militant control in the area appear to be unfounded," a NATO statement said. And at a Pentagon briefing, Defense spokesman Geoff Morrell said there was not “any imminent concern that Kandahar is about to fall to the Taliban."

Huh? How could there be such starkly contrasting versions of what happened? Conflicting reports is an everyday happenstance in Washington, but most of the time the differences are not so stark.

This is the second time in a week where reports out of Afghanistan raised more questions than answers. A few days ago, U.S. forces said they launched an air strike after insurgents attacked them from the Afghan/Pakistan border. U.S. officials said they notified their Pakistani counterparts before the attack began, and yet the Pakistani government was outraged, saying the U.S. killed 11 of its paramilitary members.

On the face of it, Monday’s news out of Kandahar could be another sign that the violence in Afghanistan is undeniably burgeoning. After all, last week the Taliban helped as many 1,200 inmates escape from Kandahar’s main prison.

But it also may signal how little the U.S. knows about what is happening in a country it has fought in since 2001. To be fair, the rugged terrain makes seeing movements in Afghanistan extremely difficult. That said, could the Taliban have moved in, destroyed crops and forced residents out of their homes right under the coalition forces’ noses? Or is the Afghan government playing politics, using today’s report to show its people that it can move forces to them quickly?

It’s been 14 hours since the reports first came in, and no one at the Pentagon seems to know.