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CIA Director Leon Panetta joined President Obama and other prominent officials Wednesday in praising longtime Washington Post political columnist David Broder, who died earlier in the day from complications from diabetes. He was 81.

Panetta called Broder, who worked at The Post for more than 40 years, "the best in the journalism business."

"For more than four decades, David Broder made sense of American politics and the sometimes messy system of governing called democracy," Panetta said in a statement released by the CIA.

"His prolific reporting and commentary did more than inform readers; it helped raise the level of debate in Washington and across our nation. He challenged us to think critically and honestly about the biggest public policy issues of the day. In so doing, he helped make politics and government more responsive to the American people, and ultimately, more effective," Panetta said. "He was, quite simply, the best in the journalism business."

The relationship between Broder and Panetta, a former eight-term Democratic congressman from California who also served as President Clinton's chief of staff, went back decades.

Ben Bonk, a top CIA official who played a key role in Moammar Gaddafi’s renunciation of weapons of mass destruction, died quietly at his home in McLean on Feb. 26. He was 56 and had skin cancer, a friend said.

Bonk was involved in some of the most important events in modern counterterrorism history, from the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, to warning President Bush about impending al- Qaeda attacks, to secret meetings with Gaddafi’s intelligence chief, Musa Kusa, that led to Libya’s WMD disarmament and cooperation with Washington against al-Qaeda.

At the time of his death, he was head of the CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program. He had also been deputy chief of the Counterterrorism Center and, before that, national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, among other ranking positions.

About 40 former agency colleagues, friends and admirers, including CIA Director Leon Panetta, former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, and Cofer Black, head of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, gathered to honor Bonk’s life at services in Vienna last Thursday.

"The agency family is saddened by the loss of Ben Bonk, a stand-out intelligence officer and consummate public servant who leaves an impressive legacy,” CIA spokesman George Little said in a statement over the weekend. “He was a gifted analyst, extraordinary teacher, and thoughtful manager. We'll always remember him as a great person--someone who combined superior intellect with a terrific sense of humor. Our hearts go out to his wonderful family."

Ken Robinson, a former Army Special Forces officer, recalled meeting Bonk during a patrol against Iranian gunboats that were attacking Western shipping in the Persian Gulf in 1987 and 1988.

Bonk was an analyst in the Joint Intelligence Liaison Element, which was supporting U.S. combat operations. Analysts usually sat at desks, far from the action, writing reports. Not Bonk.

Saying he found the arguments of other top former U.S. national security officials “compelling,” former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on Monday called for President Obama to commute the remainder of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard’s life sentence.

"At first I felt I did not have enough information to render a reasoned and just opinion,” Kissinger said in his Mar. 3 letter, released today by a public relations firm that has been lobbying for the release of Pollard, sentenced to life in prison for espionage in 1987.

“But having talked with [former Secretary of State] George Shultz and read the statements of former CIA Director [R. James] Woolsey, former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman [Dennis] DeConcini, former Defense Secretary [Caspar] Weinberger, former Attorney General [Michael] Mukasey and others whose judgments and first-hand knowledge I respect, I find their unanimous support for clemency compelling.”

Shultz was secretary at the time of Pollard’s sentencing.

"I believe justice would be served by commuting the remainder of Pollard's sentence of life imprisonment," Kissinger wrote.

The White House declined to comment on the Kissinger letter, referring to a statement by then spokesman Robert Gibbs on Jan. 15 in response to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's public petition for Pollard's release.

"Look, I think the -- obviously the State Department answered this a little bit yesterday in saying that they received the request; they’ll take a look at it," Gibbs said. "I think it is important to underscore that Mr. Pollard was convicted of some of the most serious crimes that anybody can be charged with."

Egyptian protesters breached a secret police compound in eastern Cairo on Saturday and carted boxes of files, according to rights activists and Egyptian media reports.

“Protesters entered the State Security Investigations (SSI) compound in Nasr City, a place they call the ‘torture center’ of Egypt, just before 7 p.m.,” Priyanka Motaparthy, a research fellow with U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, reported from the scene.

“They dragged out as many documents and materials as they could, to protect them from being destroyed,” Motaparthy added.

Army officers did nothing to stop them, she said.

Robert Baer, whose CIA exploits and exasperations in the Middle East were immortalized in the 2005 George Clooney thriller "Syriana", has a new role: conjugal co-author.

“The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story,” Baer’s fifth book, is his first written with his wife, Dayna, a CIA security specialist. They met during a covert mission in Sarajevo in 1994.

Love blossomed--cautiously, of course.

“Truth is,” Dayna writes, “I think Bob’s a little nutty.”

“It's chick lit,” Baer shrugs, via e-mail.

That's true, to a point. Like doing the dishes after dinner, the Baers alternate chapters, he writing one, she another, beginning with her evolution from “just a California girl, born into a comfortable lifestyle, looking for adventure and a way to serve her country,” into a street operative in some of the world’s hairiest neighborhoods.

As one advance review put it, “they describe their careers, ... their romance, and the difficulty they have in establishing a balanced life outside the world of secret agents.”

Their “world,” of course, includes glamour spots such as Bosnia, Lebanon, Syria, Greece and Tajikistan.

But “Romancing the Stone” this is not. The Baers provide realistic, often gut-wrenching portraits of the clandestine life and its costs, emotional and personal, as things go wrong and friends die.

The personal is political for Bob, who offers some shrewd and timely insights into the failed dynamics of U.S. policies in the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon, still the region's cockpit of intrigue despite the crises now roiling Egypt, Libya and beyond.

“The Sunni are a failed ruling class,” he maintains. “Iran wins by default.”

Since 2002 and his first book, “See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism,” Baer, now 59 and Time magazine’s intelligence columnist, has earned a reputation as one of the agency’s most caustic, knowledgeable--and wistful--critics.

In the new book, it's no different.

“'The Company We Keep,' ” he says, “is pro-government service in the sense there's a big personal price to pay saving the world, and it's all the worse when it turns out you haven't saved nothin.' ”

With the future of Libya still in the balance, some CIA operations veterans think it’s well past time the spy agency went past just trying to keep tabs on what’s going on and arm the rebels.

“This guy, Gaddafi, has been an enemy of ours for decades,” says Charles Faddis, who led a secret CIA mission into northern Iraq before the 2003 invasion.

“Now his people have risen up against him and are attempting to do what we never could, depose him. We should have been in there a week ago, arming the opposition and providing whatever other assistance we can.”

The agency’s success in Afghanistan in 2001, leading troops and directing air strikes that routed the Taliban in matter of weeks show that “both CIA and Special Forces have broad capabilities, as displayed in Afghanistan in 2001, to work with indigenous forces in fast moving, fluid situations like this,” Faddis added.

President Obama said today that he had "instructed...all those who are involved in international affairs to examine is a full range of options," which resumably includes the CIA and other special operations assets.

The administration should definitely not send troops when CIA and special operations units are suited for the situation, said a former top military intelligence official in Afghanistan who asked for anonymity because he still works on international issues.

But he ticked off a list of things U.S. secret agents could and should be doing in Libya, which included:

• “Intelligence and communications support to the rebels;

• “Weapons and ammunition to the rebels;

• “SIGINT [signals intelligence, or electronic eavesdropping] on the regime;

• “HUMINT [human intelligence] to infiltrate and subvert the regime, recruiting others to do the dirty work if necessary, and

• “Covert operations to further weaken regime infrastructure.”

A newly found 2003 memo by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appears to directly contradict claims that Guantanamo held only the “worst of the worst” suspected terrorists.

“We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants,” Rumsfeld says in the memo, addressed to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan,” Rumsfeld adds in the memo, which was discovered by a Seton Hall law school research team and provided to The Post.

“Therefore, effective June 16, the January 7, 2002 Screening Criteria are amended to authorize you to transfer to Guantanamo only those detainees who meet the criteria and are of [redacted several words] value.”

Rumsfeld’s memo “explicitly contradicts his continued public statements that Guantanamo Bay was reserved for the ‘worst of the worst,’" Seton Hall Law School's Center for Policy and Research said in a statement.

"The Secretary of Defense’s Memorandum is at variance with what he told Congress at the time and what he is representing to the American public in his new memoir,” added Prof. Mark Denbeaux, director of the Center. “First they lied about who was in Guantanamo, now they lie about those who left. It’s like that old gospel song, ‘Sign of Judgment’-- they told one lie to fool us all, then two to make it true.”

Asked for comment, Rumsfeld spokesman Keith Urbahn said the former defense secretary never used “the worst of the worst” to describe the Guantanamo prisoners.

“It is wrongly attributed to him,” Urbahn said, and a Lexis-Nexis search appears to back him up.

On the other hand, other top Pentagon officials close to Rumsfeld used the phrase and didn't object when reporters attributed it to him in their questions.

For example, during a Jan. 28, 2002 Pentagon briefing, Rumsfeld’s spokesman Adm. John S. Stufflebeem said of the prisoners, “These are the worst of the worst. And if let out on the street, they will go back to the proclivity of trying to kill Americans and others. So that is well-established.”

The memo was included in Seton Hall’s report, “Rumsfeld Knew: DoD's 'Worst of the Worst' and Recidivism Claims Refuted by Recently Declassified Memo,” to be published Friday.

On Tuesday Rumsfeld’s memoir, “Known and Unknown,” came under withering scrutiny by The Post’s Bob Woodward, author of several books on the Bush administration, who called it “a travesty” and “a brazen effort to shift blame to others…”

“It now appears that the same thing is true of Guantanamo and this time the proof is in Secretary Rumsfeld’s own words,” said Sean Camoni, a fellow at the Seton Hall Law School Center for Policy and Research and a co-author of the report.

Peter Finn and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

The U.S. Central Command says its new “Persona” social media "infiltration" software is designed to cozy up to extremist bloggers overseas, not law-abiding Americans chatting on Facebook or similar sites.

Earlier this month, the Web buzzed with a report that the software was designed to “manage ‘fake people’ on social media sites and create the illusion of consensus on controversial issues,” implying that the Defense Department was targeting critics of the war in Afghanistan and other conflicts.

Further compounding a sinister view of the software was the discovery of e-mails from the head of a company implicated in “dirty tricks” against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and a pro-labor organization, which discussed how such technology could be used.

"There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas...” wrote Aaron Barr, the chief executive officer of HBGary Federal, a Colorado Springs company whose hacked e-mails revealed plans to attack critics of Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Barr resigned Feb. 28 “to allow the company to move on after an embarrassing data breach,” according to the technology Web site ThreatPost.

Centom's June 22, 2010, contract, offered through the U.S. Air Force’s Air Mobility Command, specified that “Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries…while hiding the existence of the operation…and provid(ing) excellent cover and powerful deniability.”

You Tube videos purporting to show Moammar Gaddafi’s preparations for using chemical weapons on protesters are either crude propaganda or the product of Libyans who simply don’t know what they are looking at--or both, experts say.

One of the videos shows a Libyan protester handling what he says are “chemical and biological explosives” captured in Misurata, which was overrun by anti-Gadaffi forces on Feb. 24.

"These are the biological and chemical weapons that look like bombs of different sizes, used to eradicate people, found in Misurata in the storage facilities of the security forces' battalion,” the narrator says, picking up a number of canisters with his bare hands and displaying them for the camera.

“This sample has some various types of poison gas and some germ bombs,” he continues. “It…would have been horrifying if these bombs had been used to eradicate the Libyan citizens….They (the weapons) are in a safe place thank God after a furious battle [that] took place last night.”

In reality, they are mostly aircraft ejection-seat canisters, which a close examination of the blurry videos clearly shows.

“There is nothing in this video that is indicative of chemical ordnance,” says a Libya arms expert whose diplomatic position prohibits him from being quoted by name. ”At least some of the canisters are clearly labeled as ejection seat cartridges for aircraft, or similar purposes.”

“The video in question,” he added, “looks more the product of jumpy civilians who can't tell a CW [chemical weapon] from a can of Raid and are anxious to aid the agit-prop efforts against the government.”

Another video shows a man identified as a Libyan army general who joined the protesters during the takeover of Misurata air field, waving a gas mask and shouting that “Gaddafi is now using poison gas against…Libyan citizens,” according to a caption accompanying the video. It adds, “He says this type of mask is used only to protect from POISON GAS and CHEMICAL WEAPONS.” [Emphasis theirs.]

In reality, other experts said, the mask might protect its wearer against tear gas or pepper spray, but not chemical or biological weapons, whose handling requires full-body hazardous-materials suits.