The Spies Who Couldn’t Think Straight:

Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program by Stephen Grey, a London-based journalist for the New York Times and other publications, will most likely touch off an anti-Bush media feeding frenzy in the closing weeks of 2006 congressional campaign.

What is not in Grey’s book is even more explosive – and may damage Hillary Clinton more than George Bush. It is revealed here for the first time.

I spoke with Grey this weekend. He revealed that the CIA’s ability to covertly transport terrorists – a process known as rendition – has been hobbled by boneheaded legal restrictions and laughably poor spycraft. These legal restrictions were imposed during the Clinton era but never lifted by President Bush.

“One CIA pilot told me that in the mid 1990s, when Clinton was president, that the lawyers began to take over. Previously, they used to take CIA planes into hangars all the time, re-spray them, and come out with a different tail number. That way none of the tracing of CIA planes I’ve been doing since 9/11 would have been possible. The idea of flying around with one tail number for three years would have been thought completely nuts,” Grey told me. “But [Clinton-era] lawyers said they needed to stay legal. They even insisted that, to comply with FAA regulations, they needed stewardesses.”

Yes, stewardesses on CIA planes.

With these Clintonian legal rules, it was easy for amateur “plane spotters” around the globe to track the movements of the so-called secret CIA planes. Those plane spotters later pooled their information with Grey, who broke the news in a series of headlines damaging to Bush.

Other CIA mistakes – some of shockingly simple minded – continued well into the Bush years. The CIA could have removed its planes from flight-tracking online software, such as “flight tracker” and “FBOweb,” with a single phone call. If the CIA had done so, no one outside the government could have tracked the planes transporting suspected al Qaeda terrorists. But the agency never made the call.

Another error: By registering these planes as civilian executive jets as required by the agency’s lawyers, the CIA was required to file detailed flight plans in advance. If they were registered as military or even as a charter aircraft, disclosing such information would not be necessary.

“Disclosing advance notice of the movement of these planes – it could have been a terrorist’s dream,” Grey said.

Before the lawyers took over in the mid 1990s, CIA pilots told Grey this kind of tracking would have been impossible.

Other errors were more elemental.

CIA pilots in Southern Spain betrayed their covers by recklessly using their private cell phones, Grey said. Eric Fain, one CIA pilot, phoned his father in North Carolina.

In Milan, CIA officers used non-secure cell phones from the very location that they took into custody a suspected al Qaeda militant. Numerous calls among CIA agents, often using their personal cell phones, revealed their identities to Italian police. Now a left-wing Italian judge has charged the CIA team with kidnapping and other offenses.

Bob Lady, a CIA station chief in Milan, later used the cell phone used in the controversial rendition from his own home, thus revealing his true identity.

After he retired, Lady left details about the operation (emails, surveillance photos, internet searches of the route,) on his personal computer; another sloppy move.

Both Fain and Lady have been previously named in public reports. Neither Grey nor Pajamas Media is revealing the undisclosed identities of active CIA agents. Although, says Grey, they are so careless, it would be easy to do.