Secret

Two years ago, Danuta Wilson and her family were driving on a busy road when her car stalled. The Volvo was towed to a dealer, which concluded that the problem stemmed from the electronic throttle module that controls the flow of fuel and air to the engine. "I was very surprised. It's supposed to last for the life of the car," says Wilson, who administers a scholarship program at Georgetown University. Her five-year-old Volvo V70 Cross Country had 42,000 miles on it. The dealer refused to cover the repairs, suggesting Wilson put the wrong type of gas in the vehicle or she misused it in some other way. Volvo wouldn't pay, either.

Inside a large yellow warehouse within the iron gates of the National Security Agency, thousands of boxes stuffed with the nation's secrets are piled to the ceiling. For decades this place has been hidden from public view, a catacomb holding more than 15 million pages of documents filled with information about everything from the Vietnam War to President Kennedy's assassination to the Persian Gulf war. Some of the documents may never be declassified. But for five years now, since former President Bill Clinton ordered that all documents 25 years old or older be turned over to the public, the agency has been in a mad dash to keep up, sorting through a never-ending deluge of paper, tapes, photographs and film, putting aside the documents they believe could threaten national security.

``What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.``Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.

Washington -- A Senate bill that sets funding levels for U.S. spy agencies suggests that the CIA's secret network of overseas prisons should be shut down unless the Bush administration can demonstrate that they are "necessary, lawful and in the best interests of the United States." The measure amounts to a fresh attack by Congress on the five-year-old detention program, which has been credited with providing valuable intelligence on terrorism but has also been condemned by other countries.

New York's Museum for African Art inaugurated its new space in SoHo this year with a show called "Secrets." Its curator, Mary Nooter, pointed out that the central paradox of a secret is that its power depends on a certain degree of revelation. You have to know there is a secret in order to be interested in it.Each of the artists in "Cryptics," at School 33, lets you in on the fact that there's something secret about his or her art -- they're letting you in part of the way, so you'll know you won't get in all the way. And each deals with a different kind of secret with which we all come in contact in our lives.

WASHINGTON -- From the raw record of a national nightmare, committed to paper, stamped top secret and filed away for 30 years: a 1959 urinalysis of Lee Harvey Oswald; frantic requests for dossiers on the man arrested as John F. Kennedy's assassin; ballistics tests on the mail-order rifle; a scale model of the grassy knoll.The National Archives' huge cache of government documents on the assassination of President Kennedy was opened yesterday, offering a treasure trove for conspiracy theorists, a wealth of arcane details for historians and a bottomless pit of memory, loss and mystery for those who recall the president's murder.

Horses with an abundance of early speed drew the rail and the two outside post positions yesterday when the field for tomorrow's fourth running of the Frank J. De Francis Memorial Dash was drawn at Laurel Race Course.It means pretty simple strategy for at least one horse, Secret Odds, who breaks from the inside: Go for it, or be left behind in a field loaded with fast horses. There are seven graded stakes winners in the group and two graded stakes-placed.Should the early speed immolate, there are some proven closers capable of running a dynamic final quarter.

As so often, when I want to understand something about human nature, I open the pages of that great moralist, Samuel Johnson. Here, for instance, in his ''Rambler'' Essay No. 79, is a description of Ross Perot:''To profess what he does not mean, to promise what he cannot perform, to flatter ambition with prospects of promotion, and misery with hopes of relief, to soothe pride with appearances of submission, and appease enmity by blandishments and bribes, can...

PANAMA CITY, Panama -- Panama, a country terrorized for more than 20 years by misuse of government intelligence organizations, has created -- with U.S. assistance -- a secret intelligence office headed by a one-time senior official in former dictator Manuel A. Noriega's puppet governments, according to Panamanian officials and sources.Although the Council of Public Security and National Defense, as the new office is called, was authorized by presidential decree in February and has been in operation since July, the existence of ** its intelligence activities has been kept secret from the public and all but a handful of government officials.

MEMOIR MY FATHER THE SPY: AN INVESTIGATIVE MEMOIR By John H. Richardson. HarperCollins. 336 pages. A memoir written by a son intent on unraveling his father's mysteries is hardly the obvious formula for an engaging read, even if the son did spend much of his life despising the old man. But then most people's fathers were not CIA spies, who mingled and whispered with striped-suited dignitaries in the world's hot spots and struggled to undermine communism...