Undercover Agent

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The explosive growth in methamphetamine use has a profound workplace effect.Do you work in a hospital? One of your co-workers may be an undercover agent. On on an assembly line? Ditto. Believe it. You are being watched. And it's not just because somebody in management wants to dig up some dirt. It's because there are obvious indicators of illegal drug use among your co-workers.A few weeks ago, a Kansas City-area manufacturer of food processing equipment lost more than one-tenth of its work force in a drug sweep.

Stewart D. Nozette of Chevy Chase was a gifted scientist privy to America's top secrets. On Wednesday, he admitted trying to sell those secrets to a foreign government. With his guilty plea to attempted espionage, the astrophysicist was rebranded a would-be traitor. Nozette, 54, stood in an orange prison jumpsuit in the District of Columbia's federal court as he conceded that he had accepted $11,000 in cash in 2009 in exchange for passing classified materials about U.S. satellite defense systems to a person Nozette believed was an Israeli intelligence officer.

The Man's Book By Thomas Fink Little, Brown / 240 pages / $23.99 This "essential guide for the modern man," on sale May 6, is a compendium of stuff we guys ought to know in order to be credible. Such as: how to get a serious workout at home; rules of popular drinking games; essential shirts for the closet; knife-sharpening and meat-carving skills; and how to quantify beauty in women. What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 By Tina Seeling HarperOne / 208 pages / $22.99 True, it's written by a woman (a Stanford University professor, no less)

Mike Royko is on vacation. In the meantime, we are reprinting some of his favorite columns. This column was first published March 31, 1977.I really hope O'Brien made it home all right. Undercover work can be risky.But let me start at the beginning.The phone rang about 5 p.m. The operator said it was a collect call from O'Brien.I wasn't expecting a call from anybody named O'Brien. So I asked her where the call was being placed."In Chicago," she said. I accepted."My name's O'Brien," he said.

JERUSALEM -- An international human rights group has said Israeli undercover agents routinely shoot to kill unarmed Palestinians in violation of the army's own stated rules.The group, Middle East Watch, said a year-long study to be published today shows 20 "unjustified killings" of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza -- about half the fatalities attributed to the undercover groups in that time.The lengthy report also quotes one identified and four unnamed Israeli soldiers as saying that the regulations regarding when to open fire are routinely ignored, soldiers lie to investigators, and their superiors willingly encourage cover-ups of suspicious deaths.

The tactics used by federal agents to befriend a young man professing jihadist sentiments — and to help him plot an attack on a military recruiting center in Catonsville — are becoming more common nationwide. But even as such cases raise questions about entrapment, legal experts say most defendants have a hard time convincing juries that they were unfairly targeted. "Entrapment is a very difficult defense," University of Maryland law professor Michael Milleman said, a day after 21-year-old Antonio Martinez was accused of plotting to blow up the Armed Forces Career Center on Baltimore National Pike.

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Israeli troops staged a rare incursion into this city yesterday, bulldozing cars and vegetable stands near the central square as they engaged gunmen and stone-throwing residents in a chaotic two-hour battle that left four Palestinians dead. The raid, aimed at rescuing a team of undercover Israeli agents, was a diplomatic embarrassment for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as he headed to Egypt for talks with President Hosni Mubarak on how to revive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

A Chestertown man pleaded guilty this week in a New York federal court to trafficking live snapping turtles that he processed in Queen Anne's County and then sold as turtle meat. Michael V. Johnson, 57, faces a maximum of one year in prison for turning the wildlife into food at his business in Millington called Turtle Deluxe Inc., according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of New York in Buffalo. During 2007 and 2008, the statement said, Johnson purchased common snapping turtles — considered protected wildlife under New York law — from sellers in several states, brought them back to the Turtle Deluxe facility to sort and weigh and then paid the vendors based on weight.

NEW YORK -- On an unusually warm day in December 2003, three dozen men filed into the Islamic Center of Bay Ridge on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, kneeling on the moss-green carpet for midday prayer. To anyone watching, the service would have appeared unremarkable. But several police reports, when taken together with testimony at the recent federal trial of a Pakistani immigrant in the plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station, revealed something extraordinary about the gathering: Among the kneeling men were at least three who were working undercover for the New York Police Department.

WASHINGTON -- Just two blocks away from where the special prosecutor was announcing an indictment in the CIA leak case yesterday, an exhibit at the International Spy Museum was celebrating some of the best-known female spies in history. The exhibit included bonnets used to conceal messages, chemicals that could change a person's skin tone and other tools of the trade. Photos of some spies - including Mata Hari - were also shown. But one was missing: the Revolutionary War spy known only as "355," her identification number.