Don't be alarmed if it turns out the 1,000 being held in NYC are hostages of US Attorney Mary Jo White and the New York office of the FBI. The two offices are pissed that Ashcroft is trying to take over the long-lived terrorism investigation without properly rewarding those who have been running it. Some of the New York attorneys and investigators have been reassigned to DC but don't like the way they are being treated -- no doubt in part due to different party affiliations, but more likely because the Bush newcomers don't want to be condescended to by the New Yorkers who hate DC, its crud food, people and gossip. New York and DC, Justice and FBI, have been at it for decades, and this long-running vendetta is what underlies several espionage cases, including Hansen's, but not only his. DC sends people up to New York to counterspy on the operations, but they either get coopted or if uncooperative get fucked by being set up to take a fall. Various countries like Russia help out their New York buddies in screwing the competition. And the reverse happens in DC to New Yorkers who are sucked into that cesspool. When the Soviets in New York battled the Soviets in DC, both using their USG resources, and the USG doing the same, it was war beyond ordinary counterintelligence comprehension. These battles have been going on since the 1930s, and were set in motion by Hoover and his Soviet counterpart. Then became institutionalized featherbedding outdistancing DC's, if you can believe that. The CIA got ensnared in these deep seated treacheries when it came along in 1947, as have most other of the intel agencies, many of which share offices in New York, but are widely spaced in DC, all attempting to get as far away from toxic FBI HQ as possible. There's a USG-mafia in New York that is far more complex than the organized crime kind, though there is cooperation with those birds of a feather too. You can see representatives of all these cozy groups sometimes lunching together up in Sylvia's in Harlem, strolling over from a not well camouflaged satellite suite of offices housed above the studio where a world-famous cooking show is videoed. (We did a job across the street for a church one of whose deacon's owns the building and who happily bragged of his steady-rent tenants -- not that the neighborhood kids had not already scrawled their acronyms on the building, again and again, and their bros got paid to repeatedly repaint.) The gaggle of antennas the agencies use there nicely fit in among the TV antennas of the cooking show. The feds and the actors on the TV shows share a cafeteria and it's damn hard to spot who's who except for the Russians and Mobsters who are dapper dans who tap fists like the locals and boogie at the dames who spic-call them piquito cujones. This is classified so shut your suckupper or your computers will anchor you to the toxic bottom.