The CIA can’t seem to run fast enough to escape its troubled recent past.

Which is a shame, since, a notable lapse aside, it’s making steady progress in regrouping from the debacles of 9/11 and the screwball Iraq war.

Last week’s indictment of Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, a CIA logistical wizard who allegedly helped steer multi-million dollar spy agency contracts to a lifelong friend, leaves an impression that the spy agency has become just another hog at the trough of corruption connected to Iraq.

But veteran agency officials insist that Foggo is an aberration.

After years of following the CIA’s ups and downs now, I’m starting to agree.

It’s been a long time since a character remotely comparable to Foggo emerged from the shadows.

That was Edwin Wilson, a legendary agent who also handled CIA logistics in the Middle East and fell into bad company.

Until recently, I’d always felt that the biggest untold CIA story was financial shenanigans by agency operatives.

It’s true that from time to time, CIA officers who the agency set up in private business as a cover for their clandestine activities siphoned off cash from their semi-legitimate firms.

I also heard tales about CIA operatives who built their cover businesses into lucrative operations and blackmailed the agency into letting them keep them.

That’s unlikely today, said an agency veteran who cannot be identified.

“That’s not going to happen,” he insisted during a walk the other day.

“There are controls now, and when somebody slips off the reservation, they are caught.”

And quietly retired.

Foggo is not a quiet man.

Gregarious, even flamboyant, the big blonde lunk owned any room he walked into, remembers Tyler Drumheller, the clandestine service’s European Division chief when he retired in 2005.

Drumheller likened Foggo to Milo Minderbender, the unforgettable supply sergeant in Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22,” who turned a nice little blackmarket sideline into a global corporation.

“They needed somebody who could deliver the mail,” said Drumheller, who recounted the run-up to the Iraq war in a recent memoir, “On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence.”

Then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss, a Republican congressman from Florida and House Intelligence Committee chairman who President Bush picked to run the agency, promoted Foggo into the upper ranks of management.

Goss needed somebody who could get supplies to the Middle East fast.

He promoted Foggo to executive director, the spy agency’s number three slot.

“It was the Peter Principle,” Drumheller said. “A job one step beyond his abilities.”

“We were all shocked when he rose to management of the entire organization,” he said.

Foggo was championed by a small group of aides whom Goss brought to Langley from the House Intelligence Committee, which he chaired until Bush selected him to run the spy agency.

His aides called themselves “the revolutionaries,” who planned to remake U.S. intelligence along hawkish, antiestablishment lines.

Instead, they soon became known as the “Gosslings” for the protective circle they formed around their boss and for what many saw as overbearing attempts to isolate and purge veteran officials.

After months of turmoil, Goss resigned and the agency shook off the whole crowd like a head cold. Soon after, some of the CIA’s best clandestine operatives returned to the fold.

Under Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who succeeded Goss last fall, the agency is poised to remake itself into a cutting edge spying and sabotage outfit—its original mission.

But recent reports say it’s still not moving fast enough to revamp its fair-haired work force into a legion of darker skinned spies who can walk the streets of Tehran, speak Farsi and not draw notice.

Hayden recently testified that he might try to relax the CIA’s traditional strictures against hiring first-generation immigrants who still have relatives abroad.

There are complicated security issues involved — how can the agency do a background check on, say, a recruit’s family in Iran? How do you protect against double agents?

But just knowing that Hayden is considering such apostasy suggests that a lot of old, bad habits are being dumped.

The question is whether there is time for any innovation in Iraq, where it’s needed most.

As with the Army and Marines, the war has put heavy strains on the CIA’s resources and personnel, leaving it unable to marshall enough strength to deal with bubbling challenges from Moscow to Pyongyang, not to mention elsewhere in the Middle East.

It takes a year to get a CIA recruit ready for a rookie assignment abroad, years more before most of them can walk along a Parisian boulevard with any degree of skill and comfort, much less Syria or Iran.

But finally, at least, the CIA seems on its way.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.