CIA veteran Charlie Allen, who has been shaking up the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence wing for the past 18 months, has brought aboard four spy agency veterans to study the mega-bureaucracy’s vulnerability to enemy penetration.

The initial 90-day engagement, headlined by top former CIA counterspy Paul J. Redmond, was launched only days before a U.S. Navy sailor — a Muslim convert — was arrested on suspicion of mishandling classified information that ended up in the hands of a suspected terrorism financier.

Intelligence experts familiar with DHS security procedures say the sprawling department, with responsibilities ranging from infrastructure protection to border control, is similarly vulnerable to infiltration by spies and criminals.

But news of the move is likely to raise some eyebrows around Washington’s close-knit intelligence world — and particularly at the White House.

Besides Redmond, who led the CIA’s hunts for Russian moles in the 1980s and ’90s, the consultants include three former high-ranking agency officials who bucked the Bush administration’s handling of intelligence on Iraq.

Tyler Drumheller, a career-long covert operator, resigned as the CIA’s European Division chief in 2005 and published a memoir (with coauthor Elaine Monaghan), “On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence.”

Another member of the consulting team, Michael Sulick, retired as the CIA’s associate deputy director of operations in 2004 after clashing with aides to former-Rep. Porter J. Goss, R-Fla., who ran the spy agency for a tumultuous two years.

A fourth consultant, William D. “Bill” Murray, who is working under a separate contract, was a CIA station chief in Lebanon, Pakistan and Paris during his 30 years with the agency.

Murray resigned in 2005 after his repeated memos challenging the veracity of informants who were saying Saddam Hussein got uranium from Niger went ignored.

“You’ve got a hundred years of experience among these four, I would guess,” said Danny Murray, a telecommunications lobbyist, speaking of the consultants he brought together for General Dynamics, the principal DHS contractor on the deal.

Given the consultants’ pedigree, the appointments could be read as another sign of the Bush administration’s declining clout on the Hill.

Even on a good day, the White House was not likely to challenge Allen, who spent a half century at the CIA before coming to DHS and is held in almost God-like reverence by members of both parties on the intelligence oversight committees.

“A living legend . . .” Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., who chairs the Homeland Security subcommittee on Intelligence, called him just last month, saying he has been helping “DHS climb out of a fairly deep hole on intelligence.”

“It’s a consulting deal on counterintelligence,” said Danny Murray, who is also a former assistant counsel for the Senate Commerce and Labor and Human Relations committees.

The CIA veterans are “trying to put a piece together that can be implemented” throughout “the whole scope of DHS,” he said.

A previous effort to enact a DHS-wide counterintelligence program, under Tom Ridge, provoked almost unanimous opposition both inside and outside the Nebraska Ave. headquarters.

“We were told by the DHS counsel, by the White House counsel, by Intelligence Community counsel, and by Congress that under no circumstances could we have a department-wide counterintelligence program,” said a former intelligence official with firsthand knowledge of the situation.

There were concerns about creating a secret new national domestic intelligence organization, he said.

“The thinking was that those functions could be carried out by the FBI, the Energy Department,” and other counterterrorism units that were being set up, he said. “We could do in-house security investigations, but that was it.”

According to a senior DHS official, counterintelligence has also been “a concern” to homeland security boss Michael Chertoff and the department’s chief of security, Dwight Williams.

Both have welcomed Allen’s initiative, he said.

Sources familiar with the contract say the CIA veterans have begun looking at several counterintelligence vulnerabilities.

Among them is a lack of consistent, department-wide procedures for handling, storing and discussing classified information. (The Secret Service, now a part of DHS, has long had its own high security standards and probably will be exempt from the counterintelligence review, sources said.)

The challenge for DHS has been additionally vexing because its mission is to make the sometimes highly sensitive material available to relevant state and local officials who may not be cleared for it.

The department also has yet to implement consistent procedures for vetting personnel for security clearances.

Using polygraphs — so called lie detectors — to screen DHS job applicants and employees, as the FBI and CIA do, is impractical for the sprawling bureaucracy of 13 components and roughly 180,000 workers, experts say.

“There’s got to be something else, though,” that can be implemented to vet employees who deal with highly sensitive intelligence, said a security expert who has studied DHS’s situation.

But DHS intelligence faces a big hurdle in the constant turnover of personnel who find more attractive jobs at the CIA and elsewhere.

“It’s kind of like you have a graduate program,” freshman Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., said to Allen at a recent intelligence oversight hearing. “Once they have undergone training with you, they move on to other places.”

Allen woefully agreed, reminding the panel that about 100 intelligence officers didn’t even have desks at DHS when he took over.

Today, he said, about 60 percent of the DHS intelligence staff comes from private contractors.

Computer security across the department also needs prompt attention, the security expert said.

It varies wildly among DHS agencies and in segments of the nation’s critical infrastructure as well, he said.

Preventing Islamic jihadis from hacking into DHS’s computer networks is hardly the main counterintelligence challenge, the experts say: Russian, Chinese and other foreign intelligence agencies also want to steal America’s industrial, technical and government secrets.

Poor DHS counterintelligence offers our enemies a wide open gate, a former top CIA officer said. “It’s kind of ironic, because you need three different badges to get into DHS headquarters.”

One expert pointed out that Islamic terrorists might try to plant spies in the United States by enlisting in the Coast Guard, now part of DHS.

At least two al Qaeda operatives are known to have enlisted in U.S. military forces.

Recruiting and bribing disaffected workers in the Coast Guard or other sensitive DHS agencies, such as Customs or the Border Patrol, he added, would be other avenues for making inroads.

Last week, federal prosecutors charged a former Navy sailor with giving a London-based Islamic publisher information in 2001 on ships heading to the Middle East.

Part of the work of counterintelligence is ferreting out such moles.

Which leads back to Paul Redmond, who spent a short, unhappy time as head of DHS intelligence.

“I have no prepared testimony,” Redmond famously told a joint hearing of the House Homeland and Appropriations committees, in June 2003.

He offered to field questions instead.

Redmond was gone within weeks, citing health concerns.

But if Charlie Allen wants the old molehunter back, he can have him.

“He’s a no-baloney guy, and we appreciate that,” Perlmutter said of Allen in a brief interview last week.

Perlmutter, a lawyer and former Colorado legislator who sits on the House Homeland Security Intelligence Subcommittee, conceded intelligence oversight is new to him, “but I’m not new to people.”

Redmond and company have 90 days to produce their first batch of counterintelligence recommendations, Danny Murray said.

“If they [DHS] like what they see,” he said, “I guess they’ll ask for more.”

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

Bulgarian Boom: Little did I suspect that I’d send a shockwave halfway around the world with last week’s column about the Bulgarian official who has been a key link for Washington in the global war of terror.

“A tsunami,” is how the Bulgarian media described the furious reaction to my column about Boyko Borissov, a top former interior ministry official who observers in Sofia say could well become prime minister in the next elections.

Citing a private investigative report commissioned by a Swiss financial concern, I wrote, “Washington’s newest ally in the global war on terror is a close associate of known mobsters and linked to almost 30 unsolved murders in the Black Sea republic.”

The story was on page one in all the capital’s newspapers and led the national TV and radio news for most of the week. The Bulgarian ambassador to Washington asked for a meeting.

Borissov, a former bodyguard who is now mayor of Sofia, stoutly denied the accusations. His allies in the government and the media charged that the column was a bit of dirty business spawned by his political opponents and their unnamed allies in the United States. (No, it wasn’t).

A top former U.S. federal law enforcement official familiar with Bulgaria explained the reaction this way: “Heretofore everybody knew of the corruption associated with the unsolved murders of many mobsters, corruption in all branches of the government and the other payoffs, but [they] were afraid to speak out, and the press, with few exceptions, was intimidated.”

“Now that this article has come out and raised this issue in public,” he added, “it’s like the logjam has been broken.”

Borissov, meanwhile, publicly invited me to come to Sofia as his guest.

We’ll give it careful consideration.

How to say “I’ll have the combo platter” in Chinese: The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been knocked for years for sending spies to countries where they can’t speak the language.

Now comes news that the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland is launching a new federally funded initiative this summer to put 1,100 kids in intensive Chinese and Arabic classes. “The program will also help train as many as 600 Arabic and Chinese speakers to teach the languages in high schools,” a university announcement added.

The $4.8 million program is part of the Bush administration’s National Security Language Initiative, funded jointly by the National Intelligence Directorate (ODNI) and the Defense Department.