The telephone beeped in the office of John Miller, the FBI’s top spokesman, on the evening of March 1, interrupting a discussion around a coffee table about the bureau’s new counterterrorism training programs.

The former television journalist broke away from an interview and crossed his expansive office to take the call. As he talked, he picked up a remote and switched channels on one of the brace of TV sets hanging from the wall.

It was bad news, he said, returning to the interview. ABC News was going with a story about a new al Qaeda kingpin in Pakistan who was planning attacks on the United States.

“Well,” he said with a wan smile and shrug, “that’s not good. It just lets him know we’re onto him.”

No use trying to stop it now, Miller’s look said. The story was on the air.

Miller’s default mode is pure Irish: a smile and a ready, usually sarcastic, joke. He never seems happier than when he’s talking terrorism over cocktails with fellow G-men or cops. And, at 47, he may know the reporting game better than anyone who’s ever occupied the FBI spokesman’s office.

People often forget, or don’t know, he’s the same John Miller who spent five years as a television correspondent and anchorman himself — at ABC News, no less — and who scored a journalistic coup by traveling to the caves of Afghanistan in 1998 for an interview with Osama bin Laden.

Some reporters find it supremely ironic — even unseemly — that the man who gave bin Laden a global megaphone when the Saudi fugitive was issuing fatwas to kill Americans is now the face of the FBI.

Former FBI spokesman Frank Scafidi calls such criticism “plainly ridiculous. It sounds almost like envy.”

“One thing is for sure,” Scafidi adds, “John Miller has gotten closer to bin Laden with a notepad than the world’s only superpower has with all of its high-tech toys and God knows what else. That’s what I’d tell those who find his FBI position unseemly.”

In any event, Miller’s path from bin Laden to the J. Edgar Hoover Building took some resume-building turns.

He’s been a cop longer than a reporter, as the police trophies and framed testimonials around his seventh-floor office attest.

Before his stint at ABC, Miller served as a Deputy Police Commissioner of New York City and was the chief spokesman for the NYPD under then Commissioner William Bratton.

At ABC, he spent nights drinking and eating with cops, “ tucking into late-night gnocchi with his tough-talking detective pals” with beepers going off around the table, I wrote in a 2002 New York Times review of his book “The Cell,” about Brooklyn-based terrorists. He was a close friend of the late John O’Neill, the legendary FBI counterterrorism agent who died in the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks.

Miller followed Bratton to Los Angeles, where he took over the LAPD’s Counter-Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau.

An incident there in 2004 only burnished his own growing legend as a kind of Philip Marlowe dick: He was stopped at LAX with a loaded gun in his computer bag.

Bratton said it was an honest mistake.

“I talked to John when he was on the plane, and he was incredibly embarrassed for himself, for his family and for the department,” Bratton told reporters. “Apparently, he was moving things around from one case to another when he was packing and he forgot the gun was there.”

Miller was permitted to fly on to New York to celebrate Barbara Walters’ retirement, according to reports at the time.

The brickbats fly at the FBI every day, from every conceivable direction.

Over just a few days last week Miller and the 70 people who work for him scrambled to handle questions on subjects ranging from the leak probe of former vice presidential aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to a government audit of continuing FBI computer problems to the closing of an investigation into the 1955 killing of Emmett Till.

The FBI’s relationship with the media during much of the 20th century was problematic at best, from its selective leaks to reward friends and tarnish enemies — liberals, budget-cutters and civil rights leaders, most notoriously Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today the bureau is catching a new round of flak about growing evidence that it has been compiling files on anti-war groups.

But Miller’s main challenge seems to be handling the drumbeat of criticism that the agency is just not up to rebuilding itself as a version of Britain’s MI-5.

Miller can tire of these and other questions about the FBI, which he thinks is too often held to “a higher standard.”

“I’m just saying we don’t recruit from a higher universe, we recruit from the human race,” he said, speaking of the challenge of “transforming” the FBI from a law-and-order outfit to a world-class intelligence service capable of taking on al Qaeda.

To that end, he will spend hours drowning an inquiring reporter in data and talk and opening up the bureau’s legendarily closed doors for interviews.

“The media environment here is tough,” he says. “Inside the Beltway lives a post-Watergate legacy that says to a reporter, ‘If you don’t come back with someone’s head on a stick by the deadline then you have failed.’

“That is a tough atmosphere to work in when you know that thousands of employees walk into this building every day with the sole intention of working hard and doing the right thing.

“You would hardly recognize that from reading the papers some days . . .”

Ronald Kessler, author of several best-sellers that have championed the FBI’s rank-and-file, says Miller “understands that winning the media war may be as important as winning the war on terror, because without public and congressional understanding of what the FBI is doing, the tools it needs to fight terrorism will be taken away.”

Miller’s predecessor, Cassandra M. Chandler, is reliably said to be overjoyed at being out of the hot seat.

“My tenure covered nearly three years of some of the most significant changes in FBI history,” she said via e-mail from Norfolk, where she runs one of the FBI’s busiest field offices. “The uncertainty of what information would be emphasized by the national media, regardless of the amount of details we provided, frequently filled me with anxiety.

“On the other hand,” she continued, “I cannot explain in words the elation I experienced when a story was written fair and accurately and followed a reasonably fair headline.”

Why would Miller walk away from L.A. and the kind of glitterati he loves?

“I love the job,” Miller said by phone late Friday. “I always wanted to work for the FBI.”

In Washington, meanwhile, he’s kept alive a tradition from his earlier posts — a cigar club.

“We used to go to the Grand Havana room in L.A. and New York,” he reminisces. The members of his club were —and still are — Jerry Hauer, the former New York City and federal emergency official, Dr. Henry Lee, the famed criminologist, and FBI counterterrorism agent Mark Rossini (who now works for Miller at headquarters).

“While all the swells were sitting around with movie stars and producers talking about making up a story, I was with Hauer, Lee and Rossini talking real life,” he said.

“It was always more interesting.”

How about topping off his high-flying act on the biggest stage of all: The FBI’s New York Field office? Some think that’s where he is, and should be, headed.

“No thanks,” he says, a laugh in his throat, sounding very much like a candidate.

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