Hercules, a hero of Greek myth, had a tough childhood.

His father was Zeus,the top god, but his mother was a mere mortal. Legend has it that she grew so jealous of the strapping, handsome infant that one day she sent two snakes to kill him in his crib.

He strangled them and laughed.

Fast forward thousands of years. When the CIA installed a whiz-bang electronic data and messaging system sometime in the 1990s, they named it Hercules.

Why? Probably because they thought it could do to paper case files what the infant hero did to snakes.

It was an awesome system in its day, a senior FBI official recalled last week of the CIA’s highly classified system.

With a single click, icons from the CIA’s worldwide stations could be summoned to twinkle on the desktop, the official said, with the understanding that he would not be named because he is not authorized to talk publicly about such things.

With another click, the agent could pick, say Islamabad, and “see all the overnight traffic,” he marvelled. “There would be a lot of stuff like [a CIA officer’s report saying] ‘I met with [President] Musharraf’s aide this morning, who told me yadayada . . .”

The CIA reports could be long and detailed and formal, or short and breezy, even gossipy, recalled Mike Rogers, R-Mich., a former FBI agent who now chairs the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Policy. Things like, “I saw Bad Guy A in the market this morning. A soup peddler told me it was the first time she’d seen him in months. He walked with a limp.”

“All the station’s intel reports were in there,” said the senior FBI man, waxing nostalgic. “It was so easy to use . . .

“And,” he exclaimed, chopping an arm in the air, “it was totally, totally paperless.”

A number of FBI agents got to use Hercules in joint counterterrorism programs beginning in the 1990s.

They raved about its elegant simplicity and speed. Back in the Hoover Building, they were still working with floppy disks on clunky IBM clones, with no useful computer links to intelligence that might be lurking in the Bureau’s far-flung field offices.

They were drowning in paper. They had no e-mail or Internet access.

Today, the FBI still has no system to supply constant intelligence from all points, no way for an agent to just click on icon for Minneapolis, say, to see if a report on an al Qaeda spy there was filed overnight.

About a decade ago, FBI agents who were using the CIA’s wonderful system or who had heard about it began asking why the Bureau didn’t just replicate Hercules for itself.

The FBI was already struggling with its own attempt to modernize and spending millions in a widely publicized effort that was failing — big time.

FBI brass considered adopting Hercules — and then rejected the idea, a half dozen present and former intelligence officials said on condition they not be named because the issue is still so sensitive.

“They said they had to build their own,” said one senior FBI official.

“More stove-piping,” a former top FBI counterintelligence official remembered thinking gloomily at the time.

The FBI did not respond to a number of requests for an official statement on the Hercules episode.

The CIA declined an invitation to talk about any aspect of it.

According to Rogers, an FBI agent from 1988 to 1994, Bureau officials rebuffed inside agitation to buy the well-honed CIA system “years and years ago.”

But the FBI could still do it, he said. Although it’s gone through “many iterations” and has a new name, the FBI could just haul it across the Potomac from Langley, Va., and plug it in, Rogers said.

“Do you know the amount of money the FBI wasted trying to come up with their own program?” Rogers exclaimed.

About $170 million and counting, actually. And it still doesn’t have a system as good as Hercules was a decade ago, in the opinion of most people who have used both it and the FBI’s Information Data Warehouse or other systems.

“You can tweak it to what your individual needs are. You’ve got a system that’s a hell of a lot cheaper, that’s proven,” Rogers said.

Could the FBI really just box up a copy of Hercules and ship it across the river, like some classified version of Gameboy?

“Oh, absolutely. Still, to this day, I think it can be done,” he said.

But a top intelligence official dismissed that idea with a caustic laugh, saying it would be “disastrous.”

It’s too late now, the official said, but “if Director Mueller had had such a tool [when he arrived in 2001], it would have been very powerful for him,” harnessing the plethora of FBI field offices into a whole.

Rogers says he has spent the past two years pushing FBI officials to reconsider using some version of Hercules instead of throwing more money down an IT rathole.

“They stumble around. They say, ‘Well, we’re thinking about it, we’re working on it.’ ”

On March 20, in a triumph of hope over experience, the FBI signed another $350 million contract with some of the same folks it used on the previous failed campaigns to build a system.

According to some reports it could end up spending a half billion dollars before it’s finished — with no guarantees it will be any more successful this time around.

No one person is to blame at the FBI, the sources said.

“It was, you know, ‘them, they’ — the bosses,” the official said. The idea just faded away. People moved on.

For most of the 1990s Louis J. Freeh, a legendary technophobe who initially refused to use e-mail or even have a PC in his office, ran the FBI.

Then came 9/11.

That should have been a wake-up call, Rogers says.

By now, just about every other agency seems to have had some kind of wake-up call, be it 9/11, Katrina or some other reform-triggering event. The city must be full of insomniacs.

But behind the closed doors of the FBI, say a number of concerned observers, the alarm clock is still going off.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com