The FBI has it down now: No more female Chinese spies running amok in its offices, seducing the counterintelligence agents who are supposed to be managing them — instead of the other way around.

Systems are in place now, the Bureau insisted last week, to head off a repeat performance of the Katrina Leung farce, in which two of its agents were sleeping with a suspected Chinese spy that they thought they had turned — but who in reality was a triple agent working for Beijing.

In the espionage trade, Leung could be called a “dangle,” someone dispatched by the opposition secret service whom the FBI would find irresistible to recruit.

And then, bang! The trap is sprung. Except that the FBI never knows it.

Evidently neither FBI counterintelligence agent James J. Smith nor colleague William Cleveland Jr. knew Leung was sleeping with the other. And for almost 20 years the FBI “failed to detect” any of it.

Learned our lesson, the FBI now says.

Indeed, just as the Justice Department’s inspector general issued its long awaited March 24 report on how “the performance of several of the supervisors with oversight . . . was deficient,” the Bureau was ready with its its own announcement of “reforms.”

Operational files will now be reviewed by a supervisor every 60 to 90 days, the FBI says. And payments — Leung was paid $1.7 million over the years, the IG said — are now being closely monitored.

Oh, and informants will now be routinely polygraphed.

All these things will be monitored by a review board comprised of Justice Department and FBI officials, the Bureau noted.

None of these measures, however, is a replacement for trust — the confidence FBI leaders, not to mention the public, must have in the managers and agents entrusted with our most valuable secrets.

Such top-secret counterintelligence cases against Chinese operatives were always supposed to be managed closely, of course.

According to one former FBI special agent, Smith’s close relationship with Leung was well known around the Los Angeles office. He even brought her to his retirement party, which she videotaped, probably to the amusement of spymasters in Beijing, according to Rosemary Dew, a former FBI special agent from 1977 to 1990. Dew won eight commendations and was the seventh female to make it into a supervisory post at headquarters, where she worked on counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases.

“A systemic problem in the FBI culture is that sexual impropriety among agents tends to be regarded as personal business, even when connected with duty,” Dew said in an interview.

“FBI policies and procedures prohibit personal relationships with sources of information, as does common sense,” she points out. “When the source is a foreign national, it is a security violation, at a minimum.

“One would ask,” she continued, “why Smith and Cleveland were allowed to see Leung alone often enough to develop such close personal relationships with her. Normally, one would want more than one agent present in most any interview to ensure that testimony is recorded correctly.”

As for why their conduct didn’t set bells ringing and lights flashing in the corridors of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, Dew maintains that “the FBI does not like to investigate its own,” a problem that festered through the intelligence lapses of Sept. 11, 2001 and beyond.

Smith was “a crackerjack agent, as good as it gets,” according to Carter Cornick, a retired FBI supervisory special agent who worked on terrorism cases in Latin America. That insulated Smith from suspicion.

Dew agrees. “Smith was well liked and people just ignored behavior that should have been suspect.”

And Smith’s free hand with his agent was not unusual in counterintelligence, say veteran FBI agents, as well as the IG investigators.

“Headquarters managers [had] the belief that they could not give orders to the field or interfere in field operations,” the IG report says, without exclamation.

In the end, despite a virtual generation’s worth of absentee management, no one at the FBI was suspended, fired or otherwise punished.

A senior FBI official, who speaks only without attribution, conceded, “this is not good.”

“There are probably many cases where an informant and the agent meet alone and don’t screw up,” he said. But “you only hear about the bad ones and we can’t talk about the successes for obvious reasons.”

“It was always interesting to me ,” Dew says, “how managers’ loyalties were firmly rooted in protecting their friends rather than the nation.”

Smith was able to bargain down serious charges against him to petty offenses. Cleveland, who was never charged with anything, went free.

Nor was anyone fired for U.S. intelligence managers’ sloth and incompetence leading up to 9/11, Dew reflects.

The IG report says the FBI manager responsible for overseeing Smith and Leung during the critical years of 1990 and 1991“is still working for the FBI.”

And the femme fatale at the heart of the drama? The case was so sensitive, the government let her walk away with a fine, probation and community service.

So the darkest of the dark secrets remain with her — and the United States may never know what she inveigled from her FBI lovers, nor how much fool’s gold she may have funneled back from China into the eager hands of her Bureau handlers.

In a way, it’s a touching story: Love conquers all.

And there’s not much the FBI can do about that, despite all the new procedures in place.

The fact is, it’s the hearts that need changing in the FBI, not the rules.

Counterterror Noir: The first stab at a TV counterterrorism drama in 2003, “Threat Matrix,” tanked on ABC — even though one episode featured a (fictional) CQ reporter demanding answers at a White House press briefing. Now national security journalist-turned-screenwriter/producer Daniel Voll is back with “The Unit,” a CBS show about a counterterrorist team modeled on the Army’s elite Delta Force. “My first episode will be Washington-based,” Voll e-mailed from California, “about the executive order that allows the CIA and the Pentagon to make their own [terrorist] hit lists, who maintains the lists, the protocols for getting someone on or off of it, and what happens when inside the Beltway players influence who is on this “consent to kill” list. Voll said his first episode will revolved around a Washington plot in which “someone wants a Venezuelan oil minister knocked off.”

Colinoscopy: Another Colin Powell biography is on the way, this one from Washington Post Associate Editor and veteran reporter Karen DeYoung. “Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell,” is due out from Knopf on Oct. 10. “It’s a full biography,” DeYoung tells SpyTalk, a third of which “chronicles the ups and downs of the secretary of State during the first Bush administration.” Other stuff: Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003 U.N. speech making the case for toppling Saddam Hussein, the Iraq war, and his departure from government, DeYoung tells.

Oh Jerusalem Spy: The Navy investigator who flushed out Jonathan Pollard as Israel’s mole tells his side of the story next month in “Capturing Jonathan Pollard: How one of the most notorious spies in American history was brought to Justice.” Ronald J. Olive “gives details of Pollard’s confession immediately following his arrest and describes Pollard’s interaction with the author before and during the time suspicion about his activities was mounting,” according to the blurb from Naval Institute Press.

Red Alert: DHS’ Analytic Red Cell Program has all kinds of people dreaming up terrorist plots that the U.S. might want to prepare for — including author Brad Thor, who turned his stint with the Red team into “Takedown” (Atria Books), coming next week. Says Thor: “I was one of two thriller writers — a couple of sci-fi people, then your usual mishmash of alphabet soup agencies. There also are people from the private sector.” In “Takedown,” all of Manhattan’s bridges and tunnels are taken out. Not to worry: our hero deals with it.

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