Jane Harman is not someone who I would expect to reel off a litany of Bush administration intelligence successes.

After all, her fellow California House Democrat, Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi, has a reputation for black-hooding party members with anything good to say about the Republicans.

But Harman, at a cocktail party before an advance screening of ABC’s “The Path to 9/11” last week, more than obliged when I asked her to name at least one example of a Bush intelligence victory.

Even among many Republicans, the rough consensus outside the Bush White House remains that U.S. intelligence still stinks, five years after Osama bin Laden’s boys waltzed through our airports as the FBI and CIA played Punch and Judy with each other.

No less than John Lehman, the Reagan administration Navy secretary and Sept. 11 commission member, recently trashed the ineptly named “war on terror,” singling out Donald H. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, John D. Negroponte’s new Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) and the FBI in a piece that raced around the Beltway’s e-mail channels.

“[E]ven the most sanguine optimist cannot yet conclude that we are winning,” Lehman wrote in the September issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, a piece condensed for The Washington Post’s Aug. 31 opinion page.

So there seemed to be little ground for anyone to say much good about American intelligence, much less a top congressional Democrat in an election season.

But when Harman, who could well end up chairing the House Intelligence Committee next January, unexpectedly began rattling off a list of Bush-era counterterrorism coups for me, I had to grab a cocktail napkin and start scribbling.

“There was Torrance,” she started, referring to the plot of radical Muslim prison inmates in her own district to bomb the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles and other California targets. That one was broken up by the FBI and local police in 2005.

“Hambali,” she said next. The Indonesian architect of the Bali bombings was nabbed by the CIA and Thai security services in 2003.

“Zarqawi,” she added, tapping a finger into her palm. The leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, of course, was liquidated by a Predator missile in June.

“The New York tunnels case,” she went on, sounding a little impatient now, like I’d asked a pretty dumb question. Suspected plotters were uncovered by the Joint Terrorism Task Force there in July.

“The intelligence reorganization,” Harman said, understandably, since she helped legislate the creation of the uber-spookocracy — led by the new Director of National Intelligence — to bang heads together at the CIA, FBI, DHS and the Pentagon’s spy agencies.

To be sure, Harman has needled DNI chief and ex-diplomat John D. Negroponte for being more of an ambassador to the 16-member U.S. intelligence “community,” as it is euphemistically called, than a boss. And Lehman had called the DNI’s swelling 1,000-person workforce “the exact opposite of what we had recommended.”

But in the larger picture, Harman may be onto something.

When I pinged some of my own usual suspects for fifth anniversary thoughts, I got back — much to my surprise — more acknowledgements that U.S. intelligence had indeed scored major hits than what the consensus of flu-like despair here had prepared me for.

Not that my sources were ready to shout “slam dunk.”

“If there were any real successes, even dark secret ones, they’d have been leaked in a New York minute,” says Milt Bearden, who should know, having spent 30 years in the CIA working against the Russians, including the Red Army from his base in Pakistan in the 1980s.

“I think there weren’t any big [counterterrorism] successes in this country,” he went on, “because most of the threats were from slapstick misfits — blow-torching the Brooklyn Bridge, the Liberty Seven— a [Miami] terrorist group with room-temperature IQ — or Jose Padilla and his (nonexistent) ‘dirty bomb.’ ”

But Bearden says his old outfit deserves major credit for establishing new relationships with foreign intelligence services in Islamic countries, “people that may not actually have spoken English, French or German in the kitchen with their moms when they were kids.”

And that includes Pakistan’s secret services, he insists, which many observers say is laced with al Qaeda sympathizers.

“Almost every al Qaeda member arrested and extradited to the U.S. since 9/11 was taken down by the Pakistani intelligence services,” he said, “and yet the media still loves to attack the Pakistanis for not doing enough, or for supposedly double dealing with us.”

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the former FBI agent who chairs an Intelligence subcommittee, nearly whistled over the phone when he talked about the Pakistanis.

“They have gone from the sole nation that supported the Taliban and protected A.Q. Khan” — the father of Islamabad’s bomb and purveyor of nuclear weapons technology to Iran and Libya — “to our premier partner in the war on terrorism and nuclear proliferation. . . . It’s a dramatic turnaround,” he said.

Next on Rogers’ list: Two-thirds of al Qaeda’s leadership has been killed or captured.

“We’ve hammered them pretty hard.”

And that’s because cooperation among U.S. intelligence agencies, “at the pointy end of the spear,” he said, “is unprecedented.”

A former top national security official who was deeply involved in the intelligence reorganization looked at the agencies’ collaboration from the other end of the telescope: the homefront.

The Department of Homeland Security may remain in bad odor on Capitol Hill and elsewhere around town, said this insider, who talks regularly with FBI boss Robert S. Mueller III, but DHS should be applauded for bankrolling frustrated officials in the hinterland to create their own “fusion centers,” which put local intelligence, law enforcement, first-responders and infrastructure officials in the driver’s seat, with the feds advising.

“This has the potential,” said my source, who talks only on background, “to result [finally] in the development of a doctrine for providing intelligence support to the ‘warfighter’ in the homeland [first-responders, law enforcement, public works, public health, etc].”

“I do believe that information-sharing between agencies is far better than it was before,” agreed Roger Cressey, a top National Security Council official in the Clinton White House — another Democrat giving the Bush administration some credit.

“The first couple years after 9/11 were pretty grim. The government was overreacting to some of the most foolish threat info because the filter for evaluating the credibility of threats was ignored,” he said. “No matter how little credibility a threat had, it rocketed to the White House.” The system was “filled with lots of garbage.”

The creation of the Terrorist Threat Intelligence Center and the National Counterterrorism Center in the wake of Sept. 11, he said, have “institutionalized a process that is working much better.”

“That doesn’t guarantee the intelligence is any better,” Cressey said, “but it does mean the information is being evaluated in a more systematic fashion, which means the policy community can hopefully make a more informed decision about how to react to it.”

Small potatoes, the critics would say.

But facing such bleak prospects in Iraq, Iran, North Korea and so on, you can’t blame officials for basking in the few shafts of light peeking through the thick, dark clouds over Washington.

BACKCHANNEL CHATTER

You Have Mail: The two dozen reporters who accepted the FBI’s invitation to hear about advances in its beleaguered computer systems last week were treated to an impressive presentation by Gurvais Grigg, acting director of the FBI’s Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, who has been a key behind-the-scenes player in the bureau’s little-known data-mining programs. Among a number of significant, if belated, technical advances revealed by Gurvais: Since May FBI agents have been able — finally — to get Google-like alerts of new information in the system’s Information Data Warehouse. No computer advances, an official conceded to me later, however, could prevent a repeat of the CIA’s pre-9/11 withholding of critical information from the FBI about al Qaeda plotters. . . .

Osama Peddled U.S. Missiles? Among the many eye-opening bits in “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” is author Lawrence Wright’s unsourced report that Osama bin Laden sold two unexploded U.S. cruise missiles that landed in his compound in 1998 to China for “more than $10 million.” Wright told me that the information came from Al-Majalleh, a Saudi-owned magazine based in London, which it in turn got from a Russian news agency. A Google search, however, turns up sporadic reports about the alleged deal dating to 1999, including in The New York Times and the authoritative Jane’s Intelligence Review. China dismissed the allegation, and U.S. officials were mum. A 2001 report in London’s The Guardian put meat on the bones, quoting from the bugged conversation of two al Qaeda operatives in Italy allegedly heard bragging about how bin Laden “boosted his financial resources” by selling the missiles to “businessmen . . . from China.” Before 9/11, reports like these would’ve caused an uproar. Now they’re just another strange, forgotten story from the “war on terror.”

New and notable on the SpyTalk Bookshelf: An advance bound galley of “Class 11: Inside the CIA’s First Post-9/11 Spy Class,” a memoir by former CIA trainee T.J. Waters. Last spring the CIA’s publishing review board decided to reclassify information in Waters’ manuscript that it had already approved. Waters went to court, but evidently he and his publisher (Dutton) are tired of waiting for a decision. Pub date is now Oct. 19.

The Washington Way: The experts think of Frank Libutti as a nice guy who was overmatched as DHS’ first intell chief (formally, undersecretary for information analysis and infrastructure protection). But the former Marine Corps general, who was also the New York City Police Department’s first deputy commissioner of counterterrorism, is charging ahead with a new career as a speaker who “can enlighten your audience in a dynamic and charismatic way,” according to his new Web site. “He is a veteran communicator and will bring his unique ability to tell a story, injecting it with humor and wisdom that will hold the attention of the audience,” it says.

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