The holy warriors’ intelligence shop may need a shake-up, by the looks of a new analysis of White House responses to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, circulating among password-protected jihad Web sites.

“Myth of Delusion: Exposing the U.S. Intelligence” (sic), authored by a rising star in the al Qaeda hierarchy, relies on openly available materials — congressional and other official investigations of intelligence failures related to the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq, along with media exposes and scholarly studies — for its wide-ranging book-length report on the operations of American spy agencies.

But when it comes to analyzing the Bush administration’s emergency responses to the al Qaeda hijackings on 9/11, it reads like an Oliver Stone script.

In the analysis of Mohammed al-Hakaymah, an obscure Egyptian radical until he won plaudits from al Qaeda for leading a revolt against the main Islamic movement there last August, President Bush was forced to scurry about the country on Air Force One for fear of assassination by a hazy cabal of Texas oil interests and renegade U.S. military leaders.

If that weren’t enough conspiracy theory, Hakaymah also portrays the president as a captive of — pay attention now — right-wing activists and think tanks, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times newspaper and the South Korean intelligence service.

All of which, along with factual errors on the history and operations of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI and the reorganization of U.S. intelligence as a result of the 9/11 attacks, has prompted some observers to dismiss Hakaymah’s study as “drivel,” as former CIA officer Robert Baer put it in an e-mail to me last week (although he volunteered he had only read “parts of it”).

But other experts on al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism say the English-language study marks a breakthrough in the jihadists’ efforts to understand the missions and operations of the sprawling U.S. intelligence community.

“I would suggest that those behind this are working directly to influence English speakers [and] present themselves to a broader audience of potential terrorism actors,” says Marvin Hutchens, a former marine who runs the threatswatch.com blog that circulated the study here.

“I think it’s a pretty big deal,” says John Rollins, a former counterterrorism operative who was Tom Ridge’s chief of staff for intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security.

“It shows an intense focus on the capabilities and tactics of the U.S. intelligence community,” says Rollins, now a terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service. “[It’s] a concerted effort to understand what our capabilities are.”

“There is no question about the authenticity of the book and the author,” says Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, an authoritative source on terrorist developments.

And if there was ever a holy warrior who wanted to be an al Qaeda goodfella, it’s Hakaymah. But until he’s a made man, says Evan Kohlmann, a scholar on Islam and consultant to U.S. agencies, analysts should “be careful” about attributing the book to al Qaeda.

“This document,” agrees Rollins, “is not reflective of corporate al Qaeda and what they know about the U.S. intelligence community. . .I wouldn’t take this as a bible of their assessment of U.S. intelligence.” But “it shows a desire and intention to understand the U.S. intelligence community.”

Katz says the study has immense value as “propaganda . . . because he is explaining that al Qaeda was able to conduct 9/11 in spite of the tightened security and the enormous intelligence budget the U.S. has.”

The message, she says: “Jihadists should not be intimidated by the American/British security measures,” particularly restive Muslim youth who might be sitting on the fence about joining the ranks of suicide bombers.

They are the prized assets in al Qaeda’s new field of battle. And judging by the swelling ranks of holy warriors from London to Iraq, the bad guys are a lot better at getting out their message, as nasty as it is, than we are.

Where’s Karl Rove when we need him?

Some intelligence veterans are particularly disturbed by the book’s matter-of-fact explanations of how the CIA operates abroad, such as its use of State Department cover in U.S. embassies and the methods it employs to spot potential spies among foreign officials and groups — including disaffected jihadists.

With a level of detail that could have been copied from a CIA training manual, the book explains the common techniques the agency uses to recruit and manage spies by manipulating their emotions and weaknesses. It also offers an overview of the CIA’s espionage curriculum.

It wrongly places the CIA’s training facility in West Virginia in one passage, but gets it right in another — demonstrating not that Hakaymah lacks a grasp of his topic, but rather that he could use a good copy editor.

Hekaymah also covers the FBI’s dramatic expansion abroad since 9/11 and its alliances with local security services, particularly in Egypt, which he explores in fine detail.

The origins and operations of the NSA come in for scrutiny, too, based on published sources in the United States and Europe. It locates some of the NSA’s ground stations and its array of techniques for eavesdropping on the world’s telephone lines, computers and cell phones, but it does not discuss The New York Times’ revelations of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, a sign that the book was written more than a year ago.

Its discussion of cell phone chip technology, gained from open sources here, amounts to instructions on how to minimize the chance of being tracked.

Hakaymah also lays out details on the efforts of the CIA to undermine the regime in Iran.

All of which raises a dilemma for Congress, not to mention the media: Can it meet its constitutional obligation to ride herd on the government, including U.S. intelligence, without giving material support to the enemy?

Bush administration officials have already delivered their verdict, coming close to calling the media (and putative congressional leakers) traitors.

Retired U.S. Army Col. Rich Reynolds, who spent most of his career in Middle East intelligence assignments, calls the previously published information recycled by Hakaymah “useful to terrorists.”

“Anything that helps them identify intelligence personnel and those that they recruit is detrimental to the intelligence collection effort. We have very few [spies] assets in contact with terrorists and it is not useful to have people trying to figure them out and eliminate them.

“The same goes with [NSA] communications [intercepts],” Reynolds said. “As the press and others publish our efforts to monitor terror communications in all their forms, we see the bad guys moving away from the most easily exploited forms.”

It “would certainly bolster the administration’s position that there should be less public information about intelligence community efforts,” says Rollins.

“However, at the most senior levels of government one walks a very fine line between suppressing intelligence for the sake of national security and concealing information from the Congress and the general public for purposes of political expediency.”

One solution, of course, is to kill the messenger — literally.

No, not U.S. reporters or leaky members of Congress. But Hakatmah is fair game.

His book “was published on the AlMaqreze.com Web site, which is run by Hani el-Sebai, an Islamist living in London,” explains Laura Mansfield, who has worked for U.S. government agencies in the Middle East and translated several jihad tomes.

While el-Sebai “has not made a public declaration of alignment with Al Qaeda,” she told me, “the U.S. Treasury, the United Nations and Interpol have recognized his connections to Al Qaeda.”

Hakaymah, the experts say, also wrote last summer’s jihad literary hit, “How to Fight Alone,” an instructional guide for the single holy warrior.

So let’s give him a chance at it, since he wants to be a star: Our intelligence against his.

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