WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The head of the Secret Service, in his first public appearance since a scandal involving Colombian prostitutes and his employees, apologized for the misconduct on Wednesday but lawmakers expressed doubt that this was an isolated incident.

Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, gray-haired in a blue striped suit and tie, faced the Senate Homeland Security Committee and asserted that the behavior of a dozen employees in Cartagena last month did not reflect the culture of the agency.

“I am deeply disappointed and I apologize for the misconduct of these employees and the distraction that it has caused,” Sullivan said.

“Over the past several weeks, we have been under intense scrutiny as a result of this incident. To see the agency’s integrity called into question has not been easy,” he said.

In the biggest scandal to hit the agency that protects the president, a dozen Secret Service employees were accused of misconduct for bringing women, some of them prostitutes, back to their hotel rooms in Colombia, ahead of a presidential trip.

Senator Susan Collins, the senior Republican on the committee, said “the behavior is morally repugnant.” She and other senators said they found it difficult to believe the misconduct was an isolated incident.

Collins said there was no excuse for such “recklessness” and that the Secret Service employees had “willingly made themselves potential targets” and could easily have been drugged, kidnapped or blackmailed.

FORT MEADE, Maryland (Reuters) – The National Security Agency is trying to expand U.S. cyber expertise needed for secret intelligence operations against adversaries on computer networks through a new cyber-ops program at selected universities.

The cyber-ops curriculum is geared to providing the basic education for jobs in intelligence, military and law enforcement that are so secret they will only be revealed to some students and faculty, who need to pass security clearance requirements, during special summer seminars offered by NSA.

It is not easy to find the right people for cyber operations because the slice of the hacker community that would make a quality cyber operator inside the government is only a sliver.

The “quality cyber operators” the NSA is looking for are few and far between, says Neal Ziring, technical director at the agency’s Information Assurance Directorate.

“We’re trying to create more of these, and yes they have to know some of the things that hackers know, they have to know a lot of other things too, which is why you really want a good university to create these people for you,” Ziring told Reuters in an interview at NSA’s headquarters in Maryland.

NSA has two main missions: to protect U.S. government computer networks and to collect foreign intelligence through electronic means like satellites and decode it.

Of 20 universities that applied, only four received this week the new designation of Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations: Dakota State University, Naval Postgraduate School, Northeastern University and University of Tulsa.

FORT MEADE, Maryland (Reuters) – The National Security Agency is trying to expand U.S. cyber expertise needed for secret intelligence operations against adversaries on computer networks through a new cyber-ops program at selected universities.

The cyber-ops curriculum is geared to providing the basic education for jobs in intelligence, military and law enforcement that are so secret they will only be revealed to some students and faculty, who need to pass security clearance requirements, during special summer seminars offered by NSA.

It is not easy to find the right people for cyber operations because the slice of the hacker community that would make a quality cyber operator inside the government is only a sliver.

The “quality cyber operators” the NSA is looking for are few and far between, says Neal Ziring, technical director at the agency’s Information Assurance Directorate.

“We’re trying to create more of these, and yes they have to know some of the things that hackers know, they have to know a lot of other things too, which is why you really want a good university to create these people for you,” Ziring told Reuters in an interview at NSA’s headquarters in Maryland.

NSA has two main missions: to protect U.S. government computer networks and to collect foreign intelligence through electronic means like satellites and decode it.

Of 20 universities that applied, only four received this week the new designation of Centres of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations: Dakota State University, Naval Postgraduate School, North-eastern University and University of Tulsa.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The bombmaker suspected of designing exotic weapons like underwear bombs for al Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate is a key target of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts, a top U.S. official said on Wednesday.

Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, in his first public comments since a plot by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, was recently foiled said the Yemeni affiliate was the most dangerous.

U.S. officials have said AQAP was behind a recent plot to arm a suicide bomber with an improved version of the underwear bomb that failed to explode on a U.S.-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009.

The device, which is being examined by the FBI, bore the hallmarks of Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, a Saudi militant who is believed to be a bombmaker working with AQAP, U.S. officials say.

“Al-Asiri is a person who has been identified as one of the bombmakers for al Qaeda in Yemen, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and somebody who has proven to be a proficient bombmaker and to have tried to adapt devices to the types of security measures that it seems we have in place,” Olsen said.

“He is a very important person for us to find out where he is and to take appropriate action,” he said.

Asked whether Asiri was definitely linked to the recent Yemen plot, Olsen replied: “We’re still looking at it.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Communications from the 1990s suggest Iran’s current foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, had knowledge of a program to procure goods for an alleged clandestine nuclear program when he was head of a university, a U.S. nuclear expert said on Tuesday.

David Albright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), said among 1,600 telexes and other material he has obtained and is studying was a letter signed by Salehi as head of Sharif University in 1991.

The letter served as an end-user guarantee to a European supplier of materials that could have a dual purpose for use in a nuclear program. Tehran-based Sharif University, however, was acting essentially as a front for Iran’s military procurement network, Albright said.

“Salehi knew about or was involved in efforts to create an alleged parallel military nuclear program that is of great interest to the IAEA now,” Albright told Reuters, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog.

“And the intention of that program was probably to make nuclear weapons, including producing highly enriched uranium,” Albright said.

While senior IAEA officials have in the past told Reuters they suspected Salehi and Sharif University played a role in such procurement activities, the telexes appear to be the first public evidence supporting those suspicions.

ISIS planned to publish its findings and some of the documents about procurement activities of Iran’s Physics Research Center in the late 1980s and early 1990s on its website this week.