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The Telegraph reported that Gordon Brown also claimed £153 twice for the same plumbing work at his constituency home - which No 10 said was done inadvertently and had been repaid. Justice Secretary Jack Straw claimed his entire council tax bill for his second home despite already enjoying a substantial discount from his local authority, worth a reported £1,500 a year.

Among other revelations, Ms Blears is said to have claimed for expenditure under the allowance on three different properties during the same year, spending £5,000 on furniture in three months. The Telegraph says by switching their designated second home between their London and constituency properties, Ms Blears and other MPs have been able to claim for household goods or other reimbursements for both.

Business Secretary Lord Mandelson claimed for improvements on his constituency home after he announced he was leaving Parliament to become an EU Commissioner. He later sold the property for a profit of £136,000. He rejected claims he used taxpayers' cash to "renovate" his home for profit, insisting the money was spent on essential maintenance. He said the Telegraph's report - which details a £1,500 gardening bill and £1,350 in house repairs - was presented to provoke public anger. "The fact is that these allowances would not have been paid if they weren't within the rules," he told BBC Radio Scotland's Good Morning Scotland programme.

SPIEGEL: What are you hoping will happen during your visit with US President Barack Obama this week?

Zardari: That is a million dollar question. And I am hoping the answer will be billions of dollars, because that is the kind of money I need to fix Pakistan's economy. The idea is to request that the world appreciate the sensitivity of Pakistan and the challenges it faces and to treat us on par with General Motors, Chrysler and Citibank.

our wife, Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated by terrorists, feared that your country's nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of Islamist extremists. Do you share this fear? Zardari: If democracy in this country fails, if the world doesn't help democracy -- then any eventuality is a possibility. But as long as democracy is there, there is no question of that situation arising. All your important installations and weaponry are always under extra security. Nuclear weapons are not Kalashnikovs -- the technology is complicated, so it is not as if one little Taliban could come down and press a button. There is no little button. I want to assure the world that the nuclear capability of Pakistan is in safe hands.

In introducing the legislation on the Senate floor, Kerry, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, warned, "An alarming percentage of the Pakistani population now sees America as a greater threat than al Qaeda. "Until we change that perception there is, frankly, very little chance of ending tolerance for terrorist groups or persuading any Pakistani government to devote the political capital necessary to deny such groups ... the sanctuary that they've been able to receive."

The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, introduced by Sens. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, and Dick Lugar, R-Indiana, authorizes $7.5 billion in non-military aid to Pakistan over the next five years to foster economic growth and development, and another $7.5 billion for the following five years.

After making two visits to Pakistan in less than three weeks, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, is "very alarmed by the growing extremist threat in Pakistan and remains frustrated particularly by the political leadership's inability to confront that threat," according to his chief spokesman.

Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have called Taliban gains in Pakistan an "existential threat" to the country.

The bill takes into account the fluid situation in Pakistan, leaving military aid to be determined on a year-by-year basis. But it requires Obama to certify Pakistani forces are making progress in combating al Qaeda and the Taliban and not interfering with civilian rule in order for aid to continue, a condition both the Obama administration and the Pakistani government have opposed.

The bill also calls for strict benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of the aid. In addition to requiring Obama to submit a report to Congress outlining a strategic plan for the aid, the administration is to submit a report every six months detailing how the money is spent and judging its effectiveness. Clinton and Gates are to submit a comprehensive cross-border strategy for the Pakistani-Afghan border, as well as annual reports on the progress of Pakistani Security Forces.

The Obama administration inherited from President Bush a multiyear, $100 million secret American program to help Pakistan build stronger physical protections around some of those facilities, and to train Pakistanis in nuclear security. But much of that effort has now petered out, and American officials have never been permitted to see how much of the money was spent, the facilities where the weapons are kept or even a tally of how many Pakistan has produced. The facility Pakistan was supposed to build to conduct its own training exercises is running years behind schedule.

Mr. Zardari heads the country’s National Command Authority, the mix of political, military and intelligence leaders responsible for its arsenal of 60 to 100 nuclear weapons. But in reality, his command and control over the weapons are considered tenuous at best; that power lies primarily in the hands of the army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the former director of Inter-Services Intelligence, the country’s intelligence agency.

Several current officials said that they were worried that insurgents could try to provoke an incident that would prompt Pakistan to move the weapons, and perhaps use an insider with knowledge of the transportation schedule for weapons or materials to tip them off. That concern appeared to be what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was hinting at in testimony 10 days ago before the House Appropriations Committee. Pakistan’s weapons, she noted, “are widely dispersed in the country.”

“There’s not a central location, as you know,” she added. “They’ve adopted a policy of dispersing their nuclear weapons and facilities.” She went on to describe a potential situation in which a confrontation with India could prompt a Pakistani response, though she did not go as far as saying that such a response could include moving weapons toward India — which American officials believed happened in 2002. Other experts note that even as Pakistan faces instability, it is producing more plutonium for new weapons, and building more production reactors.

Those accused of being spies are said to have used sophisticated surveillance equipment and satellite phones, sometimes ingeniously disguised in crutches or knapsacks. One of them, a car dealer in southern Lebanon, placed Israeli tracking devices in cars he sold to Hezbollah members, security officials say. Most seem to have been motivated by the promise of money. Some were caught by Hezbollah before being handed over to the Lebanese authorities.

The arrests have even become an issue in Lebanon’s coming parliamentary elections, with some analysts saying that, intentionally or not, they might benefit the political alliance led by Hezbollah, Israel’s primary nemesis here. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, delivered an angry speech on Friday in which he called for all the captured spies to be executed and urged the Lebanese to help in capturing any remaining agents.

One of the important ones, the general said, was Ziyad Homsi. Mr. Homsi, 61, was the deputy mayor of Saadnayel, a town in the Bekaa Valley. According to a report in the Lebanese newspaper Al Safir, which has links to Hezbollah, Mr. Homsi had told interrogators he was assigned to meet Mr. Nasrallah, which he apparently failed to do. Israeli monitors planned to track his movements as he went to meet the Hezbollah leader.

This week, though, Kaczynski has found his old form again -- with the unexpected help of SPIEGEL. "The Germans are attempting to shake off the guilt for a giant crime," he said, commenting on the latest SPIEGEL cover story, " The Dark Continent: Hitler's European Holocaust Helpers."

Until a few years ago the simplest way to get rich quick was through foreign-currency trades. Easy, if you could get greenbacks at the subsidized import rate of 1,750 rials to the dollar and resell them at the market rate of 8,000 to the dollar. You needed only the right connections for an import license. "I estimate that, over a period of ten years, Iran lost $3 billion to $5 billion annually from this kind of exchange-rate fraud," says Saeed Laylaz, an economist, now with Iran's biggest carmaker. "And the lion's share of that went to about 50 families."

One of the families benefiting from the foreign trade system was the Asgaroladis, an old Jewish clan of bazaar traders, who converted to Islam several generations ago. Asadollah Asgaroladi exports pistachios, cumin, dried fruit, shrimp and caviar, and imports sugar and home appliances; his fortune is estimated by Iranian bankers to be some $400 million. Asgaroladi had a little help from his older brother, Habibollah, who, as minister of commerce in the 1980s, was in charge of distributing lucrative foreign-trade licenses. (He was also a counterparty to commodities trader and then-fugitive Marc Rich, who helped Iran bypass U.S.-backed sanctions.)

hings have quieted down at Prague Castle, Klaus's seat of office. The liberal-conservative Civic Democratic Party (ODS) he co-founded has broken ranks and recently voted in favor of the reform treaty. The president's euro-skepticism has pushed him to the periphery of the country's political scene.

His newly founded right-wing Party of Free Citizens (SSO) is expected to fare even worse in the European elections than Lepper's Self Defense.

Opinion polls have registered increasing enthusiasm for the EU in the new member states. According to a Eurobarometer survey, a majority of citizens in Poland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania believe that accession to the EU brought their countries economic growth and democratic progress.

Poland's farmers -- Lepper's clientele -- used to be the problem children of the EU, but are now regarded as a source of stability. In 2007, 14.7 percent of Poles still worked in the farming sector, compared to just two percent in Germany. A few years ago the vast majority of them were vehemently opposed to the EU and feared that large swathes of Polish farmland would be bought up by Germans. But by 2008, three quarters of farmers already believed that Poland's agricultural sector had benefited from EU membership.

The EU cut €220 million in payments to Bulgaria and froze a further €340 million because Bulgaria was incapable of putting the money to effective use as a result of endemic corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency. But surprisingly, the ensuing public anger wasn't directed at Brussels but against their own politicians, who had led the country into the EU but weren't able to tap the EU's financial resources.

"We are now formulating a plan for development of renewable energy. We can be sure we will exceed the 15% target. We will at least reach 18%. Personally I think we could reach the target of having renewables provide 20% of total energy consumption."

That matches the European goal, and would represent a direct challenge to Europe's claims to world leadership in the field, despite China's relative poverty. Some experts have cast doubt on whether Britain will be able to reach 20%. On another front, China has the ambitious plan of installing 100m energy-efficient lightbulbs this year alone.

Beijing seeks to achieve these goals by directing a significant share of China's $590bn economic stimulus package to low-carbon investment. Of that total, more than $30bn will be spent directly on environmental projects and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.But the indirect green share in the stimulus, in the form of investment in carbon-efficient transport and electricity transmission systems, would be far larger.HSBC Global Research estimated the total green share could be over a third of the total package.

He said the government would also plough money into the expansion of solar heating systems. He said the country was already a world leader, with 130m square metres of solar heating arrays already installed, and was planning to invest more. The US goal for solar heating by 2020 is 200m square metres.

David Sandalow, the US assistant secretary of energy, said the continuation of business as usual in China would result in a 2.7C rise in temperatures even if every other country slashed greenhouse gas emissions by 80%."China can and will need to do much more if the world is going to have any hope of containing climate change," said Sandalow, who is in Beijing as part of a senior negotiating team aiming to find common ground ahead of the crucial Copenhagen summit at the end of this year."No effective deal will be possible without the US and China, which together account for almost half of the planet's carbon emissions."

“I’m tired of buying the same horse twice,” Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said last week while touring an antimissile site in Alaska that the Bush administration built to demonstrate its preparedness to destroy North Korean missiles headed toward the United States. (So far, the North Koreans have not successfully tested a missile of sufficient range to reach the United States, though there is evidence that they may be preparing for another test of their long-range Taepodong-2 missile.)

In France on Saturday, Mr. Obama referred to the same string of broken deals, telling reporters, “I don’t think there should be an assumption that we will simply continue down a path in which North Korea is constantly destabilizing the region and we just react in the same ways.” He added, “We are not intending to continue a policy of rewarding provocation.”

While Mr. Obama was in the Middle East and Europe last week, several senior officials said the president’s national security team had all but set aside the central assumption that guided American policy toward North Korea over the past 16 years and two presidencies: that the North would be willing to ultimately abandon its small arsenal of nuclear weapons in return for some combination of oil, nuclear power plants, money, food and guarantees that the United States would not topple its government, the world’s last Stalinesque regime.

Now, after examining the still-inconclusive evidence about the results of North Korea’s second nuclear test, the administration has come to different conclusions: that Pyonyang’s top priority is to be recognized as a nuclear state, that it is unwilling to bargain away its weapons and that it sees tests as a way to help sell its nuclear technology.

While Mr. Obama is willing to reopen the six-party talks that Mr. Bush began — the other participants are Japan, South Korea, Russia and China — he has no intention, aides say, of offering new incentives to get the North to fulfill agreements from 1994, 2005 and 2008; all were recently renounced.

While some officials privately acknowledged that they would still like to roll back what one called North Korea’s “rudimentary” nuclear capacity, a more realistic goal is to stop the country from devising a small weapon deliverable on a short-, medium- or long-range missile.

In conducting any interdictions, the United States could risk open confrontation with North Korea. That prospect — and the likelihood of escalating conflict if the North resisted an inspection — is why China has balked at American proposals for a resolution by the United Nations Security Council that would explicitly allow interceptions at sea. A previous Security Council resolution, passed after the North’s first nuclear test, in 2006, allowed interdictions “consistent with international law.” But that term was never defined, and few of the provisions were enforced.

North Korea has repeatedly said it would regard any interdiction as an act of war, and officials in Washington have been trying to find ways to stop the shipments without a conflict. Late last week, James B. Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, visited Beijing with a delegation of American officials, seeking ideas from China about sanctions, including financial pressure, that might force North Korea to change direction.

“The Chinese face a dilemma that they have always faced,” a senior administration official said. “They don’t want North Korea to become a full nuclear weapons state. But they don’t want to cause the state to collapse.”

To counter the Chinese concern, Mr. Steinberg and his delegation argued to the Chinese that failing to crack down on North Korea would prompt reactions that Beijing would find deeply unsettling, including a greater American military presence in the region and more calls in Japan for that country to develop its own weapons.

North Korea’s restoration to the list would be largely symbolic, because it already faces numerous economic sanctions.

"We want to see a stop to the settlements," Clinton told reporters as she stood next to Lieberman, himself a settler. "We think that is an important and essential part of pursuing the efforts leading to a comprehensive agreement and the creation of a Palestinian next to an Israeli Jewish state that is secure in its borders and future," she said.

Mitchell has said a key element has been trying to pin down exactly what Israel means by the "natural growth." Netanyahu says he wants growing families to be able to accommodate their children in towns that Israelis have built on occupied land.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said allowances for continued building could be made if, for example, a project in a settlement was nearing completion or for cases in which money has been invested in a project and cannot be reimbursed.

Clinton cited a recent Washington Post op-ed piece by former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer. In background discussions with journalists, former Bush administration officials said that no formal agreements exist which support Israel's contention that the U.S. approves of settlement construction to accomodate natural growth, Kurtzer wrote.

Western and Israeli officials said this week that while the United States wants Israel to impose a moratorium on new tenders for building in settlements, it was nevertheless considering allowances that could permit some projects already under way to proceed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet Mitchell in Europe next week to try to hammer out an agreement, Israeli officials said.

Mitchell has said a key element has been trying to pin down exactly what Israel means by the "natural growth" of settlements that Netanyahu has said he will defend. In principle, Netanyahu says he wants growing families to be able to accommodate their children in the towns that Israelis have built.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said allowances for continued building could be made if, for example, a project in a settlement was nearing completion or for cases in which money has been invested in a project and cannot be reimbursed.

Mitchell said in Washington on Tuesday of his meetings with Israeli and other officials: "There are almost as many definitions (of natural growth) as there are people speaking."

Netanyahu has asserted that his government does not have the legal authority to stop building in cases in which tenders for new structures have already been awarded or when homes under construction have already been purchased.

Yariv Oppenheimer of the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now said Israel was likely to use any U.S. flexibility to ramp up building in the West Bank. "In the past, every time there was an understanding, the outcome was Israel doubled the number of settlers in the West Bank," he said.

Some half a million Jews live among nearly three million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, territories which were captured from Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War.

Also in September 2001, as CIA operatives were preparing for an offensive in Afghanistan, officials drafted cables that would have authorized assassinations of specified targets on the spot.

"It was straight out of the movies," one of the former intelligence officials said. "It was like: Let's kill them all."

Amid the high alert following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a small CIA unit examined the potential for targeted assassinations of al Qaeda operatives, according to the three former officials. The Ford administration had banned assassinations in the response to investigations into intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Some officials who advocated the approach were seeking to build teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the Munich Olympics terrorist attacks, said another former intelligence official.

One draft cable, later scrapped, authorized officers on the ground to "kill on sight" certain al Qaeda targets, according to one person who saw it. The context of the memo suggested it was designed for the most senior leaders in al Qaeda, this person said. Eventually Mr. Bush issued the finding that authorized the capturing of several top al Qaeda leaders, and allowed officers to kill the targets if capturing proved too dangerous or risky.

Lawmakers first learned specifics of the CIA initiative the day after Mr. Panetta did, when he briefed them on it for 45 minutes

On Sunday, lawmakers criticized the Bush administration's decision not to tell Congress. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, hinted that the Bush administration may have broken the law by not telling Congress.

Ms. Feinstein said Mr. Panetta told the lawmakers that Mr. Cheney had ordered that the information be withheld from Congress. Mr. Cheney on Sunday couldn't be reached for comment through former White House aides.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards stand to be the biggest losers if the S300 system doesn't come through, since there will be little they can do but watch the bombs fall if Western powers attack. Though Russia delivered a smaller Tor-M1 missile defense system to the Iranians last year, it's a localized weapon. The S300 system, according to Jane's Defence Weekly, is "one of the world's most effective all-altitude regional air defense systems, comparable in performance to the U.S. MIM-104 Patriot system." The latest version of the S300PMU2 Favorit has a range of up to 195 kilometers and can intercept aircraft and ballistic missiles at altitudes from 10 meters to 27 kilometers. Though it's hardly clear the S300 will pose a problem for the Israeli or U.S. air forces. The Israelis have trained in avoidance tactics on an S300 system bought by Greece and deployed on the island of Crete; the U.S. Air Force has its own S300 system, which is now deployed for training purposes in the United States. According to one senior Air Combat Command source in Washington, the U.S. Air Force has the S300 "covered."

Regardless of the system's effectiveness, delivery of the S300 will be a key bellwether of Russian relations with the West. Moscow has much less influence over Tehran than it likes to pretend when bargaining with the U.S., and the S300 is one of its few remaining chips.

For years, Russia used construction of the Bushehr reactor by the Russian nuclear company Atomenergoprom as a key element of leverage, shutting down work on the plant for long periods. But now that Atomenergoprom has completed construction and is training the Iranian staff to run it, that leverage has gone. Though Russian staff will remain on-site at Bushehr, the Iranians can now run it on their own.

Russians may have less pull with Teheran than it claims, but it still sees Iran-U.S. enmity as a strategic goal, both because it increases their own diplomatic leverage and because it keeps oil prices high. Furthermore, Russia has been trying to make itself a rallying point for anti-U.S. regimes from Venezuela to Syria and Iran in an effort to restore its status as a world strategic player—a retread of the Cold War model of forging alliances with any Third World dictator who would take Russian money. So while Russia doesn't want Iran to get nukes and historically fears Iranian influence in Central Asia, Moscow has little interest in helping a rapprochement between Iran and the West. Meanwhile, the Kremlin is, cannily or cynically, depending on one's point of view, keeping the S300s on the table, neither committing to scrapping the deal nor delivering the equipment—and reserving the right to continue to tack between Jerusalem and Tehran as self-interest dictates.

As it struggles to stay afloat, GM has deepened cuts that will include 23,000 job losses by 2011, the closure of 16 of its 47 factories in the US and a 42% drop in the number of dealers selling its vehicles.

GM announced it was shutting its 83-year-old Pontiac marque as it slims its portfolio of brands to focus on just four names in the US: Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and GMC. The gas-guzzling Hummer and Sweden's Saab will either be sold or closed by next year but GM made it clear that Britain's Vauxhall brand was not under threat.

Under the company's plan, the US treasury and the United Auto Workers' union would get 89% of the company between them. In return, the government would write off half of the emergency lending extended to GM by US taxpayers.The union's shares would replace the billions of dollars due to be pumped into a trust fund to cover employees' healthcare.

GM has offered a 10% stake to bondholders, who are owed $27bn – a tough proposition to swallow. For each $1,000 of loan notes, bondholders would get 225 shares, worth little more than $550 at today's market price.

The Obama administration insisted that private-sector creditors should get no more than this slim return, demanding that unions and taxpayers receive the lion's share of the company. But in order to proceed, the proposal must be accepted by an overwhelming majority of 90% of bondholders by a deadline of 1 June.

An ad hoc committee representing bondholders last night vigorously objected to the carve-up: "We believe the offer to be a blatant disregard of fairness for the bondholders who have funded this company and amounts to using taxpayer money to show political favouritism of one creditor over another."

Rebecca Lindland, an analyst at IHS Global Insight, said many bondholders were likely to believe they could get a better deal under a bankruptcy arrangement: "The Obama administration may be more pro-union than a bankruptcy judge but it's really a roll of the dice."

GM's smaller rival, Chrysler, has a deadline of Thursday to strike a rescue deal with Italy's Fiat without which the US government has said it will withdraw financial support. Daimler assisted the process last night by in effect writing off its 19.9% stake in Chrysler and $1.9bn in loans.

For GM, the challenge is to shrink to a scale where it can break even with sales of 10m cars in the US annually, rather than the previous rate of 15m to 17m.

His candidacy underscores the political fragmenting of a conservative faction known as the Principlists, which threw its support behind Mr. Ahmadinejad when he ran for president in 2004. Some leading figures who supported Mr. Ahmadinejad then have not publicly backed him this time.

Mr. Rezai was a candidate in the 2004 presidential race, but he withdrew before the election.

Politicians who favor more political and social openness, along with closer ties to the West, have also been unable to coalesce around a single candidate. They are divided between a former prime minister, Mir Hossein Mousavi, and a former speaker of Parliament, Mehdi Karroubi.

“Mr. Mousavi had thought that he could easily raise huge support by announcing his candidacy,” said Saeed Leylaz, a political analyst in Tehran, referring to Mr. Mousavi’s unexpected announcement last month that he would run for president.“The situation can dramatically change in his favor if he clarifies his position with reformers,” Mr. Leylaz said.

Opponents have accused Mr. Ahmadinejad of economic mismanagement and of using government money to attract support for a second term. His government has come under attack in the past month for distributing about 400,000 tons of potatoes around the country and giving bonuses, including gold coins, to civil servants, Iranian newspapers have reported.

In another development, Iran announced Wednesday that it welcomed nuclear talks and said it was ready to offer a proposal to resolve the dispute over its uranium enrichment activities, the state-run IRNA news agency reported. Mr. Ahmadinejad said last week that Iran would take part in talks, and Wednesday’s statement appeared to be an official response to an April 8 invitation by six major powers for a meeting.

Attacks like these -- or U.S. awareness of them -- appear to have escalated in the past six months, said one former official briefed on the matter.

while the spies were able to download sizable amounts of data related to the jet-fighter, they weren't able to access the most sensitive material, which is stored on computers not connected to the Internet.

The Joint Strike Fighter, also known as the F-35 Lightning II, is the costliest and most technically challenging weapons program the Pentagon has ever attempted. The plane, led by Lockheed Martin Corp.

A Pentagon report issued last month said that the Chinese military has made "steady progress" in developing online-warfare techniques. China hopes its computer skills can help it compensate for an underdeveloped military, the report said.

The Chinese Embassy said in a statement that China "opposes and forbids all forms of cyber crimes." It called the Pentagon's report "a product of the Cold War mentality" and said the allegations of cyber espionage are "intentionally fabricated to fan up China threat sensations."

The U.S. has no single government or military office responsible for cyber security. The Obama administration is likely to soon propose creating a senior White House computer-security post to coordinate policy and a new military command that would take the lead in protecting key computer networks from intrusions, according to senior officials.

The Bush administration planned to spend about $17 billion over several years on a new online-security initiative and the Obama administration has indicated it could expand on that.

Former U.S. officials say the attacks appear to have originated in China. However it can be extremely difficult to determine the true origin because it is easy to mask identities online.

Six current and former officials familiar with the matter confirmed that the fighter program had been repeatedly broken into. The Air Force has launched an investigation.

Foreign allies are helping develop the aircraft, which opens up other avenues of attack for spies online. At least one breach appears to have occurred in Turkey and another country that is a U.S. ally, according to people familiar with the matter.

Joint Strike Fighter test aircraft are already flying, and money to build the jet is included in the Pentagon's budget for this year and next.

Computer systems involved with the program appear to have been infiltrated at least as far back as 2007, according to people familiar with the matter. Evidence of penetrations continued to be discovered at least into 2008. The intruders appear to have been interested in data about the design of the plane, its performance statistics and its electronic systems, former officials said.

The intruders compromised the system responsible for diagnosing a plane's maintenance problems during flight, according to officials familiar with the matter. However, the plane's most vital systems -- such as flight controls and sensors -- are physically isolated from the publicly accessible Internet, they said.

The intruders entered through vulnerabilities in the networks of two or three contractors helping to build the high-tech fighter jet, according to people who have been briefed on the matter. Lockheed Martin is the lead contractor on the program, and Northrop Grumman Corp. and BAE Systems PLC also play major roles in its development.

The spies inserted technology that encrypts the data as it's being stolen; as a result, investigators can't tell exactly what data has been taken. A former Pentagon official said the military carried out a thorough cleanup.

Investigators traced the penetrations back with a "high level of certainty" to known Chinese Internet protocol, or IP, addresses and digital fingerprints that had been used for attacks in the past, said a person briefed on the matter.

As for the intrusion into the Air Force's air-traffic control systems, three current and former officials familiar with the incident said it occurred in recent months. It alarmed U.S. national security officials, particularly at the National Security Agency, because the access the spies gained could have allowed them to interfere with the system, said one former official. The danger is that intruders might find weaknesses that could be exploited to confuse or damage U.S. military craft.

In his speech in Austin, Mr. Brenner, the U.S. counterintelligence chief, issued a veiled warning about threats to air traffic in the context of Chinese infiltration of U.S. networks. He spoke of his concerns about the vulnerability of U.S. air traffic control systems to cyber infiltration, adding "our networks are being mapped." He went on to warn of a potential situation where "a fighter pilot can't trust his radar."