(Continued from page 33)

hide homemade bombs. They've been strapped to children's bicycles, hidden inside water jugs and even hung in tree branches. But the most shocking place that Brig. Basim Saeed has heard of such a device being planted was inside a hollowed-out book made to look like a Quran, Islam's holy book.
• A soldier who went to pick up the book from the floor was killed when it exploded.
• "Normally if that book is lying somewhere on the floor, you tend to pick it up immediately just for respect," said Saeed, the chief instructor at a school training Pakistani forces how to detect the so-called improvised explosive devices, which have become increasingly popular in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the insurgency in Pakistan's northwest, near the Afghan border.
• The Associated Press was the first foreign media outlet to be allowed access to the facility, according to the Pakistani military.
• Saeed and other instructors at the military's Counter IED, Explosives and Munitions School say it is important to constantly come up with new ways to prevent such homemade bombs because that's exactly what the militants are doing.
• ___

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- The top U.S. intelligence chief, James Clapper, said this week that the loss of state secrets as a result of leaks by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden was the worst in American history. Clapper backed up his assertion with dire forecasts about emboldened enemies abroad, but some historians and researchers said the U.S. has struggled with even more devastating intelligence breakdowns over the past century.
• Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has said Snowden's disclosures and the resulting media coverage are giving away blueprints for surveillance programs. "Terrorists and other adversaries of this country are going to school on U.S. intelligence sources, methods and tradecraft," he told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.
• At the start of that hearing, Clapper staked a claim he had not previously made in public. Snowden's leaks, he said, were "the most massive and most damaging theft of intelligence information in our history."
• Historians and researchers said Clapper's remark ignores the most devastating intelligence loss of the 20th century -- the theft of America's top-secret atomic bomb design by Soviet spies. Others say a trio of Americans who spied for Russia in the

(Continued on page 35)