While the testimony plays out in front of the jury, some intriguing people have been turning up in the audience on behalf of Tongsun's Park's defense team — including a former director of the FBI.

On Friday morning, a neatly dressed fellow named William Livingstone approached me in the courtroom, saying he'd come up from Washington to help Park's defense do a better job of organizing its dealings with the press. He gave me a card which said he is a senior vice president at Global Options Inc. — a Washington-based consulting firm that describes itself on its website as "a private CIA, Defense Department, Justice Department, and FBI, all rolled into one."

During a break, I ran into Livingstone speaking in the hall with a white-haired gentleman who is listed by Global Options as a member of their advisory board, retired federal judge and former FBI director, William Sessions. Sessions somewhat less eagerly gave me a business card for his Washington law firm, Holland & Knight, and said he had come to look in on the trial as an adviser. During the mid-day break, Sessions and Tongsun Park's defense team all lunched together in the courthouse cafeteria.

On a related note: Tongsun Park launched a web site during the first week of the trial, which appears to be registered to Global Options — though it's not clear who is actually providing the content: http://www.tongsunpark.com/ . The site talks about Park's modesty, some of his ventures involving Ghana, Zaire, Taiwan, France, and so forth, saying among other things Tongsun Park was at one point the CEO of the Canadian nuclear power company, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL). An AECL spokesman told me Friday that Park was never CEO, although he did work for the company as a consultant. My repeated queries to the web site about this have received no response.