Recognized as one of the "Top Hotels" in the country by Travel + Leisure and ranked on the coveted Condé Nast Traveler "Gold List," the hotel is a favorite among visiting celebrities, including Kevin Costner, Rod Stewart, the late, great Luciano Pavarotti, Paul McCartney, Uma Thurman, Prince Albert of Monaco and, as we're seeing, President George W. Bush. The Penthouse runs $3,500 a night and 2-bedroom suites cost $568 to $950 a night, so you can assume your tax dollars were hard at work.

The hotel offers a wide choice of elegant private meeting rooms, and claims to be superbly equipped to accommodate executive and social events of any kind. Each on-site meeting space is "handsomely appointed" with one-of-a-kind signature pieces ranging from magnificent Waterford crystal chandeliers to an 18th century Brussels tapestry.

The Library and the Boardroom both provide superb settings for intimate dinners and small meetings, and there are four refined and exclusive rooms that can be tailored to corporate needs. The two Chinoiserie Ballrooms, on the 23rd floor, capture stunning views of the city from their stepped terraces and provide an ambiance of great distinctive character for occasions that will be remembered.

It was outside one of these rooms that Quintero Curiel's memorable act of espionage took place. Before entering the conference room, everyone entering was required, as part of a new, but quite definitely misguided security effort, to leave his or her BlackBerry and other such devices on the table. Presumably this was to prevent pictures from being taken, recordings from being made, and prevent other disturbances during the meeting, but instead turned into a major security blunder.

Quintero Curiel purportedly coordinated logistics for Mexican media and, according to Fox News, "served as the lead press advance person for the Mexican Delegation and was responsible for handling logistics and guiding the Mexican media around at the conference."

Whether that was his only role with the Mexican government may be something we never know. The sordid history of professional spycraft is rife with the practice of placing intelligence operatives in supposedly diplomatic roles as their cover stories. One of the most famous of these operatives was Valerie Plame, who, while working as an agent of the CIA, was under diplomatic cover in Athens in the early 1990s as a junior consular officer.

We may never know if Rafael Quintero Curiel was merely a diplomatic functionary or an agent under diplomatic cover. In any case, on Tuesday, April 22, he was outside the Windsor's conference room and had access to BlackBerry devices belonging to senior American officials. He grabbed two of them and successfully exited the building before anyone became aware of their absense.