By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

On the FBI’s Kids’ Page Web site, young G-Men-in-training are urged to “go on an undercover assignment” to keep “Special Agent Bobby Bureau” from blowing his cover.

But on the mean streets of Washington, D.C., the FBI doesn’t always seem to practice what it preaches.

Take the house, pictured below, which is located directly across the street from the embassy of one of our former Cold War adversaries. Most of the time, the large skylights in the attic of the house appear opaque, as seen here:

By Robert Windrem and Dan Linden 

If the sky is falling, FEMA is prepared to catch it.

That’s the message tonight from FEMA - the agency made famous by its anemic response to Hurricane Katrina - to the threat posed by a spy satellite that could soon come crashing to earth.

FEMA has produced a memo and 18-page guide, a “First Responder Guide for Space Object Re-Entry,” that have been sent to thousands of local police, fire and emergency service agencies around the country.  It also has helpful hints for the public.

FEMA also has placed six “Federal Joint Interagency Task Forces” on alert in FEMA regions, ready to be deployed, just in case, according to the FEMA memo. A “Consequence Management Group” has been assembled at the Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center in Washington to manage the crisis, the memo adds.

By Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News Chief Pentagon Correspondent

Pentagon officials tell NBC News that a U.S. Navy ship is preparing to launch a missile over the Pacific on Wednesday night, in an attempt to shoot down a dead spy satellite orbiting out of control in space.  If all goes as planned, the USS Lake Erie, an Aegis cruiser, will launch the SM-3 tactical missile at about sundown Hawaii time (or about 10:30pm EST) from a position about 600 miles northwest of Hawaii.

The spy satellite lost all power almost immediately after it was launched into space in December 2006. Without power, the 5,000-pound satellite, about the size of a school bus, would be expected to make an uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere and crash in early March.  Although half the satellite would be expected to burn up on re-entry, U.S. officials fear that the 1,000 pounds of potentially deadly hydrazine fuel on board pose a risk to people on the ground.  Military and NASA officials say that, because of that threat, they decided to attempt to destroy the satellite in space.

Editor's Note: Updating from an earlier post:

By Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News Chief Pentagon Correspondent

President Bush has personally authorized the U.S. military to launch a surface-to-air missile to destroy a disabled spy satellite that is orbiting out of control and is expected to reenter the atmosphere and crash to earth within the next several weeks. This is the first time the U.S. military will attempt to shoot down an orbiting satellite with a tactical missile.

By Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News Chief Pentagon Correspondent

Editor's Note: This post has been updated.

It sounds like a scene from "Star Wars." Today, the Pentagon will reveal its plans to knock a dead spy satellite out of the sky with missiles launched from Navy ships. This is the first time the U.S. military will have used a surface-to-air missile to destroy a satellite in space.