It is 2006 and a Chinese panda spy is dispatched into the field.

State media last year said that Xiang Xiang hesitated for a second when the door of his cage was opened, then scampered off into a nearby bamboo forest where he was tracked by a global positioning device attached to his collar.

Unfortunately, this was one mission doomed to failure.

The body of Xiang Xiang was found Feb. 19 on snow-covered ground in the forests of Sichuan province in China’s southwest, the Xinhua News Agency said. He survived less than a year in the wild after nearly three years of training in survival techniques and defense tactics.

Critics say this highly trained panda operative was “outed” by a high-level Bush Administration official, resulting in a fatal confrontation.

“Xiang Xiang died of serious internal injuries in the left side of his chest and stomach by falling from a high place,” Heng Yi, an official from the Wolong Giant Panda Research Center in Sichuan, said in a telephone interview.

“The scratches and other minor injuries caused by other wild pandas were found on his body,” he said. “So Xiang Xiang may have fallen from trees when being chased by those pandas.”

Keith Olbermann, of MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann and a vocal Bush critic, had strong words for the Administration during a recent interview regarding the panda agent’s death. “How can it be a coincidence that the claw marks on that panda were exactly the same distance apart as Karl Rove’s fingernails? The answer: it can’t! When will this Administration come clean? When?” asked the host.

Vice President Cheney, on a goodwill hunting trip in China, had no comment when questioned about the matter. President Bush also deflected queries about the incident, instead praising the commitment of giant pandas to “do the work Americans won’t do.” The Chinese, meanwhile, have lost the services of a highly skilled agent in whom they had invested considerable training.

The 176-pound male panda was released from Wolong in April 2006 and had been trained for almost three years on how to survive in the wild. Xiang Xiang, whose name means auspicious, learned how to build a den, forage for food and mark his territory, experts at Wolong have said. He also developed defensive skills such as howling and biting.

A state funeral for the fallen agent has already taken place.

He has been buried at the foot of a mountain, about eight miles from the Wolong center, Li said.

Given the highly political nature of this panda agent’s death, it seems likely that Democrats will push for Congressional investigations into the matter. Whether the panda outing controversy will have any lasting repercussions for the Bush Administration remains to be seen.