How Bureaucrats Play Name Game : Government: From the military to law enforcement, someone has to christen every major operation with an appropriate label.

When the feds go after the bad guys or our soldiers head into battle, one piece of equipment comes as standard: the right moniker for the mission.

Just this month another one was thrust onto America”s collective radar screen: “Operation Innocent Images,” the FBI sting that led to the arrest of a dozen alleged child pornographers.

Wordsmiths at the Pentagon have ginned up such spine-tinglers as “Desert Storm” and “Urgent Fury”--code names for the 1991 offensive against Iraq and the 1983 Grenada invasion.

At the FBI, the naming ceremony was conducted by an agent familiar with the case who is based at headquarters. Bureau spokeswoman Jennifer Spencer described the process this way: “They try to think of something relevant.”

Acknowledging that agents invest considerable effort in the process, she elaborated: “They try to be creative; they try to be clever.”

None, however, was available to describe firsthand his or her bout of java-swilling or midnight oil-burning.

Other code names recently offered from other nooks and crannies of the federal bureaucracy have ranged from the grimly utilitarian, such as “Operation Okbomb,” a reference to the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing, to the Chandleresque, such as “Operation Night Mover,” the FBI’s name for the Aldrich Ames espionage case.

Once in a while, those responsible exhibit a flash of erudition. Consider “Operation Anlace,” the investigation that laid the groundwork for the later probe into Ames’ activities. (An anlace is a medieval dagger.)

But like many who toil in creative vineyards, the progenitors of these ingenious labels know that it may be years--if ever--before their imaginative efforts reach a wider audience because of the length of time an operation may remain shrouded in secrecy. At the Pentagon, the process is conducted with a predictable degree of military precision. The process even has a name of its own, one that sounds like it comes straight out of a Joseph Heller novel: Nicka (the Nickname and Exercise Term System).

When a military confrontation is at hand, top regional commanders are given sets of initials as parameters. They might typically range from EB to EW, allowing senior officers to select any name provided it begins with those letters and avoids “lightness or vulgarity,” according to a Pentagon spokesman.

The Pentagon follows the strictures of Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill, who decreed in August, 1943, that operations in which men might lose their lives must not be described with code words that implied “a boastful and overconfident sentiment . . . or, conversely, which are calculated to invest the plan with an air of despondency.” Nor must they be “frivolous” or involve words “often used in other connections.”

Sometimes the top brass has risen triumphantly to that challenge. Witness the evocative “Desert Storm” and “Desert Shield.” In his newly published autobiography, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin L. Powell reveals that he played an important part in picking “Desert Shield” after rejecting “Peninsula Shield” and “Crescent Shield.”

When first thoughts are less than dazzling, the military is always open to classier options, the Pentagon said.

“When we mounted a humanitarian aid operation after floods in Bangladesh, we had decided to call it ‘Operation Productive Effort.’ Then one of the Bangladeshi officials told us that he thought the Marine helicopters . . . looked ‘like angels from the sea.’ We renamed it ‘Operation Sea Angel,’ ” the senior Pentagon officer said.

Organized though it may be, the process is not immune from the rule that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. An Army Reserve unit once attempted to name a road-building project in Honduras “Operation Blazing Trails,” the Pentagon says, but a swift rewrite ensued when a literal translation turned out to be uncomfortably close to the Spanish-language name for “Shining Path,” the Maoist guerrilla group in Peru.