Washington — Congressional critics assailed the CDC and homeland security officials Wednesday for what one representative called "an across-the-board meltdown" that let Andrew Speaker travel into and out of the country harboring a dangerous strain of tuberculosis.

"It looks like there was some bureaucratic mismanagement here," Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) told Julie Gerberding, director of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Speaker himself, in dramatic long-distance testimony to the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees CDC funding, asserted that the agency was aware he had a strain of tuberculosis that is resistant to drugs but did not forbid him to travel.

"Everyone knew I was going. I didn't go running off and hiding from people," the 31-year-old Atlanta lawyer said by telephone from his Denver hospital room.

"It's a complete fallacy — it's a lie," he said of the official version of him as a man fleeing health authorities.

"CDC knew that I had [drug-resistant tuberculosis]. They were aware that I was going on my travels," said Speaker. "I was clearly told, word for word, that I was not contagious; I was not a threat to anyone."

That account was disputed by Steven Katkowsky, director of the Fulton County Health and Wellness Department.

"He was told he was not highly contagious," said Katkowsky, who said Speaker was advised not to travel. "Was he ordered not to travel? The answer to that was no," he said, because the county had no authority to do so.

Katkowsky said his office did contact the county attorney for guidance on whether they might seek a court order prohibiting him from traveling. The response was that the court would not block Speaker's travel unless he had violated specific requests from health officials, which had not happened.

"He did not refuse treatment. He did not refuse to be tested," said Katkowsky. "We found ourselves in a Catch-22."

Deborah Spero, assistant commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told the panel "there is no excuse or acceptable explanation" for a U.S. border agent deciding on his own to allow Speaker to re-enter the United States from Canada.

In doing so, Spero said, the agent ignored federal orders that identified Speaker as a public health risk. She vowed that "appropriate action will be taken."

In a CNN interview, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) said there was "an across-the-board meltdown" in U.S. border security.

During testimony before both committees, Gerberding admitted to mistakes during what she described as days of medical "detective" work in which health officials from Atlanta to Italy scrambled to track down Speaker to keep him from exposing others to the disease.

"We gave the patient the benefit of the doubt and, in retrospect, we made a mistake," Gerberding told the Senate panel. "We failed to take the aggressive effort."

When CDC analysts discovered that Speaker had extensive drug-resistant tuberculosis, officials were able to track him down in a hotel room in Rome.

Speaker was informed during the call that CDC had looked into several options — including the use of CDC aircraft or U.S. military aircraft — for bringing him back to the United States, but that none of those options was available to him.

Speaker said he was left with flying home on a commercial flight, paying an exorbitant price for charter flight or entering an Italian hospital — where he feared he might be quarantined.

"I was told: $140,000 to get home, or stay in Rome to be treated," said Speaker. He said he thought "I could be stuck there indefinitely in an Italian hospital. And I came home."

He flew back to Canada and returned to the United States in a rental car.

Said Gerberding, "The patient, understandably, was probably frightened."

Harkin, though, was not satisfied with Gerberding's explanation as to why a CDC emergency medical jet wasn't dispatched to Rome to bring Speaker home.

Taxpayers spend $7 million a year for three rented CDC jets, but Gerberding said none was equipped to protect pilots and crew from being exposed to germs from a patient like Speaker during a long flight.

"We have a gap there," she said.

Gerberding conceded, however, that the CDC overlooked that problem in later flying Speaker from New York to Atlanta and from there to Denver. Gerberding said that's because it was a short flight, under the eight hours scientists believe is required to raise risk of TB transmission aboard an aircraft.

Harkin pounced on the inconsistency.

"This answer that I've heard doesn't hold a lot of water," said Harkin.

CDC spokesman Glen Nowak said after Wednesday's hearing that Congress didn't appropriate money for a containment unit for the jet until 2006. CDC will soon begin a project with the military to design and build a biological containment system capable of transporting infectious patients long distances, Nowak said. The project is expected to take one year.

Gerberding said the CDC's internal review of the Speaker case had turned up several areas where improvements are needed. Among those are:

• Strengthening states' ability to restrict the travel of patients who pose significant potential public health risks.

• notification of such risks to authorities able to put patients on no-fly lists or travel watch lists.

• Clarifications in quarantine laws to deal with patients leaving the country.

Staff writers Alison Young in Denver and Allison Becker in Washington contributed to this article.