CIA to train Iraqi team in collecting intelligence

The new service will be trained, financed, and equipped largely by the CIA with help from Jordan. Initially, the agency will be headed by Nouri Badran, Iraq's interior minister. He is a secular Shi'ite and activist in the Jordan-based Iraqi National Accord, an exile group that includes former Ba'ath Party military and intelligence officials.

Badran and Ayad Alawi, leader of the INA, are spending much of this week at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., to work out the details of the new program. Both men have worked closely with the CIA over the past decade in unsuccessful efforts to incite coups against Saddam Hussein. The agency and the two men believe they can effectively screen former regime officials to find agents for the service and weed out those who are unreliable or unsavory, officials said.

By contrast, some Pentagon officials and Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, vehemently oppose allowing former intelligence and military officials into the new organization for fear they cannot be trusted. Chalabi and his sponsors also fear some former regime officials would use the new apparatus to undermine the influence of Chalabi, who wants to play a central role in a new Iraq.

No deadline has been set, but officials hope to have the service running by mid-February. Congress had approved money for the effort in the classified annex of this year's budget. The service will focus largely on domestic intelligence, and some administration officials see it as a critical step in the administration's effort to hand over to the Iraqis the business of running the country.

Establishing the service is one of several new steps the CIA is taking to deal with an increasingly worrisome Iraqi resistance. In recent weeks, the deputy director for intelligence, Jami Miscik, has pulled together an analytical working group at CIA headquarters similar to the task force the agency used during the war. Miscik has more than doubled the number of analysts working to identify insurgents and their sources of support.

Likewise, the CIA station in Baghdad has grown significantly since major combat operations ceased, as have the number of substations around the country.