But officials said they were rejecting a classified recommendation to give authority over covert operations to the new National Counter-Proliferation Center and the National Counter-Terrorist Center, and would defer key decisions on the authorities of the Pentagon's spy-catchers and the future of the CIA's own counter-proliferation unit.

The White House also announced, at a briefing given by the president's Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend, sweeping new powers to seize the assets of individuals and companies involved in proliferation, or connected with those who were.

Townsend said the White House would work with Congress to give legislative shape to those recommendations that required it, and urged lawmakers to continue the process of reforming their own oversight structures that they began in response to the report last July of the "9/11" Commission.

Civil liberties advocates expressed immediate concern about the implications of a new intelligence "service within a service" in the FBI. The American Civil Liberties Union charged in a statement that it "would lead to an erosion of constitutional protections against law enforcement actions."

And Democrats, while welcoming the administration's embrace of the reforms, said it was too little, too late. The changes "finally announced" Wednesday, said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., would not fix "the administration's flawed and paralyzed policies and foot-dragging in the larger fight against (weapons of mass destruction)."

The Townsend briefing was the latest in a series of policy roll-outs designed to fix the sprawling and fractious collection of a dozen or so agencies that make up the so-called Intelligence Community - after its failure to prevent the Sept 11, 2001 terror attacks and its mistaken certainty about the state of Iraq's weapons programs.

The President's Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction reported at the end of March this year - blasting U.S. agencies as being "dead wrong" on Iraq. The commission made a total of 74 recommendations, including the classified one that was publicly described in detail for the first time Wednesday.

Townsend said the administration was adopting 70 of the recommendations, tabling three for further study and rejecting one "suggesting that we should move covert action planning from the CIA, and move that into the National Counter-Proliferation Center and the National Counter-Terrorism Center."

She said: "There were persuasive and strong arguments made against doing that," adding that officials believed that "placing a senior official at the top of the (human intelligence) organization will meet the same objectives."

Of the three recommendations tabled for further study, two related to the future of the CIA's own counter-proliferation unit, the Center for Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control, known as WINPAC.

WINPAC was one of three agencies that the commission found had "made such serious errors, or resisted admitting their errors so stubbornly, that questions may fairly be raised about (their) fundamental culture or capabilities."

The commission concluded that "serious consideration" should be given to "whether each of these organizations should be reconstituted, substantially reorganized or made subject to detailed oversight."

"We didn't say 'bulldoze them,' but we came close," one commission official told United Press International recently.

But instead, the administration chose to punt any decision about WINPAC and the other two agencies singled out - the U.S. Army's National Ground Intelligence Center and the Pentagon's Defense Human Intelligence service.

Townsend said the recommendation was one of three requiring "additional study," because the newly-minted Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte - "confirmed in the midst of this review" - needed more time to ponder their future.

"The DNI, as you can imagine, having just stood up an office, has not completed that review and so that will require additional time," she said.

The Principle Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Gen. Michael Hayden, also briefing on Wednesday's roll out, told reporters that the National Ground Intelligence Center - the military's experts on conventional weapons capabilities - was, like all the military's science and technology centers, buried deep in the service's structure, far away from the source of its funding and its supposed overall taskmaster: the leadership of the intelligence community.

"Did the distance of that chain have anything to do with the performance or lack of performance of NGIC?" he asked, using the center's acronym. He said that was one of the issues the office would study as it moved ahead with its review.

But as UPI reported last month, the Pentagon is already giving the center new duties in support of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"They are working on the tactical capabilities of the enemy," a defense contractor who works closely with U.S. military intelligence said, giving insurgent use of roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers as examples.

The commission official called that "A poke in the eye."

In the second recommendation marked for further study, the new National Counter-Proliferation Center was to be designated the lead agency for interdiction related issues, and in serving the intelligence needs of the White House and other customers. These duties overlap to some extent with the current mission of WINPAC, according to a former intelligence official.

No one at either the Department of Defense or the CIA responded to requests for comment Wednesday.

A statement from CIA Director Porter Goss said merely that "The responsibilities assigned to CIA underscore... the trust and confidence placed in this agency."

Hayden said that the issue of WINPAC's future might in part be resolved by the establishment of the new center, which he described as a "mission manager."

"One should expect that if there are issues there (with WINPAC) that need to be corrected, the creation of the (National Counter-Proliferation Center) which is going to have direct authority over the counter-proliferation mission, should help," he said.

The exact size and authorities of the new center were yet to be decided, according to Townsend. "Some discretion in that regard has got to be left to Amb. Negroponte. This will be a center under his office, and he's going to need some time to set it up," she said.

The center will be likely be headed by a senior Foreign Service official, Kenneth Brill, until recently, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, officials in Negroponte's office told UPI.

"Because the center has not been created yet," it was too early to name anyone to the post, said one. Negroponte was "giving serious consideration to naming him," once the center was stood up.

The prospect of Brill's appointment has already drawn fire from some conservatives on Capitol Hill. The Washington Times, which first named him, quoted an un-named senior senate aide as saying, "We expected to see someone with operational and intelligence experience, not somebody who is a Foreign Service officer."

The paper said Brill was "viewed by conservatives as opposed" to Bush administration policy on proliferation.

The official in the office of the Director of National Intelligence said Negroponte had "very high regard for his talents, qualifications and experience."

And Democrats said his time in Vienna had readied Brill for the job.

"He has seen up close, and recently, how effective the International Atomic Energy Agency, multilateral inspections and other multilateral tools can be in obtaining information about nuclear programs" that might be a threat, said one senior congressional aide.

Other appointments to positions in the new structures Negroponte's office is creating are also likely to prove controversial.

In the midst of Wednesday's multiple briefings and press conferences by affected agencies, Negroponte's principle deputy, Gen. Hayden, casually let slip that an official in the director's general counsel's office had been appointed interim civil liberties protection officer.

The official in Negroponte's office later told UPI that the interim appointee was named Alexander Joel, but was unable to provide any further biographical details.

"You want a very good person in there, and we're taking our care to do that, but you also don't want to leave it vacant," Hayden said, explaining the interim nature of the appointment.

Hayden said he believed it essential to have someone in post as the process of intelligence reform moved forward, "So as we do these foundational documents and these first steps, we've got someone who's got that interest (in civil liberties) foursquare, so that the structures we set up are sensitive to those requirements."

Concerns about civil liberties were already surfacing Wednesday following the announcement of proposed changes within the FBI and the Justice Department, laid out in a directive to the Attorney General and other senior cabinet and administration officials from President Bush.

Again, only an outline of the changes was available at this early stage, but Hayden made it clear things are moving fast towards the deadline imposed in the Bush directive. "There has to be something back here within 60 days that says 'here's how we're going to do this.'"

Traditionally the FBI has operated under the supervision of the Attorney General, and most of the Bureau's intelligence work - which critics say was not much, prior to Sept. 11 - was coordinated through the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review in the Justice Department.

One criticism of the changes the FBI has so far enacted as part of the intelligence reform process is that the official charged with overseeing the bureau's expanded intelligence efforts, Executive Assistant Director Maureen Baginski, lacks clout within the organization, in part because she has no real budgetary authority.

The president called on Congress to create a new assistant attorney general for national security - who would manage the Justice Department's new National Security Division, made up of its counter-terrorism and counter-espionage sections and the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review.

A senior Justice Department official played down the impact of the changes on his agency, saying the three elements of the department would "simply move, as they are" into the new division, although the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review might get new resources to boost its "oversight and policy functions."

But he pointed out that "A key player in this is congress," which will have to pass legislation to reorganize the department and create the new post.

"We will work very closely with Congress to develop this plan to figure out how it's going to be authorized, how it'll be funded, and that's a process that has just begun," the official said.

The president also directed the appointment within the FBI of a new senior official, at a higher level than Baginski, to head the bureau's new National Security Service.

The service will incorporate the counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence criminal investigation elements of the bureau, as well as its newly expanded intelligence gathering and analysis operations. The attorney general is directed to develop programs to hire, train and reward a specialized "national security workforce" within the bureau.

The Justice Department official, who demanded anonymity even though briefing reporters in a conference call set up by the department's public affairs office, called the changes "a natural evolution of what we've been doing since Sept. 11.

"I don't see it and it should not be seen as any kind of a rebuke," he said, answering charges that the reorganization reflected a failure of the bureau to move swiftly or surely enough to transform itself in the wake of the failures that led up to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Other changes outlined in the president's memo are designed to more closely align the FBI's intelligence personnel with the money it receives as part of the National Intelligence Program, a budget over which the director of national intelligence has strong statutory authorities.

The idea is that the director of national intelligence should be able to -- at the very least - task elements of the FBI to gather intelligence against certain targets.

"The challenge we have," Hayden said, "is that (FBI) Director (Robert) Mueller also needs that intelligence (capability)." He said that the competing priorities of the bureau, which will want intelligence to support specific cases as part of its law enforcement activities, and the wider community, which might have broader goals, would have to be juggled.

"We're going to have to work out a structure that kinda balances that dilemma between agility for the FBI and coherence for the (Intelligence) Community."

When asked who the new national security service director would report to, Hayden referenced the so-called dual-hatted nature of his former post as head of the National Security Agency, where he served both the secretary of defense and the director of central intelligence.

"We've lived with these kinds of arrangements," he said.

Speaking in a specially prepared briefing room inside Negroponte's new suite in the White House New Executive Office Building, Hayden said the new FBI intelligence chief would "have to be sensitive to both" the director of national intelligence and the FBI director.

"You've got this amorphous world out there," he concluded.

A few block east on Pennsylvania Avenue, the other side of the White House, there seemed to be a lot less ambiguity.

"The person will be reporting to the Director of the FBI. He will work for the Director of the FBI," said the Justice Department official of the new FBI post.

"He will have a relationship with the (director of national intelligence) because he will be the person the (director of national intelligence) will look to on budget issues."

Hayden said the changes were designed to give the director of national intelligence "adequate visibility into FBI operations."

The concern of civil liberties advocates is that such visibility could mean in practice the creation for the first time of an agency specifically charged with spying on Americans.

But the Justice Department official said the director of national intelligence's role was appropriately limited to "strategic operational planning," an important safeguard which obviated the potential for the creation of a domestic intelligence agency.

"In our understanding, the (director of national intelligence) is not charged with involvement in the deployment of FBI agents, with planning, with anything other than the broad brush about what information needs to be collected and what our goals are," he said.

"Those agents operating in the United States are still going to be run by the FBI."

Another law enforcement official pointed out that the memo was very carefully worded, and talks about a process by which the director of national intelligence, through the new FBI intelligence chief, "can effectively communicate with the FBI's field offices, resident agencies and any other personnel in the national security service."

"It says 'communicate with,' not 'issue orders to,'" said the law enforcement official.

But the Justice Department official acknowledged that much remained to be finalized. "The details are going to be important," he said.

Officials Wednesday at times seemed to be wrestling the competing imperatives involved in their effort to repair - and restore public confidence in - highly secretive and powerful agencies with a new-found and vital role on the front lines of the war on terror, but a less-than-perfect record of transparency and in some cases of respecting constitutional niceties.

"These are big, powerful and on most days pretty secretive organizations," acknowledged Hayden, explaining why congressional oversight "that would be in other countries almost intrusive," was necessary.

He emphasized the importance of transparency. "In a democracy," he said, "You get to do what you do, because people trust what you're doing.

But he declined to make public or discuss in detail the turf battle that has been raging between the CIA and the Department of Defense, beyond saying, "This is a very challenging war," which had required "a discussion - I'll just call it a discussion and leave it at that - as to what, in this kind of a war, constitutes traditional military activities."

He also said he believed a memorandum of understanding between the CIA and the Department of Defense that was "about to be signed" would remain classified. "I'll take that back," he said, when pressed on how he intended to reassure the public the problem was fixed if they were not allowed to see the solution.

Another potential civil liberties issue is raised by the third new post that Wednesday's announcement created: a senior manager within the CIA, responsible for all human intelligence from all agencies, including the FBI.

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