WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon's newest counterterrorism agency, charged with protecting military facilities and personnel wherever they are, is carrying out intelligence collection, analysis and operations within the United States and abroad, according to a Pentagon fact sheet on the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, provided to The Washington Post.

CIFA is a three-year-old agency whose size and budget remain secret. It has grown from an agency that coordinated policy and oversaw the counterintelligence activities of units within the military services and Pentagon agencies, to an analytic and operational organization with nine directorates and ever-widening authority.

Its Directorate of Field Activities (DX) "assists in preserving the most critical defense assets, disrupting adversaries and helping control the intelligence domain," the fact sheet said. Those roles can range from running roving patrols around military bases and facilities to surveillance of potentially threatening people or organizations inside the United States. The DX also provides "on-site, real time ... support in hostile areas worldwide to protect both U.S. and host nation personnel from a variety of threats," the fact sheet said.

This is just one illustration of the quiet growth of Pentagon activities inside the United States and abroad as part of the war on terror. Last week, news accounts revealed that President Bush authorized secret eavesdropping on Americans with suspected ties to terrorist groups.

Another CIFA directorate, the Counterintelligence and Law Enforcement Center "identifies and assesses threats" to Defense personnel, operations and infrastructure from "insider threats, foreign intelligence services, terrorists, and other clandestine or covert entities," according to the Pentagon.

CIFA manages the Pentagon database that includes Talon reports consisting of raw, unverified information picked up by the military services on suspicious activities that could involve terrorist threats. The Pentagon last week acknowledged that the Talon database contained reports on peaceful civilian protests and demonstrations that should have been purged long ago under Defense Department regulations.

A third CIFA directorate, Behavioral Sciences, "has 20 psychologists and a multimillion dollar budget," and supports both "offensive and defensive counterintelligence efforts," according to a government biography of its director, Dr. S. Scott Shumate. Dr. Shumate was the chief operational psychologist for the CIA's counterterrorism center until 2003. His group has also provided a "team of renowned forensic psychologists [who] are engaged in risk assessments of the Guantanamo Bay detainees," according to his biography.

A Pentagon official said none of Dr. Shumate's team members questions detainees as part of their job of helping produce threat reports, though they may relay questions to interrogators.

A former senior Pentagon intelligence official, familiar with CIFA, said yesterday, "They started with force protection from terrorists, but when you go down that road, you soon are into everything ... where terrorists get their money, who they see, who they deal with."