WASHINGTON — The first wave of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay military prison created their own internal organizational structure to maintain morale, resist interrogation, and recruit new members, adhering to instructions in a 10-year-old Al Qaeda training manual, according to a classified report by analysts in the CIA’s Counterterroist Center.

“Authorities at GTMO [Guantanamo] noted that detainees while at Camp XRay [the initial holding facility] created this structure and took on these roles,” according to the August 2002 report, which was first made public last week on the Web site thesmokinggun.com.

A CIA spokesman said yesterday that the agency would not confirm or deny the authenticity of the report, which includes footnotes to more than two dozen classified CIA, Defense Department, and State Department intelligence documents.

The report “appears authentic in form and substance,” a former CIA official, who could not remember if he read it at the time, said. He asked for anonymity because he said he believes the document is still classified.

The document was recently examined in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence after it was downloaded from a Web site and no one questioned its authenticity, an ODNI official said.

The Al Qaeda training manual, obtained by the CIA in 1996, suggests a 10-position leadership structure for members held in a prison. These include “barracks chief and deputies … greeters to meet and instruct new arrivals … welfare attendant to organize equitable distribution of goods from families and aid organizations … morale officer to organize leisure time …[and] clergy, presumably to attend to spiritual needs as well as to recruit new adherents to their faith,” according to the CIA report.

The CIA report says Al Qaeda members at Guantanamo “are trying to put their training into practice by establishing cellblock leaders and dividing responsibility among deputies for greeting new arrivals, assessing interrogations, monitoring the guard force and providing moral support to fellow detainees, among other tasks.”

Since bringing the first prisoners to Guantanamo Bay in early 2002, administration officials have on several occasions publicly alleged that captives were following training outlined in the Al Qaeda manual. Staging hunger strikes and inventing false claims of abuse are two of the tactics outlined in the manual, officials have said.

The smokinggun Web site noted that although the report was prepared almost four years ago, “U.S. concerns about communication methods of detainees has not waned. Following last month’s simultaneous suicides of three inmates, authorities alleged that other detainees may have aided the trio in killing themselves as part of a broader plot to disrupt the facility.”

The CIA report suggests several steps to counteract the Al Qaeda approach, including inhibiting communications and contacts both inside and outside the prison. Terrorists should be prevented from “forming lasting bonds or organizations in prison,” the report suggests.