WASHINGTON – The Treasury Department’s authority to freeze the bank accounts of terrorists will now apply to rogue proliferators and traffickers of weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration announced yesterday in its second major restructuring of the intelligence community in less than a year.

The reforms to the intelligence community will strengthen and consolidate the powers of the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, granting him strategic planning powers over the FBI, creating a new National Security Service within the FBI, and establishing a new office of national security inside the Justice Department.

The changes – numbering 70 in all – will give the Treasury Department the ability to target the assets of individuals, companies, and banks that help rogue states pursue biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.

The administration’s proposals unveiled yesterday were in response to 74 discrete recommendations from a bipartisan commission that earlier this year concluded that the CIA was “dead wrong” in its prediction that Iraq had a chemical and biological arsenal before Operation Iraqi Freedom.

That panel – formally known as the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction – earlier this year warned that America’s massive intelligence community still knew “dangerously little” about the proliferation activities of America’s enemies.

In a statement to the press yesterday, the co-chairman of the commission, a former Virginia Democratic senator, Charles Robb, said: “By embracing 70 of the 74 recommendations, the Commission’s batting average is now almost .950. Even Ted Williams would have envied that.”

The expansion of the Treasury authority, which Mr. Bush signed yesterday in an executive order, is similar in spirit to previous nonproliferation laws, including those that granted the authority to block foreign entities from American financial markets. But the sanctions process in these laws often resulted only in naming and shaming the foreign entities, without the explicit threat of seizing property. The executive order also names eight entities doing business in Iran, North Korea, and Syria.

“This allows the Treasury Department to freeze assets of WMD proliferators in the United States. And the order gives the United States discretion to block assets and deny U.S. market access to those foreign banks and entities that do business with WMD proliferators,” a National Security Council spokesman, Frederick Jones, said yesterday. “This is a new tool in the fight against WMD proliferators. It blocks these proliferators’ access to the U.S. commercial and financial systems.” The one major recommendation from the commission the White House did not adopt was to transfer the planning for covert operations activities of the CIA to Mr. Negroponte’s new directorate.

The president’s new homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, yesterday said: “The recommendation was suggesting that we should move covert action planning from the CIA and move that into the National Counterproliferation Center and the National Counterterrorism Center. There were persuasive and strong arguments made against doing that.”

Ms. Townsend added that an additional White House decision to name a new director for gathering human intelligence – information culled through running agents in foreign countries as opposed to intercepts culled through electronic eavesdropping – would meet the same objectives of the commission’s classified recommendation.

To some degree, the shake-up of the intelligence community involves reordering the existing bureaucracy. A senior Justice Department official yesterday told reporters that if given congressional approval, the new national security division in that agency would combine the existing counterintelligence and counterterrorism divisions with the Justice division that houses the secret court that issues FBI surveillance warrants to spy on foreign nationals. A new assistant general for national security would oversee the division.

The new division would work closely with a new special national security service within the FBI. That organization’s budget and strategic direction will be set by Mr. Negroponte’s organization.

In yesterday’s briefing, the senior Justice Department official said it was his understanding that the new Directorate of National Intelligence would not have the authority to deploy FBI agents in the field. “The reason I said ‘our understanding’ is because this is still a bit of a work in progress,” he said.

Nonetheless, the bureau stands to lose a significant amount of turf. A memorandum from the president yesterday instructs the FBI to “develop procedures to ensure the DNI, through the head of the FBI’s National Security Service, can effectively communicate with the FBI’s field offices, resident agencies, and any other personnel in the National Security Service, to ensure that the activities of the service are appropriately coordinated.” It also says the Directorate of National Intelligence must concur with the FBI’s choice for the new director of the National Security Service.

The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday criticized the decision to create the new security service within the FBI as a “domestic spying agency” similar to MI5 within the United Kingdom. “This proposal could erode the FBI’s law enforcement ethic and put parts of the FBI under the effective control of a spymaster who reports to the president – not the attorney general,” ACLU’s policy counsel for national security, Timothy Edgar, said yesterday.