WASHINGTON, March 28 (Xinhuanet) -- US President George W. Bush has approved the country's first counterintelligence strategy, which calls for a more proactive approach to combating foreign and terrorist spying, officials said Monday.

    "This strategy is the first of its kind and will require substantial changes in the conduct of US counterintelligence," Michelle Van Cleave, the national counterintelligence executive, said in a statement while releasing the National Counterintelligence Strategy.

    "These changes include a renewed intelligence focus on hostile services and intelligence capabilities, including those of terrorist groups, and proactive efforts to defeat them," she said.

    The 14-page strategy said the United States has four essential objectives in counterintelligence, the first of which is to "identify, assess, neutralize and exploit the intelligence activities" of foreign countries, terrorist groups and international criminal organizations who seek to harm US interests.

    It also calls for the protection of US intelligence collection and analytic capabilities from adversary denial, penetration, influence, or manipulation.

    The other two objectives are to "help enable the successful execution" of sensitive national security operation and to "help safeguard our vital national security secrets, critical assets, and technologies against theft, covert foreign diversion, or exploitation."

    The summary did not provide details over how to achieve those objectives. But it said the United States would "extend the safeguards of strategic counterintelligence to the Global War on Terrorism."

    "Terrorist groups gain significantly when they have the support of state sponsors, which means that the intelligence services of these regimes can be links in the global terrorist support network," it said.

    The strategy also emphasizes a more offensive approach in counterintelligence. "US counterintelligence will shift from a reactive posture to a proactive strategy of seizing advantage," it said.

    Van Cleave's office, created in 2002, assembled the strategy for Bush's approval.

    She said her office would work with the new director of National Intelligence to examine the need to establish a national counterintelligence center to coordinate the effort currently scattered around 15 intelligence agencies. Enditem