A secret intelligence unit created within the US Defense Department after the Sept. 11 attacks helped capture former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in December 2003, news reports said Monday.

The unit, called the Strategic Support Branch, had a hidden hand in interrogations and identifying clues inside Iraq that narrowed the search for Saddam Hussein and led to his capture, the reports said.

The unit's existence was first revealed by The Washington Post on Sunday.

Quoting interviews with participants and documents it obtained,the Post said the Pentagon has created a previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, which arose from (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what it known as human intelligence.

The unit, which was designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces and has been operating in secret for two years, in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places, the report said.

The Pentagon issued a statement on Sunday to dispute the Post report.

"There is no unit that is directly reportable to the secretary of defense for clandestine operations as is described in the Washington Post article of January 23, 2005" and the department "is not attempting to 'bend' statutes to fit desired activities," Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita said in the statement.

DiRita acknowledged that the Pentagon was attempting to improve its human intelligence capability, in the Defense Human Intelligence Service, a component of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

He said that before the Sept. 11 commission issued its final report last year concluding that the country's human intelligence capability must be improved, the Defense Human Intelligence Service had taken steps "to make better human intelligence capability available to assist combatant commanders for specific missions involving regular or special operations forces."