BAGHDAD, Nov. 2 -- The CIA has seized an extensive cache of files from the former Iraqi Intelligence Service that is spurring U.S. investigations of weapons procurement networks and agents of influence who took money from the government of Saddam Hussein, according to U.S. officials familiar with the records.

The Iraqi files are "almost as much as the Stasi files," said a senior U.S. official, referring to the vast archives of the former East German intelligence service seized after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The records would stretch 91/2 miles if laid end to end, the officials said. They contain not only the names of nearly every Iraqi intelligence officer, but also the names of their paid foreign agents, written agent reports, evaluations of agent credentials, and documentary evidence of payments made to buy influence in the Arab world and elsewhere, the officials said.

The officials declined to name individuals who they believe received funds or to name the home countries of the alleged recipients. One official said the recipients held high-ranking positions and worked both in Arab countries and in other regions. A second official said the payments were the subjects of "active investigations" by U.S. government agencies.

The recipients of the Iraqi funds were described by U.S. officials not as formal intelligence agents, but as prominent personalities and political figures who accepted money from Iraq as they defended Hussein publicly or pressed his causes.

CIA officers and Pentagon intelligence specialists have been poring through the files from the Iraqi Intelligence Service and the notorious Special Security Organization in part because they see the services as central to Hussein's clandestine efforts to acquire or develop weapons of mass destruction.

The Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-supervised body appointed by President Bush to lead the hunt for special weapons, hopes its searches for fugitive officers from the Iraqi security services may also produce breakthroughs in the hunt for weapons of mass destruction.

In the meantime, as they travel on site visits and conduct interviews, survey group teams increasingly are falling under hostile, professional surveillance and ambush attempts, according to officials involved in the weapons searches.

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