The Times says chairman of Inter-agency National Intelligence Council is planning to expand the use of panels of outside experts, known inside the CIA as red teams, to challenge assumptions of CIA analysis. But the teams, the paper says, could cause problems. Earlier use of outside teams had created serious rivalries.

In mid 1970s, the Ford administration used an outside panel of conservative experts, known as team B, to discredit CIA analysts viewed by Republicans as being too softon the Soviet Union.

Soon team B got the reputation of being just as predictable as the conventional wisdom it was supposed to counterbalance.

The Times quoted senior officials as saying they will be careful not to allow the new teams to be tinged by partisanship and that they will only be used selectively.

But such outside advice, The Times says, is unlikely to be considered a replacement for full time in-house warning officers post which was created in 1979 as a position on the National Intelligence Council in the wake of Congressional demands for intelligence reforms.

The officer is responsible for making sure that the US is not caught by surprise by a war or any other major crisis.

The warning officer is supposed to focus on potential flash points that are sources of controversy among the experts or need to be of greater concern to policy makers. By definition, that means the job calls for unconventional thinking.

In February, The Times said, the national intelligence officer for warning,Robert Vickers, found himself at the centre of the debate over whether India would test a nuclear weapon.

His job was to argue against conventional wisdom. But after supervising a debate among experts from CIA and other agencies, Vickers accepted the consensus that India's new government, led by ``Hindu nationalist party'' would not conduct nuclear tests, The Times reported.

His decision is now seen as a key incident in the ``long chain of mistakes'' by officials throughout the US government that contributed to one of the worst intelligence failures in recent years. The Times says the danger is that the warning officer can be easily dismissed as the agency's Cassandra, always warning of worst case scenarios.

On India, all the analysts discounted the public statements of the Bharatiya Janata Party leaders who had vowed during the election campaign to turn India into a nuclear power, The Times said. American officials were quoted as saying the consensus among the experts was that the party would beforced to moderate its nuclear stand as soon as it was in power.