President Boris Yeltsin's right-hand man and chief guard, Major General Alexander Korzhakov, has a secret intelligence center that compiles clandestine reports and spreads disinformation, Izvestia reported Tuesday.


The center has been shrouded in such secrecy that, although Izvestia reporter Valery Vyzhutovich said it had existed for about a year, news of its existence has only come to light recent weeks. But Vyzhutovich said it was one of the president's main sources of information.


In the best of Soviet traditions, the center has no sign or nameplate to confirm the existence of its headquarters at 5 Ulitsa Varvarka, opposite the Hotel Rossia and within sight of the Kremlin. The mustard-colored three-story building is officially home only to government offices, including the CIS Ministry.


However, at one of the entrances on Tuesday, six people showed the green pass of the Kremlin Security Service within a five-minute period.


"They have a little branch here where they do studies of some kind," conceded the guard on duty.


With secrecy comes power. According to Vyzhutovich, the center has a staff of as many as 100 people, a large budget and free access to all levels of information.


The center, like the rest of Korzhakov's service, is also independent of the rest of the Kremlin. Yeltsin's spokesman, Anatoly Krasikov, said Tuesday he could not comment because Korzhakov's security service was an independent organization with its own press service. Korzhakov's spokesman, Andrei Oligov, could not be reached for comment.


Meanwhile, assignments have stopped coming in to the official Kremlin Analytical Center, headed by Mark Urnov, and many staff are threatening to leave, Izvestia wrote.


In its place, Korzhakov's center now appears to be the furnace for new ideas, projects and analyses. As proof of this, Izvestia printed parts of a report drawn up by the center arguing for the creation of a "national guard" with sweeping powers.


The report argues that the president needs a national guard -- in effect, a nationwide private army for Yeltsin -- that during times of crisis could be "an instrument of struggle for political power," while "in a period of stability, the national guard is an armed base of support for the political leader of the state."


Outside Moscow, the guard could "monitor and influence the situation in the regions with the help of forces loyal to the president" and even recruit Cossacks to swell its numbers.


"I have a feeling that he would like to head this national guard," Vyzhutovich said dryly of Korzhakov in a telephone interview.


He said the center was an information resource that also could be used to discredit political opponents. One example was the misleading press reports of the last year about plans to break up the Federal Counterintelligence Service, or FSK.


"It collects compromising material, secret information, denunciations," Vyzhutovich said.


The KGB had an analogous section, the so-called "Department A," which also dealt in disinformation, said Natasha Gevorkyan, a reporter for the weekly Moskovskiye Novosti, who added she was also aware of the center on Varvarka.


Gevorkyan noted that Korzhakov and the people around him, such as the head of the center, Georgy Ragozin, came from the Moscow KGB and were people in the mold of the old Soviet intelligence services. Gervorkyan said Korzhakov and his men were "trying to close a ring round the president. They were in in charge of his personal security, they controlled the Kremlin Information Center run by Sergei Nosovets and they now had their own analytical center as well.