Officials quoted by The Wall Street Journal said the project's proponents were seeking to build teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attacks.

'It was straight out of the movies,' the paper quoted one former intelligence official as saying. 'It was like: Let's kill them all.'

The administration of then president Gerald Ford banned political assassinations by the CIA in response to investigations into intelligence abuses in the 1970s. After the 2001 terrorist attacks on US soil, Bush issued a directive authorising the agency to capture and kill Al Qaeda members, the report said.

Also in September 2001, as CIA operatives were preparing for an offensive in Afghanistan, officials drafted cables that would have authorised assassinations of specified targets on the spot, the newspaper said.