The CIA is to launch a social networking site to allow members of the intelligence community around the world to converse and swap ideas and information online.

The A-Space site, set up by the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI), will go live in December.

"This is very typical within the intelligence community of the approach to social networking tools," Mike Wertheimer, the senior DNI official for analytic transformation and technology, wrote in his blog.

"We are willing to experiment in ways that we have never experimented before. It breaks a lot of traditional sense that people's lives are at risk, and how can you take any step that increases that risk?"

The site will have web-based email and a predictive program that matches interests to information.

A-Space will be open only to US agents initially, but the DNI hopes to include agents from other countries as long as they share, rather than just take, information.

"Earlier this year, the CIA used Facebook to advertise employment opportunities with the agency," George Little, a CIA spokesman, told the Financial Times.

"This effort, part of a much broader campaign leveraging traditional and new advertising media, was used strictly for informational purposes."

The DNI has also created an information resource just like Wikipedia for agents to share information.