BY WARREN P. STROBEL
Knight Ridder News Service

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration backed away Tuesday from claims that Cuba has an offensive biological weapons effort, acknowledging in a report to Congress that ''there is a split view'' among intelligence analysts on the question.

The report says instead that Cuba has the ''technical capability'' to pursue biological weapons research and development because of its advanced pharmaceutical industry. But it leaves open the critical question of whether it has done so.

The State Department report apparently marks the first time that the U.S. government has publicly softened its earlier charge, which has been controversial from the outset.

Then-Undersecretary of State John Bolton had tried to reassign two intelligence analysts at the State Department and National Intelligence Council who had challenged Bolton's view that Cuba had biowar capabilities, according to testimony at Bolton's nomination hearing to become United Nations ambassador.

The new finding on Cuba is based on a U.S. intelligence-community-wide assessment, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, completed last year. In that estimate, which is classified, ''the Intelligence Community unanimously held that it was unclear whether Cuba has an active biological weapons effort now, or even had one in the past,'' the 108-page State Department report states.

Cuba has denied any biological weapons work.

A senior State Department official said biological weapons programs are ''some of the most difficult activities to verify'' because the facilities needed are small.

Also, the technologies needed to make bioweapons are in some cases indistinguishable from those necessary for a pharmaceutical industry or for constructing defenses against biological weapons, which is permitted under international law.