A department spokeswoman said Richard Griffin did not give a reason for quitting his post as assistant secretary for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, but simply stated that he wanted to "move on to new challenges."

"He submitted his letter of resignation dated today," Julie Reside said, adding that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had accepted his resignation.

Rice was asked about Griffin's departure as she met with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, but said only that she thanked him "very much for his exemplary service."

The official's resignation came a day after the release of an internal State Department report calling for much tighter control over private security firms following a series of deadly incidents in Iraq.

In the most infamous case, Blackwater guards protecting a State Department convoy opened fire in a crowded Baghdad square on September 16, killing as many as 17 civilians.

Blackwater boss Erik Prince has rejected an official Iraqi report that said the killings were unprovoked, insisting his men were fired upon.

In an implicit admonishment, the report by a State Department panel stressed that private contractors should open fire only with "due regard for the safety of innocent bystanders."

The shootings laid bare a lack of accountability for US contractors working for the State Department rather than the Pentagon, whose private employees are covered by US military law.

The panel's report said the department should "urgently engage" with the Department of Justice and Congress "to establish a legal basis for holding contractors accountable under US law."

But it concluded that the State Department could not do without the contractors, as it has less than 1,500 of its own security agents around the world and the US military is too stretched to provide diplomatic protection.

Rice was due to undergo a grilling over the contractors' conduct at a hearing of the government oversight committee in the House of Representatives Thursday.

For months, committee chairman Henry Waxman has been demanding thousands of pages of documents from Rice's office over the State Department's dealings with security companies such as Blackwater and DynCorp International.

The New York Times said Tuesday that an audit by the US government's Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction had focused on 1.2 billion dollars in contracts given by the State Department to DynCorp.

Financial records were in such disarray that the department cannot say "specifically what it received" for most of the money it has paid the company since 2004 to train Iraqi police officers, the report said.

Spokesman Sean McCormack said the department had already recouped "well over 100 million dollars in the costs of the contract, and we are on a pathway to attain 100 percent reconciliation of all these accounts."

"This is an example of the State Department policing itself," McCormack said, while declining to say how much of the money recouped might have been due to DynCorp overcharging or defrauding the US taxpayer.

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