WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 - The Bush administration has set up a secret war room in a Virginia suburb where it is assembling evidence to prosecute high-ranking detainees from Al Qaeda including the man accused of being the mastermind of the September 2001 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, government officials said this week.

The effort to sift the classified files of the Pentagon, F.B.I., C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies amounts to the first concrete steps that the government has taken to press ahead with war crimes trials of high-level terror suspects under a plan announced by President Bush in a speech last September.

At the time, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Mohammed and 13 other high-level terror suspects had been transferred from secret prisons around the world to the military detention center at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, where they would be held pending trial.

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