By Jane Sutton

MIAMI, May 15 (Reuters) - An Afghan man drove up to a CIA outpost in Kandahar in December 2001 and delivered a truckload of documents, including what prosectors say is U.S. citizen Jose Padilla's al Qaeda pledge form, according to trial testimony on Tuesday.

The CIA agent who received the documents said he had never seen the man before but understood that he was loyal to a tribal leader cooperating with U.S. forces who were then driving out Afghanistan's Taliban government.

"He said this item came from an office that had previously been used by Arabs," said the agent, who was given permission to testify under a false name and wore a beard and glasses to hide his identity. "Basically he cleaned out the office."

Padilla, 36, and two co-defendants are on trial on charges of conspiring to "murder, kidnap and maim" around the globe and providing material support for terrorists. Prosecutors said they were part of a Florida support cell that provided money and recruits for Islamists waging a violent international jihad, or holy war.

The government initially accused Padilla of plotting to set off a radiological "dirty bomb" in the United States and President George W. Bush sent him to a U.S. military jail for 3-1/2 years as an "enemy combatant."

That designation was dropped amid a challenge to Bush's wartime powers, and Padilla was added to an existing indictment in Miami, which makes no mention of any bomb plot.

Prosecutors say Padilla attended an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 2000, and presented a document they said was an enrollment form for the camp, bearing Padilla's fingerprints. Prosecutors have said the document was Padilla's al Qaeda training camp enrollment form.

The agent was handed a blue binder containing several pages. He testified that he recognized it as one he unloaded from the heap of documents in the unidentified Afghani's truck and later delivered to the FBI in Pakistan in a cardboard box that once contained cooking oil.

He said he handled it with his bare hands and could not read it because he does not understand Arabic.

"You do realize that you degrade the quality of a piece of evidence by handling it with your bare hands?" asked one of Padilla's lawyers, Orlando do Campo.

"Yes," replied the CIA agent.

PADILLA FACES LIFE IN PRISON

The agent said he did not know who had filled in the form nor when. Nor did he know the motive of the tribal leader he presumed had directed the load of documents to be delivered.

"I'm not in a position to gauge the level of reliability," he said.

An FBI agent who received and inventoried the documents in Islamabad testified that she sent them on to an FBI office near Washington to be translated. That agent, Jennifer Keenan, said she could not read the form alleged to incriminate Padilla but recognized it as similar to another that had been partly translated from Arabic.

"I knew the content as being a pledge form with personal identification," said Keenan.

She did not elaborate on the nature of the pledge but said the form contained "the rules of going to the camp."

Padilla, who faces life in prison if convicted, sat stoically, as he has throughout the proceedings.

The FBI arrested the former street gang member at Chicago's O'Hare airport in May 2002 as he returned from the Middle East, where he had lived for about five years.

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