BY CAROL ROSENBERG

 The female federal agent who carried Elian Gonzalez out of his great-uncle's Little Havana home during last month's government raid has received multiple death threats and is now getting special protection, a U.S. government official said Friday.

 The official said authorities had analyzed multiple threats against Betty A. Mills, 33, and had found them to be credible. The official declined to describe the nature of the protection assigned to Mills.

 The image of Mills, an eight-year veteran of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, was plastered across newspapers and television screens around the world, cradling the 6-year-old and running to an awaiting van outside the Little Havana home of his great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez.

 Authorities said at the time that Mills was specially chosen for the task because of her tactical experience coupled with her multilingual skills as the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a mainland American father who grew up speaking both English and Spanish.

 Mills has not been made available for interviews, however, a position that Miami INS spokeswoman Maria Elena Garcia said Friday was not likely to change. She said neither the INS nor Mills was interested in media interviews.

 Federal authorities have for the most part shielded the identities of agents who took part in the raid. Authorities, for example, have repeatedly refused to name the agent whose image was captured inside Lazaro Gonzalez's bedroom pointing a submachine gun in the general direction of Elian and Donato Dalrymple, who stood partly in a closet at the time of the raid.

 They have even refused to give a generic description of the agent's background, except to say that he was extremely experienced and well trained for such scenarios.

 AGENT'S BACKGROUND

 But INS officials did identify Mills by name within hours of the raid, and provided some biographical information: that she had grown up in Pennsylvania, was a U.S. army veteran and had served in the military police.

 Described as an avid runner, she joined the INS as a border patrol agent in El Paso, Texas, and worked as an immigration agent in Phoenix and an INS inspector in Pittsburgh.

 It is not known when she was first posted to South Florida, but Garcia said Friday that she was continuing to carry out her regular duties in the Miami district.

 News videotape of the raid shows Mills in plain clothes, black trousers and a gray jacket, struggling to reach Lazaro Gonzalez's front door. A handgun can be seen on her hip, partially covered by her sportcoat-style jacket.

 The only agent not wearing tactical gear, she can be seen carrying a white blanket -- in which the child is eventually wrapped for the dash to the white government van.

 ON THE GROUND

 Videotape also shows Mills falling -- or being thrown -- to the ground in the melee that took place when bystanders attempted to stop the INS agents from reaching Lazaro Gonzalez's front door.

 Then Mills appears to pop up on her own, later to emerge from the Gonzalez home with Elian in her arms. Soon after coming down the front steps, she is briefly pulled into some bushes by a white-haired man -- before other agents go in and retrieve her.

 Miami police spokesman Delrish Moss said Friday afternoon that the department had received no complaints of a threat against Mills. Moss said, however, that because she is a federal agent any report would be handled on a federal level.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald