Sessions Concedes FBI Erred in Central American Activist Probe

FBI Director William S. Sessions acknowledged Tuesday that some agents may have overstepped their bounds in a controversial undercover investigation of U.S. critics of Latin American policy, saying that a probe of Central American activists disclosed last week “was not properly controlled” at the field level.

But Sessions, while conceding that the names of other organizations appear in some of the FBI documents, said at a press briefing that he does not believe the bureau ever expanded its probe to investigate other groups.

According to documents made public in federal court last week, the FBI’s probe began as a counterterrorism investigation of the Committee in Support of the People of El Salvador, which favored the armed overthrow of the Salvadoran government by a Marxist guerrilla army, the FMLN.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, an activist legal group that obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, charged that the investigation grew to encompass actions by more than 100 groups, ranging from the Socialist Workers Party to the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity.

Report on Activities

Sessions said that the FBI opened a “full international terrorism investigation on the leadership” of the Committee in Support of the People of El Salvador, based on information that key members of the group were furnishing money and materials to FMLN, whose terrorist activities included bombings, kidnapings and assassinations.

But he said the FBI inquiry was intended to be “narrow in focus,” aimed at determining if CISPES was illegally supporting terrorism, Sessions said. Regular reports were sent to the Justice Department’s office of intelligence policy and review, which advised the FBI in June, 1985, that CISPES seemed to be involved only in legitimate political activities, he said.

As a result, he added, “all FBI offices were instructed to close their investigations on this organization.”

Sessions, only three months into his job, said that he hesitated to criticize the operation, which was under the general supervision of former FBI Director William H. Webster from 1983 until its termination in 1985. Webster is now the director of central intelligence.

“I don’t know how I would have handled the whole thing,” Sessions said.

Breakdown in Control

However, referring to an apparent breakdown in control from FBI headquarters, he added: “I would hope that it would have been caught.”

In addition, Sessions agreed that an FBI Teletype from a field office in New Orleans showed that “in some instances the investigation lacked direction.”

He referred to a message from the New Orleans office that said: “It is imperative at this time to formulate some plan of attack against CISPES and specifically against individuals . . . who defiantly display their contempt for the U.S. government by making speeches and propagandizing their cause.”

Sessions said that the message ran counter to directions from FBI headquarters, which “explicitly instructed our field agents that the investigation must not interfere with the exercise of First Amendment rights of those CISPES members who politically opposed U.S. policy in Central America.”

Calls Language ‘Intemperate’

FBI spokesman Lane Bonner said later that the language in the New Orleans memo was “intemperate” and “did not represent any FBI policy that was ever adopted.”