Subject of Walsh Probe Quits CIA Central America Post

Alan D. Fiers, a subject in an independent counsel’s probe of the Iran-Contra affair, resigned this week as chief of the CIA’s Central America Task Force, the intelligence body that oversees covert U.S. support for Nicaraguan rebels, government sources said Thursday.

Fiers quit the agency, giving little more than a week’s notice, in apparent frustration over the impact of the White House scandal on his own career and on the CIA’s operational freedom, according to knowledgeable sources who asked not to be named.

The 20-year veteran undercover agent reportedly was offered an “attractive” intelligence assignment in Europe but refused it, deciding instead to leave. Said one source: “He told them to shove it.”

He could not be reached for comment.

Disciplined by Webster

Fiers, 48, was one of six agency employees that CIA Director William H. Webster disciplined or fired in December for their involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. The reason for the mild sanction levied against him--a reprimand, which would have been expunged within a few years--was not made public.

Sources have said he was one of two CIA officials disciplined for testifying to Congress on the scandal in a manner that “was not candid or forthcoming” regarding their knowledge of secret U.S. aid to the Contras.

Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh last fall notified Fiers that he is a “subject” in his criminal investigation of the scandal, a technical term which means that his conduct will be examined by a grand jury. Subjects sometimes, but not always, become targets for indictment in criminal probes.

Fiers (pronounced “fires”) became chief of the CIA’s Central America Task Force in October, 1984, days after Congress voted a ban on U.S. military aid to the rebels which lasted two years. During that period, he was the chief CIA liaison to the rebels and to CIA agents in Central America, some of whom were secretly aiding North’s private arms-supply pipeline.

In an arrangement unique to his position, he reported not only to the agency’s Latin America division chief but also to the agency’s top covert-operations officials and to the late CIA Director William J. Casey.

Panel Releases Testimony

Word of his resignation came as the Senate Iran-Contra investigative committee released a sheaf of previously secret testimony by Reagan Administration officials central to the yearlong scandal, including former National Security Council aide Lt. Col. Oliver L. North.

North’s 84-page sworn deposition, given last July 9 before he presented televised testimony to the House and Senate investigative committees, sheds scant new light on the affair.

In it, however, he appears to confirm that Fiers and a second CIA headquarters official, counterterrorism expert Duane (Dewey) Clarridge, were well versed on North’s covert, privately run arms pipeline to the Nicaragua rebels.

Fiers had testified to the panels that he suspected at times that North was exceeding his White House authority in directing arms shipments to the Contras but that he lacked proof of any genuine misdeeds.

Complains of Restrictions

He admitted that he got a bit “rambunctious” in overseeing CIA contact with the rebels in early 1986, a time when direct U.S. military aid to the Contras had been banned. But he also complained that changing congressional restrictions on Contra aid and political pressures made his job as liaison to the rebels an almost impossible task.

“I’m like the cat in the clothes dryer,” he said last summer.