FBI Disciplines Six Over Probe of Latin Policy Foes

FBI Director William S. Sessions said today that he is suspending three bureau employees and censuring three others for mishandling a terrorism investigation into political opponents of the Reagan Administration’s Central American policy.

“I am disciplining these individuals . . . because of the managerial or supervisory inadequacies displayed by them” during a bureau investigation of the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador, Sessions told a congressional committee.

“The mistakes in judgment that took place during the CISPES investigation were serious ones, and I cannot emphasize too strongly my firm conviction that there is no place for such mistakes in the work of the FBI,” Session told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Sessions became director of the FBI in November. He disciplined the agents for actions taken from March, 1983, to June, 1985, when William H. Webster headed the FBI. Webster now heads the CIA.

Three of the employees, whom he did not name, have been placed on probation and suspended without pay for 14 days. The other three were formally censured, he said, with reprimands being placed in the employees’ files that could affect their chances for promotions.

The director said a seventh employee, “whose performance in all likelihood would have merited dismissal,” has resigned. That was apparently a reference to an agent who quit in 1984 after acknowledging that he had given classified documents to an informant in the El Salvador case.

Sessions testified that the investigation was launched in March, 1983, based largely on information provided by informer Frank Varelli. The probe concentrated on the organization’s headquarters in Washington, its Dallas chapter and on a handful of other CISPES chapters.

The investigation was prompted by tips that key members of CISPES were involved in covertly furnishing funds and material to a leftist group seeking to seize power in El Salvador.

Varelli told the bureau in 1984 that CISPES members were plotting to assassinate President Reagan and disrupt the Republican National Convention in Dallas.

FBI officials now say Varelli supplied them with “disinformation” and misinformation. He stopped working for the bureau in 1984 and filed suit in 1986 to get some back pay he felt he was owed.