Countdown to Haiti Compromise : Background: Last-minute deal reflected improvised nature of Clinton policy.

After a long, frustrating day of negotiations with Haiti’s military rulers last Saturday night, former President Jimmy Carter abruptly excused himself from a dinner with Haitian businessmen, closeted himself in his suite in Port-au-Prince’s Villa Creole Hotel and typed for an hour on his laptop computer.

The page that he produced--and handed to Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras a few hours later--became the first draft of what soon evolved into the American agreement with Haiti’s military regime.

Remarkably, Carter did not clear his proposal with President Clinton; indeed, the White House did not even see it until the next morning, almost 12 hours after Carter gave it to Cedras. By then, the Haitian general had already accepted the document as the basis for an agreement, and it was too late for Clinton or his advisers in Washington to make major changes.

“It’s the best we can get,” Carter told Clinton late Sunday afternoon, shouting over a balky satellite telephone to the White House from a little office at Cedras’ military headquarters.

As he spoke, 2,900 paratroopers of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division were already in the air, counting the minutes until the planned American invasion of Haiti. Offshore, Navy SEALS were standing by motorized black rubber rafts, ready to head for the beaches around Port-au-Prince. And at a secret location in the city, a team from the Army’s secret Delta Force was already on the ground, poised to grab Carter and his fellow negotiators, retired Gen. Colin L. Powell and Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), and “extract” them from Cedras’ headquarters by force if need be.

Clinton’s advisers were divided on what to do. Secretary of State Warren Christopher complained that Carter’s document was too loose, too favorable to Cedras. Vice President Al Gore, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and special adviser William H. Gray III said the wording was not as important as the reality that the pact would put Haiti under the control of 15,000 U.S. troops, without the use of force.

Clinton hesitated, then told Carter: “Go ahead.”

As soon as the agreement was signed, the arguments began again: Exactly what had been agreed to? Were Haiti’s generals going into exile or not? Who would police Port-au-Prince’s squalid streets? How long would the U.S. Army and Marine Corps stay?

Last weekend’s frenzied negotiations, which climaxed the Clinton Administration’s long struggle over Haiti, also captured its essence. Committed to restoring democracy but uncertain how to do it, Clinton has lurched from one improvised strategy to another, from negotiations to sanctions to the brink of war and now U.S. military occupation.

Throughout, his policy on Haiti has been unusually susceptible to the influence of strong-minded outsiders, from the CIA to the Congressional Black Caucus and, most recently, Jimmy Carter.

Here, based on interviews with Carter, Nunn and more than 30 other sources in Haiti and Washington, is the story of how Clinton decided to invade Haiti, how Carter engineered the agreement that averted war and how both sides began remaking the pact as soon as it was signed.

I: Policy Reversal

Even before his election as President in 1992, Bill Clinton was out on a limb over Haiti. When Haiti’s fiery, populist president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown in a military coup in 1991, then-President George Bush promised that the United States would work to “restore democracy.”

Clinton asserted that Bush wasn’t doing enough and denounced his policy of returning Haitian refugees to Port-au-Prince as “cruel.”

“My Administration will stand up for democracy,” Clinton promised.

His first decision was forced on him even before Inauguration Day. Emboldened by the new President’s rhetoric, thousands of Haitians began building boats and preparing to sail to Florida. Bush warned the President-elect of impending disaster. Clinton reversed himself and ruefully announced that Bush’s policy would stay.

The new President was stung by reports that he had “flip-flopped.” At one of the first meetings of his national security team, he blew up at a report that promised no real movement on Haiti. “It’s just not good enough,” he railed. “I want more progress.”

Lawrence Pezzullo, who later quit as his special negotiator in Haiti, observed that Clinton “had a sense that Haiti was a problem that he could solve and come away with a diplomatic victory. I thought it was naive. . . . Haiti is always more complicated than it looks. He didn’t understand that.”

Still, the Administration’s first efforts had some success. Pezzullo told Cedras, the head of Haiti’s military regime, that this President was serious about putting Aristide back in office. After American cajoling, the U.N. Security Council imposed an oil and arms embargo. Cedras and Aristide agreed to work on a negotiated settlement.

At the wind-swept Coast Guard station at Governors Island in New York, they made a deal last year: Cedras would retire in four months with a grant of amnesty; Aristide would return; the Haitian armed forces would be retrained by a multinational force. It didn’t work. The two sides quarreled over what the agreement meant.

And, only 10 days before the United States was scheduled to land its first large group of military trainers, U.S. Army Rangers were ambushed by guerrillas in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, and 18 Americans were killed. Congress and the public went into an uproar over the Administration’s visions of deploying U.S. peacekeeping troops around the world.

On Oct. 11, 1993, the tank landing ship Harlan County steamed into Port-au-Prince harbor carrying 218 military engineers and police trainers armed only with M-16 rifles. A group of the junta’s thugs waited on the dock and created a fracas.

Washington didn’t want to lose any lightly armed trainers to a mob. On Oct. 12, the Harlan County sailed away. The message to Cedras, American officials later acknowledged, was all too clear: Clinton didn’t care enough about Haiti to take risks.

Meanwhile, liberals in Congress were upset over the apparent drift in American policy and the practice of returning refugees to Haiti, despite grisly repression there.

Randall Robinson--head of TransAfrica, an African American lobbying group, and a longtime acquaintance of National Security Adviser Lake--launched a hunger strike, demanding that refugees be granted hearings. Lake called Robinson several times, and Clinton announced that he agreed with the protest of his own policies.

That produced a huge jump in the number of Haitians taking to the sea and sent the Administration scrambling to pressure Cedras from power.

Clinton tried a complete U.N. trade embargo, a ban on commercial airline flights, a freeze on assets of wealthy Haitians. But Cedras did not budge. Clinton sent more Navy ships into the Caribbean. But Cedras, remembering the Harlan County, was unimpressed.

On July 31, the Security Council authorized the United States and its allies to use “all necessary means” to depose the military. Cedras did not believe the threat. When the United Nations sent an envoy to Haiti to try to set up talks, the general refused even to meet.

“That told Clinton that these people would not be moved,” said Gray, the President’s new special envoy. Further, he said, the State Department kept a stream of atrocity reports flowing to the White House.

On Aug. 26, Clinton met secretly with his advisers and ordered preparations for an invasion of Haiti. Deputy Defense Secretary John M. Deutch announced on Aug. 31 that U.S. forces were “going to Haiti” one way or another.

From then on, events went on fast-forward. On Sept. 10, Clinton ordered Perry to plan for an invasion “as soon as possible.” H-Hour was set for one minute after midnight Sept. 19.

II: Call to Carter

Both sides said they were ready for battle, but neither wanted to fight.

Clinton’s seemingly abrupt veer toward war caused near-panic in Congress. Polls found massive majorities opposed to invading Haiti. Clinton had been emotionally engaged in Haiti for months but, preoccupied by his domestic priorities, had never gone to the nation to build support for military intervention.

Haiti’s leaders had their own doubts. All through July and August, a flurry of messages came to Washington through men who said they were acting for Cedras or his cohorts, Brig. Gen. Philippe Biamby and Lt. Col. Michel-Joseph Francois. They sought meetings, negotiations, a deal. After months of dead ends, the Administration was skeptical.

A senior official later said, “Some of those overtures were more real than we judged them to be.”

Clinton and his aides had long agreed that they wanted to send a last-ditch envoy to Haiti to give the generals one last chance to back down. Now, with two U.S. aircraft carriers and dozens of other ships carrying thousands of troops to Haiti’s shores, the question was: Who?

Christopher, dubious about the mission, suggested William L. Swing, U.S. ambassador to Haiti. But Cedras’ wife, Yannick Prosper, had scornfully told an intermediary that her husband no longer wanted any messages from Swing. Lake and Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were proposed and rejected.

Then, five days before H-Hour, an alternative appeared.

Jimmy Carter had returned from a trip to find a letter from Charles David, Cedras’ foreign minister, asking him to mediate. Carter, as an observer at Aristide’s election, had met Cedras in 1990. On Sept. 14, Carter asked a mutual acquaintance in Haiti to tell Cedras to call him if he was serious. In minutes, Cedras telephoned Carter’s home in Plains, Ga.

“Dialogue is the only way to end the crisis,” Cedras said, according to notes taken on an extension by Carter’s wife, Rosalynn. “Clinton’s solution is the worst of all possible ones.” He warned that Aristide’s return would touch off a civil war.

Carter’s response was tough, the notes show. “I do not represent the U.S. government, but it is necessary for me to tell you the truth,” he said. “An irrevocable decision has been made to invade Haiti unless you . . . are prepared to leave.”

Cedras seemed taken aback. “As a Christian and a nationalistic Haitian, I will do everything possible to avoid any problem for my country,” he said. “My long career has not prepared me for this situation. . . . How will history judge me if I depart and leave my fellow citizens to face death?”

They argued for more than an hour without resolution. But Cedras said he wanted to talk again. “I invited him to come to my Sunday School class, either to hear me or to teach it,” Carter’s notes recounted.

Carter made a transcript of the notes and faxed it to the White House. Then he called Powell and Nunn. “They both were totally against the invasion,” Carter said in an interview. “I asked both of them if they would be willing to go to Haiti with me.”

Carter faxed a letter to Clinton proposing a Haiti mission; he followed up with a call. “He was equivocal about it,” Carter said. “He was catching hell in the White House about the concept.”

Several of Clinton’s top aides, including Christopher, were skeptical about Carter, who had irritated Christopher by trying to inject himself into sensitive Middle East negotiations and by acting as a free-lance negotiator with North Korea.

Two factors turned the tide in Carter’s favor: He already had a measure of Cedras’ confidence and, if rejected for the job, he could go public and embarrass the Administration. Carter’s decision to recruit Powell and Nunn helped too; officials expected the general and the senator to keep an eye on the former President.

On Thursday evening, Sept. 15, Lake phoned Carter and told him to expect a call after Clinton made his televised speech explaining the reasons to invade. The speech was bellicose. “Cedras and his armed thugs have conducted a reign of terror--executing children, raping women, killing priests,” Clinton said.

Carter, watching, was distressed: Would the Haitians still want to negotiate? He sat by the phone, but it didn’t ring. “Finally, we went to bed,” Carter said. A little after 11:30, Clinton phoned, Carter recalled. “What he told me that night was: ‘See if he will let you come down.’ ”

Carter phoned Cedras, who called back at 4:30 a.m. Friday to invite Carter, Nunn and Powell to come to Haiti the next day.

At the White House, Clinton and his advisers discussed Carter’s instructions--the detailed goals and limits that normally guide negotiators. But “this was an unusual situation,” one official recalled. “President Carter was going as an unofficial person, and we wanted him to have as much flexibility as possible.”

So Clinton merely called Carter, Powell and Nunn to spell out three goals: to persuade the Haitian generals to step down, to get their agreement to a peaceful entry for U.S. forces and to get it done by noon Sunday.

There were no written instructions.

III: Role-Playing

On Saturday morning, Carter, Powell and Nunn boarded a blue-and-white Boeing 707 at Warner Robins Air Force Base near Atlanta. Although the three had never worked as a group before, aides said they seemed to mesh immediately on the three-hour flight to Port-au-Prince, working on the roles they would play.

Carter was to maintain Cedras’ confidence, be sympathetic to the Haitians’ concerns and work out proposals to bridge gaps between their demands and what Washington wanted. “It was implicit from the start that Carter was to be first among equals,” said a White House aide who was on the plane.

The charge to Powell, as one of the world’s most admired military officers, was to appeal to the Haitians’ sense of duty--and, in a word that later became controversial, their honor. “Never mind whether we think they are honorable men,” a senior official noted later. “The important thing in this context is that they think they are honorable men.” Officials also hoped the Haitians might find it more palatable to hand over their swords to a Caribbean American (Powell’s parents came from Jamaica) than to a white officer.

Nunn’s function was straightforward: to explain to the Haitians that Congress was not going to stop Clinton from invading their country, no matter how much noise members had made. “The Haitians were under a lot of illusions on that count,” one official said.

The delegation’s first task, they agreed, was simply to break through the Haitians’ skepticism and convince them that the American forces they could see offshore were prepared to invade their country.

After that, they hoped to persuade Cedras and Biamby to step down--but not to leave Haiti. Clinton and other American officials had said they wanted the generals out of Haiti. But in recent weeks, officials had concluded that U.S. troops would be better off with Cedras and Biamby in command than with the chaos of a headless opposition army.

As the Carter plane landed at 12:20 p.m., anti-American demonstrators, bused in by the regime, marched at the airport. The first meeting was dreary: a long session with a room full of pro-military Haitian politicians delivering harangues about U.S. policy.

At 2:15, the three Americans were ushered into a conference room at military headquarters to meet the men they had come to see: Cedras, Biamby and seven others in the high command.

But to the Americans’ distress, this meeting was more of the same. When the delegation emerged and called the White House on their portable satellite telephone, their report was grim: We aren’t getting far but will keep trying.

In Washington, the invasion was moving inexorably toward H-Hour. Clinton was briefed in the Pentagon war room. His press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, solemnly read reporters a deliberately Churchillian quote, ostensibly from Clinton: “I will not be delayed. I will not be deterred.”

In Port-au-Prince, during a long dinner with leading Haitian businessmen, Carter seemed impatient. “What can you do to create conditions for reconciliation?” he asked them. “Not much,” one replied. By dessert, Carter had excused himself and gone to his suite.

There he drafted the document that, with few significant changes, would become the seven-point accord on Haiti’s future. Its essential elements: an “honorable retirement” for top officers in Haiti’s armed forces; an agreement to cooperate with U.S. armed forces; a pledge to hold free, fair legislative elections. Any requirement that the generals go into exile was absent, as was any mention of Aristide.

About 10 p.m., the phone rang: Cedras wanted another meeting. This time only Cedras and Biamby were there. The discussion was more cordial, with more give-and-take. Cedras, talking about his love of country, said he would be shot as a traitor if he tried to leave: “I’d rather be killed by an American bullet in my chest than a Haitian bullet in my back.”

The key contribution came from Powell, who soberly told Cedras and Biamby about the firepower of U.S. forces poised to storm ashore: 20,000 well-armed troops to Haiti’s poorly armed 5,000; more than 300 helicopters plus tanks, armored vehicles, close-support planes--the fury of America’s arsenal concentrated against a small, poor republic.

Carter said the generals sagged visibly.

“Cedras was bewildered,” Nunn said in an interview. “He said, ‘Once you get all those troops on the ground, Haiti won’t be the weakest country in the hemisphere anymore.’ And he laughed.”

Powell and the others were quietly elated. They had broken through the facade of defiance.

It was after 2 in the morning. Carter had given the generals his draft accord, but a full discussion of it would have to wait until morning.

On the way out, Carter told Cedras that he wanted to meet the general’s family. Cedras grimaced. “Yesterday was my 10-year-old son’s birthday,” Cedras said. “I love my family, and I’d like to see my son.”

Back at the Creole Villa Hotel, Carter phoned his wife and recounted the talk.

“Jimmy, I’ll give you some advice,” she said. “Go see Gen. Cedras’ wife.”

IV: A Wife Speaks

Cedras’ home is no mansion by American standards. It’s a sprawling, whitewashed suburban house with a handsome swimming pool behind high walls and tropical shrubs. Even in Petionville, the Beverly Hills of Port-au-Prince, it is overshadowed by more lavish neighbors.

But when Carter, Powell and Nunn arrived Sunday morning at 8:30, they noticed little about their surroundings.

Their attention--particularly Carter’s--was captured by imperious Yannick Prosper, Cedras’ wife. “She was a good-looking woman, not beautiful, but very attractive . . . tough, competent, strong, determined,” Carter recalled. U.S. intelligence reports described her as a Haitian Rasputin, a suspected drug abuser who had both her husband and Biamby under her thumb. Now she turned her charm--and her intensity--on the three Americans.

“People outside this country don’t recognize the grandeur of Haiti,” she said, as Carter recalled it. “They underestimate our pride and our motivation. We are the oldest black republic on Earth; Haitian slaves defeated the finest army that France could marshal. . . . (We may be) one of the poorest countries on Earth, but we have not lost our dignity.”

She spoke of her father and grandfather, both generals in the Haitian army. Then she talked of her children, ages 17, 13 and 10. “Last night, when my husband didn’t come home and we knew that the Americans were going to come in with waves of strength that we could not meet, we took an oath to give our lives,” she said. The children had agreed, knowing their home would be one of the Americans’ first targets.

“We will never yield to foreign invaders,” she said.

Powell broke the silence. He said he understood what Mrs. Cedras meant by honor and integrity, why she felt an invasion of her land should be fought to the death.

But he said the real duty of a general is to defend his nation and his people from destruction--and that means knowing when a battle is not worth fighting. “It would not be a betrayal,” he said, if her husband was to defend Haiti from harm by leaving office.

Carter spoke too, saying: “The greatest duty of a leader like your husband is not to give his life, not to go to war, but to work for peace. The decision to wage war, even if it means giving your life, is a simple decision. The decision to wage peace is more difficult.”

More than an hour had gone by, Carter said. Mrs. Cedras was quiet. Then she looked at her husband.

“Mr. President, I’ve got your written proposal,” Cedras said, referring to the draft Carter had given him. “Let me meet with you at the headquarters and give you our response.”

Carter, believing the generals finally ready to negotiate, handed a copy of his draft to Larry Rossin, a White House aide with the delegation. Rossin immediately faxed it to the White House.

“No, no, no,” Clinton groaned, as he read the agreement with aides in the Oval Office, said an official present. Carter’s draft said nothing about Aristide’s return, not even indirectly. It didn’t seem to bind the generals to step down. It said the hard-won U.N. trade embargo would end “without delay.”

In Port-au-Prince, Carter, Powell and Nunn began meeting with Haiti’s generals only 40 minutes before the noon deadline. Down the hall in the military headquarters, Rossin got on an open phone line to the White House.

In Washington, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, a former Time magazine correspondent, began drafting a new agreement. Too late, Carter said; the generals had agreed to use the first draft as a framework.

A U.S. official in Haiti was struck by the realization that Carter was no longer acting as a Clinton emissary but “as a mediator, as a broker in the middle. He was negotiating with us on behalf of the Haitians as much as the other way around.”

Clinton focused on one big problem: The Carter draft committed the generals to step down once the Haitian Parliament passed a “general amnesty.” The President interrogated his aides: Could the generals use this to stall and stay in office?

“It could be OK if a date certain could be added” for the generals to step down, said Christopher, a longtime Los Angeles lawyer. Clinton said the deadline had to be no later than Oct. 15. Christopher, using a secretary’s telephone outside the Oval Office, told Rossin to tell Carter that the President insisted on a deadline.

In Port-au-Prince, the generals now were unhappy. Giving Cedras the deadline, Carter said, “was an insult. He was willing for the Parliament of Haiti to determine when he left . . . by passing the amnesty. But he wasn’t willing for me to do it.” Biamby told Powell that he would commit suicide rather than surrender.

Clinton gave Carter a three-hour extension of the deadline. The arguing went back and forth for that long and longer.

Meanwhile, at 1 p.m., Shalikashvili, after checking with Clinton, had ordered the 82nd Airborne Division at Ft. Bragg, N.C., to board planes for Haiti. The invasion was still scheduled for one minute after midnight, and “I frankly had come to the conclusion that we were not going to reach an agreement,” Clinton said later.

About 5 p.m. in Port-au-Prince, Biamby burst into the conference room, shouting: “You men have tricked us! You’ve been here talking about peace . . . and I’ve just been informed from Ft. Bragg that paratroopers are on their way to invade our country.”

(Haitian officials later said Biamby had been tipped off by a Haitian American serviceman at Ft. Bragg.)

Biamby charged that Carter’s talks had been nothing but a ruse. He announced that he was taking Cedras to a command post to begin directing Haiti’s defense.

Clinton would later assert that dispatching the 82nd was the decision that pushed the talks to success, but Carter disagrees. At that moment, Carter said, “We knew we had failed.” Nunn agreed: “We thought we had lost it all.”

Carter, desperate, launched a last emotional appeal, beginning with the Haitians’ own complaints that the embargo was causing malnutrition and disease among children. “If I go back home and we give up this effort for peace, what’s going to happen to your children?” he asked.

Then he turned to Cedras. “I had respected you for your integrity and unselfishness,” he said. “But here, in order to stay in Haiti a few more weeks, you’re willing to sacrifice the well-being of your own people and the lives of many Haitians and, perhaps, Americans. And the children that you claim you love quite often will not live.”

Cedras suggested that they talk to Emile Jonassaint, 81, the interim president whom he had installed after Aristide’s ouster. At 5:30, the Americans and the Haitian generals drove to the Presidential Palace. According to some Haitian officers, Cedras already knew that Jonassaint would bless the accord--including the Oct. 15 deadline--and take responsibility for signing it.

But Carter thought he would turn it down. “You have 30 more minutes,” Clinton had warned, “and then I will have to order you to leave.”

Jonassaint, imposing with white hair and huge, expressive hands, listened gravely and announced his decision: “We will take peace instead of war. I will sign this agreement.”

Down the hall, one of the U.S. aides had found a usable phone and dialed the White House direct. Clinton and his advisers were in a near-panic; Carter and his party had been out of touch for half an hour, and the invasion force was on its way.

And now Clinton was having second thoughts. Talbott asked if it was too late to add a clearer reference to the U.N. resolution calling for Aristide’s return.

Carter lost his temper briefly. Powell brought the process back under control. “Let’s not get lost in the details,” he told Clinton, an aide recalled. “The important thing is that you will have 15,000 troops on the ground. You will control what happens on the ground.”

By about 7, the deal was ready. Clinton asked each of his advisers once more if there was any reason not to accept it. “There’s no choice,” said Gray. “We can worry about the details tomorrow.” At 7:45, Clinton gave his approval. The 61 transport planes carrying the 82nd Airborne turned around in midair. Carter, Powell and Nunn headed home; Powell ordered rum and Cokes all around.

“Our objective . . . has been to make sure that the military dictators leave power and that the democratically elected government is returned,” Clinton said on television two hours later. “This agreement guarantees both those objectives.”

V: Bitter Reception

In Washington, Aristide was not happy. The elected president of Haiti, joined by Lake and Gray, glumly watched Clinton’s announcement.

“I don’t like this agreement,” Aristide said, according to Gray. “I understand what the President had to do, but I don’t quite agree.”

Aristide was unhappy that the accord did not explicitly promise that he would be restored to power; he was upset that it seemed to let the generals remain in Haiti.

“These are all issues that are subject to interpretation,” Gray lobbied Aristide. “And we’ll have 15,000 troops on the ground--so our interpretation will carry some weight.”

But when Aristide finally issued a statement 36 hours later, it did not mention the United States at all. Not until Wednesday, two days after U.S. troops began taking control of Port-au-Prince, did he say “Thank you”--at a Pentagon ceremony where he received a 21-gun salute.

In Haiti, Cedras was not happy. Like Aristide, he watched Clinton’s televised speech Sunday night and did not like what he heard. Only hours after he assented to Carter’s agreement as a man of honor, Clinton was again denouncing him as a “military dictator.”

And Clinton announced that the 15,000-strong force was about to enter Haiti “immediately,” whereas Cedras thought the issue was still to be worked out. Cedras called Carter’s assistant, Robert Pastor, who had stayed behind in Port-au-Prince. The accord was “breaking down,” he complained.

At the White House, Carter was not happy. The rhetoric from Clinton’s aides was infuriating the Haitian generals and threatening to wreck his deal. Carter telephoned the Cable News Network and asked to be interviewed. Without telling Clinton or anyone on the White House staff, he left the mansion at 6:30 a.m., went to CNN’s Washington studio and gave his startling version of the talks: that Haiti’s generals had acted in accord with their sense of honor and dignity, that Clinton’s decision to put the 82nd Airborne in the air had nearly blocked a deal and that nothing in the agreement required the generals to leave the island.

On Capitol Hill, Congress was not happy. The invasion had been averted, but had the concessions been too great? Briefing leading senators and members of Congress, Carter was asked why he did not make it explicit that Cedras must leave Haiti.

His response: Forcing the general to leave his country would be a violation of his human rights. “Give me a break,” moaned Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.).

But in Port-au-Prince’s streets, Powell was being proven right. By week’s end, more than 10,000 American troops were in Haiti, patrolling towns, delivering supplies and bringing the army and police under control.

“The cooperation has been superb,” said Brig. Gen. Richard Potter, commander of the Army Special Forces unit that seized the Haitian army’s heavy weapons. “But what choice do they have?”

Times staff writers John M. Broder, David Lauter, Jim Mann, Jack Nelson and Art Pine in Washington, Kenneth Freed in Port-au-Prince and researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this report.