Aides Say Clinton Suspects Possible Cover-Up by CIA

President Clinton believes that the CIA may have deliberately withheld information from him about the deaths in Guatemala of an American and a Guatemalan guerrilla leader and promised to fire anyone who did, senior officials said Friday.

Despite formal statements of confidence in the CIA, Clinton and some aides are deeply suspicious that the “old-boy network” in the spy agency covered up its knowledge of the two cases, in which a Guatemalan army colonel on the CIA payroll was reported to have ordered the killings, officials said.

“I am not satisfied that we have as many answers as I think some people here, including the President, would like to have,” White House spokesman Mike McCurry said. “If there was information that was withheld from the President and from the White House, the President has made it very clear he will fire anyone on the spot who’s responsible for that.”

McCurry said the White House has no solid evidence that the CIA deliberately withheld information but noted that the agency’s inspector general is investigating that issue. The White House plans to review the inspector general’s findings carefully, he added.

Other White House officials said that in private, Clinton has complained angrily that the CIA was flouting his authority. “The President . . . has asked very pointed questions about this matter,” McCurry said, using diplomatic language that aides said reflected a degree of presidential rage.

In internal discussions, officials said, White House National Security Adviser Anthony Lake has defended the CIA, arguing that there is no clear evidence that the agency tried to deceive the President.

But one said it appeared that the CIA had committed “sins of omission,” failing to provide all the information in its possession when the White House asked.

The suspicions revived a charge against the CIA that has recurred ever since the agency’s founding in 1947: that the spy service is sometimes a “rogue elephant” that acts in its own interest, heedless of its obligation to follow orders from the White House.

*

In this case, the White House was asking for information about the case of Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a Guatemalan leftist guerrilla who was captured and apparently killed by his country’s army in 1992.

Bamaca’s American widow, Harvard-educated lawyer Jennifer Harbury, had pressed the Administration to investigate the case through hunger strikes covered by the media in both Guatemala and Washington.

For more than a year, the CIA provided only sketchy information. But late last year, the State Department discovered more data in its own files--information that appeared to come originally from the CIA, but that had not been given to the White House, officials said.

That information also included details of what the government knew about the death of Michael DeVine, an American who was killed by Guatemalan troops in 1990. It led to a renewed demand from the State Department and the White House for information from the CIA.

According to one account, the State Department initially asked the CIA for information on Bamaca, and received a few modest files. Several weeks later, the State Department again asked for information--this time on “Comandante Everardo,” Bamaca’s well-known nom de guerre . Only then did the CIA produce the data that it held under that name, one official said.

Finally, on Jan. 25, the spy agency gave the White House what it described as “new information” from an unnamed human source: a report that both killings were ordered by Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a Guatemalan officer who had been a paid CIA informant.

This was not the first time Clinton Administration officials have complained that the CIA was less than forthcoming. Last year, when Clinton was working to restore Haiti’s exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, CIA officials “never gave us any useful information,” a senior official charged.

The agency also has been accused of deliberately withholding information from Congress, on issues ranging from the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors in 1984 and secret arms sales to Iran in 1986 to embarrassing failures during its decades of spying on the Soviet Union.

CIA spokesmen refused to comment on the White House statements Friday but repeated an earlier declaration that the charge of withholding information was “false and utterly irresponsible.”

On Capitol Hill, leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee criticized the agency for not informing Congress about the Guatemala cases. “CIA officials have acknowledged that they erred” in not informing Congress about the DeVine case, Sens. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) said in a statement.

*

Some of the CIA officers overseeing operations in Guatemala when Bamaca and DeVine were killed were also involved in the case of Aldrich H. Ames, the agency officer who has confessed to spying for the Soviet Union and Russia from 1985 to 1994.

The agency’s deputy director for operations, Hugh E. (Ted) Price, was reprimanded for the failure to detect Ames. His deputy, Jack Devine, was Ames’ supervisor in the U.S. Embassy in Rome in the late 1980s and directed all CIA operations in Latin America during the early 1990s.

* DEATH IN PARADISE: Family seeks answers to ’90 killing in Guatemala idyll. A18