When Will CIA Get the Message? : Another flap over its ties to brutal officials

For better or worse--and on the public record it seems it’s usually for the worse--the Central Intelligence Agency has long cultivated relationships with Third World military officers whose use of torture, murder and extortion in support of their authoritarian politics brands them as little more than common gangsters.

Panama’s former drug-dealing strongman, Gen. Manuel Noriega, now in an American prison, was long a paid CIA informant. Recent days have brought grim news of another such hireling of dubious character, a Guatemalan army colonel named Julio Roberto Alpirez. He has been linked to the deaths of two men, one an American citizen, the other a leftist guerrilla who was the common-law husband of an American lawyer, at a time when he was a well-paid informant for the CIA. The agency severed its ties with Alpirez about the time it confirmed the death in 1992, possibly by torture, of Efraim Bamaca Velasquez, a guerrilla who had been captured by Guatemalan forces. What and when it knew of that killing, and the killing two years earlier of Michael DeVine, an American innkeeper in Guatemala who may have come across a smuggling operation run by the Guatemalan military, is now the subject of investigation and contro- versy.

RUMBLE IN CONGRESS: Rep. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, says flatly that Alpirez ordered the deaths of DeVine and Bamaca. Torricelli’s comments came after a long campaign by Jennifer Harbury, Bamaca’s wife, to force the U.S. government to tell what it knows of his death. The CIA now says that it knew nothing of the killings “at the time the deaths occurred.” That may be true. What also seems clear is that the agency seemed to be in no hurry to inform the White House or congressional oversight committees when it did get information about the killings. The deliberate withholding of such information from higher authority is not something to be taken lightly. It is in fact, as President Clinton warns, grounds for firing those responsible.

ROGUE IMAGE: Fairly or not, the two Guatemalan killings again evoke the image of a CIA operating altogether too independently of legal and necessary supervision, of an insular agency prone to cite the broad and expedient rationale of “protecting sources and methods” to hide embarrassing facts from those who have a right to know. A concern for protection there may well have been, but the suspicion that has now inevitably been raised is that some in the CIA were most interested in protecting themselves and the agency’s too-cozy relationships with Guatemalan torturers and assassins.

Whatever the outcome of the immediate case, it’s clear that the time has come to urgently and skeptically review the CIA’s long habit of getting chummy with various thugs and crooks across much of the world. Is any information that might be gained really worth the moral cost of such sleazy associations? And where can it ever be shown that democratic values are advanced by having those who run death squads grow rich on the U.S. payroll?