That Persistent Stink at the CIA : Guatemalan case is only the newest indication that something’s rotten

The odor from Wednesday’s Senate hearing on the CIA’s handling of two murders in Guatemala is not pleasant. Coming after the Aldrich Ames spy scandal, in which agency brass who botched the case of that Soviet mole escaped without serious penalty, the Guatemala matter suggests this tarnished agency needs a thorough overhaul.

Its acting director, Adm. William O. Studeman, admitted serious errors in the case, in which a Guatemalan army colonel on the CIA payroll appears to have been involved. Studeman conceded the CIA had failed to inform Congress about what it knew but claimed it was inadvertent. Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republicans and Democrats alike, were dubious, suggesting Congress was deliberately misled for three years.

By its own admission, the CIA says that it suspected since 1991 that its paid Guatemalan operative, Lt. Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, had covered up the 1990 slaying of an American innkeeper, Michael DeVine. Even so, it reportedly paid Alpirez $44,000 in “severance pay” in 1992. And the CIA says it failed until this year to make a connection between the DeVine murder and the 1992 torture and slaying of Efrain Bamaca Valesquez, a guerrilla leader married to an American, Jennifer Harbury.

The most charitable interpretation of all this is that the CIA is as sluggish and incompetent as many other bureaucracies. The more cynical one is that the agency is complicit in sinister doings that do not serve this country well.

Either way, the designated new intelligence director, John M. Deutch, has his work cut out for him. The CIA must retain its ability to fund covert operations, and suggestions that it be privatized or abolished are absurd. But Deutch must clean house, and fast.