A Lethal Big Brother : Fighting a Remnant of the Cold War, the CIA Kept Killers on the Payroll : GUATEMALA

A combination of the wrong friends, abysmal judgment and worse timing has left the Central Intelligence Agency suddenly without allies in Washing ton for the first time in nearly 50 years.

The wrong friends are killers in Guatemala. The abysmal judgment was to keep them on the CIA payroll and then feign surprise to Congress. The timing could not have been worse because a presidential commission recently went to work with the sort of open-ended mandate to rethink U.S. intelligence that might well decide to cut the CIA in half and give both new names.

Fending off critics and explaining away blunders is made even more difficult by the absence of a CIA director since R. James Woolsey left town the week after Christmas. President Bill Clinton’s first choice backed out and his second, Deputy Secretary of Defense John M. Deutch, is awaiting confirmation. The man minding the store is Adm. William O. Studeman, who just told Congress the CIA has “much homework to do” before it can explain just who was doing what in Guatemala and why.

U.S. support for Latin American armies and intelligence organizations has been an open secret since the CIA’s success in mounting a coup to oust a pro-communist government in Guatemala in 1954. What is new is detailed confirmation of CIA relationships with known killers; the secret continuance of millions of dollars in payoffs to the Guatemalan military after a highly public aid cutoff by the Bush Administration in 1990, and a blizzard of lies, misrepresentations and “false denials” by the CIA that have put Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher in the embarrassing situation of having to admit they do not know what is going on.

Two killings are at the heart of the current controversy. The first was in June, 1990, when the Guatemalan military murdered a U.S. inn keeper named Michael DeVine for reasons still unclear. The second killing, of a captured guerrilla fighter named Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, in July, 1992, was not publicly confirmed by U.S. officials until last month, when Rep. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.) told Bamaca’s American wife that her husband had been executed by a Guatemalan military officer, Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez--graduate of the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Ga., where 60,000 Latin American military men have received advanced training at U.S. expense since 1946.

What red-flagged this particular murder from the 110,000 others in Guatemala since 1978 was that Alpirez had been a well-paid CIA informant for years, and the agency knew he had been involved in DeVine’s murder. Some scapegoat may well be found to take the blame for the agency’s failures of judgment here--but the real culprits are deep institutional problems of long standing.

Observers should always be on the alert when they are told the White House or the State Department “did not know” what the CIA had been up to. Here, too, what officials “did not know” requires lawyerly definition to pass muster as “true.” CIA liaison with Latin American “death squads,” most of them regular military units, has long been a delicate matter in Washington, traditionally handled with an early version of “don’t ask-don’t tell”: Officials don’t ask the CIA what its counterparts are really doing, and the agency doesn’t tell. Of course, everyone knows.

But in this case, it seems Christopher, on television a week ago, really didn’t know the secret CIA payments to the Guatemalan were still going on--they ended the next day. And when CIA officers passed on false or misleading accounts about Alpirez to various officials, they apparently believed the old “don’t ask-don’t tell” rule was still in effect, and the civilians didn’t want to know.

These confusions, characteristic of any intelligence scandal as it warms up, only partly explain anger at the agency. It is CIA inertia and obtuseness that lie at the heart of the Guatemalan affair. Like an ocean liner with no one at the helm, the agency is blindly following a course set 20 or 30 years ago at the height of the Cold War--straight for the rocks.

The roots of the current crisis can be found in the early 1950s, when the U.S.-Soviet struggle for Europe had established an armed truce along the Iron Curtain. So the two sides focused on peripheral arenas, where there was less danger that a local conflict would explode into a big war--in Korea, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Soviet efforts failed in Guatemala, but succeeded brilliantly five years later when Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba. Because U.S. troops were never greatly involved, the American public has failed to notice just what a long, bloody struggle for control of Latin America has unfolded since Castro entered Havana in 1959.

Castro and his revolutionary partner, Ernesto (Che) Guevara, projected a charismatic appeal throughout the continent. Guevara’s faith that revolutions could be forced by a militant vanguard willing to take to the jungles in guerrilla campaigns sparked dozens of imitators--from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. These revolutionary movements were met head on by local armies and intelligence organizations receiving help, on a large scale, from the United States--not only weapons, money and training for conventional armies but secret help for elite police and intelligence agencies.

These revolutionary movements were met head on by local armies and intelligence organizations receiving help, on a large scale, from the United States--not only weapons, money and training for conventional armies but secret help for elite police and intelligence agencies.

This secret war grew more violent and sparked the “don’t ask-don’t tell” policy. In Argentina and Chile, for example, police organizations received U.S. training in keeping modern, computerized files. Later, many names put into the files with U.S. help were pulled out again--the subjects were rounded up, interrogated and killed. According to one Argentine military officer who took part in the “the dirty war,” thousands of suspects--they were never convicted--were stripped, then dumped alive into the Pacific Ocean from aircraft. Did the CIA bear some responsibility for these crimes because they had helped train the men who carried them out? Don’t ask.

An argument can be made that the revolutionaries were Soviet pawns, and the CIA was, therefore, defending U.S interests and even the hope of democracy in Latin America. But all that surely ended in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and revolution swept Soviet power out of Eastern Europe, or, at the latest, in 1991, when the Soviet Union itself dissolved. What possible justification at this late date could be concocted to explain millions of dollars in secret subsidies for the Guatemalan military?

But the CIA’s lapse of judgment in the Alpirez affair raises deeper questions. DeVine’s murder sparked a major row between the United States and the military-backed regime that Washington had long supported. U.S. Ambassador Thomas F. Stroock protested vigorously and called for a Guatemalan investigation.

Stroock was convinced the Guatemalan military was behind the murder and Alpirez was deeply involved. Alpirez was then on the CIA payroll, and despite the CIA’s claims it did not “know” Alpirez was behind DeVine’s murder at the time of the killings, it is extremely hard to believe it did not soon discover the truth. Stroock made such a uproar that President George Bush canceled military aid.

Or did he? From that day until last Monday, the CIA continued a secret subsidy program--basically, payoffs to Guatemalan military and intelligence officers in return for “information.”

But whatever the CIA knew or didn’t know in 1990, by its own admission it learned enough about Alpirez’s involvement over the next year to approach the Justice Department with the problem in September, 1991. Should the agency end its payments to DeVine’s killer?

The Justice Department took an incredible six months to conclude that killing DeVine was not “terrorism,” per se, that Alpirez could not therefore be indicted under U.S. law and that the CIA was free to continue its relationship. In July, 1992, just about the time Bamaca’s murdered was overseen by Alpirez--the agency insists the two events are unrelated--the CIA gave Alpirez a farewell golden handshake of $44,000.

In sorting out complex matter, it is helpful to stress important details. Repeat: In July, 1992, the CIA gave $44,000 to a man it knew had murdered a U.S. citizen. Why? The victim was no communist-sympathizer. He was just an American citizen. Giving $44,000 to the man who killed him reveals a failure at every level to notice an obvious folly.

Most intelligence scandals are nine-day wonders--an initial flap and spurt of headlines spanning two Sunday newspapers before all is forgotten. This may be different. Clinton has appointed a special committee of the Intelligence Oversight Board to report on what happened and congressional committees have promised to look into it as well.

But the real verdict will be handed down by the 17-member commission headed by former Defense Secretary Les Aspin, which will recommend a new direction for U.S. intelligence early next year. Like the debacle of the Aldrich H. Ames spy case, the Guatemalan affair suggests the CIA will have a hard time holding on to its job and its name in the post-Cold War world unless the agency can come forward with something better than a promise to be smarter next time.