Mission Impossible? : Jennifer Harbury had hoped media and congressional attention would persuade Guatemala to release her husband’s body. But her wait continues.

The FBI took the Guatemalan death threats against Jennifer Harbury so seriously that the bureau sent two agents to knock on her door in Austin, Tex., recently to warn her that her life was in danger. Right-wing elements of the Guatemalan military, angered by Harbury’s stubborn refusal to shut up about the torture-killing of her husband, had put out a contract on her after her testimony before Congress on the case. The killers might try to strike in the United States, she was warned, but they would probably be more likely to attack if she returned to Guatemala.

On Memorial Day, Harbury returned to Guatemala.

For three years she has ignored friendly and unfriendly advice, refused to take “no” for an answer, and pretty much made a complete pest of herself, both in Guatemala City and in Washington.

Obsession sometimes works.

Ultimately, Harbury’s persistence disrupted U.S.-Guatemalan relations, was a factor in sparking the biggest controversy at the Central Intelligence Agency since Aldrich Ames was arrested, and helped shame the Clinton Administration into launching investigations of at least six federal agencies.

“Jennifer has a case in which she encountered doors blocked over and over . . . people tried to portray her as crazy, as not credible, but she just kept telling her story to anyone who would listen,” says Meredith Larson, co-chair of Coalition Missing, a group that represents American victims of human rights abuses in Guatemala.

Yet Harbury has failed to accomplish the one thing she really wants: to find her husband’s body and bury him.

So she returned to Guatemala last week, accompanied by officials from Amnesty International and other organizations, to follow up on yet another tip--this time from a disgruntled Guatemalan intelligence officer--about the location of her husband’s grave. Her trip was also prompted by a meeting she and her lawyers had with State Department officials in Washington, who finally gave her a briefing about where they believe her husband’s body is buried.

It was the first sign that the U.S. government was willing to give her more than just grudging support.

Harbury has made plenty of waves. But until last week, all the ruckus had done little to solve her case.

Indeed, despite her 15 minutes of politico-celebrity status this spring, despite two hunger strikes and sympathetic statements of outrage from senior congressional leaders, she still complains that the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council--not to mention the Guatemalan government--remain reluctant to help. In fact, the new information from the State Department--coming nearly three months after she first burst onto the national scene--will mean little until the Guatemalan government decides to cooperate. What’s more, the CIA has still said little about its involvement in her husband’s case.

“Sometimes I feel like I haven’t made any progress, like I have to go back on a hunger strike just to get them to listen to me,” Harbury says. “Why have I had to go through this to get papers I should have access to?”

What is clear to Jennifer Harbury is this: She has become the latest in a long line of pilgrims to find that inertia tends to take hold in government once the television klieg lights turn off.

Until the night of March 22nd, the 43-year-old Harbury was just one more lost soul in Lafayette Park, one more invisible woman with a sad story trying vainly to catch political lightning by getting the attention of the President of the United States across the street.

She went on a hunger strike in front of the White House--her second since November, when she had been on a longer and more dangerous fast in front of the National Palace in Guatemala City.

But almost no one noticed. A Harvard-trained lawyer, Harbury had the full support of the human rights community, yet she was coming dangerously close to slipping into the special purgatory Washington reserves for people it categorizes as “eccentrics.”

Harbury’s personality didn’t help. A humorless zealot with burning eyes and an almost monotone voice, Harbury often found it difficult to win over allies. Even among her friends, the most common adjective used to describe Harbury is driven .

Spending her days in a park full of nuclear freeze advocates and animal rights fanatics and homeless veterans, she was at most a minor irritant to government officials at the State Department and the White House, including National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who had heard her story and basically brushed her off.

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Harbury’s story was complicated. As a legal aid attorney working in Austin in the late 1980s, Harbury found herself representing dozens of Guatemalan refugees whose pleas for political asylum had been rejected by the United States. She decided to travel there to see the conditions for herself, and eventually wrote a book about the country’s bloody civil war. While visiting a guerrilla base, she met Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a Mayan Indian guerrilla leader, and fell in love.

It may have appeared on the surface to have been a classic case of the American leftist sympathizer going native, but Harbury’s continued search for her husband’s body long after others would have given up hope clearly suggests that the Harbury-Bamaca relationship was deep and genuine.

The two were unofficially wed in a common-law ceremony in Texas in 1991, but he returned to Guatemala and disappeared in 1992. He had been captured, tortured and finally murdered by the Army, but for three years, Harbury couldn’t learn his fate.

Harbury sought the U.S. government’s help to pressure the Guatemalan government to tell her what had happened to Bamaca, but American officials were deeply ambivalent. Bamaca was not a U.S. citizen--was not even legally married to Harbury--and had been fighting in a war that the United States hoped to mediate to a negotiated settlement. Even the Clinton Administration, with its oft-stated commitment to human rights, was unwilling to commit itself to aggressively pursuing a case involving a leftist guerrilla.

In fact, a State Department memo to Lake written last November, when Harbury was trying to get the White House’s attention, complained that “Harbury’s determination to resolve this case is having perhaps unintended negative consequences on the peace process.” The State Department has provided “extensive help” the memo stressed, but “focusing our efforts in Guatemala exclusively on the Harbury case damages our status as an honest broker in the peace process.”

But Jennifer Harbury’s husband was dead, and she wasn’t going anywhere until she found out how and why.

It turned out that the truth was actually much worse than even Harbury had imagined: Her husband had been tortured and killed at the direction of a Guatemalan Army officer who was, at the time, on the CIA’s payroll. The CIA continued to pay the officer even after it found out about the killing--and didn’t bother to tell Congress what it knew about the case until this year. What’s more, the Guatemalan officer, Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, was also involved in the cover-up of the 1990 killing of American citizen Michael DeVine, an innkeeper in Guatemala. The CIA had never told Congress what it knew about that murder either, despite years of investigative effort by his widow, Carol DeVine.

It was just the sort of incredible story that, if recounted without solid evidence, makes the storyteller sound like a crackpot who deserves to stay in Lafayette Park with the rest of the nuts.

But in late March, Rep. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), a maverick member of the House Intelligence Committee, received classified information about the CIA’s role in Guatemala--and specifically Alpirez’s role in the two killings--from frustrated State Department officials.

With Harbury still on her hunger strike, Torricelli decided to go public. He sent a letter to President Clinton about the information he had been given, and conveniently and simultaneously had a messenger deliver a copy of his letter to the Washington bureau of the New York Times. Torricelli was immediately attacked by Republicans for revealing classified information and faces an ethics investigation as a result. “If I hadn’t acted,” he responds, “Jennifer Harbury would not have ended her hunger strike.”

Harbury was catapulted out of Lafayette Park and onto “Good Morning America,” and into the pages of Newsweek, People and every major newspaper in the country. Along with Carol DeVine, she testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose chairman, Republican Arlen Specter, was running for President and eager for an issue.

Red-faced CIA officials were forced to explain away yet another fiasco in front of an angry congressional committee.

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Harbury’s tale appeared at first to be a classic Washington-style rags to riches story, where fame is a substitute for money.

But as the weeks went by and her name and face disappeared from the nation’s front pages, the flurry of official crow-eating and scripted outrage faded away. And virtually no progress was made in her case.

Administration and congressional officials made it clear that they were more concerned about the political fallout from the DeVine case--which involved the murder of a U.S. citizen--than about the Bamaca controversy.

State Department officials, however, privately fume that the information they have provided Harbury proves that they have offered her far more help than she has been willing to acknowledge, and that her constant complaints about the State Department’s refusal to help were inaccurate and damaging to the careers of people in the department who were trying to help. “She and her lawyers have screwed over a lot of people here,” says one angry State Department official.

Yet Harbury’s attorney said Monday that they have new information showing that the U.S. government knew much more about the Bamaca case than it had acknowledged earlier. According to documents Harbury has received under the Freedom of Information Act, the Defense Intelligence Agency informed the U.S. Embassy in September, 1993, that Bamaca had been captured, interrogated and killed. That was about 18 months before Harbury was officially informed of her husband’s fate. And, it wasn’t until last week that Washington finally gave her information about what it knows about the location of her husband’s body. The State Department told Harbury that it thinks her husband’s body is buried at the Cabanas Army Detachment base in Guatemala. She now is asking the Guatemalan government to cooperate and allow her to exhume the body.

Since Harbury and DeVine testified before Congress in April, the Guatemalan government of President Ramiro De Leon Carpio has done nothing to help and shows no signs of cooperating with any exhumation. It has refused to press charges against Alpirez, although he has been suspended from active duty, and forced the special prosecutor who looked into the case to resign. The new witness in the Bamaca case--former intelligence officer Nery Angel Urizar Garcia--has already survived one attempt on his life.

But Harbury is no longer willing to stop in the face of Guatemalan resistance or threats. “She is realistic about the death threats, but she is unwilling to be deterred by the dangers,” says her father, Henry Harbury, a professor at Dartmouth Medical School.

Yet Harbury acknowledges that she does have her limits. Her voice cracks when she admits that her body might not be able to stand another hunger strike. And occasionally, her tough, obsessed look of determination falls away.

“All I want to do,” she says plaintively, “is bury my husband.”