GUATEMALA : The CIA, Once Again, Tries to Whitewash Its Mistakes

Still reeling from the Aldrich H. Ames spy case, the Central Intelligence Agency, under its new director, John M. Deutch, last week engaged in a damage-control exercise to try to contain another scandal--the charge that an agent on the CIA payroll murdered one American and the husband of another in Guatemala, and that the intelligence agency then tried to cover up its role.

The result pleased almost no one, least of all Rep. Robert G. Torricelli, the New Jersey Democrat who touched off the furor last March when he charged, in a letter to President Bill Clinton, that a CIA contract agent, Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a Guatemalan intelligence officer, ordered the murders.

The victims were Michael DeVine, an American innkeeper in the Guatemalan rain forest, who was murdered in 1990, and Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a guerrilla leader who was captured in March, 1992, tortured and, by all accounts, executed.

Last week, the CIA issued a bare-bones four-page “summary” of a 700-page report on the cases by Frederick P. Hitz, the agency’s inspector general. The summary, and the report, conceded that the CIA station chiefs in Guatemala had failed to keep two U.S. ambassadors informed of what was going on, and that the agency had neglected to tell Congress, as the law requires. In an accompanying statement, Deutch referred to “an institutional predisposition at CIA against sharing information with Congress,” a habit he pledged to end.

But the main thrust of the summary, and the report, was to try to distance the CIA from Alpirez--and thereby from the scandal. The agency did so by saying that its own informants, who said Alpirez was responsible for the deaths, were unreliable. The report thus put the CIA in the odd and unenviable position of saying, “Maybe our guy didn’t do it, because our reporting was bad.” The agency admitted, for example, that Alpirez may have been present at the interrogation of DeVine, but it said that the CIA officer who reported this was now “uncertain about key elements of the information.” And it said reports that linked Alpirez to both murders were “seriously flawed.”

But the agency, struggling to climb out of the quagmire of Guatemala, undermined its own strategy when faceless “senior officials” briefed reporters on the summary. “Alpirez,” one of these officials declared, “may very well have been involved.” The officials also confirmed that the agency had continued to pay Alpirez about $1,000 a month--a total of $44,000-- after it received allegations that he was involved in the murders. Whether Hitz singled out any CIA officials who were responsible for the Guatemalan scandal is not known, since no names were made public, but the cast of characters who may have been involved, or who participated in the subsequent cover-up, includes a number of current and former senior officials.

* Terry R. Ward, a 57-year-old Pennsylvanian, was chief of the CIA’s Latin American division at Langley, Va., headquarters during the period when the two murders occurred. Now a station chief in Western Europe, he was questioned by Hitz’s investigators. Ward spent most of his career in the Latin American division, in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Venezuela and Peru.

* Frederick A. Brugger, another career CIA officer, became station chief in Guatemala in the summer of 1991, serving under Ambassador Thomas F. Stroock, a Wyoming businessman who had been appointed to the post by President Bush. Brugger was not chief of station when DeVine was murdered, but he took over the job around the time that Bamaca was slain. Alpirez was one of the contract agents he would have supervised. Brugger also served in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador.

* Ward was succeeded as head of the Latin American division early in 1993 by John J. (Jack) Devine, who later became acting chief of the Directorate of Operations, the CIA’s covert arm. Devine, 54, briefly served as the nation’s top spy when, in May, Deutch declined to keep Hugh E. (Ted) Price in that post. Price, who retired, was reprimanded last year by R. James Woolsey, then CIA director, as a result of the Ames case.

Some CIA officers were disgruntled earlier this month when Deutch selected Devine to be station chief in London, a prestige post, since Devine had supervised Ames in Rome and later in the agency’s Counternarcotics Center, and had headed the Latin American division at a time when the CIA was concealing the Guatemala affair from Congress.

Traditionally, the Latin American division of the CIA has been something of a dumping ground for less-than-outstanding officers. When the CIA was locked in battle with the KGB during the Cold War, the place to be was in Moscow, or other communist capitals--not in Lima or Tegucigalpa.

Some of the flavor of the bureaucratic infighting that has swirled around the Latin American division can be gleaned from the fact that Lisa Harper, who succeeded Devine as division chief, reportedly told friends she had received threats and nasty telephone calls inside CIA headquarters after she was selected, calls presumably originating with angry white males jealous of her appointment. Last December, U.S. News & World Report, without naming Harper, reported that the woman division chief had received “hate mail and even death threats.” Kent M. Harrington, then a spokesperson for the CIA, denounced the report as “totally false.” But whether or not Harper had received actual “death” threats, it seems clear she was the recipient of at least some unpleasant phone calls.

In the Ames case, Hitz did a thorough job of investigation, recommending that 23 people be considered for censure. Woolsey reprimanded 11, and fired no one.

This time, Torricelli hopes heads will roll. “I think that’s essential to maintain the credibility of the agency and its relationship with the U.S. Congress,” he said. “Anyone who failed to inform the Congress of significant intelligence activities, who authorized payments to someone who was responsible for the murder of an American citizen and lied to an American ambassador to conceal criminal activity does not belong in the employ of the U.S. government.”

Torricelli scoffs at the CIA’s attempt to cast doubt on the actions of its agent, Alpirez. “Alpirez was the last person seen with Bamaca when he was alive,” he said. “A witness saw him in the act of torture. I consider that fairly conclusive since the man [Bamaca] has never been seen since.”

Robert E. White, a former ambassador to El Salvador, and a critic of U.S. policies in Latin America, was equally skeptical. “The agency hasn’t learned it must be accountable. It appears to me we have not gotten the whole story.”

An estimated 100,000 people have been killed by the Guatemalan military, while supported by millions of dollars from Washington, in four decades of guerrilla warfare. But it has taken the death of just two persons to focus attention, once again, on the beleaguered CIA.