At Last, Some Accountability at the CIA : Deutch fires two officials for their roles in notorious case in Guatemala

The new director of Central Intelligence, John M. Deutch, has finally moved to root out the old-boy culture of bureaucratic self-protection and cover-up that has so soiled the agency’s reputation. On Friday he dismissed two high-ranking agency officials and disciplined nine other agents for their roles in concealing the facts surrounding a Guatemalan army officer, a paid CIA operative, implicated in torture and murder. None of the officers were named, but Times reports identified the ranking officials as Terry Ward, former chief of covert operations in Latin America, and Frederick Brugger, former Guatemala station chief.

The venerable agency was shaken to its secret roots last year when a veteran agent, Aldrich H. Ames, was arrested as a Soviet mole who betrayed scores of CIA operatives in the Soviet Union. Ames’ espionage for dollars went on undetected for more than a decade and led to the deaths of many agents. Astonishingly, no one at the CIA was fired or demoted under Deutch’s predecessor, R. James Woolsey.

For a while, it seemed the same dreary evasion of responsibility was destined to end the Guatemalan matter. In July, the CIA’s inspector general, Frederick P. Hitz, put out a report on the murders of an American innkeeper in Guatemala, Michael DeVine, and a Guatemalan guerrilla, Efrain Bamaca, who was married to an American lawyer. The report found that local CIA officials kept the Guatemalan army officer believed responsible for the murders, Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, on their payroll even after they knew of his probable complicity. It said they concealed the facts from two successive U.S. ambassadors, from CIA headquarters and from Congress. For this, the inspector general recommended--you guessed right--that nobody be dismissed.

Now Deutch, under pressure from Congress, has fired Ward and Brugger. Among those disciplined was Dan Donahue, who succeeded Brugger in Guatemala in 1994 and failed to warn the American ambassador there that the Guatemalan military had bugged her home and was spreading nasty rumors about her. According to the inspector general’s report, he also concealed key evidence about Alpirez’s guilt from the State Department and suppressed reports about torture and other human rights abuses by the military in Guatemala.

It must be recognized that intelligence cannot be gathered solely by dealing with people who possess the moral credentials of Mother Teresa. CIA agents must necessarily trade in a world populated by the corrupt, greedy, mendacious and evil. But if the Ames and Guatemalan affairs have any lesson, it is that the CIA needs both better management and more accountability to its bosses in the White House and in the Congress.