Report Clears CIA of Abuses in Guatemala

A presidential advisory panel found Friday that there was no believable evidence that Central Intelligence Agency officers were involved in the torture or killing of several American citizens in Guatemala during the early 1990s, as some critics have charged.

After a 15-month study, the president’s Intelligence Oversight Board issued a report that essentially cleared the CIA and its agents of involvement in killings or having advance knowledge that they were about to occur.

At the same time, however, the report criticized the CIA for having recruited and established relationships with Guatemalan military officers who had “reprehensible” records on human rights issues and with not doing enough to inform Congress about the situation.

The high-level review, ordered by President Clinton, was designed to examine allegations that CIA officers were involved in the deaths in Guatemala of American innkeeper Michael DeVine and Efraim Bamaca, husband of American lawyer Jennifer Harbury, and the torture and rape of nun Dianna Ortiz.

In one especially controversial portion of the report, the panel said that it had found “not true” a widely publicized allegation that DeVine was murdered in the presence of Guatemalan Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, who was serving as a paid informer for the CIA at the time.

The charges, based partly on portions of reports from the CIA station in Guatemala City, had sparked a storm of controversy after Harbury and the families of the other victims were unable to obtain information about their loved ones or to get any U.S. help in finding them.

An investigation by the CIA’s inspector general drew harsh criticism from Congress last year after it concluded that the agency’s failure to tell lawmakers about Alpirez’s links to the CIA was inadvertent. That report mildly rebuked the agency and recommended firing no employees.

The findings and then-CIA Director R. James Woolsey’s decision not to discipline any workers played a role in Woolsey’s departure from the agency. His replacement as director, John M. Deutch, promptly dismissed two senior CIA officials and punished eight others for their involvement in the controversy.

Clinton, who was in Lyons, France, on Friday attending a summit of leaders of the seven largest industrial democracies, said the report contained “valuable recommendations” about how to improve the CIA’s handling of such situations.

But Rep. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.), one of the agency’s leading critics, harshly criticized the panel for not having exhibited “a greater level of outrage” that the CIA used tax dollars “to pay Guatemalans who murdered, tortured and then covered up their crimes.”

The report was prepared after the panel sifted through a mountain of documents and intelligence reports--including transcripts of new interviews conducted by the Justice Department. The 53-page version of the report released by the panel is an unclassified version of a far-larger volume.

Anthony S. Harrington, chairman of the four-member panel, said that the review was “unprecedented” in its scope. It covered not only the CIA but other U.S. intelligence agencies as well. Harrington said this is the first time that the results of such an inquiry have been made public.

The report includes these conclusions:

* There is no credible evidence that either CIA officers themselves or their Guatemalan informants played any role in or knew in advance of DeVine’s murder in 1990. It said that the killing came because Guatemalan soldiers let things get out of hand.

* There was no sign that CIA officers were either involved in or aware of Bamaca’s murder, nor does the panel believe that Alpirez was implicated. But the report said that Alpirez took part in a brutal “interrogation” just before Bamaca’s death and helped cover up both killings.

* The report sidestepped allegations that Ortiz, an American nun, was tortured and raped in Guatemala--partly on grounds that the case still is under investigation. However, Harrington said that the panel believes Ortiz was “subject to horrible abuse.”

The document also dismissed allegations that the CIA’s station chief in Guatemala during the early 1990s was conducting a rogue operation independent of Washington.

And the panel said it had found no evidence that the CIA had increased covert funding to Guatemala to compensate for a congressional decision in 1990 to cut off military aid to the country.

At a news conference, Harrington conceded that, in reviewing the evidence, the panel several times “asked itself: ‘What are we [the United States] doing there?’ ” Members eventually concluded that the CIA was carrying out policies set by Congress and the president, he said.

He said the agency’s failure to take into account the human rights records of some of the Guatemalans it hired as informers can be blamed on the culture in the intelligence community, which traditionally has overlooked such issues.

“How do spies get promoted?” Harrington asked rhetorically. “By how many assets [sources] they recruit, how much intelligence they produce.” The human rights issue, he said, simply “wasn’t factored into the system.”

The report pointed out that beginning in 1994, the CIA took steps to rectify those shortcomings by placing a greater emphasis on the character and human rights records of the sources it recruits.