The Family Jewels (17 page)

As the warriors fought themselves to exhaustion, there were dangers for those on the sidelines, foreigners included. United States citizens living in Guatemala were not exempt. Nine disappeared during the 1980s. In June 1990 another, Michael DeVine, was brutally murdered and his corpse found. DeVine was an eighteen-year resident of Guatemala who had developed local ties. He and his wife ran a small hotel near the town of Poptun. DeVine was returning there with beer and other supplies when he was taken by an army patrol, interrogated, and killed. Then there was Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a rebel
comandante
with one of the resistance groups. Bamaca was captured and interrogated after a firefight with government forces in March 1992. His body was never found. Both men were kidnapped in a combat zone where one of CIA's sources was assigned. That man, Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, was important to the agency because he had been the chief of the Presidential Security Department, a military-dominated secret police unit under the direct control of Guatemala's leader. The CIA had been in official contact with Alpirez since 1987, when he was still with the secret police, and at some point he became a paid agent. At the time of the DeVine killing, Alpirez commanded a Guatemalan Special Forces school near Poptun. It happened that Bamaca was married to an American lawyer, Jennifer Harbury, who sought to uncover the truth about the kidnappings and killings.

The killings became problematic for Langley before Harbury started her crusade—and the CIA's problem hinged on what had not been done when the Guatemala City station, searching for information about the DeVine murder, was covering up after receiving intelligence the military had been involved. The data became the basis for United States diplomatic démarches and a partial block on aid. Guatemala
responded by arresting and convicting some enlisted men and one officer for the DeVine killing. Then the agency received intelligence contradicting the official version, plus other information alleging that Colonel Alpirez had been present at DeVine's interrogation. The station passed the reports to Langley in October 1991. At headquarters this data led to referral of the case to the Department of Justice by the CIA's Office of General Counsel on November 19, 1991.

These dates were important because of CIA's responsibilities to inform others of its intelligence. Under oversight rules written into a 1980 law and solidified during and after the Iran-Contra affair (see
Chapter 9
), the agency was supposed to notify the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence fully and currently on all significant activities and findings. The CIA station in each country also had a duty to inform the United States ambassador there. Neither of these things was done in connection with Alpirez. Insofar as congressional oversight was concerned, Langley officials had actually prepared notes for a presentation to Congress on the affair but never used them. This failure to notify continued over four years despite repeated contacts with the congressional committees, including some on U.S. programs in Guatemala—where the CIA funded Guatemalan security services—and one specifically on CIA's knowledge of Guatemala's human rights record.
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The Bamaca disappearance took this problem to a new level. Jennifer Harbury began to shuttle to Guatemala, and she asked the United States embassy for help. The spooks at the embassy were not forthcoming. A September 1993 Defense Intelligence Agency report on Bamaca was withheld from Harbury for fourteen months. By January 1994 Harbury had nevertheless established to her satisfaction—and this was in embassy cables—that Alpirez was one of two Guatemalan officers who had tortured Bamaca. Beginning that May
the CIA station received several additional reports indicating Colonel Alpirez's direct involvement. The last of these asserted that Alpirez actually killed Bamaca. The colonel had a reputation among the Guatemalan military as a loose cannon—some held this was why he had been reassigned out of the Presidential Security Department—so a January 1995 report that he had done the killing, though secondhand, was considered credible.

Agency Inspector General Frederick Hitz was brought into this matter on January 17, 1995, when acting CIA director Admiral William Studeman discovered the Guatemala station had sat on the last Alpirez report for days before forwarding it to headquarters. Jennifer Harbury's public crusade was making this a high-profile issue, Studeman knew, and the station's inaction automatically raised questions. Studeman relieved station chief Fred Brugger and ordered up the IG investigation. He sent the intelligence to Congress immediately. Fred Hitz, reviewing the substantive material, ultimately decided other evidence called the report into question.
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But that did not excuse the CIA station's delays in reporting to headquarters, its failure to keep the U.S. ambassador in the picture, or Langley's tardiness in informing Congress. Hitz may have questioned the association of a CIA agent with Bamaca's torture, but he also confirmed the systematic failure at both station and headquarters. Latin America Division chief Terry Ward accepted the responsibility. The investigation was ongoing in late March when Senator Robert G. Torricelli (D-NJ) publicly charged a cover-up. After that the pressures on CIA became immense. The Senate oversight committee raked Admiral Studeman over the coals in public session. The press quickly discovered information about the various failures in CIA reporting.

President William J. Clinton reacted almost immediately. On March 24 the White House announced the removal
of station chief Brugger and added that President Clinton would order the dismissal of anyone at the CIA found to have deliberately withheld information. A week later Clinton ordered his Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), the highestlevel presidential monitoring mechanism for secret activities, to conduct its own review. The CIA's internal investigation lasted through the summer of 1995, the IOB inquiry through June 1996. The Board found that the CIA had paid little attention to allegations of abuse when vetting its agents, and had given Congress a lopsided impression of progress on human rights by submitting semiannual reports that emphasized positive developments while maintaining silence on abuses. Jennifer Harbury continued her crusade, and her road led to the Supreme Court, where she was finally unable to enforce accountability.

Meanwhile, in September 1995, a new CIA director, John M. Deutch, took action on the basis of the Hitz report. Deutch made the trek to Capitol Hill to declare, “I have made it clear to all levels that I shall insist that the CIA and other elements of the Intelligence Community keep Congress ‘fully and currently informed.'
” Director Deutch issued fresh orders on vetting prospective agents and fresh provisions for “ambassadorial notification,” plus he created new mechanisms for timely notice to Congress. Deutch disciplined a dozen CIA officers—Fred Brugger and Terry Ward were sent into retirement.
¹⁸
The following year a directive systematized arrangements for congressional information. Under these, each agency division periodically reviewed its operational activities and prepared materials to forward to the spy chieftain. The CIA director made final determinations on which items to send Congress.

The Guatemala affair was a Family Jewel of the Clinton years. The abuses of CIA allies had been abetted by agency officers' attempts to keep the lid on the matter. Langley's response—new regulations for agents plus stringent rules for
informing Congress—was not popular. CIA insiders groused that strictures on recruiting agents crippled collection, since bad guys were the best sources. The contradictions between upholding human rights versus aggressive spying remained largely unexplored—a dilemma that carried over into the war on terror and contributed to the making of another Family Jewel. In 2000 Terry Ward, whose sterling reputation among spooks had not suffered from falling on his sword over Guatemala, was quietly summoned to CIA and awarded a medal. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Ward would be recalled for active service. As for the rules on informing Congress, following 9/11 they were thrown overboard.

After 9/11 it was more than regulations that were thrown overboard. Indeed, the Central Intelligence Agency seems to have forgotten—or purposefully ignored—the lessons it had learned. All the elements that had made Yuri Nosenko's treatment so damaging to the CIA of the 1960s were replicated. The black prisons, the planes shuttling detainees among secret sites, the hostile interrogations (now under the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques”), and the degrading physical treatment of individuals added up to a pile of Family Jewels. The agency heaped them up with its “rendering” of prisoners to third countries and its intrusive operations in cooperating nations. Suspected enemies were not merely arrested in sweeps with the assistance of friendly police and security services, people were kidnapped right off the street in foreign lands. Nosenko had been a single individual subjected to inhumane treatment. Now the outrageous methods were applied a hundredfold.

The September 11 attacks were quite properly viewed as a major challenge to American national security. The entire government apparatus went into high gear to prevent additional attacks and apprehend terrorists of the group Al
Qaeda, quickly identified as the perpetrators. For the CIA, that meant pushing its spies to produce new leads, and activating all its alliances with intelligence services in other countries to arrest or neutralize terrorists of every stripe. According to George J. Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence at the time, within six months of 9/11 roughly 2,500 real or suspected terrorists were taken into custody across the globe, most by foreign security services, but many by local authorities cooperating with CIA.

Terrorism was not a new problem. Langley had been increasing its capacity in this area for many years. Already in the early 1990s, the agency had created what it called the Counter-Terrorist Center (CTC), a unit designed to bring together both analysts and operators, creating a focal point for intelligence collection on terrorism, reporting to understand it, and an action arm to combat this enemy. The neutralization campaign begun after 9/11 relied on CTC's data, and the most important endeavors utilized its operators.

The initial mass street sweeping mostly amounted to a security exercise. It did not meet the need to track down the perpetrators of 9/11 and other horrific terrorist attacks that had already taken place, whom the CIA soon called “high value detainees” (HVDs), or to produce what Langley saw as “actionable intelligence” on particular terrorists and groups. Al Qaeda was known to reside in Afghanistan. The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, but it did not succeed in wrapping up the Al Qaeda network. At the battle of Tora Bora that December, Afghan partisans fighting alongside the U.S. pulled their punches, the U.S. military command refused to commit regular troops, and Pakistani soldiers did not block their side of the border, leading to the escape of the most dangerous terrorists into Pakistan.

Led by its Counter-Terrorist Center, the CIA then began an intensive operation to locate and capture the leaders. Within days of 9/11, the redoubtable Dick Cheney, now vice
president of the United States, set the tone, telling a television interviewer, “We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.” It would, he said, be a walk on “the dark side.”
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How dark was illustrated a couple of months later. A Gulfstream V executive jet landed at Bromma, Stockholm's international airport, on the evening of December 19. The plane had already been to Cairo, where it picked up a couple of Egyptian officials, and when it landed at Bromma it disgorged a CIA team. They took custody of a pair of Egyptian nationals from Swedish security police. The Egyptians were put in prison coveralls, chained, hooded, sedated, and hustled aboard the Gulfstream, which took off just over an hour later. This was the first recorded incidence of something that became ubiquitous in the “war on terror”—ghost planes in the night, CIA teams to snatch suspects or take over detainees, long flights carrying HVDs to destinations they never knew. In this case the Gulfstream headed back to Cairo, where the prisoners disappeared into the maws of the Egyptian secret police.

The first known operation of this kind had occurred in 1985, when the United States had transferred the hijackers of the cruise ship
Achille Lauro
from Egypt to Italy. A couple of years later another terrorist hijacker had been brought from Cyprus to the United States. Relying on new law and court decisions, from the early 1990s the U.S. acted as a kind of international posse, usually in conjunction with foreign allies, to apprehend wanted fugitives, delivering them to countries where they would be incarcerated or tried. The capture of the terrorist Carlos Ramirez Sanchez (“the Jackal”) in the Sudan in 1994 was an example. Another, taken in 1997, was Mir Amal Kansi, the CIA murderer who had shot up agency employees during morning rush hour outside
Langley headquarters. The act came to be known as “rendition.” During the Clinton administration there were some rules. Suspects would not be “rendered” to lands where they might be tortured, or worse, and the actions were kept secret only during the active phase of the operations. Seventy persons were rendered this way, twenty of them to trial in the United States. State Department annual reports on global terrorism trends listed renditions—by name and where captives were sent—for the previous year. After 9/11 rendition disappeared into the shadows of a secret compartment. The act would be called “extraordinary rendition” by the Bush administration even if not at CIA. The rules were abolished. Renditions were not acknowledged, much less announced. Langley acted in concert with others sometimes, but unilaterally where it preferred to control interrogations directly.