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Cia investigated for killing american citizen { March 23 1995 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE4D7173EF930A15750C0A963958260http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE4D7173EF930A15750C0A963958260
March 23, 1995
Guatemalan Agent of C.I.A. Tied to Killing of American
By TIM WEINER
A Guatemalan military officer who ordered the killings of an American citizen and a guerrilla leader married to an American lawyer was a paid agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, a member of the House Intelligence Committee said today.
The intelligence agency found out about the killings ordered by the Guatemalan colonel on its payroll, but concealed its knowledge for years, the committee member, Representative Robert G. Torricelli, said in a letter he sent today to President Clinton.
Moreover, the State Department and the National Security Council learned the facts months ago but did not tell the guerrilla's widow, Jennifer Harbury, who has been petitioning the White House to disclose her husband's fate, the letter said.
A member of the Senate intelligence committee, which has been briefed on the two killings, confirmed the gist of the statement by Mr. Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat.
"The direct involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in the murder of these individuals leads me to the extraordinary conclusion that the agency is simply out of control and that it contains what can only be called a criminal element," the letter to the President said.
A spokesman for the C.I.A. said the agency had no comment.
In an interview, Mr. Torricelli said: "There were no U.S. security concerns in Guatemala that justified a C.I.A. presence there, much less the murder of citizens, including our own. This is the single worst example of the intelligence community being beyond civilian control and operating against our national interest."
The Congressman said Ms. Harbury, a Harvard Law School graduate, wept when he told her that her husband, a leftist guerrilla named Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, had been killed in 1992 while a prisoner of the Guatemalan military. Since last fall she has undertaken hunger strikes in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, and in front of the United States Embassy in Guatemala to try to learn the truth about his disappearance.
Mr. Torricelli identified the man behind the killings of Mr. Bamaca and Michael Devine, an American who ran a hotel in the Guatemalan rain forest and was killed in 1990, as Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a Guatemalan military intelligence officer.
Ms. Harbury said tonight, "They say, 'The truth shall make you free,' " citing the inscription from the Gospel of St. John on the wall of the C.I.A.'s lobby. "And now I feel free. At least I know my husband is free of torture, and I am free of the nightmare that he's suffering somewhere.
"I was told nothing except lies for two and a half years. There is no way out of this for the Guatemalan Army and the State Department and the C.I.A. They've been caught, for once and for all."
The military and intelligence services in Guatemala have been fighting and killing leftists guerrillas and civilians in the Central American nation for most of the last 30 years in what rights groups have described as one of the most violent campaigns of political repression in the Western Hemisphere. At least 100,000 civilians have been killed since the early 1980's.
In 1990, "at the time of the Michael Devine murder, Colonel Alpirez was a contract employee of the C.I.A.," Mr. Torricelli said in an interview. He still had a relationship with the C.I.A. at the time of the death of Mr. Bamaca in 1992, although it is unclear if he was still a paid agent at the time, the Congressman said.
"The C.I.A. had direct information about the deaths of both individuals at the time of the murders and there has never been any question about what occurred," he said. "That information was contained in U.S. Government cables and extensive internal memoranda. There was never any doubt about who was responsible."
The case of Mr. Devine, the Congressmen said, raises the question of whether the C.I.A. had been "withholding material evidence regarding the murder of an American citizen."
Mr. Devine's widow, Carol, lives without a telephone in an isolated village in the Guatemalan rain forest. Efforts to reach her were unsuccessful. Her husband, a 49-year-old innkeeper and tour guide who had lived in Guatemala for nearly 20 years, was kidnapped, bound and nearly decapitated by Guatemalan soldiers. In 1991 the United States stopped its military aid to Guatemala, ostensibly as a consequence of the Devine case.
In 1993 a Guatemalan Army captain, Hugo Contreras, was sentenced to 20 years in the case -- the first such prosecution of an army officer in memory -- but he escaped from custody immediately after his sentence. The reason behind the killing remains a mystery.
The case of the C.I.A. agent had been under investigation for months by staff members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate and House intelligence committees; Mr. Torricelli said he had learned the facts not from an intelligence committee briefing but through other means.
Two senior Administration officials said tonight that they had received "new reporting" on the case from the C.I.A. in January, after Ms. Harbury conducted her hunger strike in Guatemala City. The new information, they said, disclosed the role of Colonel Alpirez.
They said they had agonized over withholding his identity from Ms. Harbury but could not disclose it under laws protecting C.I.A. "sources and methods."
The role of Guatemala's military and intelligence services in death-squad killings has long been suspected. In 1993 that role was confirmed by two Guatemalan soldiers, who linked many such killings to the military high command.
The C.I.A.'s station in Guatemala has had close links to the military since 1954, when the intelligence agency led a coup that overthrew the nation's President, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and helped install a right-wing junta.
Military intelligence is "a pervasive factor in Guatemalan life," said Rachel Garst, who handles Guatemalan issues at the Washington Office on Latin America, a foreign policy advocacy organization. "The Guatemalan Army keeps close tabs not just on suspected guerrilla supporters, but on a wide variety of academics, human rights activists, religious figures, unionists and political figures," she added.
* Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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