Lying Down with Dogs

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Emmanuel "Toto" Constant was known to American reporters in Haiti as an elegant dresser, a man who spoke perfect English and claimed to hold degrees in physics and mathematics from Canadian universities -- while still believing fervently in voodoo -- and, so he said, a onetime diplomat with the Haitian mission to the United Nations. He was also the head of a gang of thugs unusually vicious even by Haitian standards, the FRAPH. Those letters are the initials of the French words for Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, but to most Haitians they stand for murder, torture and beatings.

Oh, yes, one other thing Constant was: a U.S. intelligence source. Officials in Washington confirm that he was on the payroll of the American CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, apparently from some time shortly after the coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 until last spring. So Constant was getting American money when he helped the Haitian army organize FRAPH in the summer of 1993, and also a year ago when FRAPH staged a fake riot that caused the U.S.S. Harlan County to turn back from Port-au-Prince without landing any of the U.S. military personnel aboard. That was a foreign-policy disaster the Clinton Administration is only now living down.

Constant's career points up a moral ambiguity bedeviling U.S. intelligence: when do efforts to gather information on violent dictatorships and terrorist groups cross the line into aiding and encouraging bloodshed and oppression? It is a problem the CIA faces when recruiting agents in the Iraqi secret police, the Chinese prison system and among the Hutu and Tutsi tribes that slaughtered each other in Rwanda, to mention only a few of the repugnant people it has dealt with. In Haiti specifically, says a White House official, "the CIA has bought and stolen information from all sides" -- even though "we knew that the people we were paying were killing and torturing people." But, he says, the payoff was information that helped the U.S. land 20,000 troops in Haiti without casualties so far and speed the dismantling of the military regime and restoration of elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Many other people, of course, feel that knowingly paying killers inevitably makes the U.S. morally complicit in their murders, and that is too high an ethical price to pay. Says New Jersey Democratic Congressman Robert Torricelli: "Getting good information from bad people is one thing. Contracting with bad people committing reprehensible deeds that are contrary to our national policy is quite another."

One point of contention is whether U.S. intelligence actually helped form FRAPH. The Nation magazine made that accusation last week. It quoted Constant as saying that in 1991 he had been urged by Colonel Patrick Collins, then Defense Intelligence Agency attache in Haiti, to form a front "that could balance the Aristide movement."

No, no, no, say CIA, White House and Pentagon officials, who point out that FRAPH was not started until almost two years later. "We draw an important distinction between gathering information from nasty people and supporting or encouraging the nasty things they do," says an intelligence official. In line with that policy, intelligence sources insist Constant was paid only for information, and none of the money was intended to finance FRAPH. An analogy drawn repeatedly in Washington: at the height of the cold war, the CIA was paying many double agents employed by the Soviet KGB, but that hardly means the CIA was bankrolling the KGB.

Officials, however, have no convincing explanation as to why Constant has escaped a belated crackdown on FRAPH. After FRAPH gunmen fired on and broke up a demonstration by Aristide supporters, killing six, American soldiers last Monday finally raided the organization's headquarters in Port-au-Prince. They carried off to prison 35 mostly lower-ranking FRAPH members.

Constant, though, turned up the next day at a press conference arranged by the U.S. embassy, which supplied a microphone and technicians. Speaking mainly in English, he urged FRAPH members to "put down" their arms and accept the return of Aristide to power -- sentiments greeted by an unbelieving crowd with shouts of "Liar! Killer! Rapist!" He left, protected from a howling, spitting crowd by U.S. military police. Which seems strange, since in early summer he had threatened to organize a guerrilla war to kill any foreign troops that dared to land in Haiti.

Pentagon officials interpreted his conversion as a classic illustration of the maxim: "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em." Constant, they said, had turned to American authorities after the raid with an offer to help them damp down violence, and they had accepted. Fritz Joseph, a FRAPH member who has gone into hiding, has a less charitable interpretation. Referring to Constant and Michel Francois, the police chief who has fled into exile in the Dominican Republic, Joseph says, "They both cut deals for themselves and left everyone else who worked with them without protection."

Whatever the case, the CIA's clout in Washington will not be increased by the controversy. The CIA already is under fire as a bloated bureaucracy still gripped by a cold war mind-set. It has been accused of discrimination against its female agents, and of incompetent handling of the case of Aldrich Ames, * the mole who betrayed many agents to the Soviets.

Administration officials whisper that Director James Woolsey's days are numbered; some are beginning to float the names of possible successors. A joint Congress-White House commission will examine what should be done with the CIA. While it is unlikely to follow New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan's not altogether facetious suggestion that the CIA be abolished, the commission might recommend slashing the agency's $3 billion budget and 20,000- person staff and giving some of its intelligence-gathering functions to the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency or State Department while turning over the running of many covert operations to the Pentagon.

Woolsey nonetheless insists the CIA will continue to deal with sources one of his subordinates calls "scumbags." Declared Woolsey in a press conference last week: "The worse the group, the more we are likely to want to collect intelligence from them. The very fact of human-rights violations makes ((a)) group of more interest to us . . . exactly for the same reason that it is the worst of the local organized crime groups that are of the most interest to local police."

But is the intelligence collected worth the moral cost of dealing with murderers? In Haiti it is difficult to tell. The story begins in 1986, after the fall of Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier, when the CIA set up SIN, a Haitian intelligence agency, and poured the first of several millions into it. It was supposed to keep tabs on the narcotics trade but never produced much antidrug intelligence. (No wonder, since the CIA was relying largely on drug users; Constant, for example, is widely believed to be a cocaine addict.) The real aim, however, was to use SIN to recruit agents who could supply political and military intelligence -- and never mind if they were engaging in human- rights violations at the same time. In 1987 the CIA also financed candidates in Haitian elections and refused to tell Congress which ones -- foolishly, because everyone knew. They were the only candidates who could afford fancy, four-color posters.

Aristide did not run, and win, until three years later, but the CIA always viewed him as unstable. A CIA briefer once told Congressmen that Aristide had been treated for psychiatric problems in a Canadian hospital, though the hospital said he had never been admitted. Aristide's supporters have long suspected the CIA encouraged the 1991 coup that drove him into exile. Intelligence sources in Washington deny it, but concede that the CIA knew about the coup in advance and did nothing to stop it. By one account, though, it did indirectly save Aristide's life. On the night of the coup, a soldier pointed his rifle at the President, only to have it knocked aside by a Haitian colonel -- who, officials now claim, was in the pay of the CIA.

Precisely when and how Constant came into the picture is unclear. He is said to have lectured on "liberation theology" -- Aristide's philosophy -- at a SIN school and might well have come to the agency's attention then. Most accounts agree, however, that he was one of the supporters of the military regime that the CIA turned to for information after the coup against Aristide. That he stayed on the payroll after helping organize FRAPH is more difficult to justify. Though Constant represented FRAPH to U.S. reporters as a kind of Salvation Army doing work among the poor, its own members tell a very different story. Pierre Audin, a FRAPH member now in hiding, tells TIME quite simply that his job was to beat people. He boasts that he killed at least five people on night patrols through the slums of Port-au-Prince. "I don't know who they were," says Audin. "They were just people violating the laws of Michel Francois" -- in what manner he does not say. He adds that "I would kill Aristide and his family today if I could."

And what did the CIA get from its investment in Constant? In general, says a White House official, "the intelligence we've gathered is helping us to get the bad guys out of power in Haiti, to restore the elected President and the democratic process and hopefully to reduce the bloodshed on all sides." A senior U.S. foreign-policy hand, however, says the CIA's reports on Haiti were not very enlightening. As for Constant specifically, one source says he was dropped last spring because "the guy was unreliable." That, sighs another official, is a general difficulty: "The problem with Haiti is that you can't trust your people to be corrupt" -- meaning that once bought they will not always stay bought.

With reporting by Edward Barnes/Port-au-Prince, Cathy Booth/Miami, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington