WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

With a little prodding, Milt Bearden will talk about the exploding camel. It was back in the late 1980s, when Bearden was the CIA field commander in Islamabad, Pakistan, training Afghan guerrillas in their anti-Soviet insurgency. Bearden, now retired, says he was a conscientious teacher, imparting military instruction but simultaneously making sure that his students knew the difference between acts of war and acts of terrorism or human-rights violations. He expressly prohibited indiscriminate "wide area" attacks. "I said, 'Never, never, never do car bombs,'" he recalls. Rueful pause. "I never said, 'Don't do a camel bomb.'" That was a mistake. It was with horror that he later heard about the incendiary dromedary that, vaporized by remote control while tethered at a Soviet officers' canteen, killed or maimed more than a dozen people. There is an unpredictability quotient built into the business of "human intelligence," Bearden muses. "Today's freedom fighter," he says, "is tomorrow's creep."

Bearden made this observation last week as his former employers tried gamely to explain the CIA's relationship with someone who may be a creep of significant proportions: a Guatemalan army colonel named Julio Roberto Alpirez. Earlier this year, New Jersey Democratic Congressman Robert Torricelli stunned the Clinton Administration by charging that the CIA had failed to share information with Congress and the State Department suggesting that Alpirez, once an agency informant, had been involved in two ugly, politically explosive murders in 1990 and 1992, and in fact the CIA had paid him $44,000 even after linking him to the first death. (Alpirez denies any guilt.) Torricelli said the mess was consistent with CIA support of some of the most blood-drenched elements in Guatemala's armed forces, which have killed more than 100,000 fellow citizens in the past 30 years. He intimated that the National Security Agency and the Army had also engaged in cover-ups of Alpirez's acts. The resulting furor launched six investigations by various government branches.

The first of these, a review by CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz--later confirmed in broad outline by the President's Intelligence Oversight Board--arrived on selected Washington desks early last week. It is a document offering many pages (700 plus) but little closure. Agency officials summarizing it have asserted that their organization broke no laws in connection with Alpirez. The CIA did pay him, Hitz found, but it never possessed (let alone covered up) sufficient evidence to establish him as a party to either killing. This is not, however, because no such evidence existed; top CIA sources hurry to concede his possible involvement in the deaths. Instead Hitz appears to base the agency's claim to innocence on its incompetence. The CIA's Guatemala station was shockingly sloppy. It received tips about Alpirez' supposed abuses from highly unreliable witnesses but did not seek corroboration. At one point, the station even passed on--without further investigation-allegations of torture based solely on secondhand accounts of his boasts at a drinking party. Then the station officers added insult to idiocy: the report details their withholding suspicions from two successive American ambassadors in Guatemala, from the U.S. Congress and sometimes from their own superiors. Hitz concludes that this was all from negligence rather than by intent.

The report was not well received. Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Arlen Specter said it "leaves a lot to be desired" and accused the agency of a "deliberate withholding of information" on Alpirez. House Intelligence Committee member Bill Richardson called the report "not terribly visionary in what needs to be done to improve the CIA's internal procedures." CIA director John Deutch tried to remedy that by announcing a series of reforms, including promises to choose CIA station chiefs more carefully, to "scrub" paid informants more thoroughly and report accurately on human-rights abuses by the unclean, and to require better briefing of U.S. ambassadors. Deutch's efforts only partly mollified agency critics. Not for the first time, congressional debate raged over whether the agency's human "assets" in other countries aren't more like debits.

Afghan hand Bearden, who later ran the CIA's Soviet branch and was censured for his role in the Aldrich Ames fiasco, insists that the agency must be willing to deal with shady characters and accept that they occasionally go bad. "You have to make it clear-cut that you have moral standards, and you yourself have to be unswerving in them," he says, citing his own refusal to allow government contacts in Sudan to engage in torture, even when it might have helped foil plots on his own life. But, he says, it is harder for CIA officers to control behavior of their contacts when they are doing their own business rather than the agency's. "To say that you can't deal with anybody who might potentially violate human rights could be a good moral stand," Bearden concludes. "But don't try to have an intelligence service at the same time. Shut down and get out of town.''

Bearden operated in places where the violation of human rights by CIA assets was less than endemic. In Latin America, however, where state security apparatuses are notorious for incorrigible corruption and brutality, many observers--including some middle-of-the-road members of Congress--believe a que sera attitude is insufficient. As a case in point, human-rights activist Ann Manuel cites the CIA's liaison with Honduras' infamous Battalion 316 during the years when the country was considered an essential anti-Sandinista bulwark. "For four years," she says, "you had U.S. training of a special-intelligence unit, specifically instructing them not to torture, yet they systematically tortured."

Then there is Peru, where the CIA is reportedly linked to the feared National Intelligence Service (SIN), which has been accused of killing 17 people in Lima's Barrios Altos in 1991 and causing the disappearance of nine university students and a professor in La Cantuta in 1993. SIN's purported mastermind, an attorney who is President Alberto Fujimori's intelligence adviser, has represented a number of major drug traffickers in court.

There are signs that when it wants to, the CIA can clean house. Fernando Botero, the defense minister of Colombia, recalls a visit four months ago by agency officials who explained that they could no longer do business indiscriminately with the Colombian military, some of whose officers have death-squad links. From now on, "liaison" would occur only with officers found to be free of corruption and human-rights violations. Despite patriotic grumbling within his government, Botero agreed, and the result has pleased him. The agency drew closer to the Colombian National Police, one of the government's cleaner outfits, and the teamwork proved essential in the recent capture of Cali druglords.

Still, there are presumably some governments where there are few "good guys" with whom to make common cause. And there are some CIA station heads who have grown too comfortable with guys who aren't good. Deutch will need to work hard to achieve real change in the way his subordinates do business, and just as hard to conquer the cynicism engendered by similar pledges in the past. Congressional sources grumble that the Guatemala report's conclusions were the same as every other post-screw-up assessment: an assurance that no laws were broken and a promise to tell more. Then, they claim, nothing more is said.

--Reported by Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington