Getting away with murder

A CIA employee thought he should be honest about a grisly truth he had uncovered. It was a mistake. He's been hounded ever since

The NUCCIO Affair sounds like a Sicilian intrigue, but the setting is Washington and the bad guys don't belong to the Mafia. They work for the CIA, and the enforcer's role is being played by George Tenet, the man who is expected to be confirmed shortly as the CIA's next director.

The protagonist in this present-day morality play is Richard Nuccio, a public servant, who was hounded out of government because he loved his country not wisely, but too well. Mr Nuccio was a senior official at the State Department, shaping US policy towards Cuba. Today he works as an aide in Congress, a job he may also lose if the furies he unleashed the day he exposed the shameful truth about the CIA's complicity with foreign murderers are to be appeased.

Mr Tenet's confirmation hearings in the Senate now focus on a Justice Department investigation into his finances. There has been no mention so far of the Nuccio Affair. That is a pity, because the lesson of the fall of Richard Nuccio is that the CIA, discredited by scandals which revealed that its own agents were betrayed by their controllers in Washington, can still behave like a sinister shadow government. Its authority remains unchallenged by the Congressmen and Senators who pay the bills, around $30bn (pounds 20bn) a year. Mr Tenet's participation in the character assassination of Mr Nuccio does not encourage hope that the CIA intends to mend its ways. Quite the contrary.

THE STORY begins in 1994. In the course of his work at the State Department, Mr Nuccio came across intelligence documents that showed that the CIA had a murderer on the payroll. He was a Guatemalan army colonel described in the documents as "an extremely violent individual". Mr Nuccio was faced with the toughest choice of his life: either to uphold the law, which ordered him to keep silent, or to obey his conscience. Colleagues warned him that if he broke the national security law protecting the CIA's "sources and methods", they would destroy him.

Mr Nuccio might have heeded his colleagues' warning had he been aware of the example before him of Marilyn McAfee, the US ambassador to Guatemala and a critic of military abuses. Such was the CIA's complicity with the Guatemalan killers that it was prepared to smear Ms McAfee as a lesbian. In 1994 a bug planted by the Guatemalan army recorded her making cooing noises - to another woman, the officers concluded. In fact she was talking to her dog, but when the tape was passed on to local CIA officers, they agreed with their Guatemalan colleagues and passed on the false information to Washington, where it was circulated in CIA HQ and on Capitol Hill. Mr Nuccio, however, ignored the dangers, and on St Patrick's Day 1995 told a Democratic congressman named Robert Torricelli what he knew. Mr Torricelli, who now sits in the Senate, wrote an open letter to President Clinton revealing the whole story.

It was a scandal, but it was not exactly news. Back in 1954 the CIA had overthrown a democratically elected government in Guatemala. Ever since then it had fought alongside successive military regimes in a war against left- wing guerrillas. No army in Latin America, not Argentina's, nor Chile's, nor El Salvador's, has a more consistent record of barbaric human rights abuses than Guatemala's. Since the 1954 coup the army has killed 100,000 people, 40,000 of whose remains are still unaccounted for. It also wiped out 440 Indian villages. And every grisly step along the way, the CIA applauded the Guatemalan military.

There were two remarkable aspects to Mr Nuccio's discovery. The first was that he had obtained documentary evidence proving the widespread suspicion that the CIA had killer Guatemalan colonels on its books. The second was that the colonel in question, Julio Alpirez, had been implicated in the murders of an American citizen named Michael Devine, and a second American citizen's Guatemalan husband. Of the two discoveries, this was the most damning.

A US military officer based in El Salvador during the mid-1980s observes that the wholesale slaughter of "little brown men" as they were known, is no cause at all for official concern. The murder of one American abroad, on the other hand, can be a political bombshell. This is especially true if the US government has been lying to the victim's relatives about the manner in which their American loved one met his fate, and, in this case, they had been lying.

Indeed, Mr Nuccio had been the official who told the lies. It had been his job to inform the relatives that the US government knew nothing about the murders. Then one day he came across a CIA intelligence report, dated May 1993, that told him he had been the unwitting participant in a monstrous cover-up. Colonel Alpirez had been involved in the murder of Devine, an innkeeper who lived in the Guatemalan highlands, and of Efrain Bamaca, a guerrilla commander tortured to death. Bamaca's American wife, Jennifer Harbury, had gone on hunger strikes outside the White House to press the US government to reveal what it knew.

"Furious at being exposed, the CIA aimed its anger at me," Mr Nuccio says. The CIA removed his security clearance, denying him access to classified documents, thus ending his ability to function as a senior government official; CIA officers sought to smear his name by denouncing him as a Communist sympathiser; and, at the CIA's bidding, the Justice Department initiated proceedings against him. It was the first time in US history that a government official had been criminally investigated for telling Congress the truth. As a direct consequence of his refusal to obey orders, the CIA had no option but to fire two senior operatives linked to the Alpirez operation. One of them was the CIA station chief in Guatemala. None the less, by the spring of 1996 the State Department decided that Mr Nuccio had suffered enough, and his security clearance was reinstated. Enter George Tenet, the deputy director of the CIA.

In a second action unique in American history, he told the State Department to reverse this decision. "Tenet took the specific decision to deny me access, and he managed the internal process that led to the decision," Mr Nuccio says. "His job was deputy director for operations, so it was his people who had been most p***ed off by my revelations. I became a convenient scapegoat. I wonder now whether he had a vested interest in seeing me take the rap."

The State Department objected to Mr Tenet's instructions at first, but under pressure from him, and without any help from a tremulous White House, it buckled. Mr Nuccio was left twisting in the wind. "The White House - the National Security Council and the President - could have intervened, but I know that President Clinton personally accepted the CIA's position and approved the decision," he said.

Nothing said by friend and colleagues changed Mr Nuccio's conviction that he was being victimised. "Everyone I spoke to from the administration expressed sympathy with my position. They applauded my actions, but their comments were hushed and off-the-record. No one was prepared to take on the CIA. The attitude of the White House was summed up by Nancy Soderberg, the staff director of the NSC and a former policy aid to Senator Kennedy. `Rick, you're being screwed,' she told me in her office in April 1996. `But what can we do? It's the CIA'." Mr Nuccio remained on the State Department payroll, although there was no proper work for him. He stayed in the fond hope that a panel chaired by John Deutch, the previous CIA chief, would clear his name. Undeterred, Mr Deutch ratified Mr Tenet's decision a month later. Mr Nuccio's continued permanence in the State Department was untenable. In February this year he quit and accepted a job as a foreign affairs adviser, from Senator Torricelli. And here begins another instructive story of real life in Washington DC.

Senator Torricelli receives much of his election campaign funding from the hard right Cuban-American lobby. Now representatives of the lobby are calling on Senator Torricelli to sack Mr Nuccio. Why? Partly because Mr Nuccio's position on Cuba is to favour constructive engagement over out-and-out hostility, but the principal reason is the sympathy with which right- wing Cuban Americans view the Guatemalan military murderers whom he exposed. So far Senator Torricelli has resisted the threats. But it is possible that when the imperative to raise election money becomes even more pressing, he may feel he has no option but to let Mr Nuccio go.

Meanwhile, the man who orchestrated his ruination will, assuming he is confirmed, be sitting at the top of the combined forces of the US intelligence establishment. The message is clear. The CIA can get away with murder. "I fear," Mr Nuccio says, "that we have in the US created a doomsday machine in the CIA. It continues on without a mission, destroying without reason. Only a president can turn the machine off."