Fired CIA official to receive career
medal
By NCR STAFF
Activists and critics of the Central Intelligence Agency have
expressed outrage that the CIA plans to honor an official fired from the agency
for failing to inform Congress about human rights abuses in Guatemala.
Terry R. Ward, 62, former chief of the CIAs Latin American
Division, was to receive the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal in a March
23 ceremony. The award will recognize his exceptional achievements
during his 30-year career with the agency, despite his 1995 dismissal for
failing to report CIA ties to a Guatemalan colonel implicated in two murders in
the early 1990s.
The CIA is living down to its reputation in giving this
award, Jennifer Harbury, an American lawyer, told The Washington Post.
Harburys Guatemalan husband, Efraín Bamaca Velasquez, was killed
in 1992. And they werent acting in good faith when they said they
were cleaning up their act. Obviously, they didnt mean what they
said.
Harbury held a hunger strike in the fall of 1994 demanding
information about the death of her husband. Her protest led Sen. Robert G.
Torricelli, D-N.J., then a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, to disclose that the CIA had never told Congress that Guatemalan
Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a paid CIA informant, had been linked to the
killings of Bamaca and Michael Devine, an American citizen killed in 1990.
Torricelli had been informed of the cover-up by a senior State
Department official, Richard A. Nuccio. Nuccio was subsequently stripped of his
top-secret security clearance by former CIA director John M. Deutch, who also
fired Ward.
Nuccio told The Washington Post March 9 that Wards firing
was entirely appropriate and questioned the CIAs decision to
give him one of its highest honors. If you dont fire a station
chief for lying to an ambassador and withholding information from the
president, what do you fire someone for? Nuccio asked.
However, some in the intelligence community praised the decision
to honor Ward, who they believe was treated unjustly.
Terry is one of the real good guys, said Paul Redmond,
who retired as chief of counterintelligence in 1998. He was treated
terribly. Redmond said Deutch fired Ward for political reasons, to
mollify critics.
Milt Bearden, former CIA station chief in Bonn, Germany, told The
Washington Post, It was, Give us any head, and the head was
Terry. Bearden said he planned to attend the medal ceremony.
Another senior intelligence official told the Post, He
served in a number of places where the world was particularly dangerous. By
virtue of what he did, he helped save lives.
But how many lives were destroyed? asked School Sister
of Notre Dame Alice Zachmann, director of the Guatemalan Human Rights
Commission. Zachmann, who founded the Washington-based organization 19 years
ago, told NCR that in light of the CIAs role in Guatemalas 1954
coup and its cooperation with the Guatemalan military, I wonder how many
lives actually were saved.
Wards 30-year career included assignments in many Latin
American countries in which human rights violations occurred, Zachmann said.
Ward served in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru and
Honduras, and was deputy chief of the Latin American division in the 1980s
before serving as chief of the division in the early 1990s. He was chief of a
station in Switzerland in 1995 at the time of his dismissal.
In an op-ed piece for The Washington Post, Tom Blanton, director
of George Washington Universitys National Security Archive, cited
declassified records of human rights violations in countries where Ward served.
A CIA report showed that when Ward was deputy chief of the Latin American
division, the CIA knew the Honduran military, including those on CIA payroll,
had organized a death squad called Battalion 316, Blanton said. A State
Department-funded investigation in 1986 and 1987, while Ward was deputy
division chief for Latin America and Honduran station chief overseeing the
Nicaraguan contra operation, said the contras CIA handlers turned
the other way regarding the contras use of torture and murder.
If all this makes for a distinguished career,
one can only ask the CIA: What qualifies as undistinguished? Blanton
wrote.
Harbury and the Guatemala Human Rights Commission announced plans
for a funeral Mass and silent vigil for the dead to be held in
front of CIA headquarters March 23, the day the award was to be presented.
National Catholic Reporter, March 24,
2000
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