CIA's secrecy habit

No single case tells more about how the CIA is dealing with its old Cold War habits than that of Jose Maria Reyes Mata. He was the Communist guerrilla killed when he was leading comrades back to his native Honduras in 1983 from Nicaragua, then leftist ruled. The core question is whether the CIA, which is alleged to have trained and supported the military intelligence unit that did him in, is going to disclose all relevant information about this affair, which is at the center of Honduras' brave attempt to confront past uses and abuses of secret power.

For some years, the Honduran human rights commissioner, Leo Valadares, has been investigating about 180 "disappearances", some of them presumably brought about by the U.S.-backed Honduran security forces. Reyes Mata became the leading case because of the commissioner's pursuit of his paper trail in the CIA.

The trail recently came to a strange place. A heavily censored inspector-general's report on CIA operations in Honduras said that the guerrilla leader indeed had been captured and executed. But it held back the killer's identity, or rather, it held back his name but tacitly offered clues to the Honduran civilian authorities to use in hunting him down. The idea is to preserve the agency's traditional position on protecting agents and sources but at the same time facilitating the human rights inquiry.

A neat trick if you can do it. But it looks more like a compromise that shows the CIA still has a way to go to break its habit of secrecy above all. Disclosure of the identities of old agents may perhaps hinder recruitment of new ones. But disclosure -- 15 years later, to a struggling democratic government -- serves the purpose of rebuilding a society, as disclosure legislation -- narrowly defeated in the Senate in September -- contended.

In this age of pervasive terrorism, moreover, it hard to argue that any agent should be recruited on a word or a wink and be given the license to kill.

-- The Washington Post