The World: The C.I.A. and Guatemala; The Spies Who Never Came In From the Cold War

BYLINE: By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

WHEN a Guatemalan truth commission implicated the United States last month in the creation of a killing machine that ravaged entire Mayan villages in the 1980's, it raised questions that are not likely to go away soon -- certainly not by the time President Clinton visits Guatemala this week:

How could a country that calls itself a beacon of democracy link its military and intelligence agencies so intimately to Guatemala's darkest, most reactionary forces? What was the nature of that relationship over three decades? What were American officials thinking as 200,000 people were killed?

Some answers, or at least clues, can be found in scores of declassified documents the Clinton Administration released to the National Security Archive, a research group that aided the truth commission in its research.

From these documents, a narrative emerges -- the story of an approach launched in the 1950's, when confident World War II veterans set out to stop Communism with a new kind of warfare that would eventually be called counterinsurgency.

It is well known that the Central Intelligence Agency engineered a coup in Guatemala in 1954, and that Americans lavished training and equipment on a series of rightist Governments.

What is less familiar is that, even as American policies evolved in other parts of the world, especially after the failures in Vietnam, the policies in Guatemala did not. Washington's counterinsurgency arsenal melded with the traditional brutality and racism of the Guatemalan army to make a horrifying brew, and the effects outlasted the global threat of Communism itself.

The story starts in 1954, when Gen. James Doolittle wrote a report for a fellow World War II hero, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, on how to use the C.I.A. in the cold war: "There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply." At the time, officers of the C.I.A. were sifting through the documents of an elected leftist Government it had just overthrown in Guatemala, assembling a list of suspected Communists. The new rightist regime, handpicked by the agency, used the list to eliminate by death any potential opposition. That kind of coordination went on for decades.

Newly declassified American documents, for example, place a C.I.A. officer in the room where Guatemalan intelligence officers -- men responsible for death squad killings -- planned their covert operations in 1965. They show that C.I.A. and other American officials played a key role in the latter 1960's in centralizing command structures and communications of agencies that would be involved in death squad killings for years. They contain C.I.A. reports of secret executions of Communist Party leaders by Guatemalan Government agencies in 1966 that Guatemalan officials publicly denied.

They also show that the C.I.A. station in Guatemala City knew that the Guatemalan army was massacring entire Mayan villages while Reagan Administration officials publicly supported the military regime's human rights record. Even after the war was won, the documents reveal, Defense Intelligence Agency officials knew that the Guatemalan military was destroying evidence of torture centers and clandestine graveyards in 1994. Not a word was uttered publicly by the Clinton Administration.

Through the decades, a lone voice of warning belonged to Viron Vaky, a State Department official who had been the Number 2 official in the Embassy in Guatemala. In a long memo of dissent in March 1968, he wrote that the "indiscriminate" violence of the counterinsurgency tactics "present a serious problem for the U.S. in terms of our image in Latin America and the credibility of what we say we stand for." Not shirking his own responsibility, he added, "I feel somewhat like Fulbright says he felt about the Tonkin Gulf resolution -- my deepest regret is that I did not fight harder within the Embassy councils when I was there to press my views."

The Vietnam War had not been lost yet, but it was turning sour.

Human rights concerns led the Carter Administration to cut off military aid to Guatemala in the 1970's, and Congress shackled the Reagan Administration's efforts to resume it. But it was too late. The C.I.A. would retain strong influence in relations with the Guatemalan Government, to the frustration of American ambassadors, well into the 1990's. And American training and planning could not be taken back. "The Reagan Administration wanted to pretend the officers were good people, but it was the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations that gave them muscle to create a murderous machine," said Piero Gleijeses of Johns Hopkins University, an expert on Guatemala. "That's when the Frankenstein was created."

The monster was a response to a real challenge: In the early 1950's, Guatemala's Communist Party had played a major role in the Government of Col. Jacobo Arbenz, who had expropriated the lands of the United Fruit Company, imported arms from Czechoslovakia and mourned the death of Stalin. A decade after his overthrow, Cuban-backed guerrillas threatened to take the eastern third of the country and assassinated an American ambassador. After every defeat, the left came back, exerting control in the labor movement and universities and gaining tens of thousands of Mayan supporters.

LONG after its humiliations in the U-2 and Bay of Pigs fiascos, the C.I.A. continued reaching into its bag of tricks to assure that its 1954 success would not become unglued. That meant flying intelligence flights over guerrilla positions in the 1960's and giving advice and financial support to known human rights violators through at least the 1970's.

"It's one of the saddest chapters of American relations with Latin America," said Frederick Hitz, the C.I.A. inspector general from 1990 to 1998. "The United States felt responsible for what it started by removing Arbenz, and essentially we were trapped. We started something and didn't know how to get off the train."

President George Bush cut off Washington's tiny military aid program following the unexplained 1990 murder of an American innkeeper near an army base. Even then the C.I.A. continued to give monetary assistance to the military behind the back of the State Department. Two senior C.I.A. officers lost their jobs after Congressional intelligence committees found that the C.I.A. station in Guatemala was keeping human rights violations secret from C.I.A. headquarters and Congress.

Following an investigation of the matter, Anthony Harrington, who leads the Clinton Administration's Intelligence Oversight Board, expressed bewilderment. "The board asked itself: the cold war's over -- what are we doing down there?"