CIA Purges Payroll of Ineffective, Unsavory Informants

WASHINGTON —  Over the past two years, the CIA has quietly dropped more than a thousand secret informants from its worldwide payroll because the agency’s managers concluded they were largely unproductive or had likely been involved in serious criminal activity or human rights abuses in their countries, according to U.S. officials.

About 90% of those dismissed in the “agent scrub,” as it was known within the spy agency, were simply judged to be poor sources of the type of information the CIA considers important in the post-Cold War era, the officials said.

But the group also included more than a hundred informants who the agency’s officers concluded were implicated in major crimes abroad, such as killings, kidnappings or terrorist acts and also were judged to have provided inadequate intelligence to remain on the payroll.

A disproportionately high number of informants dropped for such abuses were employed in Latin America during the 1980s and early 1990s, but some were employed in the Middle East and Asia.

The dismissals resulted from a yearlong review of informants that began in 1995 and was the most exhaustive ever conducted by headquarters personnel.

The review constitutes a major legacy of former CIA Director John M. Deutch, who left in December after 20 months at the agency’s helm. President Clinton’s nominee for his replacement, former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, is now awaiting a Senate confirmation hearing.

Under a policy Deutch established early last year, the CIA’s officers for the first time must submit annual reports assessing the quality of their informants and generally are prohibited from recruiting new sources implicated in human rights abuses or criminal behavior. Senior CIA managers can approve recruiting such people, but only for national security reasons.

The new restrictions have provoked widespread controversy among CIA field officers, some of whom have privately complained to Republican lawmakers and aides on Capitol Hill that they have been discouraged from recruiting foreigners who were disreputable but could provide data of importance to Washington.

But other CIA officers have disputed this view, claiming that the dismissals freed the agency’s field officers to concentrate on recruiting new and better sources of information regarding “transnational” problems, such as nuclear and other weapons proliferation terrorism, narcotics and international crime--that are now top CIA priorities.