Husband's Death Shattered Couple's Guatemala Dream -- CIA Role Probed In American's Slaying

POPTUN, Guatemala - When Carole DeVine and her husband, Michael, arrived in this friendly tropical village in 1971, the peacefulness and serenity so moved them, she said, that they decided to stay a lifetime.

They bought a 400-acre, heavily wooded farm, complete with wild monkeys, macaws and a pond fed by a clear stream.

But paradise turned to hell on June 8, 1990, when a group of Guatemalan soldiers intercepted Michael DeVine outside the farm and drove him away in an unmarked truck. The next morning, farmhands discovered his body inside his own truck, hidden in a wooded valley near where he had been picked up.

His hands were bound by cord. One eye, his chin and chest were swollen and bruised from a severe beating. A machete blow to the back of the neck had all but severed DeVine's head.

Her questions regarding motives and masterminds have exploded into an international controversy regarding the CIA's role in a country torn by 34 years of civil war and with a long history of death squad-style killings by Guatemala's seemingly untouchable military.

The Clinton administration and Congress in the past week have opened new probes of the slaying and the Bush administration's response to it, prompted largely by recent U.S. intelligence linking a Guatemalan colonel, Julio Roberto Alpirez, to the 1992 slaying of a Guatemalan guerrilla fighter who was married to an American, Jennifer Harbury.

CIA acting director William Studeman, testifying today before the Senate Intelligence Committee, emphatically rejected allegations that the agency was implicated in DeVine's death and that it then withheld information about it from investigators. He issued a similar denial concerning Bamaca's death.

Studeman delivered the agency's first lengthy account of CIA activities in Guatemala since allegations last month raised questions about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of DeVine and Efrain Bamaca Velasquez.

His testimony was delivered in the presence of Carole DeVine and Harbury, a Harvard-educated lawyer who has campaigned for years for information about her husband's death. Both were due to testify later in the day.

Largely because of Harbury's campaign to get the Clinton administration to probe the death of her husband, the DeVine case has received less attention. But some lawmakers and senior administration officials say the DeVine case may wind up causing a larger public stir.

Alpirez, reportedly a paid CIA informant, was the commanding officer at the nearby Poptun army base where Michael DeVine was taken for questioning.

The Poptun base's record-keeping efficiency proved effective in protecting those who committed the crime. The Clinton administration is investigating allegations that Alpirez ordered the destruction of entry logs at the base that would have registered DeVine's arrival there with his military escorts.

The CIA is under investigation for allegedly having hidden Alpirez' involvement from two U.S. ambassadors to Guatemala, both of whom found the case to be such an egregious example of injustice that they supported a cutoff of aid until it was resolved. The CIA, however, secretly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Guatemalan army in the years that followed. Alpirez is said to have remained on the CIA payroll for two years after the killing.

Nine months after the CIA knew of the Guatemalan army colonel's possible role in DeVine's death, the Alpirez was at least $44,000 richer because he received a final lump sum for back pay owed to him by the CIA. He was also free of the threat of any criminal prosecution - by either the Guatemalan or U.S. government - for his reported involvement in the slaying and in a well-orchestrated coverup by Guatemalan authorities.

Five soldiers are in prison after being convicted in the DeVine case. An army captain was found guilty - the first conviction of any military officer here on human-rights charges - but escaped from a military detention facility in Guatemala City on the day his sentence was handed down in 1993. Alpirez remains a free man and denies any connection either to the CIA or to DeVine's death.

Carole DeVine said she has yet to find a motive. The U.S. Embassy says it appears that two Galil automatic rifles had been stolen from another nearby military base just before DeVine's abduction, and that soldiers might have wrongly suspected him of being involved. The embassy says no evidence has ever surfaced that DeVine "had anything to do with weapons of any kind."