Cia Purges Criminals From Roster Of Spies

Breaking with its past, the CIA has severed its ties to roughly 100 foreign agents, about half of them in Latin America, whose value as informers was outweighed by their acts of murder, assassination, torture, terrorism and other crimes, government officials said on Sunday.

As part of a worldwide review that began in 1994 and accelerated sharply in 1995, the CIA for the first time began to systematically balance the quality of the information its informers delivered against those informers’ criminal histories.

The CIA’s purge of its informers in the last two years focused heavily on its Latin American division, which has had on its payroll hundreds of military officers and government officials.

The agency found the violence and corruption of many informers so bad, and the quality of the information so marginal, that they were not worth the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars they were paid annually.