New Director Pledges To Change Attitudes At Cia Deutch Especially Concerned About Alleged Human Rights Abuses

The new director of Central Intelligence, John Deutch, says he wants to change the thinking and the behavior of U.S. spies overseas, to insure that U.S. espionage is consistent with “American interests and American values.”

The directorate of covert operations “knows that it’s necessary to change its attitudes, its practices and its habits,” Deutch said in an interview at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

“There’s a lot that has to be done,” he said. “We’ll start in Guatemala and work our way north, east, south and west.”

Deutch, in his second month as the nation’s 17th intelligence director, has started a search for a new director of covert operations and plans to issue new rules on dealings with foreign agents suspected of killing, torture and other crimes.

He has told the Senate intelligence committee that he was “especially concerned” about accusations of the CIA’s “complicity in human rights abuses, payments to assets implicated in human rights abuses, actions in violation of government policy and failure to notify Congress” of its covert activities.

Rep. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, has accused a Guatemalan colonel who was on the CIA’s payroll of involvement in the 1990 slaying of an American innkeeper in Guatemala and in the 1992 killing of a Guatemalan guerrilla married to an American lawyer.

In the interview, Deutch said he had asked foreign-policy leaders fundamental questions about the CIA’s mission in Guatemala and other countries that once were battlegrounds in the cold war.

Among the answers, he said, was that the CIA should keep gathering intelligence in every capital and backwater of the world, so long as its activities were “consistent with government policy” and kept “American interests and American values at heart.”

He said one of his top goals was to revise the agency’s spying operations, with the goal of making them “more accountable” to Congress and the public and less susceptible to charges of abuse. Another, he said, was to change the CIA’s personnel system, so the agency could hire, train, promote and keep good people. The system, he said, is “not attuned to attract and keep the best people.”