US plants agent in Haiti police

In an article to be published in the February 26 issue of the US left/liberal weekly The Nation, investigative reporter Allan Nairn charges that the US Central Intelligence Agency has placed agents inside the newly created Haitian National Police. Nairn cites peasant leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, head of the transition team for president-elect René Preval, who was inaugurated on February 7. Unnamed US officials confirmed the story, saying that much of the CIA recruitment took place during training of the new police by the International Criminal Investigations Training Program last year at Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri. ICITAP is run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Nairn also charges that the US government "is pressing on at least two fronts to prevent further revelations about its secret work in Haiti", in particular operations with the now disbanded Haitian military and the paramilitary group, Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH). On one front, the US continues to withhold some 150,000 pages of documents the US military seized from the Haitian army and the FRAPH shortly after US-led United Nations forces began their occupation of Haiti in September 1994. Without guaranteeing the return of all the documents, the US now wants the Haitian government to sign an eight-point memorandum severely restricting the use Haiti can make of the "non-sensitive" documents the US does turn over. The second front is Emmanuel ("Toto") Constant, a former CIA informant and the head of the FRAPH. Last December 7 Constant — in custody in the US since April — called Nairn and offered to reveal "everything". Four days later, Constant dropped his offer after the US agreed that it would eventually deport him to Haiti in a US government plane with "no advance notice" to the Haitian government. Pentagon contractor Brown and Root is to provide the ground services when the plane lands, and Constant will be processed "at an isolated location" and protected through "crowd control".
[From Weekly News Update on the Americas, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY, 10012, USA; email nicanet@blythe.org.]