The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (45 page)

The evidence of “systemic” and “frequent lethal violence aimed at civilians,” however, was overwhelming. And in September of 1994, three years after the coup and almost a year after the Harlan County’s retreat, President Clinton finally ordered a full-scale invasion to end what he called the “reign of terror.” “We now know that there have been . . . over three thousand political murders,” he said. In preparation for battle, Constant changed
FRAPH’S
name to the Armed Revolutionary Front of the Haitian People and, according to news accounts, stockpiled weapons and “secret” powders that, he declared, would be able to “contaminate water so that the GIs will die.” He claimed that one of these powders had been ground from the bones of
AIDS
victims. Appearing in camouflage pants and a black T-shirt, a machine gun at his side, he no longer gave any hint of the diplomat. “Each
FRAPH
man,” Constant said, “must put down one American soldier.”

But before war broke out the junta, faced with the might of the United States, agreed to relinquish power. Thousands of U.S. soldiers easily seized the island. Surprisingly,
FRAPH
was allowed to remain an active force. When asked why, U.S. soldiers said they had been told by their superior officers that
FRAPH
was a legitimate opposition party, like Republicans and Democrats. U.S. soldiers even stood by, insisting they were not a local police force, while
FRAPH
members beat back civilians who had spilled onto the streets expecting liberation. It was only after random bands of
FRAPH
members mowed down a crowd of Haitians and shot and wounded an American photographer, and a radio conversation was intercepted in which Constant and his men threatened to “break out weapons” and “begin an all-out war against the foreigners,” that U.S. forces reversed their stance. On October 3rd, they stormed
FRAPH
headquarters. A jubilant crowd gathered outside, cheering them on. Inside, amid piles of nail-embedded sticks, Molotov cocktails, and trophy photos of mutilated corpses, soldiers surrounded more than two dozen
FRAPH
members. They bound their hands and gagged them, while the crowd shouted, “Let them die! Let them die!” As the soldiers departed with their
FRAPH
prisoners, the crowd rushed inside, smashing the headquarters.

Back at his father’s mansion, Constant listened to a police scanner, waiting for the soldiers to seize him. His wife and four children had already fled. At one point, he yelled at a journalist, “Everybody who is reporting the situation bad . . . by the grace of God, they will wind up in the ground!” But though other
FRAPH
members were taken into custody Constant remained free. The U.S. Embassy spokesman, Stanley Schrager, whose assassination Constant had called for only two days before, even arranged a press conference for him outside the Presidential Palace. News footage shows Constant standing under the glaring sun, sweating in a jacket and tie. “The only solution for Haiti now is the reality of the return of Aristide,” he said. “Put down your stones, put down your tires, no more violence.” As he spoke, hundreds of angry Haitians pushed against a barricade of U.S. soldiers, shouting, “Assassin!” “Dog!” “Murderer!”

“If I find myself in disagreement with President Aristide,” Constant pressed on, his voice now cracking, “I pledge to work as a member of loyal opposition within the framework of a legal democracy.”

“Handcuff him!” people yelled from the crowd. “Tie him up! Cut his balls off!”

As the barricade of troops gave way, U.S. soldiers rushed Constant into a car, while hundreds of jeering Haitians chased after it, spitting and beating on the windows. At the time, U. S. authorities insisted to reporters that the speech was meant to foster “reconciliation,” but a senior official told me later that it had been a disaster: “Here we were protecting him from the Haitians when we were supposed to be protecting the Haitians from him.”

Throughout the occupation, ensconced in his house, where, he says, U.S. soldiers routinely came by to check on his safety, Constant tried to reinvent his past. “We’re the ones who kept this country secure for a year,” he told reporters, adding, “Aristide needs an opposition, and . . . I am the only organization right now that . . . can allow us to say there is a democracy.” But the incoming government took a different view—and within a few months Constant was ordered to appear before a magistrate investigating charges of torture and attempted murder against him. On the day of the hearing, people saying they were victims waited for Constant outside the courtroom. He never appeared. Later, he told me that on Christmas Eve of 1994, with a small suitcase and what money he could stuff into his pockets, he had crossed the border on foot into the Dominican Republic, made his way to the airport, and then, using a valid visitor’s visa that he had obtained before the coup, caught a plane to Puerto Rico. From there, he flew to the mainland United States without incident, ending up days later on the streets of New York City.

He managed to transmit a radio broadcast to his followers back home. “As for you
FRAPH
members,” he said, “close ranks, remain mobilized.” He went on, “
FRAPH
people, where are you?
FRAPH
is you.
FRAPH
is me.” The Haitian government demanded that the United States do something. Finally, in March, 1995, Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, saying, “Nothing short of Mr. Constant’s removal from the United States can protect our foreign policy interests in Haiti.”

Two months later, saying that Constant had been allowed to enter the country owing to a “bureaucratic error,” I.N.S. officials surrounded him in Queens as he went to buy a pack of cigarettes. They forced him to the ground and frisked him. He was taken to Wicomico County Detention Center, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; in September, a judge ordered his deportation to Haiti. As he waited for the outcome of his appeal, he wrote letters to world leaders, including Nelson Mandela. (“I could not hope to fill one of your footprints, yet here am I writing to one of the few men in all the world that could understand my situation, being in a white man’s jail.”) He grew a beard, and read Malcolm X and Che Guevara. “I am . . . a political prisoner,” he wrote in a letter to Warren Christopher. At one point, he was placed on a suicide watch.

Then, in December of 1995, as the I.N.S. inched closer to deporting him, Constant decided to play the only card he had left. He threatened to divulge details of U.S. covert operations in Haiti, which he said he had learned about while secretly working for the Central Intelligence Agency.

T
HE
P
ERFECT
R
ECRUIT

The story Constant tells begins around Christmastime, 1991. It was shortly after the coup, and he was working at Haiti’s military headquarters when Colonel Pat Collins, the U.S. military attaché at the Embassy, phoned and asked him to lunch. “Let’s meet at the Holiday Inn,” Collins said.

Collins, who, a government spokesman confirmed, was working for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, could not be reached for comment. But an associate says he was known to show up often at Haitian military headquarters. Constant says Collins was there on the night of the coup. And Lynn Garrison, a Canadian who served as a strategist and an adviser to the junta, told me that Collins was present in the days that followed, conferring with the new regime.

At the Holiday Inn, Constant says, he and Collins sat by a window overlooking the pool. Many people, Collins said, were impressed by Constant’s background and suggested that Constant might play an important role in the power vacuum left by Aristide’s ouster.

Constant was a tempting choice for recruitment by U.S. intelligence. He spoke impeccable English, knew his way around the military, and, as one of the new regime’s top advisers, occupied an office right next to that of the junta’s head, Raoul Cedras. Since the coup, Constant had taught a course on the dangers of Aristide’s liberation theology at the training site for the National Intelligence Service (
S.I.N
.). The service, according to the New York Times, had been created, funded, trained, and equipped by the C.I.A., starting in 1986, to combat drug trafficking, but it had quickly become an instrument of terror (and even, according to some U.S. officials, a source of drugs).

Constant says that Collins told him, in this first meeting, that he wanted him to meet someone else at Collins’s home. “I’m not going alone,” Constant remembers saying, only half joking. “I’m going to come with a witness.” He says that he and an associate drove to Collins’s residence that night. Although the streets were pitch-black, owing to a fuel shortage, Collins’s house was completely lit up. Constant says they went upstairs, into a small antechamber next to the master bedroom, where a man with dark hair was waiting. He had on a short-sleeved shirt, and Constant noted his muscles. “I’m Donald Terry,” the man said.

Constant says that, as they sat drinking cocktails, Terry began to pepper him with questions about the stability of the current military regime, and pulled out a booklet—“a roster”—containing the names and backgrounds of officers in the Haitian armed forces. He and Collins asked Constant who were the most effective.

A few days later, Constant says, Terry asked to meet again, this time alone at the Kinam Hotel. “Why don’t you join the team?” Terry asked.

“What’s the team?”

“A group of people working for the benefit of Haiti.”

It was then, Constant says, that Terry divulged that he was an agent of the C.I.A.

The U. S. government will not comment on any questions regarding Donald Terry, and Terry himself could not be reached. But the C.I.A. had been deeply involved with the Haitian military and the country’s politics for decades. Constant remembers that, in the nineteen-sixties, his father served as an informal adviser to an agent who used to stop by for conferences on their porch. According to press reports, the agency, after starting
S.I
.N., had planned to finance various political candidates in the 1987 Presidential elections, until the Senate Intelligence Committee vetoed the plan.

Constant says that eventually he agreed to serve as a conduit between the Haitian military regime and U.S. intelligence. He says he was then given the code name Gamal, after Egypt’s former nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he admired, and a two-way radio, with which he checked in regularly.

It is impossible to confirm all the details in Constant’s account. A C.I.A. spokesman stated that it was “not our policy” to confirm or deny relationships with any individuals. But there is little doubt that Constant was a paid informant. After Allan Nairn first reported Constant’s connection to the intelligence community, in The Nation in October of 1994, several officials acknowledged it to reporters, and many have confirmed it to me. What has been a mystery is the nature of the relationship: just how big an asset was Constant? U.S. authorities have maintained that he was nothing more than a two-bit snitch. But interviews with several people connected to the intelligence community, coupled with Constant’s own version of events, suggest that from the beginning he was a generous font of information, and later, according to at least some, a full-fledged operative. After the coup, he helped run a little-known operation called the Bureau of Information and Coordination
(BIC),
which collected various kinds of data: the number of deaths and arrests in Haiti, the number of adherents of liberation theology, and so forth. Constant says the data collection was for the purposes of economic development, but it clearly had another purpose: military intelligence.

According to Constant, and to a non-Haitian connected to the intelligence community, Constant and another
BIC
member were the first to enter one of Aristide’s private quarters, where they found a hoard of secret documents. Some of these ended up in the hands of U.S. intelligence officers, who in turn provided the documentation for controversial reports claiming that Aristide was mentally unbalanced, contributing to the voices against him in the United States.

A former senior C.I.A. official justified using an informant who was as potentially problematic as Constant thus: “You can’t help these bad guys accomplish stuff, but you got to give ’em money to find out what’s happening in groups like that. And if you’re going to recruit in a terrorist group like
FRAPH,
you’re not going to get any functional equivalent . . . [of] a Western democrat. . . . To find out what’s going on, you rather rapidly end up in the same position as the F.B.I. with the Mafia—recruiting and paying money and even granting freedom to lower-level folks, even some high-level folks.”

Another former high-ranking government intelligence official put it more bluntly: “Look, we could have gone to the nuns [in Haiti] and asked them [to give us information]. But I’m sorry—the nuns are nice people, but what they know about terrorism is nothing.” This same official observed that Constant was “one of a whole range of people we had relationships with, all with the knowledge of the Administration.” He said he believed that Constant stood somewhere “on the spectrum of the relationship, from someone who talked to you occasionally to tell you things he wanted you to know to someone who was a wholly owned, salaried subsidiary, who provided information even to the detriment of his cause.”

Constant says that by the time he officially created
FRAPH,
in 1993, he had been assigned another handler, John Kambourian, who would drive with him through the mountains of Petionville, exchanging information. When I reached Kambourian by telephone and asked him about Constant, he told me to speak to Public Affairs at the State Department and hung up. It remains unclear how involved U.S. intelligence officers were, if at all, in the actual formation and evolution of
FRAPH.
A C.I.A. spokesman stated for the record that the “CIA. had no role in creating, funding, or guiding the
FRAPH
organization.”