CIA SHRINKS PAYROLL FOR INFORMANTS : BRUTAL AGENTS OF MARGINAL SPYING VALUE DUMPED, AGENCY SAYS.

Byline: The New York Times

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 past two years focused heavily on its Latin American division, which has had on its payroll hundreds of military officers and government officials in countries like Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Panama.

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

The CIA has also cashiered government officials, military officers and private citizens with criminal histories from the payrolls of its covert-operations divisions covering the Middle East, Africa and Asia, the officials said.

The CIA's purge of people whose crimes outweighed their usefulness as informers was part of a larger review that has resulted in the dismissal of hundreds more agents, as the CIA calls its foreign informers. These agents may also have committed crimes, but they were let go primarily because the quality of their information did not justify keeping them on the payroll after the Cold War, one official said. The Washington Post first reported the discharges on Sunday.

The worldwide review began in 1994 under the former director of central Intelligence, James Woolsey Jr., and gathered steam in 1995 under his successor, John Deutch. The ``scrub,'' as it was called inside the agency, was resisted by some station chiefs and covert operators who argued, in effect, that they could not recruit saints to spy on sinners, that it takes a thief to catch a thief.

But it was pressed by Deutch and his general counsel, Jeffrey Smith, who argued that if the CIA had to dine with the devil, it should bring a long spoon.

Deutch explained the thinking behind the scrub in a September 1995 speech. CIA officers had always been rated for the quantity, not the quality, of the foreign agents they recruited. As a consequence, the agency had sometimes hired agents ``blindly, without thorough vetting and established procedures for accountability,'' Deutch said.

The scrub was ``a rigorous evaluation of each one of the agents we recruit,'' he said.