Sen. Kerry Accuses CIA on Haiti Policy : Congress: He sees a ‘perfidious’ effort. But the agency is getting ‘a bad rap,’ DeConcini says.

WASHINGTON —  Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass) and other Democrats charged Thursday that CIA officials tried to sabotage President Clinton’s policy on Haiti by describing exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide as mentally unstable, but the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said the CIA was “getting a bad rap.”

“It is very clear to me that a very concerted and dangerous effort has been engaged in by some people within the framework of the CIA,” Kerry said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. “I don’t brand the entire CIA. . . . But there is no doubt that individuals within that agency are engaging in a separate foreign policy track.”

Kerry charged that CIA officers had deliberately given a secret personality profile of Aristide--branding the Haitian leader “mentally unstable”--to the Clinton Administration’s opponents “in an effort to run a course counter to the policy of this country.”

“That is a very perfidious, dangerous undertaking,” Kerry said.

But Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), the intelligence panel’s chairman, said he had investigated and found the CIA blameless.

“I think the CIA may be getting a bad rap. . . ,” DeConcini said in a written statement. “We have no information suggesting any concerted effort by the CIA to weaken or discredit President Aristide since he was elected president of Haiti.”

He also said that some of the conclusions in the CIA’s analysis are “debatable” but added that there is no evidence that the analysis was deliberately distorted.

DeConcini said the committee asked CIA officials about a report in The Times that the agency attempted to support Aristide’s opponents in Haiti’s 1988 election. “While we are continuing to investigate the allegations in question, we have no evidence that the CIA sought to prevent Mr. Aristide from coming to power,” he said. Aristide himself did not run in 1988.

The issue of the CIA and Haiti arose after Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) said in a Senate speech last month that the CIA had pronounced Aristide a “psychopath.”

Other officials confirmed that a top CIA intelligence analyst gave senators a closed-door briefing suggesting that Aristide suffered from psychiatric disorders.

The Clinton Administration has been working to restore Aristide to power despite resistance from the military officers who overthrew the Roman Catholic priest, Haiti’s first freely elected president, in 1991.

While the controversy over Aristide’s fitness as a leader has had no concrete effect on the Administration’s policy, it has forced Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other officials to spend more time defending their basic approach--as Christopher did at Thursday’s hearing.

“We have had the benefit of a good deal of personal contact with President Aristide since he’s been here in this country,” Christopher said. “And based upon that and the totality of the evidence, we think he’s worthy of our support.”

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Helms launched a fiery attack on both the policy and Christopher, charging that the secretary was covering up facts.

“It was well-known that Aristide was a murderer,” he charged, referring to allegations that as Haitian president he had ordered the deaths of some of his political opponents. “You knew all of that. . . . Yet somebody decided to return him to power at the risk, if necessary, of American lives.”