CIA censored me to avoid embarrassment, says ex-οfficer

V.L. Montesinos

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
More than a month after Secrecy News reported the legal victory of a former CIA agent, who managed to have a censored report he wrote about the CIA’s dirty dealings in Peru declassified, a US news outlet has finally given some attention to the story. On August 4 (see previous intelNews reporting), Secrecy News revealed that a memorandum drafted in 2001 by CIA officer Franz Boening, detailing assistance illegally provided by the CIA to the then chief of Peruvian intelligence, had finally been declassified following an eight-year court battle. In the censored memorandum, Boening argued that the Agency violated US law by providing material and political assistance to Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos Torres, a graduate of the US Army’s School of the Americas and longtime CIA operative, who headed Peru’s Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (SIN) under the corrupt administration of President Alberto Fujimori. Fujimori is now in prison, as is Montesinos himself. But in 2001, the CIA Inspector General, to whom Boening’s memorandum was addressed, took no action in response to the officer’s allegations. What is more, the CIA proceeded to classify Boening’s memorandum, claiming that its disclosure “reasonably could be expected to cause damage to national security”. Boening then took the Agency to court, arguing that his memorandum was completely based on open sources. In August, eight years after he drafted the memorandum, the CIA finally agreed to declassify it, and has permitted its release with minor reductions. The memorandum is now available here (.pdf). However, although this news made headlines in Peru and other Latin American nations, not a single report about it saw the light of day in the mainstream US press, with the exception of Wednesday’s brief article in The Miami Herald. The paper recounts the story of the memo’s declassification and hosts a one-line comment by Boening, who was apparently contacted by the paper at his West Virginia home: namely that the CIA classified his memorandum “because it did not want to be publicly embarrassed”. No kidding…