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WASHINGTON - Rick Nuccio's life changed for good the moment he saw a CIA report linking a spy in the Guatemalan military to the murders of one American citizen and another American's husband.
"It felt like somebody had stabbed an icicle into my heart," Nuccio recalls of the winter's day in 1995 when a superior called him into his State Department office, sat him down, and showed him the secret document.
For months, Nuccio had dreaded that the death of lawyer Jennifer Harbury's husband was the human rights case that could wreck the pending settlement of a decades-old civil conflict in Guatemala.
Suddenly, the incriminating memo made that threat real — and made mid-level diplomat Nuccio an unwitting purveyor of official lies about the case. Now the only question, to Nuccio's way of thinking, was whether the Clinton administration would join in the CIA coverup.
Not if I can help it, he resolved.
Today Nuccio looks back at his ordeal from the serenity of a new life at Salve Regina University, off Newport's sumptuous Bellevue Avenue. As the first director of the Pell Center for International Relations, he can hike the Cliff Walk, bike the Ten Mile Drive, and indulge his lifelong love of the sea. He can also laugh, in retrospect, at how naive he was about his government's entanglement with one of the most brutal dictatorships of the Cold War.
Surely we will do the right thing here, if only I can explain the facts to those in authority, Nuccio recalls having thought more than once as his career lurched into the realm of Kafka. More than once, he recalls with a grim chuckle, events proved him wrong.
Nuccio traces his innocence to his roots as the first kid on either side of a working-class New Jersey family to go to college. His father, who ran a printing press, saw that the front office guys who worked easier shifts and drove better cars were guys with college degrees.
"Why you went to college or what they did to you there, we didn't know," says Nuccio. He got hooked on Latin American affairs during a course at the University of Massachusetts that was packed with "generals and dictators and strange stories from south of the border." He took his master's at Stanford, returned to Amherst for doctoral work with his old UMass professor and went to Madrid to research his Ph.D. thesis (on the longevity of Francisco Franco's reign).
Amid the routines of daily life there were glimpses of the underground: car bombings by Basque terrorists; banned political meetings disguised as academic book parties. The blue-collar kid from Paramus was grateful for his American freedoms but drawn to this hidden world of intrigue.
His career path led from a teaching job at Williams College to a stint in a Washington think tank and, in time, policy slots on Capitol Hill and in the Clinton administration.
Nuccio hardly looks the part of a whistle-blowing hero of the left. Tall and fit, with thick black eyebrows, a high dome and rimless spectacles, he could play the stonewalling CIA heavy in a TV spy thriller. But when Nuccio talks — earnestly and in short, clean phrases that are notably free of jargon — he begins to make sense as the truth-telling idealist.
As a political appointee in the State Department, Nuccio became acquainted — if not quite comfortable — with the necessary hypocrisies of politics. He was a Guatemalan specialist during the peace talks between the dictatorship and its guerrilla foes, when Jennifer Harbury entered his life.
She was bent on exposing the truth about the death of her husband, Efrain Bamaca, a Guatemalan rebel leader, in March of 1992. She scoffed at the official word that he had killed himself in battle.
It fell to Nuccio to meet with Harbury in the spring of 1994 and tell her what the official record showed: no evidence of foul play in Bamaca's death. At this point, he saw her aggressiveness, her "somewhat strange" personality and her pro-rebel viewpoint as potential liabilities to the peace process.
But Harbury — intense, articulate, good-looking — attracted enough celebrity support and press attention to force a State Department review of the case in the fall of 1994. With Harbury on a well-publicized hunger strike, Nuccio undertook a fresh search for records of her husband's death.
"It shouldn't be more than a page long," he remembers telling his boss of his report.
But a colleague unearthed a 1993 CIA report from sources in the Guatemalan military. It lent credence to Harbury's claim that two surviving rebels had seen Bamaca captured and tortured. Some of Nuccio's hard-boiled friends at the State Department urged him not to fret about the inconclusive report. But he felt a sense of foreboding as he pressed his own demands for answers.
Then came the chilling revelation of February 1995: Documentation of a CIA relationship with Guatemalan Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, who had participated in Bamaca's torture and, possibly, murder.
Suddenly, Nuccio saw that he had unwittingly misled Harbury and — more gravely — the CIA's congressional overseers. "This document made me a liar" in denying any U.S. link to the death of Harbury's husband. Not only that, it also tied Alpirez to the long-buried killing of an American innkeeper named Michael Devine in 1990.
The reason for Devine's killing was never clear. U.S. officials have speculated that Devine may have stumbled across smugglers, but his widow has described a confrontation in which Devine ejected from his restaurant a drunken Guatemalan army officer who threatened to retaliate.
The discovery of a CIA coverup prompted Nuccio to alert then-Rep. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., whom he had earlier assured that Harbury's claims were groundless. Torricelli leaked the story to the press, and two CIA officials were fired. The coverup was scotched, preventing potential harm to the peace process and the Clinton administration.
But the story didn't end as happily for Nuccio, who was stripped of his security clearance after "Star Chamber proceedings," as he described them in a resignation letter to President Clinton.
"I believed that in taking on such controversial assignments as ... Guatemala I could count on my Administration when the inevitable controversies arose," he wrote Mr. Clinton in February 1997. "I was mistaken."
The administration offered Nuccio a chance to reapply for his clearance but he considered that an empty gesture, since he was not offered a job.
Nuccio has landed on his feet at the Pell Center, which he hopes will produce research, debate, and writing that contributes to the shaping of foreign policy.
And he plans to take sailing lessons.
Meanwhile, Nuccio has already enjoyed the sort of minor personal triumph that will help to put his bureaucratic nightmare to rest — and perhaps irritate his enemies in the CIA.
Last week, he returned to Guatemala for the first time since the U.S.-brokered peace agreement — a guest of the new government of President Alfonso Portilla.
The new president wanted advice from Rick Nuccio — who paid with his career for defying a CIA coverup — on how to open up a fledgling democracy to the scrutiny of the Guatemalan people.
John E. Mulligan is chief of the Washington bureau of The Providence Journal. He can be reached by e-mail at jmulligan@belo-dc.com
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