March  29, 1990

Investigators in Puerto Rico Murder Case Say FBI Agents Impeded Earlier Inquiry

Paul M. Barrett

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- A murder case that has roiled this island commonwealth for 12 years is leading to larger questions about Washington's role in the affair.

Investigators for the Puerto Rican Senate are charging that Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, in effect, helped conceal the truth about the July 1978 murder of two young pro-independence radicals at a mountaintop site known as Cerro Maravilla. The two, Carlos Soto Arrivi and Arnaldo Dario Rosado, were slain after an undercover policeman lured them into a purported terrorist bombing attempt.

In 1983 and 1984, Puerto Rican Senate hearings broke the murder and police cover-up case, eliciting recantations and confessions from police participants and other witnesses and leading to local homicide charges. Ultimately, 10 policemen were convicted on federal perjury and local second-degree-murder charges.

But now, among other things, the investigators -- who include Samuel Dash, the former chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee -- are looking into a question that has spawned more than a decade of conspiracy theories here: Did the Carter administration go slow on investigating Cerro Maravilla as part of a deal to secure the political backing of the island's former governor, Carlos Romero Barcelo? Former members of the Carter administration, current and former officials at the Justice Department and FBI, and Mr. Romero, all deny any wrongdoing.

Mr. Romero, whose New Progressive Party advocates making Puerto Rico a state, sees political motivation in the actions of the Senate, which is controlled by the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party. The former governor, who was defeated in 1984, charges the PDP with plotting to influence coming elections, including a plebecite on the island's future status scheduled for next year.

Mr. Romero is particularly enraged at Mr. Dash, who openly suggests that Mr. Romero as well as the FBI obstructed earlier investigations. "He went way out of his bounds," says Mr. Romero, struggling to maintain his composure during an interview. "I am against capital punishment. . . . I would much less authorize or condone anybody who did it on their own."

PDP leaders, though, blame the long delay in assembling the investigation on the former Romero government's interference and the U.S. Justice Department's continuing refusal to surrender internal records. "Both the federal and local people have fought tooth and nail not to reveal anything," says Mr. Dash.

The Puerto Rican Senate's president, Miguel Hernandez Agosto, plans to subpoena testimony from current and former federal officials. A senior Justice Department official says similar subpoenas from Puerto Rico have been ignored in the past, and that "a territorial legislature can't really investigate the behavior of a federal agency." But Rep. Don Edwards (D., Calif.), who heads the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, says he would consider holding hearings in Washington if Puerto Rican lawmakers disclose evidence of significant federal misconduct.

The Senate investigators' main allegation is that the FBI's San Juan office, possibly in league with FBI headquarters and the Justice Department, for years resisted doing anything more than repetitive, pro forma investigations, even after it appeared that Puerto Rican police had lied about how the deaths occurred.

The investigators won't discuss the specific leads they're chasing. But internal U.S. government documents they are reviewing depict, at a minimum, a lack of FBI resolve to pursue the case.

On Nov. 17, 1978, for example, the San Juan FBI office told headquarters "it would be highly unadvisable to conduct any active investigation in this matter, as to do so would undermine the credibility of the Commonwealth investigation as well as the POPR (Police of Puerto Rico) and be inimical to liaison with POPR."

Three days later, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division set aside its earlier instructions to conduct a "limited" federal investigation and directed instead that the FBI's inquiry should be reduced "to submission of newspaper articles."

On Nov. 24, the FBI closed the case altogether, according to a subsequent internal memo. In that document, dated March 17, 1979, the FBI's civil-rights section chief noted, "The {U.S. Justice} Department concurred with U.S. Attorney, Puerto Rico, that a full preliminary investigation was inadvisable as such investigation would be seized upon by elements of the press in an attempt to discredit the government of Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth Department of Justice and the police."

In April 1979, the U.S. Justice Department suddenly reversed itself and ordered the FBI to conduct an expanded investigation. Throughout that spring, the FBI's San Juan office interviewed Puerto Rican police associated with the Cerro Maravilla operation. But the documents also show that U.S. agents relied on a Puerto Rican police commander named Angel Perez Casillas -- himself a chief suspect in the case -- to help organize the interviews. In 1985, he was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

The FBI's chief spokesman, Robert Davenport, insists that "the San Juan office aggressively pursued" the Cerro Maravilla case.

James Turner, the Justice Department's senior career civil-rights official who supervised the department's role in the affair, says that separate U.S. grand juries convened in late 1979 and late 1980 were disbanded without being asked for indictments because there wasn't sufficient evidence at the time. "In hindsight, you could be suspicious" of the FBI's resistance to investigating the matter, he says. But "this happens on occasion: The FBI local branch will in good faith suggest that a requested investigation is not necessary because of local information -- that they know the local actors."

Mr. Turner denies there was ever any pressure from the Carter White House to move slowly on Cerro Maravilla. Nevertheless, the Puerto Rican Senate investigators are exploring the question because of circumstantial evidence -- principally separate December 1979 meetings then-Gov. Romero had with President Carter and Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti. Shortly after, Mr. Romero, who had previously been associated with Republicans, endorsed Mr. Carter in his primary-election struggle with Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Mr. Romero and Mr. Civiletti both deny making any deals about the case. "I didn't get involved, directly or indirectly, with" any aspect, says the former attorney general.

Mr. Civiletti does recall that there "were some assertions that guys who were there  (in the FBI's San Juan Office) were too friendly with the local police." In response, he says "we sent in some new agents" from other offices, but "even with that, they didn't come up with anything."