THE END OF THE VIGIL

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

In the end, the hunger strikes--those days of living on water and an electrolyte solution, those sleepless nights on a foam pad in front of the National Palace in Guatemala City and outside the White House--did win Jennifer Harbury some answers. Last week she learned of an intelligence report linking the death of her husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a comandante in the Guatemalan guerrilla forces, to a Guatemalan army colonel who had once been a paid informant for the CIA. She said, "The truth shall make you free."

In this case, though, much of the truth remains in shadow. Harbury, a Harvard-educated lawyer, had been pressuring the U.S. and Guatemalan governments to determine the fate of her husband, who disappeared in the Guatemalan jungle in March 1992. Although U.S. officials told her several times they believed Bamaca was dead, they gave her no definitive answers; they insist they have none. Nor did they mention any possible CIA involvement. That detail emerged only after Congressman Robert Torricelli, a Democrat from New Jersey and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, learned from sources of his own that in January the CIA had sent the State Department and White House a report containing an allegation that Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, once a paid CIA asset, may have played a role in Bamaca's death. Alpirez may also be linked to the 1990 murder of Michael DeVine, an American innkeeper in Guatemala. Torricelli claims that the CIA knew since 1992 of both Bamaca's death and its own involvement--a claim the CIA vehemently denies--and that the State Department had been "complicitous." "When an embarrassment to the CIA is weighed against informing an American family about the death of someone they love and apprehending a murderer," Torricelli said, "it shouldn't be a close call."

In reality, the issue of who knew what, and when, remains a tangled one. The CIA says it has engineered no cover-up. "When we had credible information, we shared it with the right folks," says a CIA official, "not fractionated and fragmentary [information] and rumors." But Torricelli's charges have sparked a furor: the President has vowed to fire anyone responsible for withholding information from the Administration.

That may not be enough for Harbury, 43, who has spent the past five years on a tumultuous personal odyssey. In 1990 she went to Guatemala to research human-rights violations. There she met Bamaca, whose nom de guerre was Everardo; the couple were married in a common-law ceremony in Austin, Texas, in September 1991. Soon after his March 1992 disappearance, she was told by Guatemalan military authorities that Bamaca had committed suicide rather than be captured and tortured by the army. But Harbury believed her husband was still alive and pressed for proof of his fate. In August 1993, authorities exhumed the body of a man they claimed was Bamaca; an autopsy revealed it was someone else.

Harbury's publicity campaign swung into high gear last October. She staged a 32-day hunger strike outside the Guatemalan presidential palace, which she ended when National Security Adviser Anthony Lake agreed to look into the matter. On January 25, the CIA provided the State Department with what White House spokesman Mike McCurry now calls "new information"--information about Alpirez that was at the very least potent enough to prompt the CIA to begin an internal investigation. (The CIA station chief in Guatemala was recalled to Washington around the time the inquiry began.) Concurrently, Harbury was told that the U.S. was "doing everything we could to encourage the Guatemalan military authorities to investigate," according to McCurry. According to the Washington Post, Secretary of State Warren Christopher sent a cable to the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala Marilyn McAffee saying he had "credible" reports of Bamaca being sighted on several occasions inside a military camp, including stories from another guerrilla who reportedly witnessed Bamaca being tortured. On March 7, McAfee informed Harbury that Bamaca was dead but that there was no information regarding how or when. Three days later, Washington said it would stop funding training of the Guatemalan army, citing human-rights violations.

On March 21, Torricelli learned of the Alpirez connection. CIA files reveal that Alpirez became a CIA informer in the 1980s and spent a year at the School of the Americas, an elite U.S. program for foreign soldiers. He remained on the CIA payroll until sometime in 1992, around the same time Bamaca was captured and then killed.

In Guatemala last week, President Ramiro de Leon Carpio said the military will investigate the allegations against Alpirez. The colonel, now second in command at an army base in Guatemala City, has not made a statement of any kind. For her part, Harbury is planning to file a lawsuit once the threads of responsibility are sorted out. She may have learned the truth. That, however, is not the same as having all the answers.

--Reported by Nina Burleigh and Elaine Shannon/Washington and Trish O'Kane/Guatemala City

With reporting by NINA BURLEIGH AND ELAINE SHANNON/ WASHINGTON AND TRISH O''KANE/GUATEMALA CITY