Constant says that by the time he officially created FRAPH, in 1993, he had been assigned another handler, John Kambourian, who would drive with him through the mountains of Petionville, exchanging information. When I reached Kambourian by telephone and asked him about Constant, he told me to speak to Public Affairs at the State Department and hung up. It remains unclear how involved U.S. intelligence officers were, if at all, in the actual formation and evolution of FRAPH. A C.I.A. spokesman stated for the record that the “CIA. had no role in creating, funding, or guiding the FRAPH organization.”
But Lynn Garrison recalls that when Constant was trying to start a secret police force, even before FRAPH, Collins told Garrison directly, “Let’s let it play out and see where it takes us.” A U.S. government official involved with Haiti during the military regime goes even further, saying it was common knowledge in intelligence circles that Collins was involved with FRAPH long before it became an official organization (by which time Collins had left the country). “If he didn’t found FRAPH, he was at least very, very close to it,” this official told me. Trying to explain why the C.I.A. or the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.) might form such an alliance, this official added, “People are always looking for counterbalance, and at that point Aristide was not in power. I’m not excusing it, but they didn’t quite know what FRAPH was going to become.”
Despite the existence, at the time, of internal State Department documents portraying the organization’s members as thugs and assassins, Constant says that his handlers never asked him about FRAPH’S alleged rapes and murders. What’s more, he says, the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. encouraged him to help derail Aristide’s return and even knew beforehand about his demonstrations against the Harlan County, which helped to delay the invasion for nearly a year. A C.I.A. spokesman denied to me that the agency pushed its own foreign-policy goals in Haiti, but Lawrence Pezzullo, the U.S. envoy to Haiti at the time, along with other U.S. officials, publicly accused the C.I.A. of exaggerating the threat of the Harlan County, thereby derailing Aristide’s return and, in essence, pursuing its own agenda. Constant told me, “If I’m guilty of all these things they say, then they are guilty of them, too.”
THE BREAKUP
Toto Constant’s relationship with U.S. intelligence, according to both Constant and several C.I.A. officials, continued undisturbed until the spring of 1994. It was then, Constant says, that Kambourian called and said they had to meet. He told Constant to bring the radio. “I’m sorry,” Constant remembers Kambourian saying, “but we can’t see you anymore.”
“Why?” Constant asked.
Kambourian said that, in the wake of the Harlan County incident and Constant’s rhetoric against the President, Washington wanted to sever its ties.
U. S. officials say that intelligence contacts with Constant were more or less cut at this point. Cooperation between FRAPH and the U.S. military was eventually curbed as well, and in October of 1994 American forces stormed FRAPH headquarters. Afraid for his life, Constant went to meet Lieutenant General Henry Shelton, who was in charge of the occupation. Constant recalls, “I told Shelton straight out, ‘I’m a son of a general, and I inherited his honor and dignity, and that’s why I’m here to ask what the rules of engagement are, because I don’t understand them.’”
According to a transcript of an oral history that General Shelton recorded during the invasion, Shelton had no desire to meet with Constant. But Shelton and Major General David Meade decided to see if they could get from him what they wanted: first, that he provide a complete list of FRAPH members and the location of their weapons caches; second, that he call each one of his key thugs and tell them to surrender their arms; and, third, that he publicly accept Aristide’s return and transform FRAPH into a peaceful political party.
“We were using a little bit of psychological warfare on Constant,” Shelton, in his oral history, disclosed. “I sent Meade in first. Meade was to go in and tell [Constant] that he was getting ready to meet the big guy… I gave Meade about twenty or thirty minutes to set the conditions, and then I arrived and my security guy, the SEAL,entered the room… rattling the doors and kicking on doors to make sure the place was secure before I came in, as they always did. But Constant saw all this, and it was kind of like seeing a meeting with the Godfather being set up… and so he got very nervous at that time, and his eyes got very big.” It was then, Shelton said, that Meade walked out and he walked in. “[Constant] immediately stood up and smiled and stuck out his hand, at which time I just said to myself, ‘Remember two things-force and death they understand.’ So I looked at him and I said, ‘Sit down!’ and he immediately sat down, and the smile left his face… and I said to him, ‘I understand that you have agreed to all the conditions that we have set for you to keep us from hunting you down and members of your organization.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes, yes, I have no problem with any of that.’ And then he started, ‘But Haiti is… ’ And he started into his role about the history of Haiti and how important the FRAPH is. I let him get about ten seconds into that, and I cut him off and told him very curtly that I was not interested in hearing any of that right now.”
The next day, Constant gave the speech accepting Aristide’s return and casting himself as the new leader of the democratic opposition. According to a highly placed U. S. official, the speech was outlined by Constant’s old C.I.A. contact, Kambourian, and handed over to the U.S. Embassy, which in turn dictated it to Constant, who apparently accepted it without his usual bravado. “He could have been imprisoned,” the official told me, “but the judgment was made that as long as we could get out of him what we wanted it would be O.K. for him to walk around.”
General Shelton may have wanted little to do with Constant, but other elements of the U. S. government seem to have done more than just keep an eye on him. Immigration authorities told me it was “impossible to believe,” as one put it, and “totally bogus,” as another said, that Constant could have entered the United States at that time on a valid visa without help from either someone in the U.S. government or forged documents. “Everyone knew he was a killer,” a former I.N.S. official says. “His picture was everywhere.” Constant told me that he did alert certain U.S. officials before he left, and “it’s possible they did something.” A high-ranking intelligence-community source, although not commenting directly on Constant’s case, said, “On the high end of the spectrum, the director of the C.I.A. can bring in fifty to a hundred people in the top spy category. These are people to whom we owe a lot, because they have risked their lives doing things of great value to our nation, so it is [if] you want to get out, we will get you out; you want to get in, we will get you in, get you a house, whatever… Lower down, you can do everything from a little help around the edges to supplying visas.”
HOW TOTO GOT SPRUNG
Sitting in Wicomico County Detention Center, on the verge of being deported with the full support of the State Department and the I.N.S., Constant leveraged the potential exposure of his old connections to save himself. Threatening to divulge the details of his relationship with the C.I.A., he filed a fifty-million-dollar lawsuit against Warren Christopher and Janet Reno for wrongful imprisonment. “C.I.A. operatives collaborated with the Plaintiff,” his lawyer maintained in the suit. To underscore his warning, Constant appeared on “60 Minutes” in December of 1995 in his prison jumpsuit. “I feel like that beautiful woman that everybody wants to go to bed with at night, but not during the daytime,” he told Ed Bradley. “I want everybody to know that we are dating.”