“If I find myself in disagreement with President Aristide,” Constant pressed on, his voice now cracking, “I pledge to work as a member of loyal opposition within the framework of a legal democracy.”

  “Handcuff him!” people yelled from the crowd. “Tie him up! Cut his balls off!”

  As the barricade of troops gave way, U.S. soldiers rushed Constant into a car, while hundreds of jeering Haitians chased after it, spitting and beating on the windows. At the time, U.S. authorities insisted to reporters that the speech was meant to foster “reconciliation,” but a senior official told me later that it had been a disaster: “Here we were protecting him from the Haitians when we were supposed to be protecting the Haitians from him.”

  Within a few months, Constant was ordered to appear before a Haitian magistrate investigating charges of torture and attempted murder against him. On the day of the hearing, people saying they were victims waited for Constant outside the courtroom. He never appeared. Later, he told me that on Christmas Eve of 1994, with a small suitcase and what money he could stuff into his pockets, he had crossed the border on foot into the Dominican Republic, made his way to the airport, and then, using a valid visitor’s visa that he had obtained before the coup, caught a plane to Puerto Rico. From there, he flew to the mainland United States without incident, ending up days later on the streets of New York City.

  He managed to transmit a radio broadcast to his followers back home. “As for you FRAPH members,” he said, “close ranks, remain mobilized.” He went on, “FRAPH people, where are you? FRAPH is you. FRAPH is me.” The Haitian government demanded that the United States do something. Finally, in March, 1995, Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, saying, “Nothing short of Mr. Constant’s removal from the United States can protect our foreign policy interests in Haiti.”

  Two months later, saying that Constant had been allowed to enter the country owing to a “bureaucratic error,” I.N.S. officials surrounded him in Queens as he went to buy a pack of cigarettes. He was taken to Wicomico County Detention Center, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; in September, a judge ordered his deportation to Haiti. As he waited for the outcome of his appeal, he wrote letters to world leaders, including Nelson Mandela. (“I could not hope to fill one of your footprints, yet here am I writing to one of the few men in all the world that could understand my situation, being in a white man’s jail.”) He grew a beard, and read Malcolm X and Che Guevara. “I am … a political prisoner,” he wrote in a letter to Warren Christopher. At one point, he was placed on a suicide watch.

  Then, in December of 1995, as the I.N.S. inched closer to deporting him, Constant decided to play the only card he had left. He threatened to divulge details of U.S. covert operations in Haiti, which he said he had learned about while secretly working for the Central Intelligence Agency.

  THE PERFECT RECRUIT

  The story Constant tells begins around Christmastime, 1991. It was shortly after the coup, and he was working at Haiti’s military headquarters when Colonel Pat Collins, the U.S. military attaché at the Embassy, phoned and asked him to lunch. “Let’s meet at the Holiday Inn,” Collins said.

  Collins, who, a government spokesman confirmed, was working for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, could not be reached for comment. But an associate says he was known to show up often at Haitian military headquarters. Constant says Collins was there on the night of the coup. And Lynn Garrison, a Canadian who served as a strategist and an adviser to the junta, told me that Collins was present in the days that followed, conferring with the new regime.

  At the Holiday Inn, Constant says, he and Collins sat by a window overlooking the pool. Many people, Collins said, were impressed by Constant’s background and suggested that Constant might play an important role in the power vacuum left by Aristide’s ouster.

  Constant was a tempting choice for recruitment by U.S. intelligence. He spoke impeccable English, knew his way around the military, and, as one of the new regime’s top advisers, occupied an office right next to that of the junta’s head, Raoul Cedras. Since the coup, Constant had taught a course on the dangers of Aristide’s liberation theology at the training site for the National Intelligence Service (S.I.N.). The service, according to The New York Times, had been created, funded, trained, and equipped by the C.I.A., starting in 1986, to combat drug trafficking, but it had quickly become an instrument of terror (and even, according to some U.S. officials, a source of drugs).

  Constant says that Collins told him, in this first meeting, that he wanted him to meet someone else at Collins’s home. “I’m not going alone,” Constant remembers saying, only half joking. “I’m going to come with a witness.” He says that he and an associate drove to Collins’s residence that night. Although the streets were pitch-black, owing to a fuel shortage, Collins’s house was completely lit up. Constant says they went upstairs, into a small antechamber next to the master bedroom, where a man with dark hair was waiting. He had on a short-sleeved shirt, and Constant noted his muscles. “I’m Donald Terry,” the man said.

  Constant says that, as they sat drinking cocktails, Terry began to pepper him with questions about the stability of the current military regime, and pulled out a booklet—“a roster”—containing the names and backgrounds of officers in the Haitian armed forces. He and Collins asked Constant who were the most effective.

  A few days later, Constant says, Terry asked to meet again, this time alone at the Kinam Hotel. “Why don’t you join the team?” Terry asked.

  “What’s the team?”

  “A group of people working for the benefit of Haiti.”

  It was then, Constant says, that Terry divulged that he was an agent of the C.I.A.

  The U.S. government will not comment on any questions regarding Donald Terry, and Terry himself could not be reached. But the C.I.A. had been deeply involved with the Haitian military and the country’s politics for decades. Constant remembers that, in the nineteen-sixties, his father served as an informal adviser to an agent who used to stop by for conferences on their porch. According to press reports, the agency, after starting S.I.N., had planned to finance various political candidates in the 1987 Presidential elections, until the Senate Intelligence Committee vetoed the plan.

  Constant says that eventually he agreed to serve as a conduit between the Haitian military regime and U.S. intelligence. He says he was then given the code name Gamal, after Egypt’s former nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he admired, and a two-way radio, with which he checked in regularly.

  It is impossible to confirm all the details in Constant’s account. A C.I.A. spokesman stated that it was “not our policy” to confirm or deny relationships with any individuals. But there is little doubt that Constant was a paid informant. After Allan Nairn first reported Constant’s connection to the intelligence community, in The Nation in October of 1994, several officials acknowledged it to reporters, and many have confirmed it to me. What has been a mystery is the nature of the relationship: just how big an asset was Constant? U.S. authorities have maintained that he was nothing more than a two-bit snitch. But interviews with several people connected to the intelligence community, coupled with Constant’s own version of events, suggest that from the beginning he was a generous font of information, and later, according to at least some, a full-fledged operative. After the coup, he helped run a little-known operation called the Bureau of Information and Coordination (BIC), which collected various kinds of data: the number of deaths and arrests in Haiti, the number of adherents of liberation theology, and so forth. Constant says the data collection was for the purposes of economic development, but it clearly had another purpose: military intelligence.

  According to Constant, and to a non-Haitian connected to the intelligence community, Constant and another BIC member were the first to enter one of Aristide’s private quarters, where they found a hoard of secret documents. Some of these ended up in the hands of U.S. intelligence officers, who in turn provided the documentation for controversial reports claiming that Aristide was mentally unbalanced, contributing to the voices against him in the United States.

  A former senior C.I.A. official justified using an informant who was as potentially problematic as Constant thus: “You can’t help these bad guys accomplish stuff, but you got to give ’em money to find out what’s happening in groups like that. And if you’re going to recruit in a terrorist group like FRAPH, you’re not going to get any functional equivalent … [of] a Western democrat.… To find out what’s going on, you rather rapidly end up in the same position as the F.B.I. with the Mafia—recruiting and paying money and even granting freedom to lower-level folks, even some high-level folks.”

  Another former high-ranking government intelligence official put it more bluntly: “Look, we could have gone to the nuns [in Haiti] and asked them [to give us information]. But I’m sorry—the nuns are nice people, but what they know about terrorism is nothing.” This same official observed that Constant was “one of a whole range of people we had relationships with, all with the knowledge of the Administration.” He said he believed that Constant stood somewhere “on the spectrum of the relationship, from someone who talked to you occasionally to tell you things he wanted you to know to someone who was a wholly owned, salaried subsidiary, who provided information even to the detriment of his cause.”

  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 “C.I.A. 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 him to provide a complete list of FRAPH members and the location of their weapons caches, to publicly accept Aristide’s return, and to 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.”

  It was at this point that Benedict Ferro, who was the district director of the I.N.S. in Baltimore at the time of Constant’s incarceration, began to see things that he had never seen before—things that were, as he puts it now, “off the scale.” Ferro had worked for the I.N.S. for more than thirty years, and he was used to working on cases that involved sensitive government issues. After Constant made his threats, Ferro says, highly placed officials throughout the government began to get involved, even though the Administration had already publicly and privately indicated that Constant would be returned.

  A cover page from a May 24, 1996, Justice Department memorandum titled “Emmanuel Constant Options” indicates that those consulted in the process included Samuel Berger, the Deputy National-Security Adviser; Strobe Talbott, the Deputy Secretary of State; Jamie Gorelick, the Deputy Attorney General; and David Cohen, the Deputy Director of Operations for the C.I.A. “Look, they came out of the woodwork when [Constant] started singing,” says Ferro.