by Brian Duffy, Linda Robinson, Kathie Klarreich, Bruce B. Auster,  Tim Zimmermann, Joseph P. Shapiro, Matthew Cooper  

        Haiti is half an island, today something less than a whole country, 6 1/2 million souls inhabiting a downward spiral of economic misery and political mayhem. Born of a slave revolt 190 years ago, the Caribbean nation has seen its unique promise squandered by a nearly unbroken succession of brutal, corrupt and downright bizarre political leaders. For Americans, the place has long been a conundrum. Occupied by U.S. troops early in this century, blessed later by millions of dollars in American aid, Haiti has descended unswervingly into the current maelstrom, with Washington now actively considering the use of military force as a United Nations deadline ticks down before even tougher economic sanctions are imposed. Of no strategic importance, Haiti has somehow managed to confound every recent American president but Gerald Ford, who served so briefly he did not have to deal with it.

        Now it is Bill Clinton's turn. Before he entered the Oval Office, Clinton, in discussing Haiti, conjured the sound of trumpet blasts. "My administration will stand up for democracy," Clinton said, denouncing George Bush's "cruel" policy of forcibly repatriating Haitian refugees. As for the military junta that forced out Haiti's only elected leader, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Clinton rejected its claim to leadership, saying he would work to "buttress democratic forces in Haiti ... and throughout the Western hemisphere."

        Things have not worked out that way. An examination of the Clinton administration's posture toward Haiti shows a policy remarkable at once for the ambition of its goals -- and the timidity of its actions. As with other areas of foreign policy, Clinton's episodic attention troubles even some aides. "It's reacting to domestic politics," says a State Department official. "Now we are all trying to figure out how to make it work."

        The White House vigorously defends its efforts in Haiti -- and in other foreign arenas where its policies have come under fire. "We came in here inheriting three very tough problems -- Haiti, Somalia and Bosnia," says an administration official. "They all deal with internal collapses -- unlike classic security issues; the rules are harder to define. In Haiti, the most important thing is that we refused to give up."

        A review of the administration's Haiti policy highlights a number of problems. U.S. News reporters reviewed confidential government cables and memorandums and interviewed more than 30 administration officials, diplomats and military and intelligence officers, as well as aides and advisers to President Aristide. The review identifies a handful of critical decisions marred by miscommunication and logistical snafus. Principal findings:

        A series of late-night phone calls between a presidential adviser and an Aristide aide weakened a key deal to forcibly remove Haiti's military leaders from power.

        The decision to withdraw a U.S. Navy ship from Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, was made without the knowledge of U.S. diplomats, who later cabled Washington saying the ship could have docked if given one more day.

        A State Department cable and intelligence intercepts have questioned the heart of the Clinton administration's policy -- Aristide's democratic bona fides.

        Although Clinton publicly promised to restore Aristide to office, administration officials were troubled by intercepts of phone calls from Aristide to his supporters vowing vengeance on his opponents after he returned to power.

        While the administration's policy was built on the idea of pressuring Haiti's military rulers to step aside, the CIA consistently warned that the military leader, Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, and his cronies could be removed only by force.

        Even before being sworn in as president, Bill Clinton made the first foreign policy decision of his administration, and it was on Haiti. Clinton's campaign pronouncements about reversing the Bush administration's repatriation policy on Haitian refugees had spawned an orgy of boat building in Haiti's impoverished coastal towns. A wave of Haitian refugees in Florida would be a disaster. Clinton made the announcement: The Bush repatriation policy would remain in effect. "Once the alternatives were explained to him," says Warren Zimmermann, then director of the State Department's Bureau for Refugee Programs, "it was a decision that made itself." What it wasn't, however, was a particularly auspicious beginning.

        Father Aristide was not a congenial partner for Washington. After the Haitian military arranged Aristide's ouster in September 1991, a military adviser raided his medicine cabinet in the presidential quarters and provided a long list of its contents to the CIA. The new Haitian president, the CIA was told, was taking lithium and other drugs for treatment of mental depression. A letter, allegedly from a Haitian neurosurgeon, described Aristide as a "psychotic manic depressive" and referred to treatment Aristide had undergone in Canadian hospitals a decade earlier. Many details about the physician's report and the drugs -- none of the vials had Aristide's name on them -- were questioned. Today, Aristide's opponents still use the allegations against him and some analysts still question Aristide's reliability. "He can drive you crazy," says a State Department official who has worked closely with Aristide. "But that doesn't mean he is crazy."

        Other evidence confirmed, however, that Aristide would be, at best, a difficult partner for the Clinton administration. In a speech days before he was toppled, as his supporters were being killed, Aristide described the practice of necklacing -- placing burning tires around the necks of his opponents as a "beautiful instrument." According to several informed sources, U.S. intelligence agencies also would intercept phone calls from Aristide in the United States pledging violent retribution against his opponents. Much has been made of the CIA's unflattering psychological profile of Aristide, but the more troubling parts of the intelligence community's reporting have to do with the instability that could ensue in Haiti if Aristide were returned.

        President Clinton had been briefed thoroughly on these and other aspects of the Haiti situation before his first meeting with Aristide in the White House on March 16, 1993. Clinton was committed, he said, to "stronger measures" to restore Aristide to power. "I want to make it clear in the strongest possible terms," Clinton said, "that we will not now or ever support the continuation of an illegal government in Haiti."

        The fly in the ointment. The next step seemed pretty straightforward. Since the fly in the Haitian ointment was the military, the thing to do was remove it. Working closely with Lawrence Pezzullo, then Clinton's special envoy to Haiti, a Pentagon team led by a charismatic Marine lieutenant general named Jack Sheehan, who first set foot in Haiti in 1964 and knew it well, would take on the job of remaking Haiti's military. Their plan called for a United Nations team to transform Haiti's 7,000-man military into a smaller force that would concentrate on rebuilding Haiti's shattered infrastructure and patrolling its long border with the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola. Canadian authorities would take the lead in building a new civilian Haitian police force.

        Things began lurching ahead. The "transformation" plan for the Haitian military was approved by then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. President Clinton announced tougher sanctions against the Haitian military in June 1993. Soon, a deal seemed in prospect. Aristide had two principal demands. Unlike the Clinton administration, which had adopted its predecessor's gradualist approach on tightening economic sanctions, Aristide wanted the toughest sanctions possible imposed -- but for only a short time. More important, Aristide was convinced that General Cedras and his colleagues would never relinquish power unless they were forced to do so. Oddly enough, the CIA's Haiti analysts were predicting the same thing.

        Clinton understood the problem, but his aides believed the two sides had to negotiate. Anthony Lake, Clinton's national security adviser, was the godfather of the scheme. Larry Pezzullo was assigned the job of making it happen. The result was an accord reached between Aristide and Cedras. The two never met face to face, but the deal was hatched in a comfortable building on Governors Island in New York Harbor. The date was July 2. By this time, the United Nations had imposed an embargo on shipments of oil and arms to Haiti. The financial assets of Cedras and his aides had been frozen in accounts overseas.

        Deal breaker. Cedras, presumably, had incentive to talk. Aristide, for his part, demanded that Cedras, other members of his high command and Col. Joseph Michel Francois, the head of Haiti's repressive police force, be required to resign their posts as a condition of any deal. Aristide had already agreed, reluctantly, to a delay of four months. At 3 a.m. on July 3, the terms of the deal seemed solid. Michael Barnes was a former congressman whose law firm was representing Aristide's government-in-exile. He got a call in his hotel room from Tony Lake. Cedras & Co. would leave. Four hours later, Barnes's phone rang again. This time it was a State Department official named Charles Redman. Somehow the terms of the deal had changed. Only Cedras would be required to leave the Army. His aides could assume Army assignments outside the high command. Barnes phoned Lake in a fury: "This is a deal breaker," he shouted.

        But it wasn't. Twelve hours later, after U.N. guarantees that would force Cedras's aides to either retire or assume military posts outside of Haiti, Aristide relented. At the United Nations Plaza Hotel late in the morning of July 3, Aristide was confronted with the tearful entreaties of friends and supporters; still he held firm. With a grim smile, he affixed his signature to the Governors Island accord. "I signed it," Haiti's exiled president said. "I will keep my word."

        One of the stranger things about the Governors Island agreement was that both Cedras and Aristide, having rejected the earlier plan for the "transformation" program for Haiti's military, were demanding it now: Details of the plan were specified in Paragraph 5 of the accord. At the Pentagon, General Sheehan prepared to make things happen with the Haitian military. Simultaneously, Dante Caputo, the United Nations special negotiator for Haiti, moved to Port-au Prince to begin laying the groundwork for both the police and military missions. Within a month of the signing of the Governors Island accord, the first American service personnel began showing up in Haiti to survey the job at hand. The personnel were dispatched from the Atlantic Command in Norfolk, Va. Since the "transformed" Haitian Army was to be largely an engineering force, many of the earliest Pentagon personnel dispatched temporarily to Haiti were Seabees, specialists from the Navy's Civil Engineer Corps. Things were beginning to accelerate.

        But trouble was also brewing. For one thing, many of the newly arrived military personnel were shocked by life in Haiti. The place is brutally poor, and even before the ouster of Aristide, political violence had become something of a way of life. By early September, although unarmed human rights monitors roamed the country without serious incident, many of the military specialists from the Atlantic Command were phoning back to Norfolk with horror stories: There was gunfire every night, and bloodied corpses were turning up daily in the streets. Within weeks, the phone calls from Port-au- Prince to Norfolk constituted a separate but very real intelligence network. Coincidentally, the reports to Norfolk jibed with reporting by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency about increasing violence in Haiti. The violence was among Haitians, however; foreign aid workers and diplomats were seldom even bothered.

        Within the Pentagon, there were growing concerns. Adm. David Jeremiah, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would soon become chairman, following Gen. Colin Powell's retirement. Jeremiah was worried about two things. One was the increasing violence in Haiti and growing reports that Cedras might renege on the Governors Island deal. The second concern was more prosaic but also more real. The USS Harlan County was due to depart for Port- au-Prince any day with 600 trainers and engineers on board, but there were just a fraction of the anticipated 500 Canadian police trainers on the ground in Haiti. "Our force protection would be underpinned by the police," says a senior Pentagon official. "The groundwork wasn't prepared."

        Jeremiah expressed these concerns to Secretary Aspin, who was in Norfolk on October 1 to speak to the newly reorganized Atlantic Command. Aspin asked the commanding admiral, Paul David Miller, about the situation in Haiti. Miller was not encouraging. The next day, Jeremiah, at a White House meeting, outlined conditions for the Haiti mission. The day after that, halfway around the world in Somalia, 18 U.S. Army Rangers lost their lives in a vicious firefight. In Washington, the jitters over Haiti turned to shakes. Some Pentagon officials say the nervousness was justified by the news coming out of Haiti. Lawrence Pezzullo, the administration's diplomatic point man, was skeptical. "All of a sudden," Pezzullo said, "Haiti became Somalia."

        Smaller issues intervened. The Harlan County was supposed to arrive in Port-au-Prince on October 11. Terms of the transition plan called for Pentagon personnel to carry side arms into Haiti as protection. Somehow, in translating from English to French to Creole, "side arms" turned out as "pistols." There was one problem with that: Seabees and others among the 600 people on the Harlan County didn't carry pistols; their personal side arms were M-16 assault rifles. With the Harlan County steaming toward Port-au- Prince, Pezzullo hurried to inform Robert Malval, Aristide's increasingly unhappy prime minister. Reluctantly, Malval agreed to the last-minute change; Cedras and the military were not to be informed. This might have been fine except for one unfortunate gaffe. On a Sunday morning television talk show, a day before the Harlan County would steam into Port-au-Prince harbor, Secretary Aspin was being grilled about the tragedy in Somalia when the questioning turned to Haiti. Would the 600 Pentagon trainers and engineers be unarmed, ABC's Sam Donaldson asked Aspin. Not at all, Aspin replied. "They'll have M-16s." Within an hour, the news had ricocheted around Port-au-Prince. The response from Cedras was predictable: double-cross. Says Pezzullo: "That blew it for us nicely."

        The wind was calm and the skies fair when the Harlan County arrived at the lip of the Port-au-Prince harbor shortly after noon on October 11. Several dozen unarmed thugs were waiting at the dock; earlier that morning, they had jostled an embassy car carrying the charge d'affaires, Vicki Huddleston. To Huddleston, Pezzullo and Dante Caputo, the U.N. envoy waiting for the ship, the demonstration was annoying -- no more. Cedras, reached by phone, told Huddleston he knew nothing of the little demonstration. An impasse ensued. Later, on the water, two tiny Haitian patrol boats menaced the Harlan County, and the ship's captain ordered the boats tracked with a radar-fitted Gatling gun. The patrol boats departed. In Port-au-Prince early that evening, the Harlan County cast a tall silhouette against the darkening tropical sky.

        In Washington, the secure phone lines from the White House purred quietly. Details remain unclear, but Anthony Lake spoke with Les Aspin, and the president was briefed: The Harlan County would be ordered back to Norfolk. The decision was clearly one with which several administration officials felt uncomfortable. At a meeting the next morning in the White House Situation Room, Pezzullo called the demonstration on the dock in Port-au-Prince "a bit of theater, no more." CIA Director R. James Woolsey disagreed, and Pezzullo rose to try and refute the argument. Lake cut him off: "The decision has been made, Larry." The Harlan County weighed anchor soon after. Aristide heard about it still later -- on CNN.

        The decision, even many administration officials now concede, was a fiasco. A State Department cable reports that the demonstrators on the Haiti docks "never had any expectation that they would in fact be successful in prompting the departure of the vessel." A study of the incident by the U.S. Army War College delivers a more scathing indictment. "The decision to withdraw the ship from Haitian waters was taken without consultation with or even notification of the United Nations, President Aristide or Prime Minister Malval. It left the impression that the United States had cut and run ... frightened away by a few unruly thugs." From the Harlan County incident in October until March of this year, Washington's Haiti policy would be marred by similar dramatic episodes, each side shooting down new initiatives to get them back together. "After Harlan County," Pezzullo sighs, "it was like trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again."

        Dithering. The Harlan County episode may be the most embarrassing in the Clinton administration's handling of the Haiti account, but it is not the most troubling. The yearlong display of dithering and direction changing has come with a price, a high one. Today, having declared his own Haiti policy a failure and ordered his aides to conduct a full-blown review, President Clinton increasingly finds himself confronting two unpalatable choices: dumping Aristide or intervening with force. A confidential 11-page State Department cable reflects the ambivalence within the administration about Aristide: "If the U.S. and the U.N. choose to remain engaged with Aristide, they must also remain engaged in human rights monitoring and institution building in Haiti, otherwise Aristide will continue to use lawlessness in Haiti to force his own agenda of intervention." Aristide disputes the cable's conclusions -- and worries that even if Clinton is serious about returning him to Haiti, many of his key aides don't support the tough measures that may be necessary to make it happen.

        That agenda, which could well result now in the deployment of American troops in a unilateral or multilateral invasion of Haiti, may satisfy Clinton's growing number of critics on Capitol Hill. Indeed, Clinton's decision this month to begin processing Haitian refugees aboard ships in the Caribbean instead of sending them back to Haiti immediately had the effect of ending a popular activist's hunger strike against the administration's Haiti policy.

        But it is hardly a solution. Nor is the option of increased sanctions. The U.N. deadline for Cedras and his aides to leave Haiti will expire later this month, when the tighter economic sanctions will take effect. No one expects them to work; but they could well result in a new wave of Haitians taking to the high seas in boats, which would only compound the administration's problems. So barring the unexpected departure of Cedras and his colleagues, the only option left to President Clinton may be the one he relishes least -- the use of military force.