U.S. SPLIT GROWS OVER CHAVEZ LINKS TO REBELS

Among U.S. Officials, Disagreement Has Sharpened Over The Credibility Of
Reports That Venezuela's Hugo Chavez Aided Colombian Rebels.

VENEZUELA - The Bush administration is growing increasingly divided over
the credibility of intelligence reports on Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez's links to Colombian guerrillas, officials say.

"It's getting very testy, because the believers and skeptics want to quote
only from the reports that agree with their own views," said a top U.S.
government official involved in the dispute.

The debate has remained largely out of the public eye because skeptics and
believers agree that making the allegations against Chavez public would
only push him further into the anti-American left and divert attention from
a drive by his domestic opponents for a recall referendum.

Lack Of Evidence

Both sides also agree that there's no hard evidence that Chavez approved
any assistance on weapons or false indentity documents to the Colombian rebels.

"There is no smoking gun on Chavez's personal intervention or direction on
this," said a government official, describing his words as the consensus in
Washington.

But hard-liners insist that Chavez's leftist-populist policies have created
at least the atmosphere in which officials of his government feel they have
a green light to assist foreign radicals -- because of political sympathy
or simple corruption -- and that Chavez is not doing enough to stop them.

"If Chavez didn't give them the green light, he winked a lot," said a
former U.S. government official who had access to U.S. intelligence reports
on Venezuela.

Beyond Chavez

Skeptics, meanwhile, argue that a 2-year-old political and economic crisis
has left Venezuela mired in such chaos that Chavez cannot be blamed for the
problems and caution that U.S. intelligence had insisted for more than a
decade that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which so far
have not been found.

The debate has been going on since Chavez, a former army paratrooper who
led a failed coup in 1992, was elected in 1998 on a vow to eliminate
Venezuela's corrupt politics and favor its poor majority. He has embraced
Cuba's Fidel Castro and attacked U.S. policy at almost every turn, from
Iraq and Afghanistan to the counter-drugs aid to neighboring Colombia.

But the argument sharpened after President Bush appointed several
conservatives to key positions on Latin America, including White House
Special Envoy Otto Reich; Roger Noriega, the assistant secretary of state
for hemispheric affairs; and his deputy Dan Fisk.

On the skeptics' side are U.S. Ambassador to Caracas Charles Shapiro, U.S.
Ambassador to the Organization of American States John Maisto and several
top officials at the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said.

Skeptic Leaving

Shapiro will leave Venezuela next summer after only two years on the job --
a year short of most ambassadorial appointments. A senior Bush
administration official said Shapiro decided to leave early for personal
reasons and denied he was being pushed out for his skepticism. Shapiro and
the State Department declined to comment. He is likely to be replaced by
Bill Brownfield, now ambassador in Chile.

Chavez has steadfastly denied the allegations of aiding foreign radicals
but at times seemed supremely insensitive to the claims. Even in the face
of a U.S. media report this year that Venezuelan identification documents
may have been issued to Arab radicals, he appointed a Venezuelan of Syrian
ancestry, whose father and uncle are officers in the Baghdad and Venezuelan
branches of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, as the No. 2 official in the
nation's passport office.

No Muslim Radical Ties

Even the most conservative "believers" agree there's no evidence of Chavez
links to radical Muslims. "Chavez knows we have a red line there. He's an
idiot, but he's no fool," said a former U.S. military intelligence officer
who monitored Venezuelan affairs.

But over the past four years, Washington has received thousands of reports
that leftist Colombian guerrillas have established rest camps and obtained
weapons and false identity documents across the largely jungled border with
Venezuela. What remains unclear is whether Chavez or his government have
actively helped the Colombians.

Crossing Borders

"Let's be honest about this . . . Terrorists know no borders, and you have
a country, Colombia, that is bordered by many different countries, so it
only stands to reason that the terrorists will take advantage of those
borders. That's just common sense," Army Brig. Gen. Benjamin R. Mixon,
director of operations at the Miami-based Southern Command, told The Herald
last month.

Officials at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency last year found no
evidence that the sale of Venezuelan weapons to Colombians had risen under
Chavez but did find some signs of a drop, depending on how the figures were
compared, a U.S. government official said.

More widely believed are reports that several hundred Cuban security
advisors are active in the Venezuelan armed forces' Directorate of Military
Intelligence and the country's secret political police, known as DISIP.

U.S. Embassy officials broke off contacts with DISIP last year because of
its Cuban penetration -- a decision that also meant losing contact with
Venezuelan security sources and increasing Washington's reliance on
intelligence reports from Chavez foes.

One former U.S. congressional aide called the opposition sources "the Ahmed
Chalabis of Venezuela" -- a reference to the Iraqi exile leader who fed
U.S. intelligence several reports on Hussein's weapons that have so far not
proved to be correct.