In 1960, C.I.A officer Larry Devlin was told to kill a Congolese politician, an episode that resonates with today’s debate about the limits of covert actions to counter a different global threat.Today, Mr. Devlin’s story has new resonance amid a renewed debate about the proper limits of C.I.A. actions to counter a different global threat and their cost to the United States’ standing. The C.I.A.’s destruction of videotapes of harsh interrogations is under criminal investigation. Congress has been reviewing the C.I.A.’s secret detention program and the transfer of terrorist suspects to countries that practice torture, though so far no inquiry has approached the sweep of the Church Committee in the Senate in the 1970s, whose reports quote Mr. Devlin under a pseudonym, Victor S. Hedgeman.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/world/africa/24congo.html?ex=1361595600&en=7a0aaf98fdfc3df2&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
