CIA PURGES ITS PAYROLL WITH `SCRUB' OF SOURCES.(MAIN)

Byline: R. JEFFREY SMITH Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- During the past two years, the CIA has quietly dropped more than a thousand secret informants from its worldwide payroll because the agency's managers concluded they were largely unproductive or had likely been involved in serious criminal activity or human rights abuses in their countries, according to U.S. officials.

About 90 percent of those dismissed in the ``agent scrub,'' as it was known within the spy agency, were simply judged to be poor sources of the type of information the CIA considers important in the post-Cold War era, the officials said.

But the group also included more than a …