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After a secret three-year investigation, federal prosecutors have decided to end a criminal inquiry into whether at least four Central Intelligence Agency officers lied to lawmakers and their agency superiors about a clandestine antidrug operation that ended in 2001 with the fatal downing of a plane carrying American missionaries, Justice Department officials said last week. "The Justice Department has declined a criminal prosecution," said Bryan Sierra, a Justice Department spokesman, in response to a question about the previously undisclosed investigation. The conduct under scrutiny was part of a CIA operation authorized by President Bill Clinton beginning in 1994 to help the Peruvian air force to interfere with drug flights over the country. The Justice Department's decision ended an inquiry that current and former government officials say was the most serious to focus on the official conduct of CIA officers since the Iran-contra affair in the late 1980s. More broadly, the inquiry had been seen within the CIA as a message that employees could be held accountable for operations that go awry, at a time when officers at the agency are coming under scrutiny in other areas, like the interrogation and detention of terror suspects. "A criminal investigation is something that breeds a risk-averse culture at CIA," said a Bush administration official familiar with the case. The officials said the investigation had not been directly related to the act of shooting down the plane, which was carried out by a Peruvian air force jet after the missionary plane was misidentified as a potential drug smuggling aircraft by a CIA surveillance plane operated by a contract crew. . [more]