Pubdate: Tue, 24 Apr 2001
Source: Salon (US Web)
Copyright: 2001 Salon
Contact:  http://www.salon.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/381
Author:  Jeff Stein
Note: Jeff Stein, a military intelligence case officer in South Vietnam 
during 1968-1969, covers national security issues for Salon.

TREACHERY OVER THE ANDES

The killing of Veronica Bowers and her daughter Charity by Peruvian pilots 
who thought their Baptist missionary plane was part of a drug operation is 
just the latest tragedy to result from the controversial U.S.-backed drug 
war in the shadowy skies over the Andes.

Maybe the most mysterious aspect of the plane's downing Friday was the role 
of a CIA drug surveillance team, which first notified the Peruvians that 
the Baptists' plane was flying in airspace frequented by drug traffickers. 
Though the CIA team insists it warned the Peruvian officer who was riding 
along on the flight not to attack the plane without more information about 
its mission, the officer apparently gave the order for a nearby fighter jet 
to shoot at the single-engine Cessna.

Bowers and her daughter were killed by a single bullet; her husband Jim and 
son were rescued from the downed plane and survived, as did the pilot. 
Their distraught families are demanding answers from the U.S., which 
announced it would suspend such surveillance flights pending an 
investigation of the shooting.

"There was no communication," says Jim Bowers' older brother, Phil. "The 
planes flew by first, did some swooping, and then came in from behind and 
started shooting. Why didn't they call and check the registration?" he 
said. "Sounds like a bunch of vigilante, hotshot pilots. Either that or 
someone higher up ordered the pilots to shoot."

To some veterans of U.S. anti-drug operations in Colombia, and the families 
of those who have died there, such concerns about treachery will sound 
sadly familiar. A Salon investigation of several U.S. air units flying drug 
interdiction flights over Colombia shows American military personnel 
routinely worried about the trustworthiness of their local allies. They 
also complained of poor security, compromise of flight plans, and friction 
between U.S. military, CIA and local military personnel.

"It was bound to happen sooner or later," said a former U.S. Special Forces 
soldier who served on several anti-drug missions in the region, including 
in Colombia. While he was flying a counternarcotics mission out of Haiti in 
1995, he said, his Blackhawk helicopter was nearly shot down by a 
Venezuelan fighter because the chopper pilot had forgotten to activate the 
onboard IFF -- the "friend or foe" signal that identifies the craft.

"Those guys are so trigger-happy, especially the fighter jocks. It doesn't 
matter whether they're from Peru, Colombia or wherever." He said it was 
"entirely possible" that a similar mix-up downed the Cessna in Peru.

But in Colombia, problems of coordination and communication are only part 
of the problem, veterans say. There is also evidence that Washington's host 
and ally in the Colombian drug war has been penetrated by the narcotics 
cartels. Pilots have complained that Colombian military personnel riding 
along on their surveillance flights notified drug traffickers of their 
whereabouts.

"In Vietnam, you called them Victor Charles, or Charlies," said a 
26-year-old former U.S. Army Ranger who served as an advisor in Colombia in 
1997, referring to the nickname for the Communist Viet Cong. "We call them 
'Julios'" -- drug traffickers and their agents inside Colombia's military 
units.

There's no evidence -- yet -- of such betrayal in the Bowers case. But the 
tragedy highlights the high cost of the inter-American war on drugs. Its 
expansion under the $1.3 billion Plan Colombia will only continue to spread 
those risks to neighboring states like Peru, and ultimately, as the Bowers 
family painfully learned, to the U.S.

Charles Odom felt the drug war's sting in July 1999, when his wife Jennifer 
Odom's U.S. Army spy plane crashed in Colombia, killing her, four other 
U.S. crewmembers, and two Colombian military "ride-alongs."

"I'll always believe that plane was shot down, and now because of Peru, 
maybe we'll someday find out it was by one of our own," said Odom, himself 
a retired Army colonel. Odom has long theorized that a drug cartel, tipped 
off to the spy plane's movements by corrupt military personnel, was 
responsible for downing his wife's plane, because she was constantly taking 
ground fire and had often been "lit up" by missile radar when flying over 
the coca fields.

The Army insists that Jennifer Odom's four-prop Dehaviland-7 crashed into 
the Andes because the crew put faulty target coordinates into the onboard 
navigation computer. But her husband says the data was always provided by 
the U.S. Embassy in Bogota -- a view backed up by other members of her 
unit, the 204th Military Intelligence Battalion, based in El Paso, Texas.

Moreover Odom, who won two citations from the Drug Enforcement Agency for 
helping down suspected narcotics flights, also worried about the 
reliability of the Colombians who often ride along, her husband says.

So did former crewmember Briana Krueger, a U.S. Army intelligence 
specialist who, unlike Odom, lived to tell about it herself. But Krueger's 
husband Ray was not so lucky -- he perished along with Odom on the fateful 
July surveillance mission. Like Chuck Odom, Krueger believes her spouse 
lost his life because officials within the Colombian military -- and 
possibly even the U.S. military -- were collaborating with drug traffickers.

Ironically, the deaths of Odom and Krueger helped lead to expanded use of 
for-hire civilian contractors -- like the CIA-paid crew that first 
identified the Bowers' plane, incorrectly, as a drug-trafficking suspect -- 
in order to avoid more U.S. military casualties. But they have not led the 
U.S. military to admit that its Andean drug war, which has just claimed two 
more American lives, has spiraled out of its control.

Now, when she looks back, Briana Krueger realizes she was in more danger in 
Colombia than she knew at the time.

Nighttime spy missions over the Andes were always draining. Winds off the 
sheer mountains made the four-prop "Dash-7" tremble like a leaf. The long 
hours hunched over a radio set in headphones eavesdropping on the telephone 
conversations of drug traffickers left her and the rest of the six-man crew 
exhausted. But one day in 1999 Krueger, an Army-trained Spanish-language 
linguist, learned something that terrified her: Two Colombian military 
officers riding along in her plane had been detected clandestinely 
communicating with drug traffickers on the ground. The unit's flight path 
had been compromised -- by enemy moles onboard working for the drug 
cartels. Krueger's account, in an exclusive interview with Salon, makes 
public for the first time what U.S. personnel in Colombia have long taken 
for granted but generally kept to themselves: Our supposed allies in the 
Colombian drug war have been corrupted by the narcotics cartels.

Pilots from Krueger's unit, the 204th Military Intelligence Battalion, 
based in El Paso, Texas, also tell stories of lackluster security and 
intense friction between U.S. and Colombia personnel at Apiay, the mountain 
base 35 miles south of Bogata where crews from the U.S. Army, the CIA and 
the Drug Enforcement Agency fly in and out.

The U.S. Army denies its spy flights have been infiltrated by Colombians 
working with drug traffickers, despite the embarrassing spectacle of 
discovering that the wife of its top counternarcotics official in Bogota 
was smuggling cocaine to New York with the help of her husband's driver. 
Col. James Hiett, who was himself convicted last year for helping his wife 
Laurie launder profits from her drug sales, was routinely briefed on the 
204th's spy flights, including Odom's doomed mission in July 1999.

The U.S. Army's Intelligence and Security Command responded to a faxed 
query about corruption in the 204th with a statement that there was "no 
reliable evidence" that any missions had been compromised by Colombian 
ride-alongs on the flights.

Krueger's detailed, on-the-record account, however, and more general 
comments by unit personnel about security problems in Colombia, belie the 
Army's assurances.

Krueger was assigned to Odom's unit, then based in the Panama Canal Zone. 
The unit conducts both electronic and photographic reconnaissance of the 
cocaine-producing regions of the Andes -- Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela 
and Colombia -- spending long hours circling over the jungles and mountains.

Under terms negotiated with the U.S., the military personnel of Andean host 
countries usually rode along on the airborne intelligence missions. But in 
Colombia, the unit was also required to file flight plans with Bogota's 
civil air authority, virtually insuring that drug traffickers knew where 
they were going before they lifted off the runway.

Right away, Krueger said, she got a bad feeling about Colombia.

"Most Latin American countries, you can get a feel if they're gonna be 
fighting against drugs with you," she said. "I didn't get that feeling at 
all from Day 1 when I stepped into Colombia. It's like, why work with 
people if they're not gonna be helping us, they're gonna be against us and 
we can't trust them? It doesn't make any sense.

"In Colombia, you didn't know who to trust and who not to trust."

Krueger's fears were borne out in February 1999 after a routine review of 
mission tapes by intelligence analysts back at the Army intelligence 
headquarters in Fort Huachuka, Ariz. They had picked up something she'd 
missed: the voices of Colombian ride-alongs on her flight talking to drug 
traffickers on the ground.

"They had caught it on the tape," Krueger said. The analysts played it back 
for the U.S. crew on the plane, she said.

"We heard the guys on the ground saying, 'There's a helicopter' (one flying 
in tandem with her plane that day). And the guys on the plane were talking 
to them about us coming, and warning them (the drug smugglers) to get out 
of there -- 'We're coming, we're on our way.'"

"I mean, you could clearly hear (it)," Krueger continued. "I don't know how 
we didn't hear it while we were on the mission. I guess we were doing so 
many things at once. Everybody has their own sections of the country they 
have to [monitor] while we're on the plane. Unless you pick up something 
and then everybody gets on one thing, then you're doing your own thing.

"They asked questions of everybody that was on that mission," she said, 
"and had us listen to the tapes again. Everybody was like, 'whoa,' because 
we didn't catch it while we were flying. It was after the tapes were sent 
out that they caught it. That's when we found out about it. We left 
(Colombia) early because of that."

For a while after the leak was detected the flights were suspended, partly 
out of security concerns, but also because of constant equipment failures, 
she said.

"There were always problems with the planes, they were always messed up," 
Krueger recalled. "The surveillance equipment. Lights weren't working 
right. Some stuff with the fuel and the engines wasn't working right. I 
mean, they were down a lot."

In June of that year, meanwhile, she'd married Ray Krueger, another 
intelligence specialist in the unit, whom she'd dated for two years.

Then in July the company commander caused an uproar when he announced the 
crew would be resuming spy missions in Colombia.

"Nobody was even thinking about [going back to] Colombia," Krueger said, 
"so when he said Colombia, there was a hush all over the room, like, 'What? 
Why are we going back there?' There was like a whole minute of silence. 
Then everybody was talking at once, like, you know, 'Why are we going there?'"

The plane's pilot, West Point graduate Odom, 29, was also leery of the 
Colombian ride-alongs.

"Jennifer said they were always suspect," her husband said. "In that part 
of the world, they don't know who to trust." The Colombians are supposedly 
checked out and cleared by the U.S. Embassy, "but a quick background check 
down there doesn't mean much."

His wife had also quarreled privately with her commander, because the sad 
state of the equipment would require her to fly alone in Colombia, without 
the usual pairing with other aircraft. Since she was scheduled to take 
command of the unit in October, she argued that the unit should stand down 
and bring the aircraft up to snuff.

"The unit was overworked, undermanned, overextended," said Charles Odom.

"She felt it foolish to deploy simply for a show of force, with one 
aircraft. Also she felt it was dangerous to fly only one aircraft in a 
normally three-ship, mutually supporting configuration." Odom pressed for 
postponing the mission but was overruled. On July 13, she left for Colombia.

U.S. personnel at Apiay shared the base with Colombian air force and army 
units, who didn't always appreciate the efforts of their mentors. Colombian 
officers deplored the practice of their counterparts sharing meals with 
enlisted personnel. The Colombian Air Force commander "was very rude and 
difficult with Jennifer," a fellow pilot recalled, as well as with other 
U.S. pilots.

Another source of friction was that the Americans were under orders not to 
give the Colombians any intelligence they'd gathered on Marxist guerrilla 
groups while on counter-narcotics missions.

The rationale was -- and remains -- that the U.S. isn't at war with the 
rebels, only drug traffickers, although the distinction is quickly lost on 
U.S. personnel. Drugs are to Colombia what secret bank accounts are to 
Switzerland: the country's principal business, engaging every sector of the 
economy from transport to insurance. Government officials, army officers, 
leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries alike are entwined in the 
illicit trade.

Since U.S. policy required that American units maintain the appearance of 
noninvolvement in the civil war, however, intelligence gathered on rebels 
during anti-narcotics missions is thus denied to local Colombian 
commanders, sources said, and instead sent to Washington.

Appearances aside, however, the intelligence eventually got back to the 
Colombians after it was processed in Washington, via the U.S. Embassy in 
Bogota, where it was shared with counterparts, at least some of them corrupt.

The system prompted U.S. military advisors in Colombia to avoid the embassy 
like the flu, according to one Green Beret sergeant. He said his unit, the 
20th Special Forces Group, an Army Reserve outfit in Maryland that rotates 
into Colombia on training missions, avoided sharing mission plans or other 
data with "the embassy pukes" because they considered the environment 
insecure. Any useful intelligence they gathered was channeled to their own 
command at Fort Bragg, N.C., circumventing the embassy.

The Americans' distrust of the Colombians extended to training missions in 
the field, said the sergeant, who had also seen duty in Haiti and Somalia 
in the 1990s.

"The SEALs (U.S. Navy special operations forces) won't even let the 
Colombians on their boats," the sergeant alleged, on condition that his 
name not be disclosed, "and they're supposed to be training riverines.

"We don't have that choice, because there's a certification process we have 
to go through." (They must report to Washington that the Colombians have 
been trained and are aggressively combating drug traffic.) The sergeant 
said that in the field the Green Berets would camp several hundred meters 
from their charges because they didn't trust the Colombians, who, in any 
event, rarely deployed sentries or mines at night.

The Green Berets also suspected that the Colombian major in charge of the 
1st Marine Brigade, the unit they were training, was secretly doubling as a 
right-wing paramilitary leader in league with a drug cartel.

"He completely avoided attacking the cocaine refineries," the sergeant said.

Meanwhile, spy plane crews at Apiay found themselves increasingly involved 
in a shooting war.

"I was just very uncomfortable about us going down there," said Dawn Smith, 
an Army spy pilot in Colombia during 1999-2000, "because we were supposed 
to be [in a condition of] low intensity, period. We were not supposed to be 
in a high-intensity environment." At night, she said, automatic rifle fire 
often crackled outside the perimeter. "And it was kind of primitive. They 
had just a low little barbed wire fence surrounding the grounds, and the 
place could've been overrun very easily. And we at first didn't even have 
any weapons."

But if the situation on the ground at Apiay was dicey, security in the air 
was hardly better, former unit personnel said. Increasingly, the spy planes 
were taking fire. More and more, they were being tracked through the night 
skies by ground-to-air missiles of the narco-guerrillas.

"Every time they came back from a mission," Jennifer's husband, Chuck Odom, 
recounted in a previous Salon story about her death, "there'd be small-arms 
bullet holes on the fuselage or the tail. I asked her about it, and she 
said, 'It's a dangerous place. We're always getting shot at and lit up (by 
missile radar).'

"It wasn't Colombian government radar," declared Odom, who'd had many 
sensitive assignments during his own Army career. "It was a missile lock" 
by someone armed with advanced, U.S.-made Stingers or foreign equivalents.

Dawn Smith and other pilots say their flights were compromised even before 
their wheels lifted off the runway. For starters, Colombian civil aviation 
authorities required all aircraft -- including spy missions -- to file 
flight plans. Thus, air controllers broadcast their progress through the skies.

The situation was crazy, pilots said.

"One time coming back from another country, you could tell they were giving 
our call sign to somebody else," Smith said. "We thought, 'Who are they 
talking to on the air? Why are they saying anything about us?' I didn't 
know that much Spanish, but I knew they were talking about us. So we felt 
that their ATC (air traffic control) was definitely giving out information 
about us ..."

In the end, Briana Krueger was able to avoid an assignment to return to 
Colombia in July of 1999, but her husband of one month, 20-year-old Ray, 
couldn't, or wouldn't, resist.

"I told him before he left that I didn't want him to go," Briana recalled. 
"We were talking about breaking his arms so he wouldn't be able to go. I 
just felt really uncomfortable that he was going. He said, like, 'Orders 
are orders.'"

On the night of July 30 the flight took off from a Colombian military base 
at Apiay. Its lone runway, set in a high meadow and buffeted by wind, rain 
and fog off the Andes, had a lot of customers, from the 204th's Dash-7's to 
CIA, DEA and U.S. Customs Service aircraft. Sometime after 3 a.m. that same 
night, Odom and her crew crashed into the side of a steep mountain near the 
border with Ecuador. All were killed. The plane wreckage, already 
pulverized by the crash, was blown up by a Delta team from the U.S. 
Embassy. The Army said neither of the two flight data recorders was working.

While the military disputes Chuck Odom and Briana Krueger's theories about 
the role of Colombian drug collaborators in their spouses' death, it's 
clear the losses had one impact: Anti-drug generals in Washington have 
stepped up the recruitment of civilians to fight the war, to minimize the 
political fallout more U.S. military deaths could cause back home.

To some extent, the strategy worked: When three pilots employed by Dyncorp 
of Reston, Va., died in Colombia a few years ago, it hardly made the news. 
According to military sources, the U.S. employs about 70 "contractors" in 
Colombia, but there are many more in border regions, such as Iquitos in 
northern Peru, working as military advisors, mechanics and pilots. They're 
coming in for more scrutiny now, however, thanks to the death of Veronica 
and Charity Bowers.

Since her husband's death, Briana Krueger has left the military and is 
trying to get on with her life; she'd like to open a restaurant. When she 
thinks back on her time in Colombia, she says simply: "We're just wasting 
our time doing this."

Chuck Odom wishes the Bowers family well, trying to get to the bottom of 
the mystery surrounding its loved ones' deaths, but his voice reflects his 
weariness. "You never get over something like this," he says. "You learn to 
deal with it, to live with it ... I just march along every day."

Reflecting on the conflicting accounts of the Bowers tragedy coming from 
Peru and Washington, Odom said sadly, "It sounds like business as usual 
down there."

Note: The downing of a U.S. missionary plane over Peru raises questions 
about whether we can trust our drug-war allies -- and the families of 
soldiers who died in Colombia say the answer is no.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

About The Writer:

Jeff Stein, a military intelligence case officer in South Vietnam during 
1968-1969, covers national security issues for Salon.
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D