Pubdate: Thu, 26 Apr 2001
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2001 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Karen DeYoung, Washington Post Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?172 (Peruvian Aircraft Shooting)

SENATE COMMITTEE LOOKING INTO DRUG INTERDICTION PACT WITH PERU

Questions Raised Over U.S. Control of Shootdown Decisions

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has begun an extensive 
examination of the six-year-old agreement under which the United States 
assists Peru in tracking suspected drug smugglers, seeking in particular to 
determine what control, if any, U.S. surveillance aircraft crews have over 
Peruvian decisions to shoot down civilian planes.

The CIA has launched its own investigation into the incident that sparked 
the Senate inquiry -- the Peruvian Air Force shootdown Friday of a plane 
carrying American missionaries in which a woman and her infant daughter 
were killed. Americans under CIA contract were flying the surveillance 
plane that tracked the missionaries' single-engine Cessna 185 and guided a 
Peruvian A-37 warplane to it before its identity was determined.

The Bush administration announced soon after the shootdown that it would 
review the program, and would send an interagency team to Lima to 
investigate. An initial CIA assessment indicated that the Peruvians 
appeared to have rushed through or skipped agreed procedures that could 
have confirmed the innocence of the missionary plane.

But the intelligence committee, following an initial closed-door session 
Wednesday with CIA Director George J. Tenet, has decided to "scrub" the 
entire intelligence-sharing agreement from its inception, said a Senate 
source. The committee, he said, "wants to know who negotiated it, what were 
the written agreements, and did we ever push for, and not get, more 
authority" over shootdown decisions.

A recording of cockpit conversation in the surveillance plane indicates 
that, even as the Peruvian officer aboard radioed for an interceptor and 
the Americans used satellite and radar systems to direct that jet to the 
Cessna, the CIA crew strongly doubted that it was a drug flight.

Although pressed by committee members, Tenet deflected questions on whether 
U.S. pilots and crews are provided with guidance about what to do if they 
disagree with Peruvian decisions, or the Peruvians do not follow agreed 
procedures during an air interdiction operation, sources said.

What the committee inquiry will discover, however, according to former CIA 
surveillance pilots who flew missions in Peru, as well as former and 
current U.S. officials involved with the policy, is that there is no such 
guidance, and that the agreement intentionally gives the Americans no 
authority over Peruvian shootdown decisions.

"We didn't want to be part of a decision process because we didn't want to 
assume responsibility when somebody made a decision to shoot down an 
airplane," one official said.

Congressional reaction to the incident has been largely muted, with most 
members saying that the facts should be established and made public before 
conclusions are drawn. But any examination of the underlying policy that 
led to it is likely to reopen a rancorous debate that accompanied the 
policy's initial approval in 1994. Then, as now, there were deep divisions 
over whether the threat posed by the trafficking of illegal drugs was so 
intense that it justified extreme measures.

The 1994 debate centered on the fact that attacks against civilian planes 
in the air clearly violated both international and U.S. law. When first 
Colombia, and then Peru, said they would shoot down suspected drug planes 
that ignored orders to land, the Defense Department shut down the radars 
and grounded surveillance planes that were providing both countries with 
the ability to track such flights, fearing U.S. liability for any shootdown.

But with the drug war raging, many people argued that the United States 
needed to use every possible means to combat it. Withholding intelligence 
from Peru and Colombia was "a self-destructive act that rewards drug 
traffickers and threatens American national security," Sen. John F. Kerry 
(D-Mass.), then chairman and now ranking minority member of the Senate 
subcommittee on terrorism and narcotics, told the Boston Globe in June 1994.

Within weeks Congress overwhelmingly passed a measure sponsored by Kerry to 
provide immunity for "employees and agents of the United States and foreign 
countries engaged in interdiction of aircraft used in illicit drug 
trafficking."

Defining "interdiction" as "to damage, render inoperative, or destroy," the 
measure made it legal for authorized Americans to assist in such 
operations. President Clinton issued the required national security 
justification, and determined that both Peru and Colombia had "appropriate 
procedures in place to protect against innocent loss of life . . . which at 
a minimum include effective means to identify and warn an aircraft" before 
force was used.

Inside the government, however, concern remained. Both countries provided 
written policies governing their interdiction procedures -- including 
checking for a flight plan, looking up the registration number of suspect 
aircraft, attempting a series of radio and visual commands to persuade the 
plane to land and firing warning shots before a shootdown was ordered.

But officials said the agreements -- which Colombia has rarely used for 
shootdowns in recent years -- also make clear that U.S. involvement in the 
operations extends only to locating the suspect plane, and leaves the 
decision about what to do about it to the host country.

Former pilots said that standard procedure in all daylight missions is for 
the U.S. plane to approach the "track" close enough to ascertain its 
registration number, something that was not done in last week's shootdown. 
That procedure is not specified in the agreements, however, officials said.

In their training, one former CIA pilot said, "the U.S. crew is told many, 
many times not to interject themselves into the middle of this process. It 
is their country, their air space, their air force. Decisions made to shoot 
down or not to shoot down are their decisions. . . . When it comes to the 
actual shootdown, you don't want to be on tape saying, 'There he is, shoot 
him.' You don't want to be heard saying, 'No, don't shoot him down.' You 
don't want to be interjecting yourself into a Peruvian decision."

A U.S. official explained the diplomatic rationale: "No country wants to 
have some foreigner telling them who to shoot down or not to shoot down in 
their own country."

Kerry said yesterday that "tracking is important but we never contemplated 
shooting down planes without verification." The agreement needs to be 
fixed, he said, "by requiring certitude in shootdowns."
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