Pubdate: Thu, 03 May 2001
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Section: Pg 1A
Copyright: 2001 The Dallas Morning News
Contact:  http://www.dallasnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117
Author: Tod Robberson, The Dallas Morning News

SHEDDING LIGHT ON A DARK WAR

Congress, Others Tire Of Anti-Drug Operations' Secrecy

PANAMA CITY - A U.S. surveillance plane crashes in a Colombian combat zone, 
killing all aboard. A private U.S. military contractor sends Americans into 
combat against rebels who have downed a police helicopter. A civilian 
aircraft flown by missionaries is shot out of the skies after being tracked 
by a CIA-contracted aircraft over Peru.

These are the types of U.S. operations - all conducted under the cloak of 
secrecy and all in the name of fighting drug traffickers - that 
inadvertently have come under public scrutiny during the past two years.

Watchdog groups and members of Congress are demanding answers about what 
they say is an increasingly secret drug war that U.S. government personnel 
and private U.S. contractors are waging in and around Colombia, using $1.3 
billion in taxpayer funds.

In Washington on Tuesday, conservative and liberal members of Congress 
demanded that the federal government explain its need for so many secret 
operations related to the anti-drug mission in the Andean region. And if 
answers are not forthcoming, some members of Congress warned, future 
funding might not be forthcoming either.

"The key word here is accountability," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., 
who has introduced a bill to curtail the use of private contractors in 
policing and military-related missions in the Andean region. "If this is a 
valid mission that we're on ... then it seems to me that to have it 
shrouded in secrecy and keeping it more than at arm's length from the 
public ... is a very dangerous process."

U.S. officials say that in a nefarious zone where drug traffickers 
regularly mingle with leftist guerrillas, kidnapping rings, paramilitary 
militias and international money launderers, secret operations play a 
crucial role in America's overall security strategy for the Andean region.

Many operations must be kept secret because of the dangers American 
personnel regularly are exposed to, officials say. Would-be kidnappers and 
leftist guerrillas can be found barely a 20-minute drive from the Colombian 
capital or in the jungles of northern Ecuador, where the United States is 
outfitting and expanding an air base for anti-drug missions.

To make public the activities of private defense contractors or 
intelligence personnel involved in these missions would effectively make it 
impossible for them to do their jobs, officials say.

But according to groups that monitor such activities, an increase in "black 
ops" means U.S. taxpayer dollars are going to fight a covert war whose 
expenses are not submitted for public scrutiny. Little will be known, and 
few explanations will be provided to inform the American public about their 
government's activities.

Revived Attention

The issue arose anew April 20 after a U.S. anti-drug aircraft, operated by 
a private company reportedly under CIA contract, tracked a single-engine 
civilian plane over the skies of Peru. A Peruvian military officer on board 
the counternarcotics aircraft called in a jet fighter and, in accordance 
with a long-standing policy of shooting down aircraft suspected of carrying 
drugs, ordered the civilian plane destroyed.

Instead of carrying drugs, the plane turned out to be transporting U.S. 
missionaries. A mother and her infant daughter were killed.

"The history of these black ops doesn't inspire confidence," said Andrew 
Miller, who monitors human rights issues in Latin America for Amnesty 
International. "If overtly they're shooting down civilian planes, it makes 
you wonder what's being done covertly."

Of the $1.3 billion in U.S. anti-drug and military aid now pouring into the 
Andean region, $55.3 million is devoted to classified, intelligence-related 
activities that are being hidden from public view, according to the 
Washington-based Center for International Policy.

Those activities include CIA-run aerial-surveillance missions to track drug 
traffickers and a sophisticated network of radio intercepts that allow the 
National Security Agency to monitor guerrilla communications in Colombia, 
according to U.S. government sources.

Missions' Key Role

There are times when those secret operations serve an important security 
role, such as when four American birdwatchers were kidnapped by Colombian 
rebels in 1998. Radio intercepts monitored by U.S. intelligence personnel 
enabled the government to hone in on the precise location of the 
kidnappers, who received a stern warning to release their captives without 
delay. The birdwatchers were released in a matter of days.

Last year, secret U.S. satellite intelligence enabled authorities to track 
a major drug shipment from Panama to the coastal waters of Ecuador and then 
to the northern Chilean port of Arica. Without the help of U.S. 
intelligence, Chilean authorities said, authorities would never have found 
the 9.7 tons of cocaine hidden in one of the ship's cargo cranes, leading 
to the third-largest cocaine seizure in history.

For some of its most important missions, Ms. Schakowsky complained, the 
United States is relying more and more on private contractors who employ 
retired military officers and U.S. Army Special Forces members to conduct 
combat-related tasks that the military is barred by law from carrying out.

Employees for one such contractor, DynCorp of northern Virginia, say they 
regularly are exposed to combat situations in Colombia while conducting 
missions such as aerial spraying of drug crops or maintaining aircraft in 
areas where guerrilla attacks occur.

In February, guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia shot 
down a Colombian police helicopter during a U.S.-supported spraying mission 
in southern Caqueta province. In order to rescue the helicopter pilot and 
crew members, DynCorp ordered its combat-trained personnel to assist.

"The FARC were maybe 100 or 200 yards away," the pilot, Colombian police 
Capt. Giancarlo Cotrino, told a Bogota newspaper after his rescue. "We were 
in combat for seven or eight minutes. One of my crew had a grenade launcher 
and I had my pistol. We were under heavy gunfire up until the [DynCorp] 
search-and-rescue helicopter landed behind us."

Limits Of The Law

U.S. law allows up to 500 U.S. military personnel and 300 civilian contract 
personnel to be deployed in Colombia at any given time. They provide 
counterinsurgency instruction, maintain listening outposts, or monitor air 
traffic from any of five U.S.-built rural radar stations, among various 
other tasks.

Military personnel also are deployed in Peru at three U.S.-built radar 
stations, in addition to hundreds of troops helping to refurbish an air 
base in Manta, Ecuador, and to construct several military bases in Bolivia. 
The United States also runs AWACS military surveillance flights from the 
Caribbean islands of Aruba and Curacao. No information is available about 
the number of CIA and other intelligence personnel operating in the region.

"If this is a legitimate U.S. mission, we ought to know exactly what it is, 
and we can't seem to find out," Ms. Schakowsky said in a phone interview. 
"What happens if there is a ground skirmish and there are casualties? What 
is the obligation of the United States toward these [privately contracted] 
personnel?"

Another Crash

Similar questions arose in 1999, when a U.S. de Havilland RC-7 
reconnaissance plane crashed in a southern Colombia combat zone, killing 
all five U.S. service personnel and two Colombian military officers on 
board. A subsequent investigation blamed the crash on pilot error, but 
little else was revealed publicly about the nature of the mission.

"We're putting our people in combat situations or areas that are certainly 
contested by illegal armed groups. In other areas, we're just putting them 
where a lot of bad guys are - without any real transparency over how it's 
going," said Adam Isaacson, a senior associate at the Center for 
International Policy in Washington.

"In Colombia's case, it's our proximity relative to a civil war that we 
swear up and down that we don't want to get ourselves involved in. But it 
could happen anyway," Mr. Isaacson said. "Again, there's so little 
scrutiny, and anyone who tries to do any scrutiny runs up against so many 
brick walls that it's hard to know how close we are to this conflict right 
now."

The government sometimes imposes strict rules of secrecy even when missions 
are not technically classified as secret. Last year, Alex B. Pinero, a 
retired U.S. Special Forces medic who once flew search-and-rescue missions 
for DynCorp, posted his resume on the Internet in hopes of finding another job.

When The Dallas Morning News published a story mentioning Mr. Pinero's 
credentials and his current work in Colombia, the State Department 
immediately revoked his security clearance. The same day, DynCorp notified 
him that his contract in Colombia was canceled, Mr. Pinero said. A DynCorp 
corporate attorney declined to comment.
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