Pubdate: Fri, 22 Feb 2002
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A23
Copyright: 2002 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Ellen Nakashima
Note: Staff writer Karen DeYoung contributed to this report

MILLIONS SOUGHT FROM U.S. IN PLANE DOWNING

CIA-Guided Peru Action Killed Woman And Infant, Hurt Pilot

American missionaries whose small plane was mistaken by CIA contract 
employees for a drug-runner's and was shot down over Peru last year are 
seeking $35 million in compensation from the U.S. government. They say they 
are frustrated by the lack of a response, and, if there is no settlement 
soon, they will sue.

The husband of Veronica Bowers, who was killed with their infant daughter, 
Charity, in the incident; injured mission pilot Kevin Donaldson; and the 
Association of Baptists for World Evangelism Inc., which owned the plane, 
are upset that the government has not responded to the claim they submitted 
in June, said their attorney, Karen Hastie Williams.

Jim Bowers saw his wife and daughter killed by a bullet, and 
then-7-year-old Cory Bowers, who was also on board the flight, watched his 
mother's body float in the Amazon River after their Cessna 185 
single-engine plane was identified by a CIA surveillance crew as a drug 
carrier and was gunned down by a Peruvian fighter jet in April. Donaldson 
survived, but the loss of the group's floatplane has hindered his mission 
into the remote areas of the Amazon in Peru, the Baptist group said.

The missionaries' press for a settlement comes as President Bush is 
scheduled to visit Peru next month. Neither government has apologized to 
the missionaries or admitted liability for the downing, Williams said. The 
White House is expected to announce within weeks the resumption of the drug 
interdiction flights, which were suspended after the incident.

"The issue here is what is our government doing about the situation, which 
is really quite unusual and should have been resolved months ago," Williams 
said.

The loss of the plane and of "Roni" Bowers has had a "devastating impact" 
on the mission in Peru, said Don Davis, the Baptist group's corporate 
counsel. No one has replaced the Bowerses, who taught the Bible and trained 
locals in church leadership, and a family that had been working with them 
in remote regions has left.

"Kevin Donaldson [who has returned to Peru] has decided he doesn't want to 
fly down there anymore," Davis said. "He just lacks confidence that it'll 
be safe as long as drug interdiction efforts continue."

A CIA spokesman, Bill Harlow, said settlement discussions are "continuing."

"There's certainly no desire on the part of anybody to slow things down," 
he said. The Justice Department, which is representing the government in 
the negotiations, did not respond to requests for comment.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R), whose western Michigan district includes 
Fruitport, where the Bowerses lived and where the church that sent them to 
Peru is located, has been trying to expedite a settlement. He said he 
believes the CIA wants the claim settled.

"Everybody wants to get this thing taken care of so that the missionary 
organization and the Bowers family can move forward," he said. He said it 
would be "unfortunate" if, by the time Bush reached Peru on March 23, "our 
government had not taken care of the Bowers family and the Donaldsons."

Williams said she has provided the government information on similar cases 
involving federal entities, private companies and foreign governments in 
which individual damage amounts were often higher than what the Bowerses 
and the Donaldsons are seeking. (Williams declined to release the 
individual amounts the families are asking for.) In Hurd v. United States, 
for example, a federal judge last year awarded a woman $6 million for each 
of her two sons killed in a boating accident in which the Coast Guard was 
found to have been negligent in its rescue effort.

Williams, who has met with CIA and State and Justice department officials 
on this matter only once -- in June -- said the missionaries were not 
seeking compensation from the Peruvian government at this time. She said 
the State Department requested that it be allowed to deal with the Peruvian 
government. A State Department spokeswoman last night said the 
missionaries' concerns were relayed to Peruvian officials last week. She 
did not elaborate.

Last April 20, two CIA contract pilots flying a routine surveillance 
mission over northern Peru as part of a U.S.-Peruvian drug interdiction 
program spotted a floatplane they mistook for a drug carrier. A Peruvian 
Air Force officer, or "host rider," on board, following standard procedure, 
alerted a Peruvian A-37B "Dragonfly" fighter and guided it to the Cessna. 
Program rules call for a series of warning actions before a suspect flight 
is shot at, but those procedures were truncated and the Cessna received no 
warning.

The Pentagon-owned CIA plane tailed the Cessna for nearly an hour. Although 
the two American pilots began to express doubts in the minutes before the 
downing that the Cessna was a drug flight, they were unable to communicate 
with the Spanish-speaking Peruvian officer, who was engrossed in a 
conversation with his ground station, or with the fighter pilot.

Roni and Charity Bowers, who was in her mother's arms, were killed by a 
single bullet that passed through the fuselage. Kevin Donaldson's left leg 
was shattered by bullets, but he managed to land the crippled plane on one 
pontoon in the Amazon.

While not assigning blame, a review conducted by the State Department and 
the Peruvian government concluded in August that the program, operated in 
Peru by the CIA, had become sloppy in its implementation and that 
procedures designed to prevent mistakes had been dropped.

In October, a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation found that the 
U.S. government had been lax in managing the program and that the Peruvian 
military had shown a "tragic" lack of judgment. It recommended that the CIA 
stop running the interdiction flights. For the White House, former U.S. 
ambassador to Colombia Maurice Busby conducted a review of the overall air 
interdiction policy. The results of his report, completed last fall, were 
not released.

An interagency working group led by the National Security Council is 
reviewing the Busby findings and preparing a revised regional code of 
operations that will allow the resumption of the interdiction program, 
State Department officials said.
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