Pubdate: Sat, 1 Dec 2007
Source: Men's Vogue (US)
Copyright: 2007 CondeNet
Contact: http://www.mensvogue.com/contact/emailEditor
Website: http://www.mensvogue.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4646
Author: Joshua Hammer

BUNGLE IN THE JUNGLE

It's Been 1,750 Days Since Their Mayday Call, and Three Members of a 
Flight Crew Contracted by the State Department Are Still Awaiting 
Rescue. While the U.S. and Colombian Governments Refuse to Bargain 
With Terrorists, the Hostage Crisis Threatens to Become the Longest 
in U.S. History.

The tropical prison lies in a muddy clearing deep in the southern 
Colombian jungle, surrounded by a barrier of rough-hewn logs and 
close to a wide, swift river.

Scattered around the compound are a dozen simple tents-plastic 
tarpaulins supported by bamboo poles, with hard wooden pallets on 
which the prisoners and their guards sleep.

There's a volleyball net, a meeting place for Catholic masses and 
English classes, an outdoor kitchen where rice and beans, river fish, 
and wild pigs are cooked in cast-iron pots. Outside the barricade, 
camouflage-clad guerrillas with AK-47s patrol day and night in five 
concentric circles extending deep into the wilderness.

For the three American hostages serving indeterminate sentences in 
this equatorial Alcatraz, the day begins at dawn, when guards-all 
insurgent units of FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, 
a 17,000-strong Marxist rebel army-unlock the steel shackles that 
wind around their necks and bind them to one another.

The hostages are Tom Howes, a quiet 54-year-old pilot and veteran of 
Latin American drug wars; Keith Stansell, a rakish 43-year-old 
ex-Marine mechanic and bear hunter; and Marc Gonsalves, a gung-ho 
35-year-old former Air Force intelligence officer.

As employees of Northrop Grumman, the giant U.S. defense contractor, 
they were on a surveillance mission five years ago that went horribly wrong.

And in a fate that might not have befallen them had they been part of 
the U.S. military that trained two of them-and whose aims their 
surveillance work served-they have become America's longest-held 
hostages still in captivity, with no end to their ordeal in sight.

In 2001, the Bush administration was ramping up U.S. initiatives in 
Colombia. But the war on terror quickly supplanted the war on drugs 
as a White House focus, and these three men got caught up in the 
shifting priorities. In the White House's view, however, the FARC 
uses terrorist tactics and therefore its demands are nonnegotiable. 
Complicating the diplomacy is another hostage whom the guerrillas 
consider their most valuable bargaining chip: Ingrid Betancourt, 45, 
a former Colombian presidential candidate and the sole female 
prisoner in the compound, who was captured during a fact-finding 
mission into rebel-held territory in early 2002.

Other governments have pushed for a more flexible approach.

This spring, one of Nicolas Sarkozy's first official acts as 
president of France was a phone call to Colombian president Alvaro 
Uribe, in which the French leader urged the hard-line, 
never-negotiate Colombian head of state to make a release of FARC 
prisoners. (After all, Betancourt spent the first 20 years of her 
life in Paris and has dual French-Colombian citizenship.) In August, 
Venezuelan leftist strongman Hugo Chavez, in another bid to build his 
international profile, announced his own initiative to get the 
hostages out. But mostly it's been left to the Colombians themselves 
to find a way to end the kidnapping epidemic.

In its 40-year quest for a Marxist-Leninist state, the FARC has 
seized thousands of prisoners, and the group is just one of many 
Colombian factions employing this tactic.

On a recent visit to Bogota, I sat down with Vice President Francisco 
Santos Calderon, a former newspaper editor who once spent eight 
months in the 1990s chained to a bed as a hostage of drug kingpin 
Pablo Escobar. Asked whether there was any chance that the government 
would risk sending troops to extract the hostages, Santos said 
cautiously, "The government cannot close the door on rescue."

Though his circumstances were different, Santos offered that he knows 
what the Americans and the other hostages are going through. "I had 
little children, one a year and a half, the other six months, and 
that's your weak spot," he said. Many times when he was a prisoner, 
"I wished for the SWAT teams to come in to rescue me even if I died. 
I was so desperate.

You say, 'Let's hope they jump in. And if I get a gunshot wound, 
we'll see what happens."

Last September, I met Jhon Pinchao Blanco, a baby-faced man with a 
nervous smile, in a lounge at national police headquarters in Bogota. 
The police sergeant sat ramrod straight while recounting his memories 
of the three gringos he lived with for the final six months of his 
own captivity.

In a crisp olive-drab uniform with crossed pistols on both epaulets, 
Pinchao maintained a stiff demeanor reflecting both the military 
regimen that has shaped him since his teens and the tight 
restrictions he is under while talking to journalists. "The worst 
part was the chains," he said, gesticulating sharply with both hands. 
"When you bathed, when you slept, when you were moved from camp to 
camp, you were in chains. That was a kind of slavery, a kind of 
humiliation. We felt like rabid dogs."

After dark on April 28, 2007, while the Americans slept a few yards 
away, Pinchao snapped a link of the chain that had bound him to a 
fellow cop. (When the guards weren't looking, he had inserted a piece 
of wood into a link of his chain and twisted the wood over and over 
until the metal eroded and gave way.) With the remnants of his 
shackles around his neck, Pinchao waited until his guard was 
distracted. He made his move solo-there was no feasible way to 
include another prisoner in the escape.

He then crawled through the barricade, crept through the bush, and 
leapt into the river. Holding tight to a gallon jug filled with 
potable water, he let the fierce current sweep him downstream. 
Suddenly, he felt "tranquilo," he says, though his respite was only momentary.

Pinchao wandered lost in the jungle, dodging FARC patrols.

He was savaged by mosquitoes, and his only nourishment was some flour 
that he'd secretly accumulated over weeks. Eventually, he found his 
way back to the river, and 17 days after his breakout, he 
staggered-ragged, half-starving, feverish with malaria-into a police outpost.

The trauma is still visible on Pinchao's solemn face. He first met 
the Americans only about three years ago-usually they were kept in a 
separate camp with about 45 other "high-value" captives-but Pinchao 
was alongside them when they were sent on a weeks-long march through 
the jungle to a new camp. Betancourt was among the trekkers too, 
which was unusual as her irascibility earned her long terms of 
solitary confinement. "Ingrid didn't respect her captors," Pinchao 
said, describing how she talked back to her guards and even slapped 
one across the face-an offense that could have gotten her shot. 
Pinchao recalled that Betancourt attempted five escapes in all: In 
one, she eluded the guerrillas for five days in the jungle before 
being dragged back to camp and kept isolated and chained to a chair for days.

Pinchao also described a numbing daily routine that has governed the 
prisoners' lives for nearly five years.

Morning begins with cups of coffee in the damp heat, as the calls of 
toucans, macaws, and spider monkeys echo from palm and wild papaya trees.

At 7:00 A.M., the hostages march down a trail to the river, where 
they bathe and wash one of the two tracksuits that constitute their 
entire wardrobe.

Back at camp, they are fed breakfast-usually chocolate milk, soup, 
corn, and bread.

The men fill the hours by doing push-ups, reading novels by the likes 
of John Grisham, lifting homemade barbells, and playing team sports 
with the four dozen other captives, mostly Colombian policemen and soldiers.

The Americans, Pinchao said, have adapted reasonably well to 
captivity, though several have endured bouts of malaria and hepatitis.

They've managed to learn Spanish and have even struck up friendships 
with guards.

Among the three Americans, Marc Gonsalves, an Air Force veteran and 
native of Bristol, Connecticut, began as the greenest and most gonzo 
but has since become subdued, reading the Bible voraciously and 
holding improvised Catholic masses for the other prisoners.

Tom Howes, a Massachusetts Yankee known for his reticence, plunged 
into a long phase of melancholy, and then emerged with a newfound 
ability to tell jokes.

One key to his well-being: He adopted a smelly stray dog, which he 
named Tula. Pinchao singled out Keith Stansell, a Miami native raised 
by a pair of academics, as "the one who told stories, who tried to 
entertain. Stansell talked about his two kids, how he'd clean the 
house and cook for them." Stansell had also committed himself to 
hours of weight training each day. The hardy ex-Marine even taught 
Pinchao to swim during their daily bathing sessions in the river. 
Those lessons, Pinchao explained, gave him the courage to cross the 
river and make his way to safety.

Pinchao sadly related that prisoners never received any of their 
families' letters, which the Catholic Church regularly delivered to 
the FARC. But every morning, the hostages huddled around transistor 
radios, listening to news and family messages that Caracol, 
Colombia's most popular radio station, had agreed to broadcast.

In one message, Stansell's parents gave him an update on his 
children: "Kyle and Lauren are doing fine. Lauren's graduation from 
high school went very well; she wished you'd been there for the 
party. Don't give up-people are working very hard to get you 
released." Messages like that "gave every one of us a reason to keep 
on living," said Pinchao.

In November 2002, Gonsalves arrived in Bogota and moved into a 
tightly guarded apartment complex with Stansell, Howes, and a dozen 
other pilots and systems analysts.

The men were all private contractors who had been hired by California 
Microwave Systems, a division of Northrop Grumman, to locate cocaine 
labs deep in Colombia's jungles.

Gonsalves arrived at a particularly tense time: A major peace 
initiative had just collapsed, and Betancourt had been snatched at a 
guerrilla roadblock months earlier.

The flight team members, including Gonsalves, left their wives and 
children behind in the United States for the four weeks that they 
spent in Columbia out of every six. Gonsalves stayed in daily phone 
contact with his wife, Shane, a onetime exotic dancer whom he had met 
in a nightclub in Tampa. He had taken this six-figure-salary job with 
a goal in mind for his wife, their daughter, and his two stepsons, 
according to his mother, Jo Rosano: "He called me and said, 'It's 
only for three years, and we'll save $50,000 a year, so Shane can get 
the big house she's dreamed about, and then we can move back to Connecticut.'"

Stansell, a divorced dad of two teens, had a steady girlfriend back 
in the Florida Panhandle to whom he often returned.

In Bogota, however, he was living openly with a Colombian flight 
attendant, Patricia Medina, whom he'd met on an Avianca flight to 
Panama in April 2002. While many members of the team holed up in the 
condos during their time off, Stansell and Medina enjoyed a busy 
social life that included dancing at the city's salsa bars.

Howes had flown for the State Department's Air Wing, a secretive 
outfit that oversaw counternarcotics operations and dabbled in 
counterinsurgency. He had married a Peruvian woman, Mariana, and when 
raising two children in Bogota got too dicey, the family also 
repaired to the safety of Florida-for them, Merritt Island-and Howes 
visited there as often as his work allowed.

The Northrop Grumman teams operated from a secure 1.5-acre base at 
Bogota's El Dorado Airport known as "Fast Eddie's" after the dual 
Colombian-U.S. citizen who managed the outpost.

The five-man teams (two pilots, two systems analysts, and a Colombian 
military intelligence escort) received "targeting" instructions three 
or four times a week from a military officer at the U.S. Embassy. 
Then they took off in a pair of leased single-engine Cessnas, each 
equipped with gyro-stabilized cameras, cathode-ray-tube monitors, 
communication intercept equipment, and nighttime infrared systems 
that allowed the crew to zero in on drug laboratories in the jungles 
5,000 feet below.

The planes took off with only half a load of fuel to climb over 
13,000-foot Andean passes, refueled at Colombian military bases, then 
photographed the verdant terrain, looking for the telltale signs of 
coke labs: concrete maceration pits, chemical discoloration in the 
vegetation, water sources, and airstrips.

The teams turned their findings over to the U.S. Embassy, which 
worked hand in hand with the Colombian military to destroy the FARC's 
major moneymakers. "We found 72 labs one day during a single 
mission," recalled Doug Cockes, a pilot who joined the program in 
April 2001. "It would have taken the Colombian military months to 
find them all."

At the start of the program, the U.S. Embassy restricted the teams to 
daytime flights over three of seven Colombian regions.

Soon, however, at the embassy's insistence, the teams began running 
missions after dark. After six months, "we ended up working every 
zone in the country-unbroken jungle, mountains," Cockes said. "It was 
a classic case of mission creep." He and other pilots were worried 
about the flight-worthiness of the Cessnas' Pratt & Whitney PT-6 engines.

In June 2001, the team's ace pilot, Tom Janis, was flying over the 
Caribbean Sea, heading to Puerto Rico, when the engine suffered a 
catastrophic failure.

Janis turned back to the shoreline, picked up a tailwind, and was 
able to land safely in the coastal town of Santa Marta. Recalls 
Cockes: "Fifty percent of pilots would have missed the runway. Tom 
hit it perfectly, jumped out, and lit a cigar."

Engine failure wasn't the crews' only worry.

By late 2001 the planes were venturing deep into guerrilla territory 
and sometimes flying over large FARC encampments. "We saw muzzle 
flashes all the time; they were always shooting at us," said Cockes, 
who recalled one night flight where "an entire island of trees lit up 
like lightning bugs-they were firing hundreds of weapons." One day, 
as Tom Schmidt flew in low to record the tail number of a plane that 
was loading cocaine, he took three rounds to his craft. Lesson 
learned, but none of the men voiced objections to the work, though 
some admitted their worries privately. "The guys we had were hard 
chargers," said Cockes. "At some point, we should have said, 'Are you 
nuts? Do you realize how dangerous that is?' But we never turned a 
mission down."

Finally, Cockes spoke up. In November 2002, he and another pilot 
addressed a letter to Northrop Grumman, mentioning Janis's 
near-disaster and warning: "The continued use of a single-engine 
airframe in day and night flight profiles invites a catastrophic 
aviation mishap and potential corporate liability." Cockes said it 
would have cost the company another $500,000 a year to lease a pair 
of twin-engine planes, which would have given pilots a backup engine 
in the event of a failure; Northrop Grumman never acted on the 
warning and Cockes was demoted.

Marc Gonsalves found himself caught between an increasingly 
frustrated team and an unresponsive employer. "He didn't have a clue 
how dangerous it was," Cockes said. "He'd say, 'We need to go on more 
of these night flights to stay ahead of our competition.' I told him, 
'You need to be here longer before you open your mouth.' Gonsalves 
had "the enthusiasm and the ignorance of youth.
He'd been an intel guy, behind a desk. He had no jungle training. He 
never dreamed that he'd be put in such a dangerous position by a 
legitimate company."

On the morning of Thursday, February 13, 2003, Gonsalves joined 
Stansell, Howes, Janis, and Luis Alcides Cruz, a Colombian 
intelligence operative, at Fast Eddie's terminal and climbed into the 
Cessna Caravan. The flight plan detailed what was supposed to have 
been a routine surveillance mission-one of a dozen or so that the men 
flew each month.

The team flew south as usual over high Andean passes, preparing to 
refuel, but as they approached the Colombian base at Larandia, the 
plane's single engine abruptly died. The plane decelerated to 100 
knots, losing about 1,200 feet a minute.

Stansell issued a Mayday call, and Janis steered toward a bare, 
grassy hillside-a cleared coca field-jutting out of the mountainous terrain.

As the plane fell, the skilled pilot pulled up the nose and the 
aircraft smashed into the earth, cracking open.

Seconds after receiving Stansell's Mayday, a rescue team of Colombian 
and American crew members waited impatiently on the ground, 
helicopter blades spinning, for a go-ahead from a Colombian commander.

Meanwhile, a mobile unit of the FARC quickly swarmed over the 
shattered aircraft.

Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes were surrounded and marched into the 
bush. Janis and Cruz, whose pelvis had been broken in the crash, were 
shot dead. Their bodies were found some distance from the Cessna, 
which suggests that they were killed while trying to escape.

Another possibility: The guerrillas may have felt that the badly 
injured Cruz would slow them down, and Janis died trying to protect 
him. The helicopters, in any case, did not show up until after the 
bloodshed, and had no real chance of a rescue.

Five months after their capture, the Cessna's crew members were 
roused out of their sleep at dawn by their FARC guards.

The hostages groggily stumbled from their beds in a simple wooden 
house and confronted a Colombian journalist, Jorge Enrique Botero, 
who had been led on a seven-day hike from the jungle town of San 
Vincente del Caguan to the rebel encampment. Botero handed the 
Americans a recent issue of Newsweek, and they pored through the 
magazine excitedly, devouring news about the war in Iraq, which had 
begun weeks after their capture.

"I live in a vacuum-dead time," said Howes into Botero's video camera.

They had yet to receive their transistor radio, and Howes explained 
that he had no eyeglasses, which left him glum and unable to read. 
Stansell, ever outspoken, recounted in chilling detail the engine 
failure, his radio pleas for help, and the silence before the crash.

Then he demanded that the guerrilla commanders outline the conditions 
for their release.

Botero handed the men a printout of an MSNBC online story.

It detailed the night five weeks after the Cessna crew's capture, 
when Tommy Schmidt and two other team members, James "Butch" Oliver 
and Ralph Ponticelli, took off at night on a rescue mission.

As the would-be rescuers neared Larandia, their plane flew low over a 
ridge and clipped a tree. The plane crashed, killing everyone on 
board. (The families of the dead men sued the company for negligence 
shortly after the crash, and in 2005, Northrop Grumman settled out of 
court for an undisclosed sum.) After reading this report, Howes, 
stunned, began to cry on camera.

Asked whether he wanted the Colombian army to attempt a rescue, a 
visibly shaken Stansell said: "I don't want any more deaths. I don't 
want to die. I don't want anybody dying trying to get me out of here."

After nearly five years in captivity, the Americans are prisoners not 
just of the FARC but of the inaction of their own government and the 
Colombians-and of a growing international consensus that no 
government should negotiate with terrorists. Before he assumed the 
presidency in 2002, Uribe squared off with the FARC as governor of 
central Colombia's Antioquia region, and he has maintained an 
affinity for right-wing paramilitary outfits. His predecessor, Andres 
Pastrana, carried on futile talks with the FARC for years, and even 
granted the faction a Switzerland-sized swath of territory known as 
the despeje (Spanish for "cleared out") as a base for negotiations. 
But the rebels exploited Pastrana's diplomatic overture, using the 
sanctuary to grow coca and carry out attacks on police and military bases.

Uribe refuses to open another despeje and has unleashed his security 
forces to drive the guerrillas out of urban areas, which brought 
kidnappings down from 973 in 2002 to 122 last year.

The State Department has said it won't negotiate for the men's 
release, "as a matter of longstanding U.S. government policy," an 
embassy spokesman told me in Bogota. Yet some family members of the 
hostages charge that the government bears a heavy burden for putting 
the men in this predicament: Lured to Colombia for what they assumed 
would be routine surveillance operations, the employees of Northrop 
Grumman quickly found themselves drawn into a direct conflict with 
Colombian guerrillas-a war for which, family members and colleagues 
charge, they were left dangerously unprepared. Sharon Schmidt, 
Tommy's widow, said: "Keith knew before they went out that the U.S. 
government would turn their backs on them if they went down." She 
added that if they were captured, "they knew they'd either have to 
make the best of this or go down fighting."

Immediately after Sarkozy's phone call urging Uribe to make a 
goodwill gesture, Uribe released nearly 200 convicts and political 
prisoners, including a high-level FARC official.

The FARC leadership, though, dismissed the move as a "farce" and did 
nothing in return.

That same month, a federal jury in Washington convicted Ricardo 
Palmera, an extradited FARC commander better known by his nom de 
guerre, Simon Trinidad, of kidnapping. Months before, a U.S. federal 
judge had handed down a 17-year sentence to another extradited FARC 
military leader, Nayibe Rojas. The FARC leadership issued a 
declaration that they won't release their American captives until 
these two commanders are freed from U.S. prisons.

The Bush administration dismissed such a handover, and Uribe insisted 
he wouldn't accept the FARC commanders back into the country anyway.

In his sprawling office near the square where the father of yet 
another hostage was holding a vigil, I asked Vice President Santos 
whether he thought the hostages might be freed before Uribe leaves 
office in 2010. The small, exuberant man turned solemn and shook his 
head. "The FARC has not moved an inch," he said. "I think the only 
thing they understand is if we kick them in the head, kick them in 
the head, and then when we're tired, we kick them again. These people 
are beasts."

The hostages' families have placed their hopes on an unlikely deus ex 
machina-Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez. Last summer he reached 
out to the FARC, to persuade them to release all the hostages as a 
humanitarian gesture. In August, Chavez welcomed into his 
presidential palace Yolanda Pulecio, Ingrid Betancourt's mother, and 
nine relatives of the American hostages. Before their meeting with 
Chavez, Keith Stansell's parents had spoken with a top State 
Department official who warned them to be wary of the Venezuelan leader.

But the Stansell family came away impressed by Chavez's sympathetic 
demeanor and his focus on the stalemate. "If Chavez can free not just 
three Americans, but everyone, and end the suffering for all the 
families, I think he'd be a hero," said Lynne Stansell, Keith's 
mother. "He may be a real dog, but he treated us fabulously." 
Ultimately, however, Chavez offered no fresh ideas and instead tied 
any hostage release to the return of Trinidad and Rojas to Colombia.

Still, Yolanda Pulecio believes that the Chavez option represents the 
best possibility in five years for her daughter's release.

In her comfortable Bogota apartment, she thumbed through a book she 
recently published, Ingrid, My Daughter, My Love, a compilation of 
all of the messages that she had read over the radio every morning 
for the past five years-family gossip, news about Betancourt's two 
children, and expressions of love. "I learned from Pinchao that she 
listens to the radio every morning, and that she has heard all of 
these," she said, dabbing her face with a tissue.

A handsome woman in her late sixties, from one of Colombia's 
wealthiest families, she has been a diplomat's wife, an activist, and 
later a senator herself. Since her daughter's kidnapping, she has met 
with numerous heads of state, trying to keep the hostages in the 
public eye. "Uribe doesn't want to give an inch on anything," she 
said with clear disgust.

Jo Rosano, Gonsalves's mother, is taking a wait-and-see attitude, for 
her own emotional protection: "If anything develops, you get the 
'up,' and then-boom-you're back down again," she said. "It's taken 
over my life. It's torn me apart.

The thing that is constantly on my mind is, 'How did my little boy 
get caught up in this?' Rosano stuck a video into her VCR: Gonsalves, 
filmed by Botero in 2003, looked directly at the camera. "I am being 
strong," he said in a steady voice, as Rosano's eyes welled up with 
tears. "Don't worry about me. Just continue on with life and I'll be 
there one day." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake