WASHINGTON, April 27 - With inquiries beginning into Peru's downing last week of a flight carrying American missionaries, Congressional officials say they are examining the role played by C.I.A. contract employees who worked for the Aviation Development Corporation of Montgomery, Ala.

There is no indication of wrongdoing by Aviation Development, and government officials said the three C.I.A. contract employees on board a surveillance plane tried to prevent the Peruvian military from shooting down the missionaries' plane, which was suspected of carrying drugs.

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They are deeply religious people from small-town America, called by their faith to jungle villages along the Amazon river tributaries that thread through northeastern Peru.

American missionaries have been working here since the 1930s - but with last week's deadly shooting attack by the Peruvian military on a missionary plane, their isolated lifestyle has been shaken.

The remote region where they have chosen to spread the gospel is a transit route for small planes ferrying unrefined cocaine to neighboring Colombia from coca-growing regions hundreds of miles to the southwest.

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'Are You Sure It's A Bandito?'

USA Today listens to the cockpit tape of CIA drug-spotters trying to stop Peruvian officials from shooting down a civilian plane. They learned later it was carrying missionaries.

By Jack Kelley, USA Today

WASHINGTON - The three CIA crewmembers aboard a U.S. surveillance aircraft that first spotted an American missionary floatplane over the Amazon River repeatedly questioned whether the civilian aircraft was carrying drug runners.

The CIA crew then tried in vain to stop a Peruvian jet from shooting down the missionary plane, according to a tape of the cockpit conversation.

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Nation Focused On Presidential Race And Recent Scandals

LIMA, Peru -- Peruvians and Peru's media are immersed in nearly daily reports on scandals involving top government and military officials and a heated presidential campaign. They have had little time for the story of an American woman and her child who died last week when a Peruvian air force fighter shot down their light plane.

"What plane?" is the most common response from Lima residents when asked what they think about last Friday's downing of a plane carrying American missionaries.

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To the Editor:

Re "Baptists' Plane Was Identified as Drug Carrier" (front page, April 22):

You report that the State Department said the American missionary plane shot down in Peru had been mistakenly identified as a drug-running plane. But in the United States, people are presumed innocent until proved guilty. The police don't have the right to kill suspects at will because they believe that they may have broken the law. In this country, we leave punishment to the judicial system. The punishment for smuggling drugs is not the death penalty.

The only way to determine whether a plane is carrying drugs is to board it. Determining whether or not the right people were killed while sorting through the wreckage is wrong.

MARC LIBRESCU Fair Lawn, N.J., April 22, 2001

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Civilian pilots around the world have reacted with anger to the downing of a plane carrying a missionary family in Peru, saying the U.S.-Peruvian policy of attacking suspected drug smuggling aircraft is a blatant violation of international law.

"Nothing justifies a no-questions-asked destruction of civilian aircraft," said Phil Boyer, president of the International Council of Aircraft Owner and Pilot Associations, which represents 400,000 pilots in 56 countries. "We would have thought the nations of the world would have learned an important lesson from the downing of Korean Air Lines 007 in 1984."

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Here is a brief timeline of how the United States became involved in interdicting drug-laden planes in Peru.

1986: President Reagan issues a directive declaring that combating drug trafficking is a national priority. With host country consent, U.S. military forces and assets can be used, in supporting but not lead roles, to detect and interdict drug traffickers.

1989: President Bush approves a $2.2 billion, five-year Andean Initiative to help Bolivia, Colombia and Peru dismantle drug-trafficking operations, eradicate coca crops and encourage farmers to grow substitute crops. More law-enforcement, military and economic aid is offered.

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Attack: The U.S. Defends Program In Peru, But It Was Aware That Smugglers, Evangelists Fly Same Routes.

BUENOS AIRES--U.S. and Peruvian anti-drug officials knew all along that missionaries and drug smugglers fly the same routes over the Peruvian jungle, and they had worried about just such an incident as Friday's inadvertent downing of a plane carrying an American missionary family, former officials of the U.S. Embassy in Lima said Monday.

"Our worst fear was: 'What if we shoot down [some] missionaries.' " said one former embassy official involved in anti-drug efforts. "You don't know how much we talked about that at the embassy. We went through all kinds of pains to put the right sequence of protocols in place so that couldn't happen."

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April 24, 2001 -- An American Baptist group raised sharp questions yesterday about official U.S. and Peruvian explanations of the shooting down of a plane carrying missionaries. Peruvian authorities claim they thought the plane was being used by drug smugglers because no flight plan had been filed.

But the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, whose missionaries were aboard the Cessna 185 shot down by the Peruvian air force Friday, posted the flight plan on its Web site yesterday.

The disclosure came as U.S. and Peruvian authorities engaged in a series of charges and countercharges over who was responsible for the tragic blunder that resulted in the deaths of American missionary Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity.

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WASHINGTON - The Peruvian air force's attack on a small plane carrying U.S. missionaries focused attention yesterday on how U.S. intelligence and Peru's military coordinate their fight against narcotics trafficking.

CIA personnel on the U.S. surveillance plane did not attempt to read the registration number on the side of the civilian aircraft before it was shot down by the Peruvian air force Friday because they were afraid it would flee if they got too close, U.S. officials said yesterday.

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The CIA has grounded its joint anti-drug missions over Colombia as well as Peru, imposing a total freeze on the airborne search for drug smugglers over the cocaine-rich Andean region of South America, U.S. officials disclosed Wednesday.

The suspension, a major setback in the U.S. war against narcotraffickers in Latin America, was triggered by a Peruvian Air Force attack on a plane full of missionaries that killed two U.S. citizens Friday.

Colombian officials decried the suspension. ``This is serious for everybody because it will permit drug traffickers to operate with a certain freedom,'' said Air Force Gen. Hector Velasco.

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WASHINGTON, April 25 -- The American crew of a surveillance aircraft overheard the pilot of a small plane carrying a missionary family communicate with the tower at a Peruvian airport, and tried to warn a Peruvian Air Force fighter before it attacked, tape recordings of the incident reveal, according to United States officials who have reviewed them.

But the Peruvian jet almost immediately opened fire, and the pilot of the small Cessna can then be heard on the tape saying "they are killing us!" one official said.

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- An American missionary plane shot down over Peru did not appear to be on a drug trafficking mission because it flew deep into that country's airspace instead of sticking close to the border area and took no other actions normally associated with drug flights, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

The CIA-sponsored plane that monitored the missionary aircraft decided to notify the Peruvian Air Force about the single-engine Cessna despite the crew's belief that it probably was unrelated to drug smuggling.

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COLLEEN MCEDWARDS, CNN ANCHOR: Investigators in Peru are sorting out details in the crash of a U.S. missionary plane. The plane was mistaken for a drug trafficker's and was shot down Friday by the Peruvian air force, killing an American missionary and her daughter. The military was working with information from a CIA surveillance plane. Veronica Bowers and her seven-month-old daughter died in that incident.

She and her husband were working for the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism.

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For many U.S. officials, an agreement with Peru that has led to more than 30 midair attacks against drug-smuggling aircraft has been a resounding victory in the war on drugs. Along with U.S.-funded development programs and aggressive law enforcement on the ground, the air interdiction program is credited with a more than two-thirds drop in recent years in Peruvian exports of coca base, the processed raw material of cocaine.

"Has this been an effective program?" said a former official who until recently was closely involved with it. "The answer is undeniably yes."

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US-Peru inquiry begins this week into downing of missionary plane as drug interdiction flights halted.

Behind Peru's tragic shootdown of an American missionary plane is an aggressive drug-interdiction program that has earned Peru nothing but praise from the United States - until now.

The Peruvian Air Force's attack Friday on a Cessna aircraft is revealing to Americans the extreme measures foreign governments sometimes take in the US-promoted drug war - measures that in some cases would not be tolerated at home. The shootdown killed an American missionary and her infant daughter.

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For many U.S. officials, an agreement with Peru that has led to more than 30 midair attacks against drug-smuggling aircraft has been a resounding victory in the war on drugs. Along with U.S.-funded development programs and aggressive law enforcement on the ground, the air interdiction program is credited with a more than two-thirds drop in recent years in Peruvian exports of coca base, the processed raw material of cocaine.

"Has this been an effective program?" said a former official who until recently was closely involved with the program. "The answer is undeniably yes."

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U.S. Crew Objected Moments Before Attack

An audiotape made aboard a U.S. surveillance plane shows that its CIA crew expressed doubts about whether a civilian aircraft they were tracking was smuggling drugs 20 minutes before it was shot down last week by the Peruvian air force. But they did not vigorously object until just before it came under fire.

U.S. officials previously said the three crew members strenuously resisted the shootdown. But the tape, described to The Washington Post by U.S. officials, shows that the crew displayed little urgency as the Peruvian jet approached the plane because they expected it to take a closer look and read the plane's registration number. They sounded surprised when the jet attacked.

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WASHINGTON, April 24 -- A Peruvian Air Force plane flew close enough to a small plane carrying a missionary family to obtain the aircraft's tail number, but American officials concluded that it failed to check records of the number with Peruvian officials on the ground, an American official said today.

The official said that C.I.A. contract personnel on a nearby American surveillance aircraft tracking the small plane urged the Peruvians to obtain the tail number.

Since the downing of the small plane last Friday, which left an American woman and her baby daughter dead, American officials have said the Peruvian jet opened fire on the missionaries' plane without carefully following established procedures. American officials say tapes of the episode, which have not yet been released by the United States government, show that C.I.A. contract personnel raised questions with the Peruvians about their procedures before the Peruvian pilot opened fire.

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The downing of an American missionary plane and President Bush's subsequent decision to suspend U.S.-backed anti-drug flights has led Peruvians to fear drug traffickers will return to their skies soon.

The program, in which Peruvian pilots using information supplied by U.S. radars and surveillance planes force down suspected drug flights, helped Peru reduce cultivation of coca by almost three-quarters since 1992, knocking it from the spot as the world's top producer. Coca is used to make cocaine.

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