ANTI-DRUG PROGRAM CALLED `SLOPPY'

Report: U.S., Peru Share Blame In Shooting Of Plane

WASHINGTON -- Peru and the United States were undisciplined and "sloppy" in
the way they conducted a joint program to interdict airborne drug smugglers
in recent years, and share responsibility for mistakenly shooting down a
civilian aircraft carrying American missionaries in April, according to
sources familiar with the findings of a State Department investigation.

The downing of the plane over northern Peru occurred after a CIA
surveillance plane flown by American contract employees targeted the
aircraft as a suspected drug flight, tracked it and helped guide a Peruvian
air force fighter jet to it. A Baptist missionary, Veronica "Roni" Bowers,
and her 7-month-old daughter were killed, and pilot Kevin Donaldson was
seriously wounded.

A preliminary report by the United States concluded that Peru did not
comply with procedures established in a 1994 agreement between the two
countries. However, the new State Department report does not assign direct
blame, according to several sources, all of whom refused to be identified.
Instead, the report compiles facts about the aerial interdiction program as
well as the immediate events leading to the April 20 deaths.

Although the sources declined to provide specific details of the report,
they said it characterizes the program as having limited U.S. oversight and
having evolved over the years into one with lax adherence to procedures by
both the United States and Peru.

The sources said the report is likely to prompt calls from Congress and
elsewhere to circumscribe or shut down U.S. ground and air radar and
tracking assistance to interdiction programs in Peru and Colombia --
neither of which has the radar capability to operate on its own.

The Bush administration suspended intelligence agreements with both
countries after the missionary plane was shot down, pending the results of
the investigation to be jointly conducted by the United States and Peru.

But Bush officials, and Clinton administration officials before, have cited
the program as the key factor in a sharp decrease in the cultivation of
coca and export of cocaine from Peru over the past five years. They have
repeatedly warned that the shipments could easily resume now that
traffickers know the skies are not patrolled.

Officials said U.S.-based over-the-horizon radar fixed on the Andean region
had detected no increase in suspected drug flights during the past three
months. But Colombia's ambassador to Washington, Lus Alberto Moreno, said
last week that his government, using its own resources, is now detecting
only about three or four flights a month, compared with about 20 each month
with the Colombia-based U.S. radar and tracking assistance that has been
cut off.

Concern about the program's future has been reflected in the Bush
administration's reluctance to release the State Department's Peru report,
which was completed weeks ago. Last month, the administration hired an
outside expert, former U.S. ambassador to Colombia Morris Busby, to study
the report and conduct a broad review of the entire policy before it
decides what to do.

Based on videotapes and audiotapes from the CIA two-engine Cessna Citation
V, it initially appeared to U.S. officials that the Peruvian colonel
aboard, his fellow officers in radio contact on the ground and the pilot of
the Peruvian Air Force A37B had rushed through, or even skipped, steps set
out in the 1994 agreement.

But the situation became more complicated after investigators interviewed
U.S. and Peruvian program participants and discovered correspondence,
training information, memos and other documents from the past six years
that made it more difficult to dismiss Peru's insistence that it had not
done anything the United States had not agreed to.

The State Department report indicates that procedures for tracking and
shooting down aircraft had evolved, with mutual awareness, into something
"much less detailed and defined" than when they started in 1994, a source
said. "In bureaucratic language" the report comes out and "says we were sloppy."