'THEY ARE KILLING US!'

For Jim and Roni Bowers, the plane ride high above the Amazon River was
a welcome respite from their rewarding but rigorous life as
missionaries. They'd gone to the border town of Leticia, Colombia, with
their 6-year-old son, Cory, to get a Peruvian visa for their newly
adopted daughter, 7-month-old Charity. And now they were enjoying a
breathtaking view of the rain-forest canopy during a three-hour return
trip to their mission base in Iquitos, Peru. For days Jim had been
happily anticipating the opportunity to gaze down upon the 56 villages
where he had been spreading the Gospel by houseboat. "I'll get a better
feel for how they're situated and their full size and location on the
river," he e-mailed a friend, Pastor Terry Fulk, back in Fruitport,
Mich. He was just where he wanted to be--in the copilot's seat at 4,000
feet, feeding his infant daughter Cheerios. But as he looked out the
window to his right, Bowers got a start. There, flying below him on the
right side of the Cessna 185, was a Peruvian fighter jet.

The jet swooped back and forth under the Cessna, then popped up on the
left side. Bowers, sensing trouble, passed Charity back to his wife.
Pilot Kevin Donaldson could not contact the A-37B fighter because he had
no access to military frequencies. Instead, he radioed the control tower
in Iquitos to ask what the fighter was doing.

Roughly a minute after, according to an account Donaldson later gave to
his brother, the jet opened fire. Bullets tore into the pilot's legs;
another hit Roni Bowers in the back, exited her chest and then
penetrated her baby's head. Donaldson stayed on the radio to the Iquitos
tower: "They are killing us!" he yelled.

Donaldson didn't panic.

Smelling smoke in the cabin, he cut off fuel to the engine and put the
pontoon plane into a dive toward the river.

Bowers grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed the flames, then reached
across to help his wife and daughter, who were already dead. The plane
was veering into the river, slanting to the left, and Donaldson was
struggling unsuccessfully to push the rudder pedal.

It was only then that he realized that bullets had badly mangled his
right leg. The Cessna hit the water on its left pontoon, then came down
on the right, and slid to a stop about 50 feet farther on.

With fire spreading in the cockpit, Donaldson tugged himself out of the
left side of the plane, collapsing on the pontoon.

Bowers got Cory out of the right side, then struggled to extract Roni
and Charity. Tugging the two corpses, he swam to Donaldson's side, while
Cory swam on this own. Leaking fuel near the plane was burning now, so
the three survivors had to swim out into the river.

Donaldson, bleeding profusely and worried about piranhas, put Cory on
this back. He could feel his shattered bones grinding in his right leg.
Near him, Bowers tried to keep the corpses of his wife and daughter face
down so Cory wouldn't have to see their lifeless expressions. The
6-year-old, however, pleaded with his dad to lift their heads and keep
them from drowning.

It was then that Jim Bowers told his son that his mom and new sister
were in heaven. "Now they won't hurt anymore," he said.

As Donaldson and Bowers learned later, the attack was a tragic error,
probably born of negligence and machismo--and a controversial
anti-narcotics program sponsored in part by Washington. The Peruvian
fighter jet, which got its initial intelligence on the Cessna from a
CIA-manned surveillance plane, had fired at the Bowers thinking they
were drug runners.

After the shootdown, Washington immediately suspended its participation
in the Air Bridge Denial Program and promised a policy review. Although
many in Washington focused the blame on the Peruvian military, the
episode also set off a vicious round of finger-pointing among U.S.
government agencies involved in the drug war in Latin America. NEWSWEEK
has learned that even while the incident was unfolding, radio operators
from an interagency task force in Key West, Fla., tried to intercede
with the CIA surveillance plane.

One law-enforcement source said that the Key West team, which can
monitor aviation frequencies around Latin America, had overheard
something that made them uncomfortable. The CIA contract employees in
the plane, however, told the Key West operators that they were too busy
to talk, several sources with access to the transcripts told NEWSWEEK.
At one point, as the CIA-contracted fliers spoke among themselves, they
referred to their American colleagues at the Key West task force as
"a--holes."

The episode is rife with ironies.

Foremost among them: the Peruvian anti-drug campaign, with 102
"interdictions" over 11 years prior to last week's incident, was one of
the few such programs that had ever produced positive results. (The
United States provides surveillance and support in the shootdowns or
forced landings of suspected drug flights in both Peru and Colombia.)
The program even had the vigorous support of missionaries like the
Bowerses and Donaldson, who felt safer for it. The tragedy also raised
many questions, some old, some new: Should the United States be part of
any mission that involves firing on unarmed aircraft?

Why was the Peruvian surveillance program the nearly exclusive domain of
the CIA, while other drug-interdiction programs in Latin America
involved several U.S. law-enforcement agencies?

And why was the CIA using "contract employees" who spoke little Spanish
on a mission that involved life-and-death decisions in Peru?

These questions further underscored doubts about Washington's overall
drug-fighting strategy.

There's an emerging consensus among American policymakers that efforts
to combat drug lords have been ineffective, and that Washington needs to
concentrate on policies that reduce domestic demand. (Although the
Peruvian program was successful for a time, coca cultivation expanded in
other areas.) After the attack on the Bowerses' plane, Secretary of
State Colin Powell blamed Latin America's drug problems largely on
narcotics users in the United States. "The real problem in the region...
is caused by what happens on the streets of New York, the streets of all
our other major cities," he told a congressional panel. "And it is not
just a poor kid's problem, a poor kid taking pot on the street corner;
it's corporate lawyers, it's actors who over and over and over again
continue to use drugs in an unlawful way." But while Powell focused on
the demand side, Bush this week is expected to announce a new drug czar,
John Walters, who has built a career on battling supply.

He is a conservative who has previously favored tougher law enforcement
and interdiction to combat the drug trade.

The story of how the Bowers family became victims in the latest of many
grim parables about Washington's war on drugs begins at takeoff.

A senior Peruvian military officer insists that Donaldson's flight plan
called for him to fly back to Iquitos a day earlier. (A colleague of
Donaldson's denied that claim and said his flight plan had clearly
indicated his intention to fly back that Friday.) The general also says
that when Donaldson took off and banked to the south, he briefly crossed
into Brazilian airspace and then back into Peru, which triggered the
air-monitoring-and-control system run by the United States and Peru.

It's not clear who then picked up and reported on the pontoon plane.
According to the Peruvian general, it is usually a U.S. radar facility
in Puerto Rico that relays the information to the Peruvian Air Force
command-and-control post in the eastern Peruvian city of Pucallpa. But
according to the CIA, it was the Citation surveillance plane that first
notified its base about the Cessna. While most other U.S.
drug-surveillance flights in the region report to the interagency
command center in Key West, which is under the authority of the Defense
Department, planes in the Peruvian program report directly through the
CIA chain of command.

The Citation was operated by a CIA contract company called Aviation
Development Corp., located on an Air Force base in Montgomery, Ala.
Aboard the plane were three CIA contract employees and a Peruvian
liaison officer with the rank of major. (A man who answered the phone at
Aviation Development last week refused to identify himself and hung up.)
NEWSWEEK has learned that the Pucallpa air-base facility also hosts a
shadowy U.S. government operation known as the Office of Regional
Administration, which is run and primarily staffed by the CIA.

The Citation followed the smaller Cessna 185 for about 50 minutes along
the Amazon River. At some point during this time, the Key West
interagency command center, which had no authority over the mission,
asked the surveillance plane some questions: "What's going on with your
track?" and "Are you in trail?" According to U.S. officials, the pilot
responded by saying, essentially, that he didn't have time to answer
routine questions. Other American officials say the CIA employees were
busy attempting to head off a quick attack on the Bowerses' plane.

On several occasions, they voiced doubts to their Peruvian liaison
officer that the Cessna was a drug plane, and insisted that the A-37B
pilot acquire the aircraft's tail number and attempt visual recognition.
But the registration number was never called back to Peruvian
authorities for verification. Up to the last moment, the CIA employees
were warning that they thought the Peruvians were making a "mistake."
According to a Peruvian news report, the pilots of the fighter were
ordered to fire by Col. Hilario Valladares Zegarra, a decorated war hero
who had recently become second in command of the Peruvian Air Force
Sixth Region.

After the attack, the Peruvian fighter jet made a few last, low passes
over the wreckage in the river.

But it did not, as some reports had it, strafe the plane again.

Donaldson later told his brother that he also spotted the Citation
surveillance plane at that time. Once the flames died out, the survivors
did their best to clamber back aboard the capsized, half-submerged
wreck.

Donaldson fashioned three tourniquets, out of a sock and two belts, to
restrict the bleeding from his leg. As they waited for help, the two men
and the boy prayed out loud for God to take care of them.

Finally a man in a dugout canoe spotted the wreckage.

He and other residents of the nearby village of Huanta, where Jim and
Roni had ministered and worked so hard to save souls, brought the
survivors and the dead ashore.

Then some of the villagers took Donaldson by boat to a hospital in
Pebas, 18 miles away. Two hours later, troops from U.S. Special Forces
arrived to get Cory, Jim and the bodies of Roni and Charity. "From that
point on, [Jim] felt safe," says family friend Heidi Enck, who spoke to
Bowers last week.

At the funeral back in Michigan on Friday night, Bowers declared that he
had forgiven the pilots who attacked his family, whom he compared to the
Romans who crucified Christ. He attributed the plane tragedy to the hand
of God. Standing at a podium a few steps from the single white casket
that held his wife and daughter, Bowers said he believed that God spared
Cory so that he would "have an opportunity to trust Christ as his
personal savior," and that God had "directly intervened" in order to
"wake up" sleeping Christians, including himself. "How could something
so terrible be so good?" he asked the congregation. "Both Cory and I are
experiencing inexplicable peace.

Some are telling us that won't last. I hope it will." Few had such
single-minded faith.

And some policymakers--in both Peru and the United States--worried that
the only people who would benefit from the tragedy would be the drug
lords.