U.S. TOOK RISKS IN AIDING PERU'S ANTI-DRUG PATROLS

Control, Standards Conceded

LIMA, Peru, - Crisscrossing Peru's eastern jungle,
U.S.-Peruvian air patrols for the last six years have attacked
low-flying planes trying to smuggle coca paste to the cocaine
production and distribution networks of Colombia's drug lords to the
north. The cooperative missions have been hailed as the most
successful tactic so far in America's war on drugs.

But the mistaken downing of a small plane carrying American
missionaries on April 20, which killed a woman and her infant
daughter, has suddenly thrust into the limelight the flaws, pitfalls
and risks that go along with such missions. In the life-or-death
decisions being made here using information from U.S. radar and
intelligence planes -- often transmitted across a language gap -- the
United States has given up a significant amount of control over
tactics and accountability. At the same time, it has forged an
alliance with a military and government leadership long rife with
corruption, sacrificing safeguards and legal standards it would be
held to at home.

The agreement that established U.S. cooperation with the Peruvian
government was negotiated directly with Vladimiro Montesinos, former
president Alberto Fujimori's intelligence chief who is now on the run
from corruption and drug charges. U.S. officials repeatedly have
uncovered evidence of Peruvian pilots and military officers conspiring
with drug traffickers, forcing the United States to continually take
steps to protect the operation's integrity.

These problems, outlined in interviews with U.S. and Peruvian
officials here and in Washington, were never seen as a reason to call
off the joint patrols. Rather, they were taken as compromises that had
to be made if the U.S. government was going to get something done in a
region where other governments are in charge and adversaries play by
the dangerous rules of Latin American drug smuggling.

The Central Intelligence Agency, for instance, operates the Citation
surveillance jets that flag suspicious planes for Peru's fighter jets.
But U.S. officials have had virtually no involvement in on-site
investigations of nearly 20 deaths resulting from the 38 incidents in
which planes have been shot down or forced to land under Peru's policy
of shooting drug planes out of the sky unless they surrender.

What the United States knows about those killed on the basis of
U.S.-supplied intelligence, it knows from the Peruvian government and
military. The shooting down of the U.S. missionaries, which provoked
outrage and concern in the United States, was widely and swiftly
reported mainly because there were survivors backed by an active
missionary organization in the United States to spread the word.

But Peruvian officials say the United States has not been the weak
partner it has sought to portray itself as since a U.S.-made Peruvian
A-37B warplane killed the 35-year-old missionary, Veronica "Roni"
Bowers, and her daughter, Charity, over the hamlet of Huanta along the
Amazon River. U.S. officials here provide critical counsel to Peruvian
military authorities right up to the moment when a senior Peruvian air
force officer gives the order to fire, they say.

"We have shared responsibility in the success and we should share
responsibility in the problems," said Maj. Gen. Pedro Olazabal Arbulu,
Peru's air force spokesman. "The U.S. has chosen to be our close
partner in this operation, and they play an inseparable role. We are
in this together."

Tape-recorded conversations between the pilot of the Peruvian jet and
the CIA surveillance plane, described by U.S. officials, suggest that
CIA contractors aboard the surveillance plane tried unsuccessfully to
call off the attack moments before firing began. Such last-minute
guidance from U.S. officials has not been unusual during the countless
patrols and about 50 specific interception missions flown since 1995,
Peruvian military sources here say.

Closing the 'Air Bridge'

Since their inception as a way to discourage cultivation of coca paste
in Peru and its export into Colombia, Peruvian patrols over what
became known as the "air bridge" linking Peru and Colombia have
fundamentally changed the U.S. drug war in the Andes. Confronted with
the "you fly, you die" policy over Peru, Colombian traffickers began
growing coca themselves. Cultivation here sank by 70 percent and
ballooned in Colombia.

The air-bridge patrols were the cornerstone of a U.S.-Peruvian
anti-drug partnership. The cooperation dated back to the early 1980s
but took on new urgency under Fujimori, who came into office in 1990.
Within two years of taking over, he launched Latin America's most
aggressive anti-drug campaign, defined largely by the threat to shoot
down drug planes.

At that time, smugglers' single-engine planes were coming in low, fast
and often, swarming like hornets over the jade-colored Amazon jungle
of northern Peru. Fujimori, encouraged by the United States, unleashed
his military to attack clandestine airstrips, patrol transit routes
and, most important, shoot down suspected traffickers.

Applauding Fujimori, Washington began providing aerial intelligence
and expanding the range of U.S.-funded ground radar stations in the
Amazon. Those radar stations, built in 1991, were jointly staffed by
Peruvian and U.S. military personnel. Between 1991 and 1994,
intelligence was shared with the Peruvians, but only four joint
Peruvian-U.S. missions were carried out -- none resulting in planes
being shot down, U.S. officials say.

Coordination problems, many of which resemble the series of mistakes
that led to the April 20 accident, began almost immediately. In April
1992, the Peruvians scrambled jets to intercept an unidentified plane.
The jets fired on what turned out to be a U.S. military transport that
had strayed from its flight plan, killing one crew member and injuring
two others.

"We are not always informed about everything the U.S. was doing here,"
said one Peruvian military source who asked not to be named, "and
their decision to maintain a level of secrecy has sometimes caused
problems."

In May 1994, cooperation was temporarily suspended after the State
Department raised concerns about who would be held responsible if a
civilian aircraft were downed with intelligence provided by the United
States. Congress passed a law three months later authorizing the
president to identify countries under extraordinary threat from drug
trafficking. Those countries, including Peru and Colombia, as well as
U.S. officials operating there, were indemnified from liability for
air interdictions as long as they provided detailed and safe rules of
engagement.

With new rules of engagement in place -- including the addition of a
Peruvian liaison on every U.S. surveillance flight -- the United
States reached a new agreement with the Peruvians in 1995 that brought
the two countries even closer in their war on drugs.

Under the agreement, a U.S. Citation aircraft owned by the Defense
Department and operated by CIA contractors would be used in joint
missions with the Peruvian air force. The agreement, signed by
then-Ambassador Alvin Adams and Foreign Minister Francisco Tudela,
required both parties to cooperate in "the detection, eventual
detention and interdiction of crafts, aircrafts and modes of
transport" suspected of smuggling drugs, chemicals and other materials
associated with the drug trade.

The United States raised concerns in 1997 about the Peruvians'
apparent eagerness to shoot down a private aircraft without following
established safety procedures. Although the aircraft proved to be a
drug plane, the CIA quickly launched an "intensive dialogue" with
Peruvian officials out of fear that providing U.S. radar data could
end in tragedy, according to a former State Department official who
was posted in Peru at the time.

"It raised a red flag, one that said we had to be really careful, even
more careful than we were being," the source said.

After that, U.S. officials required the Peruvians to read and sign
statements that they had reviewed all procedures for interdiction
operations, an intelligence official said. Training sessions were
conducted twice a month for Peruvian pilots.

In 1998, it was the Peruvians' turn to complain when a U.S. Citation
flying alongside a Peruvian A-37B warplane during an interdiction
mission accidentally veered toward the fighter and grazed it.

"The U.S. pilot almost cost the lives of two Peruvian pilots," said an
official with the Peruvian air force. "It caused us to redraft the
rules. We began flying under, rather than beside, the U.S. jets."

Contract pilots hired by the CIA to operate the intelligence flights
here say their training is limited to simulations in which they are
chasing bad guys, meaning they do not receive training for situations
in which the target turns out not to be a drug plane.

Additionally, language repeatedly emerged as a problem. A U.S.
official who has listened to the tapes of the April 20 incident said:
"The CIA guys' Spanish is not great. The [Peruvian liaison] speaks
some English, a little better, but still not great. They didn't have
trouble understanding each other early on. But the indication is that
when the adrenaline started flowing, they stopped being able to
clearly communicate."

A Large U.S. Presence

The United States was maintaining as many as 100 staff members on the
ground as part of the joint mission by the middle of the decade, from
the Central Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration,
the Pentagon and the Customs Service. Besides working in the
camouflaged Amazon radar stations, they were posted at Peruvian
military bases and the U.S. Office of Regional Affairs, a CIA-run
umbrella headquartered inside the fortress-like U.S. Embassy in Lima
and with officers posted behind high fences in the eastern town of
Pucallpa, 300 miles northeast of the capital.

The U.S. presence is immediately apparent at Pucallpa's new commercial
airport. More than a dozen UH-1H Huey helicopters sit a few hundred
yards from the terminal, part of the aid package given to the Peruvian
National Police to assist them in uprooting Peruvian coca
cultivations.

An $8 million complex houses the offices of State Department, Pentagon
and DEA employees, as well as a half dozen contract workers with
Reston, Va.-based DynCorp Co., according to a U.S. official posted
there. A new barracks for national police pilots being trained by U.S.
officials and DynCorp employees is half built, an investment meant to
bring scattered agencies and resources under one roof.

Within the past two months, one of the CIA's two Citation surveillance
planes kept here was called away to Colombia, which was receiving the
bulk of U.S. aid and attention until the downing of the missionary
aircraft. Colombia, which will receive more than 50 helicopters
through the anti-drug Plan Colombia aid package, has a similar
interception policy that last year resulted in the downing of one
suspected drug aircraft and the forced landing of 23 others.

In all, about 110 U.S. and Peruvian National Police officials work in
Pucallpa at any given time, the U.S. official said. Among them are six
of the 22 DynCorp employees in Peru, hired by the State Department to
handle everything from aircraft maintenance to pilot training. DynCorp
is the lead contractor for anti-drug work in Peru, Bolivia and
Colombia, where in February several of its employees came under fire
from leftist guerrillas during a rescue mission in the southern
province of Caqueta.

Pucallpa was chosen more than a decade ago for this "forward
deployment" because of its central location. The 14 helicopters kept
here have quick access to the Apurimac and Huallaga river valleys,
where national police patrols trained by U.S. advisers are carrying
out coca eradication efforts. The CIA surveillance planes, staffed
separately from DynCorp by contractors from Seattle-based Aviation
Development Corp., also have a short flight to their patrol zone along
the Peruvian border with Brazil.

Drug traffickers, according to U.S. advisers in Pucallpa, seek to keep
their flying time over Peruvian territory to a minimum. Once called in
from one of three nearby bases along the border with Brazil, it
usually takes a Peruvian jet about 10 minutes to intercept the
slow-moving drug planes.

The buildup did not come without a price. According to U.S. and
Peruvian sources, Montesinos used the agreement as a political weapon.
He occasionally threatened to suspend the partnership when it appeared
the U.S. government was putting too much pressure on Fujimori's
authoritarian government.

Since Montesinos went underground last year, authorities have seized
millions of dollars in secret bank accounts. Prosecutors in Peru have
charged that some of the cash was derived from protecting the drug
trade. Peru's most notorious drug lord, Demetrio "El Vaticano" Chavez,
testified at his 1996 trial that he paid Montesinos $50,000 a month to
ensure that his shipments reached Colombia. Soon afterward, he
retracted the statement.

Six months ago, not long after Montesinos left the government,
Chavez's brother was shot down in a suspected drug flight over eastern
Peru.

U.S. sources insist that if Montesinos worked with traffickers, he did
so without their knowledge. Nevertheless, corruption plagued the
program. The United States repeatedly discovered senior officers in
league with drug traffickers and became suspicious of pilots who
refused to fly missions on certain days.

This led the United States to ask Peruvian officials to begin rotating
the pilots flying interdiction missions. While such steps prevented
pilots from gaining familiarity with procedures, they were viewed as
necessary to root out corruption, U.S. sources said.

"On a particular day, for instance, [a Peruvian] pilot would suddenly
decide he didn't want to fly a mission," said the former State
Department official with long experience in Peru. "It happens when you
have that much money out there. We rotated the pilots with frequency.
I don't know to what extent that contributed to their ability to
follow the plans. But on the other hand, it was something that had to
be done to deal with the corruption."