NEWS ANALYSIS: INTELLIGENCE FALLOUTS FOR BUSH

WASHINGTON, April 26 -- President Bush has already seen that far-flung
United States intelligence operations can lead to some of the most delicate
foreign policy crises that an American leader can confront. Two significant
flare-ups early in his term -- the collision of an American spy plane and a
Chinese fighter, and the mistaken downing of a plane carrying a missionary
family over Peru during an anti-narcotics operation -- involved elements of
American intelligence.

By operating in gray areas beyond the scope of other aspects of American
foreign policy, such intelligence operations come with the potential for
creating international incidents, government officials say.

Intelligence is "at the point of the sword, and that's the most vulnerable
position to have," said Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida and vice
chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Hugh Price, a former deputy director of operations for the Central
Intelligence Agency, said: "Of course these things lead to problems,
because they are perceived as intrusive. What is intelligence? It is the
cheapest form of being kept advised and informed."

"So where you are not willing to use a very aggressive military approach to
a certain problem," he added, intelligence is used.

During the cold war, Washington was willing to take such risks, because the
operations aided in the collection of information about the Soviet Union or
other adversaries that policy makers considered crucial. Perhaps the most
famous historical example was the Soviet Union's downing of the U-2 pilot
Francis Gary Powers in 1960, which strained relations between Washington
and Moscow just before a summit meeting between President Eisenhower and
the Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Now, however, the threats to American national security are more varied
than a monolithic Soviet threat, and so such programs face greater
scrutiny. Both the surveillance flights off the Chinese coast and the air
interdiction operations to fight drug traffickers have been suspended in
the wake of the two incidents.

Certainly, American involvement in air interdiction operations in Latin
America to combat drug trafficking is now likely to come under
Congressional scrutiny because of the downing last week of the missionary
plane by a Peruvian fighter working in a joint Peruvian-American operation,
according to members of Congress. An American woman and her infant daughter
were killed in the incident. An American surveillance plane, with a crew of
three C.I.A. contract employees, was part of the joint operation with Peru,
working to identify and interdict drug trafficking aircraft.

The American plane's role was to locate and monitor suspicious aircraft,
and then turn the information over to the Peruvian Air Force, which would
then intercept the suspect planes. Under certain established procedures,
Peruvian fighters were authorized to shoot, but only after making extensive
efforts to identify the aircraft. Since the downing of the aircraft last
Friday, American officials have said the Peruvian jet opened fire on the
missionaries' plane without carefully following those established procedures.

Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, who represents an
area of western Michigan where the victims were from, said in an interview
that he expected the air interdiction program would be reviewed by Congress
to determine how such accidents can be prevented.

"The rules of engagement are fairly clear," he said. "We identify the
plane, but then what happens to the plane becomes the responsibility of the
Peruvian chain of command. I think you will see a lot of discussion about
that policy. Is this the kind of policy we ought to be embracing?"

Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama and chairman of the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence, said he agreed with the Bush
administration's decision to suspend the air interdiction program while the
incident is investigated. "My judgment would be that this has been a very
successful program over the years, but this was a tragic incident that
shouldn't have happened," he said.

Mr. Shelby and other lawmakers have already raised questions about possible
communications hitches between the English-speaking American crew of the
surveillance plane and Peruvian Air Force personnel. American officials say
there was a bilingual Peruvian officer on board the American surveillance
plane, acting as the liaison with the Peruvian Air Force; the American crew
would speak English with that officer, who then spoke Spanish with the
pilot of the Peruvian jet that fired upon the missionary plane.

The United States is expected to conduct an investigation of the incident,
although it is still not certain who will conduct that review.