SENATE COMMITTEE LOOKING INTO DRUG INTERDICTION PACT WITH PERU

Questions Raised Over U.S. Control of Shootdown Decisions

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has begun an extensive
examination of the six-year-old agreement under which the United States
assists Peru in tracking suspected drug smugglers, seeking in particular to
determine what control, if any, U.S. surveillance aircraft crews have over
Peruvian decisions to shoot down civilian planes.

The CIA has launched its own investigation into the incident that sparked
the Senate inquiry -- the Peruvian Air Force shootdown Friday of a plane
carrying American missionaries in which a woman and her infant daughter
were killed. Americans under CIA contract were flying the surveillance
plane that tracked the missionaries' single-engine Cessna 185 and guided a
Peruvian A-37 warplane to it before its identity was determined.

The Bush administration announced soon after the shootdown that it would
review the program, and would send an interagency team to Lima to
investigate. An initial CIA assessment indicated that the Peruvians
appeared to have rushed through or skipped agreed procedures that could
have confirmed the innocence of the missionary plane.

But the intelligence committee, following an initial closed-door session
Wednesday with CIA Director George J. Tenet, has decided to "scrub" the
entire intelligence-sharing agreement from its inception, said a Senate
source. The committee, he said, "wants to know who negotiated it, what were
the written agreements, and did we ever push for, and not get, more
authority" over shootdown decisions.

A recording of cockpit conversation in the surveillance plane indicates
that, even as the Peruvian officer aboard radioed for an interceptor and
the Americans used satellite and radar systems to direct that jet to the
Cessna, the CIA crew strongly doubted that it was a drug flight.

Although pressed by committee members, Tenet deflected questions on whether
U.S. pilots and crews are provided with guidance about what to do if they
disagree with Peruvian decisions, or the Peruvians do not follow agreed
procedures during an air interdiction operation, sources said.

What the committee inquiry will discover, however, according to former CIA
surveillance pilots who flew missions in Peru, as well as former and
current U.S. officials involved with the policy, is that there is no such
guidance, and that the agreement intentionally gives the Americans no
authority over Peruvian shootdown decisions.

"We didn't want to be part of a decision process because we didn't want to
assume responsibility when somebody made a decision to shoot down an
airplane," one official said.

Congressional reaction to the incident has been largely muted, with most
members saying that the facts should be established and made public before
conclusions are drawn. But any examination of the underlying policy that
led to it is likely to reopen a rancorous debate that accompanied the
policy's initial approval in 1994. Then, as now, there were deep divisions
over whether the threat posed by the trafficking of illegal drugs was so
intense that it justified extreme measures.

The 1994 debate centered on the fact that attacks against civilian planes
in the air clearly violated both international and U.S. law. When first
Colombia, and then Peru, said they would shoot down suspected drug planes
that ignored orders to land, the Defense Department shut down the radars
and grounded surveillance planes that were providing both countries with
the ability to track such flights, fearing U.S. liability for any shootdown.

But with the drug war raging, many people argued that the United States
needed to use every possible means to combat it. Withholding intelligence
from Peru and Colombia was "a self-destructive act that rewards drug
traffickers and threatens American national security," Sen. John F. Kerry
(D-Mass.), then chairman and now ranking minority member of the Senate
subcommittee on terrorism and narcotics, told the Boston Globe in June 1994.

Within weeks Congress overwhelmingly passed a measure sponsored by Kerry to
provide immunity for "employees and agents of the United States and foreign
countries engaged in interdiction of aircraft used in illicit drug
trafficking."

Defining "interdiction" as "to damage, render inoperative, or destroy," the
measure made it legal for authorized Americans to assist in such
operations. President Clinton issued the required national security
justification, and determined that both Peru and Colombia had "appropriate
procedures in place to protect against innocent loss of life . . . which at
a minimum include effective means to identify and warn an aircraft" before
force was used.

Inside the government, however, concern remained. Both countries provided
written policies governing their interdiction procedures -- including
checking for a flight plan, looking up the registration number of suspect
aircraft, attempting a series of radio and visual commands to persuade the
plane to land and firing warning shots before a shootdown was ordered.

But officials said the agreements -- which Colombia has rarely used for
shootdowns in recent years -- also make clear that U.S. involvement in the
operations extends only to locating the suspect plane, and leaves the
decision about what to do about it to the host country.

Former pilots said that standard procedure in all daylight missions is for
the U.S. plane to approach the "track" close enough to ascertain its
registration number, something that was not done in last week's shootdown.
That procedure is not specified in the agreements, however, officials said.

In their training, one former CIA pilot said, "the U.S. crew is told many,
many times not to interject themselves into the middle of this process. It
is their country, their air space, their air force. Decisions made to shoot
down or not to shoot down are their decisions. . . . When it comes to the
actual shootdown, you don't want to be on tape saying, 'There he is, shoot
him.' You don't want to be heard saying, 'No, don't shoot him down.' You
don't want to be interjecting yourself into a Peruvian decision."

A U.S. official explained the diplomatic rationale: "No country wants to
have some foreigner telling them who to shoot down or not to shoot down in
their own country."

Kerry said yesterday that "tracking is important but we never contemplated
shooting down planes without verification." The agreement needs to be
fixed, he said, "by requiring certitude in shootdowns."