U.S. NOTIFIED PERU OF SUSPECT PLANE

Amazon Surveillance Operation Identified Missionary Craft as Possible Drug
Flight

A U.S. government surveillance plane flying over northern Peru identified a
small aircraft carrying American missionaries as a possible drug flight and
passed the information to the Peruvian Air Force shortly before a Peruvian
fighter jet shot it from the sky Friday morning, U.S. sources said.

A woman and her 7-month-old daughter were killed by rounds fired from the
Peruvian plane. The missionary plane, a Cessna 185 that was flying from the
Colombian border toward the city of Iquitos, 620 miles northeast of Lima,
swerved to an emergency landing on the Amazon River. The pilot, who was
shot in the leg, survived, as did the woman's husband and another of their
children.

The U.S. government plane, a twin-engine Cessna Citation jet, was piloted
by a civilian working under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy in Lima. The
U.S. Customs Service operates such flights routinely over Peruvian airspace
in search of low-flying drug-runners. Under a longstanding
intelligence-sharing agreement with Peru, the United States passes
information on suspect planes to the Peruvian military, which has a policy
of intercepting the aircraft and shooting down those planes that refuse to
land. Peruvian military officials insisted yesterday that the crew of their
A-37B fighter followed "international procedures of identification and
interception" spelled out in the intelligence agreement. They said the
missionaries' flight failed to respond to radio messages and signals to land.

U.S. officials in Washington said that an investigation had been launched
into the incident, and that the Peruvian government had pledged full
cooperation. Both the United States and Peru have suspended their joint
interdiction flights pending the outcome of the investigation, according to
a U.S. Embassy source in Lima.

In Quebec City, where he was attending the Summit of the Americas,
President Bush expressed sorrow over what the White House called a "tragic
accident."

"The United States is certainly upset by the fact that two American
citizens lost their lives," Bush told reporters.

There were sharp differences between Peru's insistence that correct
procedures had been followed and the version provided by the U.S.-based
Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, whose members were aboard the
flight. Rev. E.C. Haskell, a spokesman for the missionary group, said that
the pilot, Kevin Donaldson, had filed a flight plan at Iquitos. Donaldson
was described as an experienced pilot in the Peruvian Amazon, a region
where Protestant missionaries have been heavily active for decades.

Haskell said that Donaldson maintained radio contact with air traffic
controllers at the Iquitos airport throughout the flight. He said the
Peruvian military did not communicate with Donaldson, by radio or
otherwise, before shots were fired directly into the aircraft.

Mario Justo, civil aviation chief at the Iquitos airport, insisted in a
telephone interview today the missionaries had not filed an official flight
plan. He said Peruvian civil aviation authorities had no knowledge of the
flight until one radio transmission moments before the plane was shot down.

It was unclear whether the confrontation between the Peruvian jet and the
missionaries' plane was visible to the U.S. surveillance plane. An official
in Washington said that the U.S. military had monitored a communication
between unknown parties calling for a halt in the interception.

"We monitored a communication that said you should not intercept with
violence, to wait, hold off," said the official, who asked not to be
identified.

International law and the intelligence-sharing agreement require that once
U.S. officials identify a suspect plane, Peru's military must first
determine if it filed a flight plan with nearby airports, and then attempt
radio contact. If there is no response, intercepting fighters are to
attempt hand signals to the pilot, then rock their wings -- an
internationally recognized signal for "follow me." If all else fails, the
intercepting jet is required to fire a warning shot across the nose of the
plane before shooting at it directly.

A former U.S. official with close knowledge of the agreement and how it has
operated in recent years said the Peruvians have observed those procedures
meticulously in the more than two-dozen shootdowns since 1995, most of
which were recorded on a sophisticated version of video tape by the U.S.
surveillance planes. The Peruvian A-37s, he said, have no air-to-air radar
and thus are "flying blind" until the U.S. surveillance aircraft directs
them to the exact location of a suspect plane.

In many cases, both the suspect plane and the Peruvian attackers, as well
as any confrontation between them, are fully visible by eye to the
surveillance plane's crew. The reconnaissance plane is also in radio
communication with the Peruvians.

According to ABWE aviation director Hank Scheltema, who spoke by telephone
with James Bowers, a passenger on the flight, the missionaries were flying
toward Iquitos when they noticed two other planes flying above and behind them.

"They just flew around, over and above, and never slowed up," Scheltema
said Bowers told him. "One went from behind and began to fire." He said
Bowers' wife, Veronica, 35, and daughter, Charity, were shot on the first
pass and died instantly. Donaldson, the pilot, was struck in both legs on
the second pass. The plane erupted in flames.

Donaldson managed to bring down the pontoon-equipped plane onto the Amazon
River, where it bounced and then flipped over. Donaldson pulled himself
out, and Bowers managed to unstrap his wife and daughter and pull them to a
pontoon. He told his 7-year-old son, Cory, to jump into the water. Bowers'
father-in-law said Bowers told him that the Peruvian plane continued to
fire at them while they were in the water.

About 45 minutes later, local Peruvians rescued them in a dugout canoe and
took them to the small, nearby city of Pebas. Jim and Veronica "Roni"
Bowers were well known in Pebas, according to David Southwell, the
missionary group's director for South America, because they had preached
there and taught local schoolchildren.

Four hours after the group reached Pebas, Southwell said, a Peruvian Air
Force Twin Otter, carrying American personnel, arrived and carried the
Bowerses to Iquitos. Donaldson, whose leg was shattered, was taken to an
Iquitos hospital today.

Southwell said Bowers was questioned last night by a Peruvian military
official from Lima, in the presence of U.S. consular officials.

Bowers told him, Southwell said, that "there was no indication whatsoever
that there was any warning given" by the Peruvians before the shootdown.
"If there had been any warning given, I can guarantee you that our pilot
would have landed. We have been operating for 14 years in aviation in that
area of Peru and nothing like that has ever happened before."

The Baptist missionary association is one of a number of U.S. Christian
evangelical groups operating in South America. Founded in 1927, it began
operations in Peru in 1939. The missionaries specialize in work along the
Amazon River and its tributaries, as well as along the Pacific coast.

The Bowers family, from Muskegon, Mich., had flown with Donaldson on
Thursday from Iquitos to the far eastern corner of Peru, where the country
borders Colombia and Brazil. Their purpose was to cross the border for
documents for their newly adopted infant daughter at the Peruvian consulate
in the Colombian border town of Leticia. They spent the night there and
returned to their aircraft on Friday morning for the trip back to Iquitos.

The intelligence-sharing agreement between Peru, Colombia and the United
States, was originally signed by former President Bush in the early 1990s
during a time of rapid growth in Peru of cultivation of coca, the raw
material of cocaine. The processed coca paste was being exported, often in
small aircraft, to Colombia, where cartels turned it into cocaine powder
for export to the United States.

Although efforts were made to stem coca cultivation on the ground in Peru,
the government of then-President Alberto Fujimori agreed with U.S.
government officials that air interdiction -- including Peruvian Air Force
shootdowns -- was an effective way to combat the traffic.

Under the agreement, U.S. facilities on the ground and in the air were used
to track possible illegal flights. U.S. officials viewed the program as a
particularly valuable weapon against drug trafficking after the Colombian
government in 1991 banned the extradition of drug kingpins to the United
States.

But in May 1994, the Clinton administration suspended the program. Both the
Pentagon and the Justice Department argued that any attack on civilian
aircraft was illegal under international and U.S. laws and questioned
whether U.S. cooperation with the shootdowns might jeopardize treaties on
aviation safety.

Several Pentagon officials raised specific questions about the possibility
that an innocent civilian aircraft -- even one in which U.S. citizens were
traveling -- would be shot down by Peru or Colombia. The State Department,
while acknowledging certain legal concerns, argued that some form of the
intelligence arrangement could continue under the equivalent of a "don't
ask, don't tell" policy in which the United States could share tracking
data but express its official disapproval of attacks in flight.

By mid-1994, however, as drug imports increased, Democratic leaders in both
the House and Senate turned aside administration concern that the United
States could be held liable if it aided attacks on civilian planes and
insisted that the agreement be reinstated. The administration agreed, but
insisted that new safeguards and procedures for aircraft identification be
written into the accord to guard against mistaken shootdowns. The
administration also sponsored legislation that exempts U.S. military
personnel from prosecution in connection with shootdowns resulting from the
intelligence agreements.

In recent years, U.S. counternarcotics officials have repeatedly hailed
Peru for sharply decreasing coca cultivation in that country. The Bush
administration's new budget request includes increased funds for
anti-narcotics aid for Peru.

The Pentagon moved quickly yesterday to disassociate itself with the
incident, and to note that the U.S. government aircraft involved was not
operated by any of the five U.S. military services. Although the
Miami-based U.S. Southern Command is authorized to use AWACS reconnaissance
flights over the region, such flights are rare.

"It was not an operation we had control of," a Defense Department official
said.

Faiola reported from Buenos Aires, DeYoung and Nakashima from Washington.
Edward Walsh and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.