BUNGLE IN THE JUNGLE

It's Been 1,750 Days Since Their Mayday Call, and Three Members of a
Flight Crew Contracted by the State Department Are Still Awaiting
Rescue. While the U.S. and Colombian Governments Refuse to Bargain
With Terrorists, the Hostage Crisis Threatens to Become the Longest
in U.S. History.

The tropical prison lies in a muddy clearing deep in the southern
Colombian jungle, surrounded by a barrier of rough-hewn logs and
close to a wide, swift river.

Scattered around the compound are a dozen simple tents-plastic
tarpaulins supported by bamboo poles, with hard wooden pallets on
which the prisoners and their guards sleep.

There's a volleyball net, a meeting place for Catholic masses and
English classes, an outdoor kitchen where rice and beans, river fish,
and wild pigs are cooked in cast-iron pots. Outside the barricade,
camouflage-clad guerrillas with AK-47s patrol day and night in five
concentric circles extending deep into the wilderness.

For the three American hostages serving indeterminate sentences in
this equatorial Alcatraz, the day begins at dawn, when guards-all
insurgent units of FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,
a 17,000-strong Marxist rebel army-unlock the steel shackles that
wind around their necks and bind them to one another.

The hostages are Tom Howes, a quiet 54-year-old pilot and veteran of
Latin American drug wars; Keith Stansell, a rakish 43-year-old
ex-Marine mechanic and bear hunter; and Marc Gonsalves, a gung-ho
35-year-old former Air Force intelligence officer.

As employees of Northrop Grumman, the giant U.S. defense contractor,
they were on a surveillance mission five years ago that went horribly wrong.

And in a fate that might not have befallen them had they been part of
the U.S. military that trained two of them-and whose aims their
surveillance work served-they have become America's longest-held
hostages still in captivity, with no end to their ordeal in sight.

In 2001, the Bush administration was ramping up U.S. initiatives in
Colombia. But the war on terror quickly supplanted the war on drugs
as a White House focus, and these three men got caught up in the
shifting priorities. In the White House's view, however, the FARC
uses terrorist tactics and therefore its demands are nonnegotiable.
Complicating the diplomacy is another hostage whom the guerrillas
consider their most valuable bargaining chip: Ingrid Betancourt, 45,
a former Colombian presidential candidate and the sole female
prisoner in the compound, who was captured during a fact-finding
mission into rebel-held territory in early 2002.

Other governments have pushed for a more flexible approach.

This spring, one of Nicolas Sarkozy's first official acts as
president of France was a phone call to Colombian president Alvaro
Uribe, in which the French leader urged the hard-line,
never-negotiate Colombian head of state to make a release of FARC
prisoners. (After all, Betancourt spent the first 20 years of her
life in Paris and has dual French-Colombian citizenship.) In August,
Venezuelan leftist strongman Hugo Chavez, in another bid to build his
international profile, announced his own initiative to get the
hostages out. But mostly it's been left to the Colombians themselves
to find a way to end the kidnapping epidemic.

In its 40-year quest for a Marxist-Leninist state, the FARC has
seized thousands of prisoners, and the group is just one of many
Colombian factions employing this tactic.

On a recent visit to Bogota, I sat down with Vice President Francisco
Santos Calderon, a former newspaper editor who once spent eight
months in the 1990s chained to a bed as a hostage of drug kingpin
Pablo Escobar. Asked whether there was any chance that the government
would risk sending troops to extract the hostages, Santos said
cautiously, "The government cannot close the door on rescue."

Though his circumstances were different, Santos offered that he knows
what the Americans and the other hostages are going through. "I had
little children, one a year and a half, the other six months, and
that's your weak spot," he said. Many times when he was a prisoner,
"I wished for the SWAT teams to come in to rescue me even if I died.
I was so desperate.

You say, 'Let's hope they jump in. And if I get a gunshot wound,
we'll see what happens."

Last September, I met Jhon Pinchao Blanco, a baby-faced man with a
nervous smile, in a lounge at national police headquarters in Bogota.
The police sergeant sat ramrod straight while recounting his memories
of the three gringos he lived with for the final six months of his
own captivity.

In a crisp olive-drab uniform with crossed pistols on both epaulets,
Pinchao maintained a stiff demeanor reflecting both the military
regimen that has shaped him since his teens and the tight
restrictions he is under while talking to journalists. "The worst
part was the chains," he said, gesticulating sharply with both hands.
"When you bathed, when you slept, when you were moved from camp to
camp, you were in chains. That was a kind of slavery, a kind of
humiliation. We felt like rabid dogs."

After dark on April 28, 2007, while the Americans slept a few yards
away, Pinchao snapped a link of the chain that had bound him to a
fellow cop. (When the guards weren't looking, he had inserted a piece
of wood into a link of his chain and twisted the wood over and over
until the metal eroded and gave way.) With the remnants of his
shackles around his neck, Pinchao waited until his guard was
distracted. He made his move solo-there was no feasible way to
include another prisoner in the escape.

He then crawled through the barricade, crept through the bush, and
leapt into the river. Holding tight to a gallon jug filled with
potable water, he let the fierce current sweep him downstream.
Suddenly, he felt "tranquilo," he says, though his respite was only momentary.

Pinchao wandered lost in the jungle, dodging FARC patrols.

He was savaged by mosquitoes, and his only nourishment was some flour
that he'd secretly accumulated over weeks. Eventually, he found his
way back to the river, and 17 days after his breakout, he
staggered-ragged, half-starving, feverish with malaria-into a police outpost.

The trauma is still visible on Pinchao's solemn face. He first met
the Americans only about three years ago-usually they were kept in a
separate camp with about 45 other "high-value" captives-but Pinchao
was alongside them when they were sent on a weeks-long march through
the jungle to a new camp. Betancourt was among the trekkers too,
which was unusual as her irascibility earned her long terms of
solitary confinement. "Ingrid didn't respect her captors," Pinchao
said, describing how she talked back to her guards and even slapped
one across the face-an offense that could have gotten her shot.
Pinchao recalled that Betancourt attempted five escapes in all: In
one, she eluded the guerrillas for five days in the jungle before
being dragged back to camp and kept isolated and chained to a chair for days.

Pinchao also described a numbing daily routine that has governed the
prisoners' lives for nearly five years.

Morning begins with cups of coffee in the damp heat, as the calls of
toucans, macaws, and spider monkeys echo from palm and wild papaya trees.

At 7:00 A.M., the hostages march down a trail to the river, where
they bathe and wash one of the two tracksuits that constitute their
entire wardrobe.

Back at camp, they are fed breakfast-usually chocolate milk, soup,
corn, and bread.

The men fill the hours by doing push-ups, reading novels by the likes
of John Grisham, lifting homemade barbells, and playing team sports
with the four dozen other captives, mostly Colombian policemen and soldiers.

The Americans, Pinchao said, have adapted reasonably well to
captivity, though several have endured bouts of malaria and hepatitis.

They've managed to learn Spanish and have even struck up friendships
with guards.

Among the three Americans, Marc Gonsalves, an Air Force veteran and
native of Bristol, Connecticut, began as the greenest and most gonzo
but has since become subdued, reading the Bible voraciously and
holding improvised Catholic masses for the other prisoners.

Tom Howes, a Massachusetts Yankee known for his reticence, plunged
into a long phase of melancholy, and then emerged with a newfound
ability to tell jokes.

One key to his well-being: He adopted a smelly stray dog, which he
named Tula. Pinchao singled out Keith Stansell, a Miami native raised
by a pair of academics, as "the one who told stories, who tried to
entertain. Stansell talked about his two kids, how he'd clean the
house and cook for them." Stansell had also committed himself to
hours of weight training each day. The hardy ex-Marine even taught
Pinchao to swim during their daily bathing sessions in the river.
Those lessons, Pinchao explained, gave him the courage to cross the
river and make his way to safety.

Pinchao sadly related that prisoners never received any of their
families' letters, which the Catholic Church regularly delivered to
the FARC. But every morning, the hostages huddled around transistor
radios, listening to news and family messages that Caracol,
Colombia's most popular radio station, had agreed to broadcast.

In one message, Stansell's parents gave him an update on his
children: "Kyle and Lauren are doing fine. Lauren's graduation from
high school went very well; she wished you'd been there for the
party. Don't give up-people are working very hard to get you
released." Messages like that "gave every one of us a reason to keep
on living," said Pinchao.

In November 2002, Gonsalves arrived in Bogota and moved into a
tightly guarded apartment complex with Stansell, Howes, and a dozen
other pilots and systems analysts.

The men were all private contractors who had been hired by California
Microwave Systems, a division of Northrop Grumman, to locate cocaine
labs deep in Colombia's jungles.

Gonsalves arrived at a particularly tense time: A major peace
initiative had just collapsed, and Betancourt had been snatched at a
guerrilla roadblock months earlier.

The flight team members, including Gonsalves, left their wives and
children behind in the United States for the four weeks that they
spent in Columbia out of every six. Gonsalves stayed in daily phone
contact with his wife, Shane, a onetime exotic dancer whom he had met
in a nightclub in Tampa. He had taken this six-figure-salary job with
a goal in mind for his wife, their daughter, and his two stepsons,
according to his mother, Jo Rosano: "He called me and said, 'It's
only for three years, and we'll save $50,000 a year, so Shane can get
the big house she's dreamed about, and then we can move back to Connecticut.'"

Stansell, a divorced dad of two teens, had a steady girlfriend back
in the Florida Panhandle to whom he often returned.

In Bogota, however, he was living openly with a Colombian flight
attendant, Patricia Medina, whom he'd met on an Avianca flight to
Panama in April 2002. While many members of the team holed up in the
condos during their time off, Stansell and Medina enjoyed a busy
social life that included dancing at the city's salsa bars.

Howes had flown for the State Department's Air Wing, a secretive
outfit that oversaw counternarcotics operations and dabbled in
counterinsurgency. He had married a Peruvian woman, Mariana, and when
raising two children in Bogota got too dicey, the family also
repaired to the safety of Florida-for them, Merritt Island-and Howes
visited there as often as his work allowed.

The Northrop Grumman teams operated from a secure 1.5-acre base at
Bogota's El Dorado Airport known as "Fast Eddie's" after the dual
Colombian-U.S. citizen who managed the outpost.

The five-man teams (two pilots, two systems analysts, and a Colombian
military intelligence escort) received "targeting" instructions three
or four times a week from a military officer at the U.S. Embassy.
Then they took off in a pair of leased single-engine Cessnas, each
equipped with gyro-stabilized cameras, cathode-ray-tube monitors,
communication intercept equipment, and nighttime infrared systems
that allowed the crew to zero in on drug laboratories in the jungles
5,000 feet below.

The planes took off with only half a load of fuel to climb over
13,000-foot Andean passes, refueled at Colombian military bases, then
photographed the verdant terrain, looking for the telltale signs of
coke labs: concrete maceration pits, chemical discoloration in the
vegetation, water sources, and airstrips.

The teams turned their findings over to the U.S. Embassy, which
worked hand in hand with the Colombian military to destroy the FARC's
major moneymakers. "We found 72 labs one day during a single
mission," recalled Doug Cockes, a pilot who joined the program in
April 2001. "It would have taken the Colombian military months to
find them all."

At the start of the program, the U.S. Embassy restricted the teams to
daytime flights over three of seven Colombian regions.

Soon, however, at the embassy's insistence, the teams began running
missions after dark. After six months, "we ended up working every
zone in the country-unbroken jungle, mountains," Cockes said. "It was
a classic case of mission creep." He and other pilots were worried
about the flight-worthiness of the Cessnas' Pratt & Whitney PT-6 engines.

In June 2001, the team's ace pilot, Tom Janis, was flying over the
Caribbean Sea, heading to Puerto Rico, when the engine suffered a
catastrophic failure.

Janis turned back to the shoreline, picked up a tailwind, and was
able to land safely in the coastal town of Santa Marta. Recalls
Cockes: "Fifty percent of pilots would have missed the runway. Tom
hit it perfectly, jumped out, and lit a cigar."

Engine failure wasn't the crews' only worry.

By late 2001 the planes were venturing deep into guerrilla territory
and sometimes flying over large FARC encampments. "We saw muzzle
flashes all the time; they were always shooting at us," said Cockes,
who recalled one night flight where "an entire island of trees lit up
like lightning bugs-they were firing hundreds of weapons." One day,
as Tom Schmidt flew in low to record the tail number of a plane that
was loading cocaine, he took three rounds to his craft. Lesson
learned, but none of the men voiced objections to the work, though
some admitted their worries privately. "The guys we had were hard
chargers," said Cockes. "At some point, we should have said, 'Are you
nuts? Do you realize how dangerous that is?' But we never turned a
mission down."

Finally, Cockes spoke up. In November 2002, he and another pilot
addressed a letter to Northrop Grumman, mentioning Janis's
near-disaster and warning: "The continued use of a single-engine
airframe in day and night flight profiles invites a catastrophic
aviation mishap and potential corporate liability." Cockes said it
would have cost the company another $500,000 a year to lease a pair
of twin-engine planes, which would have given pilots a backup engine
in the event of a failure; Northrop Grumman never acted on the
warning and Cockes was demoted.

Marc Gonsalves found himself caught between an increasingly
frustrated team and an unresponsive employer. "He didn't have a clue
how dangerous it was," Cockes said. "He'd say, 'We need to go on more
of these night flights to stay ahead of our competition.' I told him,
'You need to be here longer before you open your mouth.' Gonsalves
had "the enthusiasm and the ignorance of youth.
He'd been an intel guy, behind a desk. He had no jungle training. He
never dreamed that he'd be put in such a dangerous position by a
legitimate company."

On the morning of Thursday, February 13, 2003, Gonsalves joined
Stansell, Howes, Janis, and Luis Alcides Cruz, a Colombian
intelligence operative, at Fast Eddie's terminal and climbed into the
Cessna Caravan. The flight plan detailed what was supposed to have
been a routine surveillance mission-one of a dozen or so that the men
flew each month.

The team flew south as usual over high Andean passes, preparing to
refuel, but as they approached the Colombian base at Larandia, the
plane's single engine abruptly died. The plane decelerated to 100
knots, losing about 1,200 feet a minute.

Stansell issued a Mayday call, and Janis steered toward a bare,
grassy hillside-a cleared coca field-jutting out of the mountainous terrain.

As the plane fell, the skilled pilot pulled up the nose and the
aircraft smashed into the earth, cracking open.

Seconds after receiving Stansell's Mayday, a rescue team of Colombian
and American crew members waited impatiently on the ground,
helicopter blades spinning, for a go-ahead from a Colombian commander.

Meanwhile, a mobile unit of the FARC quickly swarmed over the
shattered aircraft.

Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes were surrounded and marched into the
bush. Janis and Cruz, whose pelvis had been broken in the crash, were
shot dead. Their bodies were found some distance from the Cessna,
which suggests that they were killed while trying to escape.

Another possibility: The guerrillas may have felt that the badly
injured Cruz would slow them down, and Janis died trying to protect
him. The helicopters, in any case, did not show up until after the
bloodshed, and had no real chance of a rescue.

Five months after their capture, the Cessna's crew members were
roused out of their sleep at dawn by their FARC guards.

The hostages groggily stumbled from their beds in a simple wooden
house and confronted a Colombian journalist, Jorge Enrique Botero,
who had been led on a seven-day hike from the jungle town of San
Vincente del Caguan to the rebel encampment. Botero handed the
Americans a recent issue of Newsweek, and they pored through the
magazine excitedly, devouring news about the war in Iraq, which had
begun weeks after their capture.

"I live in a vacuum-dead time," said Howes into Botero's video camera.

They had yet to receive their transistor radio, and Howes explained
that he had no eyeglasses, which left him glum and unable to read.
Stansell, ever outspoken, recounted in chilling detail the engine
failure, his radio pleas for help, and the silence before the crash.

Then he demanded that the guerrilla commanders outline the conditions
for their release.

Botero handed the men a printout of an MSNBC online story.

It detailed the night five weeks after the Cessna crew's capture,
when Tommy Schmidt and two other team members, James "Butch" Oliver
and Ralph Ponticelli, took off at night on a rescue mission.

As the would-be rescuers neared Larandia, their plane flew low over a
ridge and clipped a tree. The plane crashed, killing everyone on
board. (The families of the dead men sued the company for negligence
shortly after the crash, and in 2005, Northrop Grumman settled out of
court for an undisclosed sum.) After reading this report, Howes,
stunned, began to cry on camera.

Asked whether he wanted the Colombian army to attempt a rescue, a
visibly shaken Stansell said: "I don't want any more deaths. I don't
want to die. I don't want anybody dying trying to get me out of here."

After nearly five years in captivity, the Americans are prisoners not
just of the FARC but of the inaction of their own government and the
Colombians-and of a growing international consensus that no
government should negotiate with terrorists. Before he assumed the
presidency in 2002, Uribe squared off with the FARC as governor of
central Colombia's Antioquia region, and he has maintained an
affinity for right-wing paramilitary outfits. His predecessor, Andres
Pastrana, carried on futile talks with the FARC for years, and even
granted the faction a Switzerland-sized swath of territory known as
the despeje (Spanish for "cleared out") as a base for negotiations.
But the rebels exploited Pastrana's diplomatic overture, using the
sanctuary to grow coca and carry out attacks on police and military bases.

Uribe refuses to open another despeje and has unleashed his security
forces to drive the guerrillas out of urban areas, which brought
kidnappings down from 973 in 2002 to 122 last year.

The State Department has said it won't negotiate for the men's
release, "as a matter of longstanding U.S. government policy," an
embassy spokesman told me in Bogota. Yet some family members of the
hostages charge that the government bears a heavy burden for putting
the men in this predicament: Lured to Colombia for what they assumed
would be routine surveillance operations, the employees of Northrop
Grumman quickly found themselves drawn into a direct conflict with
Colombian guerrillas-a war for which, family members and colleagues
charge, they were left dangerously unprepared. Sharon Schmidt,
Tommy's widow, said: "Keith knew before they went out that the U.S.
government would turn their backs on them if they went down." She
added that if they were captured, "they knew they'd either have to
make the best of this or go down fighting."

Immediately after Sarkozy's phone call urging Uribe to make a
goodwill gesture, Uribe released nearly 200 convicts and political
prisoners, including a high-level FARC official.

The FARC leadership, though, dismissed the move as a "farce" and did
nothing in return.

That same month, a federal jury in Washington convicted Ricardo
Palmera, an extradited FARC commander better known by his nom de
guerre, Simon Trinidad, of kidnapping. Months before, a U.S. federal
judge had handed down a 17-year sentence to another extradited FARC
military leader, Nayibe Rojas. The FARC leadership issued a
declaration that they won't release their American captives until
these two commanders are freed from U.S. prisons.

The Bush administration dismissed such a handover, and Uribe insisted
he wouldn't accept the FARC commanders back into the country anyway.

In his sprawling office near the square where the father of yet
another hostage was holding a vigil, I asked Vice President Santos
whether he thought the hostages might be freed before Uribe leaves
office in 2010. The small, exuberant man turned solemn and shook his
head. "The FARC has not moved an inch," he said. "I think the only
thing they understand is if we kick them in the head, kick them in
the head, and then when we're tired, we kick them again. These people
are beasts."

The hostages' families have placed their hopes on an unlikely deus ex
machina-Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez. Last summer he reached
out to the FARC, to persuade them to release all the hostages as a
humanitarian gesture. In August, Chavez welcomed into his
presidential palace Yolanda Pulecio, Ingrid Betancourt's mother, and
nine relatives of the American hostages. Before their meeting with
Chavez, Keith Stansell's parents had spoken with a top State
Department official who warned them to be wary of the Venezuelan leader.

But the Stansell family came away impressed by Chavez's sympathetic
demeanor and his focus on the stalemate. "If Chavez can free not just
three Americans, but everyone, and end the suffering for all the
families, I think he'd be a hero," said Lynne Stansell, Keith's
mother. "He may be a real dog, but he treated us fabulously."
Ultimately, however, Chavez offered no fresh ideas and instead tied
any hostage release to the return of Trinidad and Rojas to Colombia.

Still, Yolanda Pulecio believes that the Chavez option represents the
best possibility in five years for her daughter's release.

In her comfortable Bogota apartment, she thumbed through a book she
recently published, Ingrid, My Daughter, My Love, a compilation of
all of the messages that she had read over the radio every morning
for the past five years-family gossip, news about Betancourt's two
children, and expressions of love. "I learned from Pinchao that she
listens to the radio every morning, and that she has heard all of
these," she said, dabbing her face with a tissue.

A handsome woman in her late sixties, from one of Colombia's
wealthiest families, she has been a diplomat's wife, an activist, and
later a senator herself. Since her daughter's kidnapping, she has met
with numerous heads of state, trying to keep the hostages in the
public eye. "Uribe doesn't want to give an inch on anything," she
said with clear disgust.

Jo Rosano, Gonsalves's mother, is taking a wait-and-see attitude, for
her own emotional protection: "If anything develops, you get the
'up,' and then-boom-you're back down again," she said. "It's taken
over my life. It's torn me apart.

The thing that is constantly on my mind is, 'How did my little boy
get caught up in this?' Rosano stuck a video into her VCR: Gonsalves,
filmed by Botero in 2003, looked directly at the camera. "I am being
strong," he said in a steady voice, as Rosano's eyes welled up with
tears. "Don't worry about me. Just continue on with life and I'll be
there one day."