US CREWS INVOLVED IN COLOMBIAN BATTLE

US PERSONNEL have become involved in fighting in Colombia's 37-year
civil war for the first time, rescuing the crew of a helicopter
brought down by left-wing guerrillas, it emerged yesterday.

The US is funding the world's largest aerial eradication programme in
an attempt to destroy drug crops in Colombia. In an engagement at the
weekend, guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) fired on a crop dusting aircraft and supporting
helicopters.

The pilot of a US-supplied Huey helicopter was hit in the barrage of
small arms fire, but managed to land his stricken craft.

Two other helicopter gunships circled the grounded helicopter, firing
on the guerrillas, while the crew of a third helicopter rescued the
crew.

The pilots of some of the choppers in the rescue were Americans
contracted by the US state department, a US Embassy source said.

"The FARC were 100 to 200 yards away," Capt Giancarlo Cotrino, the
pilot of the downed helicopter, said from his hospital bed in Bogota.

"We fought for seven or eight minutes - one of my crewmen had a
grenade launcher and I had a pistol - until the SAR [search and rescue
helicopter] came in behind us, landed and picked us up in the middle
of a very hot firefight."

The rescue helicopter carried four US citizens and two Colombians, all
armed with M-16s. Most of the SAR teams in Colombia are former members
of the US special forces, the US source said.

Last year, when the $1.3 billion (UKP 900 million) aid package to
Colombia was approved by Congress, several rules were imposed.

One was that no more than 500 US military personnel could be stationed
in Colombia at any time. Another was that they were not to become
directly involved in fighting.

"The department of defence will not step over the line that divides
counter-narcotics from counter-insurgency," Maria Salazar, the deputy
assistant secretary of defence for drug enforcement policy, told a US
congressional subcommittee.

However, private US companies, paid by the state department and
staffed by former US special forces and pilots, face no such
restrictions.

US military personnel in Colombia conduct a variety of training and
monitoring roles. Three US-trained and equipped anti-narcotics
battalions have been created, while US navy specialists train
Colombian marines, who patrol the rivers that are the only means of
transporting much of the nation.

Five radar and listening stations are manned by US personnel, and
others are liaison officers at the Colombian Joint Intelligence Centre
(JIC), which the US helped set up.

According to the letter of the law, the rules regarding US involvement
in the civil conflict have not been broken, as serving military
personnel have not been caught in active combat roles.

However, by providing intelligence on guerrilla movements and actions,
the US is already taking an active role in the counter-insurgency war.

In March 1999 the US government issued new guidelines that allow
sharing of intelligence about guerrilla activity in Colombia's
southern drug-producing region, even if the information is not
directly related to the fight against narcotics.

The activities of private companies in the pay of the US are not
covered under the rules imposed on military personnel.

"This is what we call outsourcing a war," said one congressional aide
in Washington, who asked not to be named.

The company involved in last weekend's engagement with guerrillas is
called DynCorp. It has been contracted since 1997 by the US state
department to provide pilots, trainers and maintenance workers for the
aerial eradication programme.

What had not been known was that they piloted helicopter gunships that
are used in an offensive capability when crop dusting aircraft came
under fire. Three DynCorp pilots have been killed in operations, but
one pilot said that at $90,000 a year tax free, the rewards were as
high as the risks.

Another company, hired by the US defence department on a $6 million a
year contract, is Military Professional Resources Inc (MPRI), a
Virginia-based military-consultant company run by retired US generals.
Its 14-man team, holed up in an upmarket hotel in Bogota, refuses to
speak to The Scotsman. Brian Sheridan, the senior Pentagon official
who oversees the work of MPRI, said in congressional testimony in
March last year that the firm's role in Colombia was not sinister,
just "a manpower issue", insisting the US southern command did not
have the men to spare to give strategic and logistic advice to the
Colombian army.

"It's very handy to have an outfit not part of the US armed forces,
obviously," said the former US ambassador to Colombia, Myles
Frechette. "If somebody gets killed or whatever, you can say it's not
a member of the armed forces." Despite massive military aid to
Colombia, the US has insisted it is not getting itself into another
Vietnam. But an MPRI spokesman, Ed Soyster, a retired US army
lieutenant general and former director of the defence department's
defence intelligence agency, compared the need for secrecy in Colombia
with the need for secrecy in Vietnam.

"When I was in Vietnam, I wouldn't want to tell you about my
operation," he said. "If the enemy knows about it, he can counter it."

Human rights groups say the use of private contractors in Colombia is
a ploy to ensure actions are carried out that US troops under
congressional restrictions cannot perform. They say "deniability" is
the name of the game. "We're outsourcing the war in a way that is not
accountable," said Robin Kirk of Human Rights Watch.