FOREIGN PILOTS HIRED TO BOOST U.S. DRUG WAR

Colombia: The State Department Is Accused Of Circumventing Attempts
By Congress To Limit Washington's Role In The Latin Nation's Civil
Strife.

BOGOTA, Colombia -- The State Department has directed its largest
private contractor in Colombia to hire foreign pilots to fight the
drug war, an order that helps get around Congress' attempt to keep
the U.S. from slipping further into this country's messy civil war.

Last year, Congress limited to 300 the number of civilian contract
workers participating in U.S.-financed drug-eradication efforts in
Colombia. But in a little-noticed decision, the State Department only
counts U.S. citizens toward that limit.

As a result, more than 400 civilians already are working for private
contractors under the U.S. anti-drug program. The largest employer is
DynCorp, which has 335 civilians on the payroll. Fewer than a third
are U.S. citizens, the contractor's chief of operations here said
Friday. An estimated 60 to 80 U.S. citizens work for other
contractors, including Bell Helicopter Textron, Sikorsky Aircraft,
Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.

A senior aide to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who has
been at the forefront of the battle over U.S. assistance to Colombia,
acknowledged that the language passed by Congress specified that the
cap applied to "United States individual civilians" and that the
State Department is not obliged to include foreigners in its reports
to Congress.

"Legally, they may be within the law," said the aide, Tim Reiser.
"But in terms of congressional interest in being informed on what
U.S. money is being used for, that is of interest to Congress and
it's something that the Congress should be informed about."

State Department officials say they are not required to inform
Congress that they have ordered DynCorp to hire as many as 50 pilots
from Guatemala, Peru, Colombia and other countries to transport
Colombian army forces into cocaine-growing zones.

The pilots, most of them former Central and South American air force
members who fly the most dangerous anti-drug missions here, also are
hired to reduce the risk that an American would be shot down and
killed in the drug war, according to U.S. Embassy officials.

"I'm under no illusion what it would mean to have an American shot
down here, and no one in the U.S. is," Ambassador Anne W. Patterson
said in a recent interview with reporters.

U.S. lawmakers have long worried that the effort to eradicate cocaine
will draw the U.S. deeper into Colombia's four-decade-old civil war.
Both leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary groups fight to
protect the coca crops that are their primary source of revenue.

Lawmakers contacted Friday accused the State Department of
circumventing congressional intent to limit American involvement in
the conflict.

The issue goes to the heart of congressional critics' fears about
Plan Colombia, which was launched last year with a $1.3-billion
American contribution: that U.S. involvement will slowly escalate, as
happened in Vietnam.

The situation also has historical echoes, touching on controversies
surrounding congressional limits on the number of U.S. military
advisors in El Salvador during the 1980s and Reagan administration
efforts to evade them.

"This seems to be a loophole around the cap, a way to get around
them," said Rep. Janice D. Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who has sought to
eliminate the use of private contractors in the region since a U.S.
firm was involved in the accidental downing of a private airplane by
the Peruvian military in April. That incident resulted in the deaths
of an American missionary and her infant daughter.

"Every time we find out more about what goes on in Colombia, a dozen
more questions are raised," Schakowsky said. "Most members of
Congress interpreted the cap to mean we will limit to a total of 300
personnel, no matter what their nationality is."

Private contract workers, who do everything from flying crop dusters
to transporting troops to staffing radar stations, long have been
controversial. Some lawmakers fear that the U.S. is conducting
foreign policy through private companies without adequate public
accountability.

Even some of those who have closely followed the debate over Plan
Colombia were surprised to learn of the State Department's practice.

"Nobody knows about this in Washington," said Adam Isacson, an expert
on Colombia at the Center for International Policy, a left-leaning
Washington think tank. "If anybody is still concerned about mission
creep, this will make them all the more worried."

The State Department's International Narcotics and Law Enforcement
Affairs Bureau, which is overseeing the bulk of the U.S. effort in
the region, early on debated whether to count the foreign employees.

At one point, according to an embassy official who was present at the
discussion, the State Department acknowledged the sensitivity of the
issue and initially discussed being "totally virtuous" and counting
the foreign employees in its reporting to Congress. The official and
several others interviewed requested that their names not be used, in
keeping with State Department policies.

The department subsequently decided to not count foreign employees
after what the official called a "hotly debated" discussion. It
became apparent by the middle of this year that there would be nearly
300 U.S. citizens working on the program in Colombia by December.

The official added that the State Department discussed the issue with
members of Congress before reaching a final decision, but did not
specify which lawmakers were consulted.

The issue came up again recently when the Bush administration,
responding to State Department fears about reaching the cap by
December, tried to remove all limits on U.S. personnel as part of the
aid package for the Andean region for the coming fiscal year.

House lawmakers compromised, instead allowing a total of 800 U.S.
military and civilian personnel in Colombia. The Senate has so far
insisted on maintaining the civilian cap at 300, with a separate cap
of 500 U.S. military personnel.

State Department officials defended the move to not count foreign
employees, especially since many are Colombians working as
secretaries and drivers and in other low-level jobs traditionally
given to host country citizens.

These officials noted that if the Colombians were not tallied, the
U.S. program would not reach the 300-worker cap even including the
Peruvians, Guatemalans and other Latin Americans recruited to
transport troops into conflict zones where leftist guerrillas and
narco-traffickers are defending cocaine fields.

DynCorp officials interviewed Friday acknowledged that the State
Department had specifically directed them to hire the foreign pilots
as part of a five-year, $200-million contract to fumigate drug crops
in Colombia.

"That was customer-directed," said the DynCorp director in Colombia,
who declined to be identified for safety reasons.

But the director also said that part of the reason for hiring foreign
nationals is the lack of qualified personnel in the U.S. Another
factor is that the Latin American pilots speak fluent Spanish.

The lack of fluency among contract workers contributed to the April
incident in Peru that killed Veronica Bowers of the Assn. of Baptists
for World Evangelism and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity.

Some Central American pilots who interviewed for jobs with DynCorp
told The Times that they were asked whether they had combat
experience. DynCorp officials said military experience played no
special role in their hiring decisions.

"They were looking for pilots with 3,000 hours of flying experience
and war combat," said an ex-member of the Salvadoran air force who
interviewed with DynCorp nearly a year ago. "When we were flying for
El Salvador during the war, we did it for patriotic values, to defeat
communism. Now, it's for money."