IN PERU, TWO LIVES LOST TO LANGUAGE BARRIER

WASHINGTON -- In the black-and-white video the single-engine Cessna flies
along the clouds in northern Peru, and it's easy to imagine 7- month-old
passenger Charity Bowers wrapped in her mother's arms, sound asleep or
perhaps crying for want of a bottle.

The infant had been recently adopted in the United States. You know her
folks are beaming.

In fact, they're traveling by air from their houseboat on the banks of the
Amazon River, where they are missionaries, to get a residence visa for
their baby to allow her to stay with them in Peru.

It's eerie, though, seeing the plane on the video -- at first without sound
- -- gliding along, oblivious of any danger. But in less than an hour,
Charity and her mother, Veronica Bowers, both U.S. citizens, will be dead
and their pilot seriously injured.

The time frame covers the moment a CIA radar aircraft spotted the Cessna to
the moment a Peruvian air force A-37 shot it down April 20, mistaking it
for a drug runner.

We see the plane carrying Charity and her mother and the three other U.S.
citizens, including her father, James Bowers, and older brother, Cory, 7,
because the CIA tracking plane was equipped with an infrared camera on its
nose.

At a news conference last week, State Department officials played a video
of the tragedy to coincide with the release of the findings of a joint
investigation. What American and Peruvian officials wanted to know was: How
could a civilian floatplane carrying U.S. missionaries be mistaken for one
carrying South American drug traffickers?

What they discovered literally made reporters laugh. Not that the death of
a baby and her mother is a laughing matter.

But the joint U.S.-Peruvian anti-drug program was so riddled with problems,
including shortcuts in verifying suspect aircraft, that it is amazing more
innocent people haven't been killed.

In this case, contact was never made with the suspect aircraft; its tail
number was never checked against a registry; and it was never warned,
either by radio or visually, of the attack.

Language, it turns out, was probably the biggest obstacle. The four
Americans aboard the radar aircraft, on contract to the CIA, hardly spoke
Spanish. The Peruvian officer on board hardly spoke English.

In the transcript of the mission, the Americans who were flying the
surveillance plane sound like characters from the Al Pacino movie Scarface,
in which he plays a Miami drug lord. They keep putting a Spanish touch to
the word "okay," for example. The Peruvian, at one point, misunderstands
4,000 feet for 40,000 feet. He also refers to "10 thou feet," meaning
10,000 feet.

Had the Americans and the Peruvian understood each other, perhaps the
result would have been different. Consider repeated concerns by the
Americans, in English, to the Peruvian officer, who was communicating with
his handlers on the ground. The Peruvians had the ultimate say on whether
to shoot down the plane.

"I don't know if this is bandito or it's amigo, okay?" one of the American
pilots says.

"I understand it's not our call, but this guy is at 4,500 feet, he is not
taking any evasive action. I recommend we follow him, but do not recommend
phase three (downing the aircraft) at this time."

After Peru has given its A-37 pilot the shootdown order, again, one of the
Americans interrupts. "Are we sure this guy is a bad guy?"

"He is not trying to run, is he?"

"This is bulls---."

"I think we're making a big mistake."

Finally, the pilot of the suspect aircraft, Kevin Donaldson, contacts a
nearby control tower to say that a military aircraft is tailing him but
that he doesn't know why.

Donaldson shouts seconds later: "They're killing me! They're killing us!"

One of the CIA contractors shouts: "No! Don't shoot! No more! No more!"

Another CIA contractor says, "God."

At the news briefing with Rand Beers, assistant secretary of state for
international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, I asked about the
language barrier. It kind of nagged at me.

Here's our exchange:

QUESTION: Am I understanding correctly that language was a problem in this
incident, that some people didn't understand English or Spanish, or
whatever the case was?

BEERS: You sure did.

QUESTION: Why, in such a crucial program, which resulted in death, such a
basic -- I think it's a basic requirement to understand the language -- why
did you have people that didn't understand the language? And secondly, in
the future, if you continue these flights, would it be a good idea to have
people understand the language?

BEERS: The answer to your second part is, of course, with the benefit of
hindsight. The answer to the first part of your question was there was
training for the Peruvian participants in a series of technical terms and
phrases in order that they could communicate at a basic level about the
procedures. But I think it is also fair to say that the stress levels that
occurred in the cockpit on the 20th of April created impediments to any
level of understanding. . ..

But as I also said earlier, you will in some cases hear a response that
suggests understanding, but subsequent action clearly indicates that that
particular message was not at all understood, and it was simply a polite
"yes" or "okay."

QUESTION: When you get into that aircraft, do they already know -- both
sides already know that they don't understand the language?

BEERS: No, they practice together and they train together, and they
believed before they took off that they could communicate with one another.
This was not sort of folks coming together only for the first time in this
particular instance. They had been together -- what, for two or three
weeks. Before they had trained together, they had flown together. This was
not even the first operational flight that they had been on together.

So there was an expectation or understanding that, yes, they could
communicate. And it didn't show up, at least not in so pronounced a manner,
until this particular incident.

He could have added that, by then, it was too late for Charity and her mom.