MAP's index for the series: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n000/a251.html

Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia

MISSION STIRS CONCERN BACK HOME

Gen. Jack Sheehan Was Director Of All Special Operations
Overseas.

Chapter 26 of a continuing serial

As the hunt wore on late into the summer of 1993, at least one member
of the top brass at the Pentagon began to worry about how far the
Americans in Colombia seemed willing to go to get Pablo Escobar.

As the operations chief at the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Jack Sheehan was
director of all special operations overseas. Sheehan already suspected
that Delta and Centra Spike were overstepping the strict limits of
their deployment order, which confined them to the Search Bloc
headquarters outside Medellin. There, they were restricted to
training, intelligence-gathering and analysis.

Sheehan was not a big fan of special operators. He regarded the men in
charge - Gens. Wayne Downing and William Garrison in the United States
and Ambassador Morris Busby in Bogota - as exceptionally aggressive.
He called such men "forward leaners," by which he meant that they
sometimes tended to stray beyond the strict parameters of their
missions. Sheehan had heard tales of Delta operators going out on
raids with the Search Bloc, and he worried about a possible U.S.
relationship, direct or indirect, with the vigilantes of Los Pepes.

Sheehan's chief concern was that information gathered and analyzed by
Centra Spike and Delta might be used to guide assassination squads to
their targets - Escobar's lawyers, bankers, associates and hired
killers. If that were the case, such assistance could fall into the
category of supplying "lethal information," something allowed only
with authorization from the president and notification of Congress.

The Clinton administration was growing more cautious about clandestine
U.S. military operations overseas, and by autumn that year seemed
inclined to pull everything back. According to administration
officials, President Clinton felt he had been blindsided when Gen.
Garrison and his Delta special operators found themselves in a pitched
firefight in Somalia, where 18 American soldiers were killed in
October 1993.

The deployment order for sending the special operations units to
Colombia in 1992 had been very clear. They were there only to provide
training. If they were going out on missions for any purpose other
than training, they were exceeding their authority.

In fact, Delta operators had been secretly going out on Search Bloc
raids for months, assisting as forward observers and helping the
Colombians use global positioning devices. Sheehan knew that if just
one Delta soldier were wounded or killed during a Search Bloc raid, it
would raise an unholy stink in Congress, which by law must be
consulted before placing American troops in harm's way. The larger
concern for him was civilian control of the military - a principle
both he and his boss, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell,
took very seriously.

The American involvement in Colombia had created a string of issues
inside the Pentagon. When it was decided that Search Bloc helicopter
pilots needed training flying at night with night-vision goggles,
American pilots were sent to Medellin. The pace of the hunt was
demanding, so any training would have to be given on-the-job. This
provoked a fight over whether sending pilots along to conduct training
violated the prohibition against sending American soldiers on raids.

The pilots got permission to go.

This opened the door slightly for Gen. Garrison. He sought to send
Centra Spike's skilled operators, with their portable
direction-finding equipment, out with an American pilot on the Search
Bloc helicopters.

Steering a raid to a specific spot required smooth coordination
between the technician and the pilot, something the Americans had
perfected. Here Garrison saw an opportunity to get official permission
to send Delta operators out on raids. He argued that with an American
pilot and technician accompanying the Search Bloc, then Delta needed
to go along, too, to provide protection.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the request in the summer of 1993,
but the Defense Department would not concur without approval from the
White House. Defense officials were waiting at the White House for a
meeting with Clinton's staff when a colonel on the Joint Chiefs' staff
called to say they had decided to withdraw the request.

There were those working for the Joint Chiefs who, like Gen. Sheehan,
weren't especially keen on sending Delta out on raids in Colombia, so
they weren't about to take such a fight to the President. And as the
mission evolved, Sheehan began to object more strongly.

In the late summer of 1993, Sheehan took his concerns to Powell. The
chairman, who would be leaving the job in late September, asked him to
look into it further. Sheehan also discussed his concerns with Brian
Sheridan, the principal deputy secretary of defense for special
operations. Sheridan began asking pointed questions about possible
connections between the American effort in Colombia and Los Pepes.

In November, two CIA analysts met with Sheehan and other top brass at
the Pentagon to report that Los Pepes were, in fact, Col. Hugo
Martinez's Search Bloc. The analysts claimed that the vigilantes had
been paid for and trained and, in part, led by Delta Force, and were
receiving intelligence from the CIA and Centra Spike. "These guys have
gone renegade, and we're behind it," one analyst told Sheehan.

Others at the meeting sharply contradicted the report.

"Bull----," one of them said, explaining that Ambassador Busby had
been monitoring the situation and was convinced the Search Bloc was
not involved with Los Pepes.

Gen. Sheehan believed the CIA report. He said he was taking the matter
to the new Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. John Shalikashvili, and would
ask that all American special forces engaged in the hunt for Escobar
be pulled out of Colombia. Sheridan backed Sheehan. He expressed
concern that revelations, or even suspicions, of an American military
link to Colombian death squads would harm Clinton.

It was late on a Friday afternoon in mid-November, and the only hope
supporters of the mission against Escobar had of stalling the
immediate withdrawal of American forces was to find someone on the
Defense Department staff to oppose Gen. Sheehan. Before the night was
over, a position paper had been produced that rebutted the CIA
analysts' claims. That effectively countered Sheehan and Sheridan by
forcing the question to a higher level at the Department of Defense.

Busby and his staff in Bogota had weighed in on the position paper,
denying the CIA analysts' findings, which was enough for the Defense
Department to decide to delay pulling out Delta and Centra Spike until
further information was gathered.

As it happened, that mid-November delay was all that was needed. At
the very moment the issue was heating up inside the Beltway, matters
were finally coming to a head inside Colombia.