PERSONNEL CAP IN U.S. AID TO COLOMBIA A CONCERN

WASHINGTON -- Now that Congress and President Clinton have allocated an
unprecedented $1.3 billion to prop up Colombia's war on a narcotics-fueled
insurgency, planners across eight federal agencies are engaged in their own
sticky bureaucratic battle:

Figuring out a way to spend the money, for programs from helicopter
maintenance to agricultural assistance, while never exceeding an 800-person
limit on the number of U.S. citizens, civilian and military, who can work on
the plan inside Colombia on any one day.

A senior Pentagon official predicts that once the various programs are under
way, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy, Barbara Moore, will be
like an "air traffic controller," waving off U.S. contractors --
consultants, mechanics, accountants -- while allowing others inside the
country.

The limit on the number of U.S. citizens participating in Plan Colombia was
included in legislation at the insistence of Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who
has served in the Senate long enough to remember how a group of U.S.
military advisors sent to assist the South Vietnamese army turned into a
commitment of more than a half-million combat troops.

Byrd said the cap was intended "to prevent the U.S. proposal for assistance
to the anti-narcotics initiative called Plan Colombia from succumbing to the
siren song of mission creep."

Byrd originally wanted the cap to be 350 -- 100 civilian contractors and 250
U.S. soldiers. But he agreed to increase those numbers to 300 civilians and
500 military; plus a provision giving the president authority to notify the
Congress and waive the threshold.

The U.S. military already keeps a strict count of the number of soldiers in
Colombia through a computer-assisted team at Southern Command headquarters
in Miami. But with the onset of Plan Colombia, a U.S. diplomat will be
assigned to do nothing but keep count of American contractors on the ground.

Pentagon officials say they believe the military cap is high enough to allow
soldiers to accomplish their training goals.

But there is concern the civilian cap is too low, and State Department
officials are surveying eight different agencies to see how many contractors
each want to provide.

They include the departments of Defense, State, Justice and Treasury plus
the Customs Service, U.S. Agency for International Development, the Drug
Enforcement Administration and Foreign Commercial Services -- responsible
for such disparate programs as human rights training for the National Police
($25 million); stimulating agricultural projects other than coca and poppy
growing ($87 million); providing police with agricultural spray aircraft
($10 million), and special training for judges and prosecutors ($7.5
million.)

"There is a general consensus that the 300 cap, the civilian cap, is
problematic and really is inadequate," said Tim Hanway, Colombian program
officer with the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and
Law Enforcement. "The commitment is to make an effort to try to make it
work."

A U.S. AID official said the numbers may be workable because Colombia has a
well-trained, well-educated work force that can be hired to carry out much
of the contracting work. In any case, the real crunch is not expected until
next year at the earliest, when the first of 60 helicopters -- the U.S.
centerpiece of Colombia's $7.5 billion program -- start arriving. The
helicopter program will be coordinated with the Pentagon, but run by the
State Department through civilian contractors.