PERU CONFIRMS DRUGS-FOR-GUNS RING

MSNBC Broke Story Of Russian-South American Connection

NEW YORK, Aug. 25 - Peruvian officials this week confirmed details of a
vast drugs-for-weapons ring involving Russian arms merchants, corrupt
diplomats, Jordanian officials and Colombia's largest rebel movement, a
story that was first reported exclusively by MSNBC.com last April.

ON APRIL 9, MSNBC.com reported that Russian crime syndicates and military
officers are supplying sophisticated weapons to the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, in return for huge shipments of cocaine.

The enterprise, described by a senior U.S. intelligence official as
"literally an industry" involves giant Russian-built IL-76 cargo planes
taking off from various airstrips in Russian and the Ukraine, refueling in
Amman with the cooperation of corrupt diplomats and bribed local officials,
and then using remote airstrips or parachute air-drops to provide tons of
weapons to FARC, a violent insurgent army linked to drug cartels that is
battling the Colombian government's control of large areas of the country.

In exchange, the planes return laden with up to 40,000 kilograms of
cocaine, most of which eventually makes its way into the former Soviet
Union, Europe and the Persian Gulf.

Fujimori Offers Details

On Monday, Peru's President Alberto Fujimori announced that his shadowy
security adviser Vladimiro Montesinos had broken a smuggling ring supplying
Jordanian arms to Colombian rebels. The ring, which officials said was
headed by a retired Peruvian army lieutenant, used parachutes to drop at
least 10,000 Russian-made automatic rifles obtained in the Middle East into
rebel-held Colombian territory between March and July of 1999. Montesinos
said that the Jordanian arms were shipped from the Canary Islands to Guyana
and finally to Peru's northern Amazon city of Iquitos, passing over
southern Colombia.

The announcement drew an angry reply from Jordan, which denied any illegal
activity. It was also denounced in Peru by opposition figures, who view it
as a distraction from Fujimori's current political troubles.

A senior Jordanian government official said in an interview with the
Associated Press on Thursday that the arms were sold in 1998 through legal
channels and that Jordan was willing to show Peruvian government officials
all the documents pertaining to the deal.

The Ukrainian Connection

The Peruvian announcement did not touch on the Russian connection to the
arms shipments, although U.S. intelligence officials, all of whom spoke to
MSNBC.com on condition of anonymity, said the Russian involvement is
substantial, the scope of which remains unknown to all but a few
high-ranking figures in the American government.

"The source of the weapons is both organized crime and military. There is a
tremendous gray area between the two in Russia and the Ukraine."

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many KGB and other Soviet security
agents appropriated bank accounts, companies and contacts used for covert
operations, and turned them instead into conduits for their own organized
crime activities, including arms and drug trafficking.

Refueling In Jordan

Officials close to the investigation cited intelligence intercepts that
show the IL-76 cargo planes use Royal Jordanian Airlines cargo facilities
in Amman, where airline officials are bribed to ignore false cargo
manifests. While in Amman, the planes are cleared for transit under
diplomatic cover originating from a Spanish-speaking embassy in Amman,
according to U.S. intelligence officials.

"They're using diplomatic authority to get that stuff in," said a senior
U.S. intelligence official close to the investigation. "If they're not
using a [diplomatic] pouch, they're using diplomatic authority to clear the
shipment. This is a big operation. There are a lot of people involved -
it's literally an industry."

Once the planes have refueled in Amman, they fly to various landing strips
throughout South America, where shipments are coordinated by a renegade
Peruvian military officer, whose role was confirmed by Fujimori on Monday.

The FARC rebels, who control the distribution of the arms, pay the
smugglers with cocaine, which is loaded onto the planes for the return
journey through Amman. Hundreds of thousands of kilos of cocaine have been
smuggled over the last two years. And at up to $50,000 per kilo, the payoff
can be huge for the Russian crime groups, which smuggle most of the
Colombian cocaine into the European heartland, usually via Spain.

U.S. Aid To Battle Colombia's Cartels

The latest details about the arms-for-drugs smuggling ring put the
spotlight again on Colombia's losing battle against the well-armed cocaine
cartels that operate with impunity in large sections of the country.

This week, overriding opposition from human rights groups, U.S. President
Bill Clinton released $1.3 billion in aid to Colombia to fight its drug
trade and he travels to Cartagena next Wednesday to meet President Andres
Pastrana. According to U.S. officials, the aid package includes a few
hundred U.S. military advisers who will go to Colombia to train special
battalions in fighting the drug trade. But their presence is also likely to
draw the attention of the guerrillas, whose weaponry, according to
intelligence officials, include rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs)
and Russian SA-model shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft weapons similar to the
U.S. Stinger missiles.

"[The guerrillas] get the RPG to explode in the vicinity of the tail rotor,
which gives the helicopter its horizontal stability," said a U.S. Army
official. "All that has to happen is for the tail rotor to become a bit
unbalanced or for a hydraulic line to be cut, and that helicopter is coming
down. It takes good aim and cases full of RPGs, but it's been done many times."

However, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger on Thursday denied that the
aid allocation would lead to the "Vietnamization" of Colombia. American
involvement in Vietnam began with the dispatch of military advisers and
ended with the deaths of around 50,000 U.S. troops.

"I think you can get paralyzed by the foreign policy of analogy," Berger
said. "You should learn from what happened before. But the fact is this is
nothing similar whatsoever. We're talking about a few hundred American
people going to train some Colombian army battalions."

Berger said the training would allow the battalions to provide security for
the national police to go into the areas where the drug problem is most
pervasive and destroy crops and laboratories.