DRUG SURVEILLANCE HAMPERED, WHITE HOUSE SAYS

U.S. ability to fly counterdrug surveillance missions over Colombia, Peru
and Bolivia has been severely hampered by drawn-out negotiations with other
governments over landing facilities and by congressional funding delays,
administration officials testified yesterday.

In response, congressional Republicans accused the Clinton administration
of failing to make adequate plans to replace lost drug flight facilities at
Howard Air Base in Panama following U.S. withdrawal from the Panama Canal
Zone last year.

At a hearing of the drug policy subcommittee of the House Government Reform
Committee, Chairman John L. Mica (R-Fla.) noted that cocaine exports from
Colombia had vastly increased at the same time U.S. aerial surveillance
capabilities had decreased. Mica waved a letter from Gen. Charles Wilhelm,
head of the U.S. Southern Command, stating that drug "source country"
overflights were now only one-third of what they were when Panama was
available.

Officials insisted that once new airfield agreements with El Salvador and
Ecuador are implemented, they will provide even better monitoring than was
available at Howard. In the meantime, they testified, surveillance flights
operating from the Netherlands Antilles islands of Curacao and Aruba are
tracking drug smugglers flying over the Caribbean at rates that have
increased since Howard closed.

But without the money and final agreements for the other flight locations,
"we cannot execute our congressionally mandated mission," said Ana Maria
Salazar, deputy assistant secretary of defense for drug enforcement policy.

Yesterday's hearing provided a reprise of long-standing Republican charges
that the administration--bound by the 1979 Panama Canal treaties to turn
over U.S. military facilities and the canal itself last year--dropped the
ball in losing access to Howard and the civil contract to manage ship
traffic in the strategically crucial canal. The Panamanian government chose
a Hong Kong company over U.S. bidders in what some Republicans have charged
was a corrupt selection process.

Citing concern over "Chinese communist presence in Panama," Rep. Robert L.
Barr Jr. (R-Ga.) said Beijing now not only had putative control over the
canal, but that Chinese organized crime was moving into Panama to smuggle
drugs and launder money.

The Republicans were aided in their charges by a leaked U.S. Customs
Service intelligence report that said drug seizures in Panama, a major
transit point for Colombian cocaine, had fallen drastically last year. The
report described Panamanian law enforcement as "corrupt and ill-trained."

Panama, said Mica, "is ripe for takeover by narco-terrorists" from
Colombia, who already have made several incursions over their shared border.

Assistant Secretary of State Rand Beers and William E. Ledwith,
international operations chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration,
acknowledged ongoing problems with Panamanian banks and vast smuggling
operations through the Colon Free Zone on the Caribbean coast. But, they
said, Panamanian drug seizures so far this year had greatly increased,
rivaling the banner year of 1998.

The much bigger problem, said all three administration witnesses, is the
delay in implementing plans for a series of "forward operating locations,"
the combination of airfields in the region from which surveillance flights
eventually will exceed those flown from Howard.

Last November, the administration signed a 10-year agreement for use of the
Ecuadoran Air Force field at Manta. Although P-3 and other surveillance
aircraft from the Navy and the Customs Service are flying out of the field,
its runway must be improved before it can be used by E-3 AWACS planes that
would provide broad coverage over cocaine source-countries Colombia and Peru.

Real-time information from such surveillance would improve the ability of
those countries to interdict drug flights before they leave their air
space. But money for the improvements is part of the administration's $1.6
billion emergency appropriations request that has been stuck in the Senate
for months.

Although flights have begun out of Curacao and Aruba, the Dutch Parliament
has not yet ratified the 10-year agreement signed by that government.

The government of El Salvador has agreed to allow U.S. use of Comalapa Air
Base, adjacent to San Salvador's international airport, but the accord is
still being debated by the Salvadoran legislative assembly. Ironically,
Comalapa was a staging base for U.S. military resupply of the Salvador Army
during its 10-year war with leftist guerrillas, who are now part of the
legislature and must approve the agreement.