POST-CRASH QUESTION: WHAT ARE U.S. PERSONNEL DOING IN COLOMBIA?

Official Line Is That They're Performing Training Exercises

Back in 1982, when U.S. leaders feared communism more than cocaine,
then-Vice President George Bush attended the inauguration here of President
Belisario Betancur and offered him a U.S. military base to keep an eye on
his country's leftist insurgents, according to a Colombian official of that
era.

Wary of such a high-profile U.S. presence, Betancur demurred, but he did
agree to let the Americans install radar stations for surveillance. By
1990, relations were cordial enough that a group of U.S. military advisers
reviewed Colombia's military intelligence organizations and recommended
changes.

Hundreds more soldiers, Marines, Coast Guard personnel and CIA and Drug
Enforcement Administration agents have since followed them to Colombia.

Today, Americans assist in operating five jungle radar stations, fly
drug-eradicating crop dusters and are helping redesign the Colombian army
into a more effective drug-fighting force. They even pilot spy planes like
the one that crashed into a Colombian mountain last month, killing all
seven crew members, including five U.S. Army aviators.

The crash of that plane has raised questions about what exactly 200 or more
Department of Defense employees -- both civilian and military -- are doing
in Colombia. And that's not even counting the unknown number of CIA and DEA
agents.

Are they here to combat drugs, or are they harbingers of another U.S.
venture into an intractable war with Marxist guerrillas? And what happens
to the information gleaned by U.S. spies?

The standard answer from U.S. military officials is that most are involved
in training missions and that none is involved in combating the Marxist
guerrillas who have been fighting the Colombian government for more than
three decades. The numbers are unusually high now -- 283 on Aug. 10 --
because of investigations into last month's crash of the De Havilland RC-7,
said Lt. Col. Bill Darley, a Pentagon spokesman. On top of that, 1,000 U.S.
Marines arrived Thursday for a previously scheduled training exercise on
the Pacific coast.

"We do have Americans in the field, probably out fighting, but those guys
are not with the Department of Defense," he said. "They are DEA (agents),"
he said, and refused to comment further.

"Two hundred people scattered over a country . . . is not that much,"
Darley said. He contrasted that number with the 5,000 U.S. soldiers sent to
Central America to help with disaster relief after Hurricane Mitch struck
last October.

In a press briefing in Washington on his return Monday from a trip to
Colombia, Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering dismissed the
possibility that more U.S. troops will be deployed to this country.

"That is not our policy," he said. "It's a crazy idea."

In fact, he added, until Colombia makes significant new progress in
fighting the drug threat, the United States is unlikely to increase its
counter-narcotics aid.

But those answers do not satisfy many political and human rights analysts,
who recall that until 1996, the Pentagon also denied that the U.S. military
advisers in El Salvador -- officially never more than 55 at a time -- were
involved in combat against the country's leftist guerrillas during the 1980s.

Such concerns have been heightened as U.S. officials point to the strong
ties between rebels and drug traffickers to justify the growth in U.S.
anti-narcotics assistance to Colombia.

Colombia's insurgents get an estimated $600 million a year in "taxes" on
opium poppies and coca -- the raw material for cocaine -- grown in
territory under their control. Colombia supplies about three-fourths of the
cocaine and a growing share of the heroin consumed in the United States.

To curb that supply, the United States has budgeted $289 million in
anti-narcotics aid for Colombia this year, with the restriction that the
money is not to be used to fight Colombian rebels. U.S. officials insist
that careful logs are kept of equipment to enforce that rule, but the logs
are not made public.

About 90 percent of U.S. aid is given to the Colombian National Police,
because the army's poor human rights record makes most of its units
ineligible for assistance.

Increased U.S. involvement in Colombia, said Teofilo Vasquez, a researcher
at the Center for Research and Popular Education, a group here in the
Colombian capital that studies human rights issues, "is simply adding
another factor to the violence so that the war in this country will never
be resolved."

Concerns about the U.S. military presence in Colombia center on both the
kind of training the United States is providing and the military
intelligence the U.S. advisers reviewed nine years ago. Spy missions put
Americans near territory controlled by rebels, and they also put the United
States in danger of inadvertently supporting some of the least savory
elements in Colombia's brutal civil war.

Still, Colombian military leaders insist they need U.S. help with spying.

"The population is involved with the guerrillas, so we cannot get
intelligence from them," said Gen. Fernando Tapias, commander of the
Colombian armed forces. In contrast, the rebels seem to have quite a
reliable network to tell them when the army and police plan to attack a
cocaine laboratory, he said. Often, the laboratories have been moved or no
one is there.

U.S. intelligence technology, such as the De Havilland RC-7 or the radar
stations, thus becomes crucial. In addition, U.S. tactical analysis teams
take the raw data the radar and planes gather, Darley said, "and combine
them into something useful in terms of establishing a pattern."

What worries many observers is that the planes may be learning about more
than drug crops and narcotics flights. They could be finding out about the
movements of the rebels who guard the drug crops.

The concern of many analysts is that the information provided to the
Colombian military may be leaked to right-wing private armies. Estimated to
have a troop strength of about 5,000, these groups fight the rebels mainly
by attacking civilians believed to support the insurgency.

"Members of the armed forces are involved in promoting the actions of the
paramilitaries," Vasquez said. Indeed, several high-ranking officers have
been relieved of their commands pending investigations into allegations
that they had ties to armed right-wing groups.