U.S. INVESTIGATING BOGOTA EMBASSY STAFF - REPORT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is investigating as many as eight
U.S. embassy employees and dependents in Colombia to determine whether they
used the mission's postal system to smuggle drugs, the Washington Post
reported Saturday.

The investigation was sparked by a review of the Bogota embassy's mailing
records that was undertaken after the wife of the officer in charge of the
U.S. military's counter-drug efforts in Colombia was charged with shipping
cocaine to the United States, the newspaper reported.

A State Department spokeswoman declined to comment. The report was
particularly embarrassing for the United States because most of its $289
million in annual aid to Colombia is spent to combat drug trafficking.

It was unclear whether the people under investigation were connected to the
previously disclosed case of Laurie Hiett who was arraigned in Brooklyn
Aug. 5 on charges of shipping $235,000 worth of cocaine to the United States.

Hiett is the wife of U.S. Army Col. James Hiett, who headed U.S. efforts in
Bogota to train Colombian military in counter-drug operations. She admitted
mailing the packages but denied knowing what was in them. Her husband was
cleared and has since been reassigned to another post.

The U.S. State Department began a congressionally requested review of its
Colombia program several months ago to determine if congressional
guidelines were being met. The review centered on millions of dollars of
U.S. aid given to the Colombian National Police in the past two years. Most
of the funds were spent on 40 helicopters and some fixed-wing aircraft.

"Their performance has been very poor," the newspaper quoted one official
as saying about the embassy. "They are shutting down -- they seem unable to
drive forward any new policy initiatives. It is an embassy that sees itself
as being under siege and it is acting like that."

News of trouble at the embassy came as U.S. drug chief Barry McCaffrey
called for increased U.S. spending in Colombia, the world's top cocaine
producer and home to the longest-running civil conflict in the Western
hemisphere.

Half the country is controlled by armed groups, and heroin and cocaine
output is up sharply, producing profits that drug traffickers share with
leftist guerrillas, McCaffrey said earlier this week. McCaffrey proposed
raising U.S. aid to the area to $1 billion in 1998.