TEAMS STILL NOT ABLE TO REACH PLANE CRASH SITE IN COLOMBIA

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Low clouds prevented recovery teams from reaching a
remote mountainside to inspect wreckage thought to be that of a missing U.S.
anti-drug reconnaissance plane, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

The wreckage was first sighted Sunday, and U.S. officials speculated that
the plane, which disappeared Friday, had crashed into a mountaintop not
specified on maps.

Fog and low clouds in the area of the suspected crash site "are pretty much
continual," said Steve Lucas, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command in
Miami, the U.S. military's operations base for Latin America.

White House anti-drug chief Barry McCaffrey, on a visit to Colombia, said
ground teams had not yet been able to reach the site. However, he said it
was unlikely rescue teams will find survivors.

"There is no reason to believe anybody is alive," McCaffrey said while
visiting a Colombian military base where U.S. advisers are helping train and
equip a new 1,500-member counternarcotics battalion. It is part of an aid
program valued at nearly $300 million this year.

The de Havilland RC-7 disappeared from radar screens while flying over a
major drug-producing region dominated by the rebel Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

The missing airplane, packed with sophisticated radar and eavesdropping
equipment, was on a "routine" counternarcotics mission over Putumayo state,
which in recent years has seen an explosion in the cultivation of coca --
the raw material of cocaine.