MISSING U.S. SPY PLANE LIKELY TO FUEL FEAR OF U.S. INTERVENTION

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- The disappearance of a U.S. Army spy plane over
rebel-dominated territory was likely to heighten speculation in Colombia
that Washington is getting deeply involved in the country's 35-year civil war.

U.S. officials have repeatedly stressed they have no interest in giving
counterinsurgency aid or sending American troops to fight in the Andean
nation's conflict.

But the perception among many Colombians that intervention is possible has
grown amid steady rebel advances, frequent visits to Bogota by high-ranking
U.S. officials, and growing U.S. support to the Colombian military -- whose
main activity is fighting the guerrillas.

"Ratified: United States Presence on Colombian Soil," El Espectador
newspaper headlined a story Saturday about the missing aircraft. The U.S.
military insists the plane was on a routine counternarcotics mission over
an area where illicit drug crops are grown when it disappeared from radar
screens Friday.

The U.S. military said Sunday afternoon that wreckage spotted on a
mountainside in southern Putumayo province may be that of the four-engine
de-Havilland RC-7, lost with its crew of five U.S. soldiers and two
Colombian air force officers.

"We have visually identified a wreckage. We have not yet determined,
though, whether it is the aircraft we are looking for," said Capt. Jack
Miller, a spokesman for the United States Southern Command in Miami, the
U.S. military's operations base for Latin America.

Heavy cloud cover and the approaching night skies would probably make it
impossible to definitively identify the aircraft until Monday morning,
Miller said. He said he could not give more details on the location of the
wreckage.

The missing American crew members are based at Fort Bliss army base in El
Paso, Texas. The U.S. army was not releasing their names.

Colombia, the world's No. 1 source of cocaine and a growing exporter of
heroin, is the primary focus of U.S. anti-narcotics operations in the
hemisphere. Aid this year tripled to roughly $300 million.

As Washington expands its anti-narcotics program here, U.S. officials have
repeatedly stressed that they have no interest in getting involved in the
fight with the rebels. An even less likely scenario, they assure, is that
American troops would be sent.

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the Clinton administration's top anti-narcotics
official, was to arrive Sunday and spend two days in Colombia as part of a
review of U.S. drug-interdiction operations in the Andean region.

McCaffrey, who last week called Colombia an "emergency situation" meriting
far greater U.S. attention, will be visiting an army base where the U.S.
army is helping to train and equip a new, 1,500-member counternarcotics
battalion.

The new force will operate largely in the rebel-dominated south, where the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, partly finances itself by
taxing the peasants who grow drug crops and protecting traffickers'
airstrips and laboratories.

The U.S. government also recently began sharing intelligence on rebels with
the army units taking part in anti-narcotics operations.

FARC units often fire on crop-dusting planes, but there was no immediate
evidence to suggest that the U.S. reconnaissance plane was attacked.