HOUSE GOP SUBPOENAS STATE DEPT. ON COLOMBIA

House Republicans have subpoenaed all State Department records on contacts
between the Clinton administration and Colombia's Marxist guerrillas,
alleging U.S. diplomats have carried on unauthorized negotiations with a
terrorist organization.

The unusual move reflects growing hostility between the State Department and
a group of House Republicans led by Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana over the
administration's policy toward Colombia and its fragile peace process.
Burton is chairman of the Committee on Government Reform, which issued the
subpoena.

While subpoenas are often threatened when Congress wants information it
feels is being withheld, they are seldom served. However, according to State
Department officials and congressional aides, the distrust is so deep and
the dislike so strong that the subpoena was served with little warning May 14.

The government of President Andres Pastrana has been negotiating with the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the hemisphere's oldest and
largest Marxist insurgency, since last year. In December, at Pastrana's
request, two State Department officials met with FARC representatives in San
Jose, Costa Rica, for two days of talks.

Burton and other Republicans charge the administration was negotiating with
a terrorist group that has kidnapped and executed Americans, is on the State
Department's list of terrorist organizations and gets hundreds of millions
of dollars a year from protecting cocaine and heroin traffickers. They also
charge there have been continuing, unreported contacts with FARC commanders.

"I think the U.S. ... has no business negotiating, talking to, or meeting
with terrorist organizations of any kind," Burton said in a May 13 letter to
congressional colleagues. "Ironically, it has been the bedrock principle of
the United States not to negotiate with terrorist organizations, and this
administration has casually dismissed this policy by sitting down at the
table with a group that actively seeks to wantonly kidnap and murder
American citizens."

A State Department official said the subpoena will be honored by May 28, the
deadline given. The official said the documents would "support in general
terms and in detail what we have said, that we have talked but not
negotiated with the FARC and only at the request of the Colombian government."

The official said U.S. officials listened to the FARC, demanded an
investigation into the fate of three U.S. missionaries taken hostage in 1995
who have not been heard from since, and made it clear that any U.S. aid for
developing alternative crops in areas of heavy drug trafficking would not
start until the 35-year-old civil war ends.

Phil Chicola, who is director of the department's Office of Andean Affairs
and attended the meeting in Costa Rica, later exchanged three e-mail
messages and had three telephone conversations with a FARC commander known
as Olga, he added. But the official said the exchange of messages and calls
were to demand an explanation for the FARC's kidnapping and execution of
three American humanitarian workers in March.

The official said Chicola told the FARC there would be no more talks until
the killers of the Americans were arrested and turned over for trial.