COLOMBIA ASSAILS CIA OVER COCA COUNT

Drugs: Officials say U.S. analysts can't always distinguish live plants
from dead ones.

Bogota, Colombia - Colombia's police are challenging recent U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency assessments that coca crops expanded worldly last year,
making Colombia by far the world's biggest producer of cocaine. They say
CIA analysts can't always tell a dead coca bush from a productive one.

In a recent meeting, National Police Chief Rosso Jose Serrano bristled when
two CIA analysts and other U.S. officials asserted that coca crops expanded
28 percent in 1998 in Colombia.

Check your satellite images again, Serrano retorted.

At stake in the dispute is not only the wounded pride of the Columbian
police, whose fumigation pilots constantly brave enemy gunfire, but also
methods for keeping tabs on a narcotics industry that Washington has
portrayed as growing unmanageably in Colombia while declining in Peru and
Bolivia.

While the CIA's word might reign supreme in Washington, Colombians have won
the latest round: The worldwide chief of the U.S. Drug Control Program said
he sides with Colombia. The U.N. official, Pino Arlacchi, said CIA methods
fall short because the agency relies almost exclusively on satellite
images, rarely checking on the ground to see if coca plants are, indeed, dead.

"Satellite observation alone is not enough. You must also have ground
observation and aerial photography," Arlacchi said.

"We are very sorry about this discrepancy of data. The national police have
very good data, very good expertise, and we entirely trust this data," he
added.

In dispute is how much of the coca fumigated with herbicide by Colombian
police actually has been killed. Police say they sprayed 160,615 acres of
coca crops in 1998, killing 85 percent of coca bushes. With the aggressive
spraying, they say the amount of coca in Colombia has remained constant in
the past two years.

But CIA analysts, in a meeting with Serrano and other senior police
officials March 2, disputed Colombia's statistics. They said barely 25
percent of the aerial fumigation effectively killed coca bushes.

"The Colombians were indignant," said a participant at the meeting.

They whipped out aerial photos and their own satellite images - obtained in
a $1 million contract from a subsidiary of the French space agency - to
show why they think CIA analysts counted fields littered with dead coca
bushes as unaffected by the spraying.

"When coca is killed, the jungle regenerates quickly,: said Luis Eduardo
Parra, the environmental auditor retained by the police, as he gave a
visitor a slide show of dead coca fields. "See this. This isn't coca. It is
grass, herbaceous plants, shrubbery."

Two months after coca plants are killed, jungle vegetation crops up anew,
and optical satellite images can be fooled, he said. Ground checks must be
made to see if the vegetation is grass or coca.

State Department officials, who finance much of Colombia's coca-spraying
program, are keeping a low profile in the dispute.

"I am trying to stay out of ... this controversy," said a senior department
official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I'm trying to
resolve it. I'm not in a position to disavow the CIA estimate."

On Feb. 11, White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey released CIA figures
during a speech at the University of Miami showing that coca production in
Colombia had risen 26 percent in 1998. According to his CIA-supplied
figures, the total area of coca cultivation in Colombia is 251,500 acres.

The CIA keeps its satellite images secret, and the agency declined to offer
details about how it reaches its estimates.

What especially raised Colombian doubts over the CIA estimates was the
agency's report on a north-central mountainous region known as the
Sierrania de San Lucas, which has never been subject to aerial fumigation.
In 1991, the CIA spotted about 12,600 acres of coca there, Parra said, but
now reports only about half that acreage.

"How can the be? How do you explain that?" Parra asked. "The figures can't
go down if there hasn't been a plague or disease in the coca bushes."