AMERICA'S NEGLECTED WAR

The capture and murder by narco-guerrillas of U.S. intelligence operatives
in Colombia was a disaster waiting to happen.

It was predicted in a report submitted a month ago by visiting congressmen,
who described the U.S. government's multi-billion-dollar Plan Colombia as an
expensive failure. The incident signified that the Colombia crisis is
getting worse.

Details of the mission and crash of the single-engine Cessna 208 are
obscure, thanks to the U.S. government's reluctance to talk about secret
operations. Sources in Colombia, however, report the plane contained four
contract employees of an office in the U.S. embassy in Bogota under CIA
control.

Their fate was sealed by multiple security blunders, in the opinion of
special operations experts. With the U.S. preparing for combat in Iraq and
trying to avoid it in Korea, Colombia is America's forgotten war-remembered
occasionally by events such as last week's plane crash.

The U.S. investment of $2.2 billion in Plan Colombia, badly in need of
congressional oversight, is largely ignored on Capitol Hill. An exception is
former Rep. Bob Barr, who after his defeat in the Georgia Republican primary
made a fact-finding mission to Colombia late last year as his congressional
valedictory. In a report to Speaker Dennis Hastert Jan. 10, Barr concluded:
With billions of taxpayers dollars invested in Plan Colombia, there is no
active peace process today, and the drug-funded killing continues at a
disturbing pace. He was prophetic: Force protection for U.S. military and
contractors now serving under Plan Colombia is inadequate. Just how
inadequate was found last Thursday by four U.S. civilians employed by
California Microwave Inc, of Sunnyvale, Calif., a communications service,
when their plane crashed. Government officials deny that they were CIA
agents, and technically they were not. In fact, they were under contract to
the Office of Regional Administration in the Bogota embassy, which is a
covert CIA operation. U.S. officials called this crash accidental, but other
sources claim the plane was shot down by FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia) guerrillas. They would have reason.

While the cover story had the plane monitoring coca production, embassy
sources said the plane was an ELINT (electronic intelligence) operation
monitoring the FARC's notorious 15th Front to gather information on the
whereabouts of guerrilla commandantes. Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador
in Bogota and one of the rising stars of the U.S. Foreign Service, was
reported by associates as coming unglued after the incident.

A single-engine plane on an intelligence mission is considered unacceptable.
Nor was there a chase plane following to quickly come to rescue the
intelligence aircraft if necessary. On last Oct. 15, when Barr was on his
Colombian mission, he was informed by U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission Richard
Baca of a foolproof search and rescue plan if any of the American planes
went down. Instead, a veteran special operations officer told me, this was
amateur hour. While one U.S. civilian and a Colombian army sergeant (the
fifth man in the crashed plane) were immediately shot to death by FARC,
intercepted radio conversations Monday indicated the other three Americans
also might be doomed.

Until the incident, 80 Americans had been taken hostage since 1990 and 12
had been murdered since 1995. In the wake of the latest attack on Americans,
Barr's ignored report should be scrutinized. He was assigned the
fact-finding mission last fall by Rep. Dan Burton, then the House Government
Reform Committee chairman, accompanied by then Reps. Ben Gilman and Brian
Kerns. A veteran of many visits to Colombia, Barr found no good news. The
Barr delegation found the security situation in Colombia ... has continued
to deteriorate in the past decade and that the chaos has increased markedly
over the last decade.

The report contended that the Bogota embassy's cheery good news is not
justified or accurate.

The delegation's report lists 15 failings, including lack of protection for
contract employees. Barr, Gilman and Kerns are no longer in Congress,
Republican term-limits have removed Burton as committee chairman, and
Burton's successor, Rep. Tom Davis, has gotten rid of committee staffers
specializing in Colombia. Davis left Washington Tuesday on his own mission
to that bloodstained country.

He could start by looking into the latest disaster.