BEHIND THE PERUVIAN SHOOTDOWN

Nearly an hour before a Peruvian Air Force A-37 fighter jet shot down a
single engine float plane carrying American missionaries from the
Association of Baptists for World Evangelism in April 2001, a CIA contract
pilot flying a spotter aircraft said he was "a little nervous" about the
Peruvians' assumption that drug traffickers were flying the plane.

The CIA man's hesitation is documented in a Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence report that was recently made available on the committee's Web
site. The chronology in the report lays bare a fatal chain of mistakes that
took the lives of two Americans.

Several minutes later, the CIA pilot told a Peruvian "host nation rider"
aboard his Cessna Citation that the float plane, capable of landing on
water, might not be a bad guy at all and then discussed with his co-pilot
how the plane's flight path did not match that of a drug plane.

Half an hour later-about 10 minutes before the shoot down-the Peruvian
fighter jet radioed the "host nation rider" with the tail number of the
float plane. The "host nation rider" had with him a list of all registered
tail numbers in Peru. It showed that OB-1408 was registered to the
Association of Baptists for world Evangelism. But in his rush to trigger
the fighter attack, he never checked the list.

The CIA pilot, increasingly alarmed, radioed back to a U.S. official on the
ground whose job it was to monitor the joint U.S.-Peruvian drug
interdiction program, in which only the Peruvians were authorized to shoot
down suspected drug traffickers.

"I understand this is not our call, but this guy is at 4,500 feet, he is
not taking evasive action," the pilot said. "I recommend we follow him. I
do not recommend phase three [a shoot down] at this time."

Finally, a minute and a half before the shoot down, the CIA pilot tried one
last time to stop the attack, telling the "host nation rider" that he had
just heard the pilot of the float plane talking to air traffic controllers
at the airport in Iquitos, Peru. But by the time the "host nation rider"
finally instructed the fighter jet to back off, the fatal shots had been
fired, killing missionary Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter, Charity.

Bowers' husband, Jim, and her son, Cory, survived the attack after pilot
Kevin Donaldson managed to land the stricken plane on the Amazon River 80
miles south of Iquitos despite bullet wounds that shattered two bones in
his leg.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that, while CIA,
State Department and National Security Council officials "failed to
adequately monitor the operation of this risky program," the CIA pilots had
repeatedly tried to stop the shoot down and "expressed strong reservations
to their own chain of command" once the Peruvians initiated military action.

"Recognition by any of the Peruvian officials of Mr. Donaldson's flight
profile and route alone would have precluded the precipitous rush to
authorize use of lethal force," the committee's report states. "Instead,
the Peruvian host nation rider and his chain-of-command never questioned
their initial presumption that Mr. Donaldson's plan was a narcotics
trafficker."

Frontrunners for Intelligence Post

While Rich Haver, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's special assistant
for intelligence, is being mentioned as the frontrunner to become
undersecretary of defense for intelligence if the new post is approved by
Congress, one well-informed government source predicts the job will go to
Rumsfeld aide Steve Cambone.

Cambone has his boss's trust. The former director of research for the
Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University
in Washington, he served as staff director on two blue- ribbon commissions
Rumsfeld chaired in the 1990s (on missile proliferation and space). When
Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon last year for a second stint as defense
secretary, he brought Cambone with him. As principle deputy undersecretary
of defense for policy, Cambone was put in charge of managing military
"transformation," Rumsfeld's signature initiative for creating a 21st
century fighting force.

A little over a month ago, Rumsfeld made Cambone director for Program
Analysis and Evaluation (PA&E), a key Pentagon post. Cambone said he would
use it to make Rumsfeld's transformation agenda happen. But the government
source, plugged into the Bush administration at a high level, said Cambone
took the PA&E job knowing it might only be a short-term assignment if the
undersecretary of defense for intelligence job were created.

Cambone himself took legislative language creating the post to the Senate
on Rumsfeld's behalf and helped convince senators to make it part of the
fiscal 2003 defense authorization bill. A House-Senate conference committee
could make the post a reality later this year.

Another Pentagon source said that he thought the job would go to Haver or
someone else, given Cambone's important new responsibilities as PA&E director.

"Steve is in a pretty pivotal position as it is and Rich is undeniably the
big thinker when it comes to intelligence," the source said. "He certainly
has the background for the job, but the issue that some raise is his
interest and talent [in] managing."

Whoever gets the job will have enormous responsibility and clout overseeing
and coordinating the Pentagon's 85 percent share of the nation's $35
billion intelligence budget. When the directors of the National Security
Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Imagery and Mapping Agency
and Defense Intelligence Agency now have a problem, they look for answers
in numerous Pentagon offices, all of which lead eventually to Rumsfeld's.
Soon, they could be reporting to one very influential new official,
particularly if that new official is Steve Cambone.

Genetic Imagery Exploitation

With the intelligence community girding for congressional hearings into
failures related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it's worth remembering
that the federal government's spy apparatus occasionally works to perfection.

Consider the development of Genetic Imagery Exploitation software, or
Genie, now being used in the global war on terrorism by government imagery
analysts to find concealed terrorist camps and hidden manufacturing sites
for biological and chemical weapons.

Genie is the stuff of science fiction-computer software that "mimics
evolution" by mutating through a computerized process of survival of the
fittest. Genie was developed by scientists at Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico, which exists to produce just this kind of cutting
edge technology for government use.

Then the National Reconnaissance Office, the supersecret spy satellite
agency headquartered in Chantilly, Va., stepped in and tapped a three-
year-old venture capital fund called the Director's Innovation Initiative
to finance adaptation of the technology for use in combing through vast
quantities of spy satellite imagery.

And now Genie resides in the desktop computers of imagery analysts at the
National Imagery and Mapping Agency. They play the part of god in the
process of computer evolution by drawing on their screens with colored
marking pens.

Once they find a feature they are looking for-an airfield, for
example--they circle it in green and send their computers off on a search.
Genie starts the process using a set menu of existing search formulas and
provides examples of what they find. As the analysts identify the best
examples, Genie's formulas "evolve" into those best able to identify what
the analysts are searching for.

In the air field example, Genie would focus on more specific types of
runways, say those with runways that are more than 10,000 feet, or on
hangars that are within 500 feet of those runways, or on buildings emitting
certain types of smoke plumes.

"Remote sensing offers a lot of information, but it overwhelms the end
user," one NRO official said in a recent interview. Genie solves this
problem by enabling analysts to scan thousands of miles of terrain and have
computers find precisely what they are looking for.

In one recent test, the official said, NRO analysts used Genie to train a
computer to find not just any golf courses, but PGA-caliber golf courses,
throughout the United States. The task, the official added, took about an hour.