MILLIONS SOUGHT FROM U.S. IN PLANE DOWNING

CIA-Guided Peru Action Killed Woman And Infant, Hurt Pilot

American missionaries whose small plane was mistaken by CIA contract
employees for a drug-runner's and was shot down over Peru last year are
seeking $35 million in compensation from the U.S. government. They say they
are frustrated by the lack of a response, and, if there is no settlement
soon, they will sue.

The husband of Veronica Bowers, who was killed with their infant daughter,
Charity, in the incident; injured mission pilot Kevin Donaldson; and the
Association of Baptists for World Evangelism Inc., which owned the plane,
are upset that the government has not responded to the claim they submitted
in June, said their attorney, Karen Hastie Williams.

Jim Bowers saw his wife and daughter killed by a bullet, and
then-7-year-old Cory Bowers, who was also on board the flight, watched his
mother's body float in the Amazon River after their Cessna 185
single-engine plane was identified by a CIA surveillance crew as a drug
carrier and was gunned down by a Peruvian fighter jet in April. Donaldson
survived, but the loss of the group's floatplane has hindered his mission
into the remote areas of the Amazon in Peru, the Baptist group said.

The missionaries' press for a settlement comes as President Bush is
scheduled to visit Peru next month. Neither government has apologized to
the missionaries or admitted liability for the downing, Williams said. The
White House is expected to announce within weeks the resumption of the drug
interdiction flights, which were suspended after the incident.

"The issue here is what is our government doing about the situation, which
is really quite unusual and should have been resolved months ago," Williams
said.

The loss of the plane and of "Roni" Bowers has had a "devastating impact"
on the mission in Peru, said Don Davis, the Baptist group's corporate
counsel. No one has replaced the Bowerses, who taught the Bible and trained
locals in church leadership, and a family that had been working with them
in remote regions has left.

"Kevin Donaldson [who has returned to Peru] has decided he doesn't want to
fly down there anymore," Davis said. "He just lacks confidence that it'll
be safe as long as drug interdiction efforts continue."

A CIA spokesman, Bill Harlow, said settlement discussions are "continuing."

"There's certainly no desire on the part of anybody to slow things down,"
he said. The Justice Department, which is representing the government in
the negotiations, did not respond to requests for comment.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R), whose western Michigan district includes
Fruitport, where the Bowerses lived and where the church that sent them to
Peru is located, has been trying to expedite a settlement. He said he
believes the CIA wants the claim settled.

"Everybody wants to get this thing taken care of so that the missionary
organization and the Bowers family can move forward," he said. He said it
would be "unfortunate" if, by the time Bush reached Peru on March 23, "our
government had not taken care of the Bowers family and the Donaldsons."

Williams said she has provided the government information on similar cases
involving federal entities, private companies and foreign governments in
which individual damage amounts were often higher than what the Bowerses
and the Donaldsons are seeking. (Williams declined to release the
individual amounts the families are asking for.) In Hurd v. United States,
for example, a federal judge last year awarded a woman $6 million for each
of her two sons killed in a boating accident in which the Coast Guard was
found to have been negligent in its rescue effort.

Williams, who has met with CIA and State and Justice department officials
on this matter only once -- in June -- said the missionaries were not
seeking compensation from the Peruvian government at this time. She said
the State Department requested that it be allowed to deal with the Peruvian
government. A State Department spokeswoman last night said the
missionaries' concerns were relayed to Peruvian officials last week. She
did not elaborate.

Last April 20, two CIA contract pilots flying a routine surveillance
mission over northern Peru as part of a U.S.-Peruvian drug interdiction
program spotted a floatplane they mistook for a drug carrier. A Peruvian
Air Force officer, or "host rider," on board, following standard procedure,
alerted a Peruvian A-37B "Dragonfly" fighter and guided it to the Cessna.
Program rules call for a series of warning actions before a suspect flight
is shot at, but those procedures were truncated and the Cessna received no
warning.

The Pentagon-owned CIA plane tailed the Cessna for nearly an hour. Although
the two American pilots began to express doubts in the minutes before the
downing that the Cessna was a drug flight, they were unable to communicate
with the Spanish-speaking Peruvian officer, who was engrossed in a
conversation with his ground station, or with the fighter pilot.

Roni and Charity Bowers, who was in her mother's arms, were killed by a
single bullet that passed through the fuselage. Kevin Donaldson's left leg
was shattered by bullets, but he managed to land the crippled plane on one
pontoon in the Amazon.

While not assigning blame, a review conducted by the State Department and
the Peruvian government concluded in August that the program, operated in
Peru by the CIA, had become sloppy in its implementation and that
procedures designed to prevent mistakes had been dropped.

In October, a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation found that the
U.S. government had been lax in managing the program and that the Peruvian
military had shown a "tragic" lack of judgment. It recommended that the CIA
stop running the interdiction flights. For the White House, former U.S.
ambassador to Colombia Maurice Busby conducted a review of the overall air
interdiction policy. The results of his report, completed last fall, were
not released.

An interagency working group led by the National Security Council is
reviewing the Busby findings and preparing a revised regional code of
operations that will allow the resumption of the interdiction program,
State Department officials said.