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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Now, when she looks back, Briana Krueger realizes she was in more danger in Colombia than she knew at the time.
Nighttime spy missions over the Andes were always draining. Winds off the sheer mountains made the four-prop "Dash-7" tremble like a leaf. The long hours hunched over a radio set in headphones eavesdropping on the telephone conversations of drug traffickers left her and the rest of the six-man crew exhausted. But one day in 1999 Krueger, an Army-trained Spanish-language linguist, learned something that terrified her: Two Colombian military officers riding along in her plane had been detected clandestinely communicating with drug traffickers on the ground. The unit's flight path had been compromised -- by enemy moles onboard working for the drug cartels. Krueger's account, in an exclusive interview with Salon, makes public for the first time what U.S. personnel in Colombia have long taken for granted but generally kept to themselves: Our supposed allies in the Colombian drug war have been corrupted by the narcotics cartels.
Pilots from Krueger's unit, the 204th Military Intelligence Battalion, based in El Paso, Texas, also tell stories of lackluster security and intense friction between U.S. and Colombia personnel at Apiay, the mountain base 35 miles south of Bogata where crews from the U.S. Army, the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Agency fly in and out.
The U.S. Army denies its spy flights have been infiltrated by Colombians working with drug traffickers, despite the embarrassing spectacle of discovering that the wife of its top counternarcotics official in Bogota was smuggling cocaine to New York with the help of her husband's driver. Col. James Hiett, who was himself convicted last year for helping his wife Laurie launder profits from her drug sales, was routinely briefed on the 204th's spy flights, including Odom's doomed mission in July 1999.
The U.S. Army's Intelligence and Security Command responded to a faxed query about corruption in the 204th with a statement that there was "no reliable evidence" that any missions had been compromised by Colombian ride-alongs on the flights.
Krueger's detailed, on-the-record account, however, and more general comments by unit personnel about security problems in Colombia, belie the Army's assurances.
Krueger was assigned to Odom's unit, then based in the Panama Canal Zone. The unit conducts both electronic and photographic reconnaissance of the cocaine-producing regions of the Andes -- Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia -- spending long hours circling over the jungles and mountains.
Under terms negotiated with the U.S., the military personnel of Andean host countries usually rode along on the airborne intelligence missions. But in Colombia, the unit was also required to file flight plans with Bogota's civil air authority, virtually insuring that drug traffickers knew where they were going before they lifted off the runway.
Right away, Krueger said, she got a bad feeling about Colombia.
"Most Latin American countries, you can get a feel if they're gonna be fighting against drugs with you," she said. "I didn't get that feeling at all from Day 1 when I stepped into Colombia. It's like, why work with people if they're not gonna be helping us, they're gonna be against us and we can't trust them? It doesn't make any sense.
"In Colombia, you didn't know who to trust and who not to trust."
Krueger's fears were borne out in February 1999 after a routine review of mission tapes by intelligence analysts back at the Army intelligence headquarters in Fort Huachuka, Ariz. They had picked up something she'd missed: the voices of Colombian ride-alongs on her flight talking to drug traffickers on the ground.
"They had caught it on the tape," Krueger said. The analysts played it back for the U.S. crew on the plane, she said.
"We heard the guys on the ground saying, 'There's a helicopter' (one flying in tandem with her plane that day). And the guys on the plane were talking to them about us coming, and warning them (the drug smugglers) to get out of there -- 'We're coming, we're on our way.'"
"I mean, you could clearly hear (it)," Krueger continued. "I don't know how we didn't hear it while we were on the mission. I guess we were doing so many things at once. Everybody has their own sections of the country they have to [monitor] while we're on the plane. Unless you pick up something and then everybody gets on one thing, then you're doing your own thing.
"They asked questions of everybody that was on that mission," she said, "and had us listen to the tapes again. Everybody was like, 'whoa,' because we didn't catch it while we were flying. It was after the tapes were sent out that they caught it. That's when we found out about it. We left (Colombia) early because of that."
