This predates Plan Colombia, it's something they've been doing since at least the mid-'90s, but it is being beefed up somewhat by the money that was in last year's Plan Colombia aid package. Again, I'm not sure where the intelligence plane took off from, but it probably took off from this site in Manta, Ecuador, which is getting a lot of money for refurbishment and construction from the Plan Colombia aid package.

What other countries do these flight missions?

Looking for suspicious aircraft is something we do really everywhere from Bolivia all the way up to the border of Mexico. It's most intense, though, in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, where obviously the cocaine comes out of first and also where a lot of the coca paste gets taken to be processed into crystal cocaine -- that's what a lot of the flights going out of Peru do.

Does this relate at all to the flight that killed U.S. Army pilot Jennifer Odom in Colombia last year?

That plane was doing signals intelligence -- they were actually listening in to stuff going on on the ground. Whereas this one was doing visual, looking up signals that had already been found by radar sites within the region, trying to ID the plane, I think. So it's a little different, but it's part of the same effort. It's all counterdrug and all gathering intelligence by air. The Jennifer Odom plane was certainly a lot more sophisticated than what the CIA was using.

Peru has certainly gone through a lot of big changes in the past year, including the corruption scandal that brought down President Alberto Fujimori and his spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos. How is that affecting the counternarcotics efforts in Peru?

To the best I can tell, it's not having much effect on what's going on. All the political turmoil is in Lima, on the coast, and most of the counternarcotics stuff is happening well over the Andes. For most Peruvians, it might as well be on a different planet. So the work with those particular units of the police, the air force, the navy, has probably remained about the same.

Actually, now that Fujimori is gone, it's probably a little more politically palatable to start jacking up military aid, which is something that's going to happen in 2002 if you look at George Bush's request. The only thing that might have been disrupted over the past few months is the fact that many of the officers loyal to Montesinos were forced out. So there may be some intelligence gathering and command and control [may] have been disrupted a little bit. But that's probably the only way it's been weakened.

How has the implementation of Plan Colombia affected Peru?

Last year, the only money in Plan Colombia for Peru was about $32 million for helicopters. Since Peru had just stolen an election, it wasn't really politically palatable or possible to give it to them. But they're going to get more next year.

A lot of people are speculating that most of the aid for Colombia's military is being concentrated in an area right along Colombia's border with Ecuador and Peru, that we're going to be pushing not just drug trafficking but also violence and refugees into Ecuador and Peru. So we may see an increase in coca and violence on the other side of the border.

That spillover is a big worry about Plan Colombia -- that's probably one reason why they're proposing $90 million in military aid for Peru now. You push the coca growers out of one place, coca's still profitable, so they might just cross the river and start cutting down jungle on the Peruvian side.

Does that military response have anything to do with their "shoot 'em out of the sky" approach?

I think that attitude has been around for a while now. They've shot down about 30 planes in the past five years or so.

Why don't we hear more about them? Have there been any more Americans killed, or any conflicts in the air between drug trafficking planes and intelligence or military planes?

If there have been dogfights in the air, I don't know about them. I think usually they're shooting down these little Cessna planes. According to official U.S. reports, they've always been narcos, and we've had no basis to challenge that and we've been assured that when they do shoot them down, it's after trying to contact them several times, trying to signal to them in the air, firing warning shots, and only if they keep going do they shoot them down or force them down. But this mistake last week makes you wonder how often they are asking questions first before they shoot.

In general, this whole operation happens with almost no transparency. You're asking me some very basic questions here and I'm still only able to give you very basic answers. Why is the CIA involved? What are these contractors? How do they chose their targets? We don't know and nobody's really asking.

Who is in charge of the oversight of these missions?

The oversight eventually falls on Congress -- the international relations and armed services committees that are paying for this stuff. When staffers go down there they get flown to these bases and shown some select professional troops and a PowerPoint presentation telling them how effective they've been. But nobody asks questions about how we can avoid situations like this one.

Rather than have congressional staff, who are really overworked and underpaid, do all of this, [the agencies] should be forced to make information about this more and more accessible, so that there could be more of an evaluation of where we're headed with this.

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