Hostage Nation (18 page)

The case turned politically cold, and there seemed to be no hurry or reason for Northrop Grumman to investigate the actual cause of the Cessna crash. In fact, there was no mandate for military contractors to report or investigate mishaps, even in the case of plane crashes or fatalities. However, because the intelligence equipment aboard the plane belonged to the Department of Defense, the U.S. military would eventually require a crash investigation. Almost a month after the engine was taken from the crash site to Bogotá, CMS site manager Steve McCune requested that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) come and collect the destroyed engine. But NTSB officers refused to go to Colombia to collect the wreckage because, they told those at the airport, Colombia was “too dangerous.” Finally, the engine was shipped out on March 11, 2003, and taken to Patrick Air Force Base, in Florida, where it was determined that there were internal mechanical problems with the engine. The formal crash report, issued
later by the U.S. Navy, would offer more insight into the cause of the crash and the overall failure of the SRS mission:

According to the report, Northrop Grumman refused to give navy crash investigators information on how the SRS missions were handled, but the report concluded:

Toward the end of March 2003, the Colombian military still had not found any trace of the Americans. From Monkey Camp, Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes were moved about half a mile away to a more permanent hostage compound that had been hastily constructed. The men were being held within the borders of the FARC's Eastern Bloc (in southern Colombia), the strongest military faction of the guerrillas commanded by Secretariat member Mono Jojoy. While most of the FARC high commanders dedicated a large part of their time to writing and reading, El Mono (a Colombian epithet used to refer to a person with light hair and skin color)—as everyone in the FARC called him—moved constantly throughout the jungle. He almost never slept in the
same place and was always exploring ways to escape from the enemy. His troops admired him—many even revered him—but they also feared him. (The Colombian government and the media described him as the “military leader” of the FARC, but the FARC denied that there was any differentiation between military and political leaders.)

Mono Jojoy had been responsible for the FARC's most resounding military victories, including the massive attacks in the late 1990s, which left 250 soldiers dead and 500 as prisoners. On August 7, 2002, he planned and directed the mortar attack against the Casa de Nariño (the Presidential Palace) the day of Álvaro Uribe's presidential inauguration, and the prosecutor general accused him of carrying out the attack on the exclusive and elegant Bogotá club, El Nogal, which left thirty-five dead and hundreds injured. Mono Jojoy was also accustomed to dealing with the FARC's highest-profile hostages, and he was referred to as the “jailer” of the FARC. Already under his command were more than forty-five military and National Police officers and Colombian politicians, some of whom had been held for up to five years. He also held Ingrid Betancourt, whose yearlong captivity had turned her into an international celebrity and a tragic symbol of the dysfunctional nature of Colombia.

The Eastern Bloc's success had come with a price: Mono Jojoy and his men were bearing the brunt of Plan Colombia and a tremendously improved Colombian military. By 2002, thousands of Colombian troops surrounded many of Mono Jojoy's strategic positions. His troops were in constant battles with army forces. The high commander himself was a wanted man with a bounty on his head, and it was not only Colombian forces who were tracking him down; there were Americans looking for him, as well. After the crash of the Cessna, the guerrillas had intercepted the SRS mission orders that Marc Gonsalves had tried desperately to destroy. Their target that day had included intelligence on top FARC commanders.

In what they referred to as “New Camp,” Gonsalves and Stansell were locked in six-foot-square wooden boxes, which the men thought must have been built originally as storage containers. Howes was given a larger bungalow, similar to the one the three of them had been in at Monkey Camp. The first night, when Howes heard the clank of chains
as the guerrillas locked him inside, he was racked by terrible guilt that the other two men were in far worse conditions, and he suffered a debilitating breakdown. Stansell could not lie down in his cell, and Gonsalves got to a point where he couldn't even lift his head. But worse than the physical pain was the psychological isolation that the men felt because they had been forbidden to speak to one another. The captors were sure that if they could talk among themselves, the Americans could figure out where they were and formulate an escape plan. Three or four days into their stay at New Camp, Howes was emotionally falling apart and doubting his ability to live through their ordeal. It was then that Stansell dropped a note on the ground near him. Howes wrote, “I unfolded it and read ‘We are not forgotten. People are looking for us. One day at a time. We will go home.'”

R
outine surveillance missions were briefly halted to wait for the results of an investigation into the February 13 crash, but many agencies depended on CMS's surveillance for their counternarcotics operations. Within four weeks, SOUTHCOM gave the go-ahead for the CMS pilots and crew to restart operations. They were to fly in the same model Cessna Caravan—the only remaining plane leased by CMS for the SRS contract—which had recently been in the United States for repairs. Not only were the contractors ordered to work the drug and guerrilla recon missions; they would also fly night missions to search for their missing friends.

Pilot Tommy Schmidt and assistant site manager Ralph Ponticelli—two of the remaining CMS employees—were close friends of Keith Stansell and Thomas Howes and were devastated by their capture. Both were ex-military men—Schmidt had flown night missions in Vietnam and was shot down and rescued five times. Ponticelli had been captured during the invasion of Panama and subsequently rescued by U.S. Special Forces. Although Schmidt had given notice just before the February 13 crash that he would be leaving the job, both he and Ponticelli lived by the motto Leave No Man Behind, and they felt compelled to remain in Colombia until their friends were released or rescued.

Employees of California Microwave Systems in 2002: pilot Thomas Howes (standing second from left) and systems analyst Keith Stansell (standing fifth from left), held hostage from February 13, 2003, to July 2, 2008; pilot Tommy Janis (standing seventh from left), killed by FARC guerrillas after the February 13, 2003, crash; assistant site manager Ralph Ponticelli (standing third from left) and pilot Tommy Schmidt (kneeling third from left), killed in the March 25, 2003, crash; site manager Lawrence “Steve” McCune (standing at far left). Photo: Government exhibit
, U.S. v. Simón Trinidad,
04-232
.

The SRS missions resumed on March 11, but there was ambiguity about what company the men were actually flying the missions for. This uncertainty was due to the fact that eleven days after the crash and kidnapping of Stansell, Howes, and Gonsalves, Northrop Grumman had shed the SRS contract, dissolved CMS, and handed all assets and personnel to a successor company called CIAO, Inc. The hastily formed company would essentially take over the contract, and the remaining CMS crew members in Bogotá were told that they would be transferred to the new corporation. “The name CIAO was thought up by [site manager] Steve McCune, who thought the acronym would be funny
and [that he'd] finally be able to call himself a ‘CIA operative.' To everyone else, he would say that the name was Italian for ‘good-bye,'” said Sharon Schmidt in 2004, who was living with her husband, Tommy, in Bogotá. Sharon was incensed by McCune's foolhardy choice, especially since being thought of as a CIA operative in Colombia was a very dangerous thing. Tom Cash, a former regional DEA chief in Miami, agreed with Schmidt in an interview with the
Times-Picayune
. “Can you imagine any more absurd acronym in Colombia than to call something CIAO? Wouldn't that be a Kmart blue-light special, a luggage tag that says, ‘Kidnap me'? If it were known they were working for the CIA or connected with it, it would be very dangerous for everyone involved.” The California Microwave Systems owners and managers were shuffled around and some new names were added to formal documents, but the new company was essentially made up of all the same players.

At Ponticelli's apartment, the remaining crew held a small get-together that was sort of a memorial service for Tom Janis. Sharon Schmidt remembers that her husband and the other contractors discussed the possible change to the new company. “They had agreed that if this CIAO got approved, the single-engine plane was going to be based in Cartagena and only fly over the northern parts of Colombia, where they could make forced landings—that it wouldn't fly in the south anymore.” According to Schmidt, CMS owners had been planning to replace the Cessnas with twin-engine King Caravans for the SRS program. “And they would just have to cancel the missions in the south until they got the twin-engine plane ready.”

But the dual-engine plane did not arrive before Tommy Schmidt, Ralph Ponticelli, and the remaining crew members were ordered back to work. “Tommy felt that if they could find [Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes], the Special Forces—the Delta Force that was down there—would go in and get them,” says Sharon Schmidt. “Ralph was one of these cheerleader guys who says, ‘Come on, guys. We've gotta go save 'em. It's gotta be us.' And I think Tommy just kind of got caught up in that. The U.S. Embassy was saying, ‘Oh, they're here, they're there. Go. And if you can confirm it, we can send someone in'—which was all lies. They weren't going to send anybody in.”

When the missions resumed, there were only two pilots in Colombia at the time, and Tommy Schmidt had to fly every mission. According to former CMS pilot Paul Hooper, Schmidt had always found it impossible to sleep during the day. Although Northrop Grumman denies that they were responsible for the CIAO employees, Patricia Tomaselli, Northrop Grumman's director of security, spoke to Ponticelli and expressed her concern about the night flights, which she considered too dangerous. (Ponticelli had been the assistant site manager at CMS at the point the company became CIAO, Inc.) The possibilities for successful night reconnaissance were dubious because although the infrared instruments could show a temperature differential and identify the presence of humans, it would be impossible to tell who they might be. Tomaselli said that Ponticelli seemed determined regardless of the fact that the effort would probably not be successful. “He told me, ‘If they hear us above, at least they'll know that we haven't forgotten them.'”

The March 25 departure—the eleventh day in a row of flying the night missions—was scheduled for late afternoon. Ponticelli and Schmidt would fly with the newest CMS pilot, James “Butch” Oliver, who had been on the job for just two weeks. Oliver was a good friend of Tommy Janis and had told his father that one of the main reasons he took the job was to help find Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes. Although Tommy was not superstitious, his wife says he felt an impending sense of doom about the entire operation. For her part, Sharon Schmidt wasn't too worried; she'd always considered her husband to be invincible. Schmidt had been shot at several times before in Colombia. Once, a bullet came through the floor and went right up in front of him, about six inches from his crotch; another bullet lodged in the armrest. “They take ground fire and they don't even know it, because with the roar of the engine, you don't even really hear it. So taking ground fire is just something that you hope doesn't hit anything critical.”

Possibly because he was exhausted by the ceaseless schedule, Tommy Schmidt sat as copilot to the less experienced Oliver as they took off on March 25 from the Bogotá airport. Checking the instruments, Ponticelli noticed that something on the aircraft's transponder was not working. He likely wasn't particularly worried—small fixes to
the planes were needed after many of the flights—he would report it to home base when they arrived in Larandia to refuel. Everything went as planned, and two and a half hours later, they were at the base. The sun dropped down behind the mountains just before they landed, and dusk quickly turned to darkness.