Hostage Nation (3 page)

W
ithin minutes of the crash, at the request of Keen and U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson, the Colombian military in Larandia embarked on a rescue attempt. But initial efforts would be feeble at best. “Our response was quite slow,” Colombian army colonel Gustavo Enrique Avendaño said in a 2006 court testimony. “At nine a.m., we were informed about an incident relating to an aircraft, and that there had been individuals kidnapped. Immediately, we received the geographic coordinates.” Avendaño contacted the Colombian National Police and readied his own troops at the base. (The National Police are responsible for civilian policing and are under the command of the minister of defense.) But there was a problem: In another part of the country, the Colombian health minister's plane had crashed, and Avendaño's fleet of helicopters had gone to assist in the rescue. The battalion normally had sixteen personnel-transport helicopters and four helicopters equipped with artillery. “Unfortunately, that morning we only had one personnel-transport helicopter,” recalled Avendaño. The lone helicopter, which could carry only five troops, departed at 9:50 a.m. from Larandia and arrived at the crash scene at 10:17 a.m.—more than an hour after the plane had crashed. The Colombian troops found the burned wreckage of the plane, but the immediate area was deserted.

With the single transport helicopter, Avendaño began ferrying soldiers, five at a time, to the site. An hour later, several helicopters from a nearby military base arrived and began taking soldiers to the crash area. By 11:00 a.m., Avendaño joined sixty men on the ground. “When I arrived at the location, our main mission was to rescue the crew,” he said. A local man who arrived in the area gave the troops information as to the direction that the guerrillas had taken when they left with the hostages. “We proceeded north of where the aircraft had crashed. At one p.m., two thousand meters from where the plane went down, we unfortunately found two bodies.” One of the dead men wore blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and sneakers and appeared to be an American. He had been shot in the back of the head at close range, the bullet having entered the back of his neck and exited through his forehead. The other, a Colombian, had been shot twice—once through his clavicle and once through his back. There was no trace of the other three Americans. At the small house where Gonsalves, Stansell, and Howes had been just four hours earlier, soldiers found hundreds of shell casings for automatic rifles, and Avendaño determined that was the position from which the guerrillas had shot at the plane.

On February 15, 2003, two days after the crash of the California Microwave Systems Cessna, locals investigate the wreckage. Photo: Reuters TV
.

“We continued to secure the scene,” Avendaño said, “the area where the plane was found, where the house was, where the bodies were found, so that the national prosecutor's office and their personnel and a representative from the American government or the embassy in Colombia could do what they had to do.” Avendaño then ordered his troops to search the perimeter two miles from the crash. Knowing the guerrillas would have planted land mines, the soldiers moved very slowly behind a demining unit. Their search netted a plethora of litter left by the guerrillas, who, it was obvious, had made an expeditious retreat. There were two backpacks belonging to the guerrillas, grenades, note cards with the code that the guerrillas used when communicating on the radio, and a 9mm gun. There were approximately 950 rounds from various-caliber semiautomatic rifles and machine guns, and twenty-three antipersonnel mines. Between the house and the bodies, the Colombian troops found two wallets. “So we gathered the wallets and put them into a bag to hand over to the prosecutor's office so that they could have the evidence gathered at the scene.” Because the downing of the aircraft and the subsequent murder and kidnapping of civilians had not happened during military combat, the investigation of the crash would not be conducted by the Colombian army, but by the Colombian prosecutor's office. “The bodies remained on-site because we could not touch the bodies,” said Avendaño. “All we could do is protect the scene.”

During their first few hours of captivity, the guerrillas continued pushing Gonsalves, Howes, and Stansell away from the crash site. When they felt sufficiently safe from the immediate threat of the Colombian military, the guerrillas ordered the Americans to strip down to their underwear. Stansell was struck by the appearance of their captors. He'd been working on antidrug missions in Colombia for two years and had been briefed over and over on Colombian insurgent groups. He'd been told the FARC was an enormous and well-equipped army of narco-terrorists, but what he encountered hardly fit the image of a cohesive terrorist force. Most were no more than teenagers. Their uniforms were shabby. Each wore a different type of hat in a different
way, and to Stansell, they all seemed incredibly ignorant—no more than bullies with anti-American attitudes and Russian guns. The guerrillas confiscated all of their belongings, including wallets and family photos. After a strip search, which, the guerrillas said, they conducted to look for possible transmitting microchips planted on the Americans' bodies, the men were given back their clothes and told to move out.

Several hours later, the group heard helicopters approaching in the distance. In a panic, the guerrillas ordered Stansell, Howes, and Gonsalves to cross a rough clearing and head toward a house on the other side. “The Colombian military couldn't open fire on our position because they would have killed us,” wrote Howes in
Out of Captivity
. “The FARC didn't try to shoot the helo down because the gunner would have returned fire on them. So we were all standing there looking up at them, and they were looking down at us as they hovered overhead.” The guerrillas shoved the men to the ground and forced them to crawl on their bellies under the tree cover until the helicopters lost sight of them and left the area.

The guerrillas regrouped and continued their march toward the mountains. As the initial shock of their crash and capture began to subside, the men's thoughts turned to their families and colleagues. How would their loved ones react to the news of the crash? What had happened to Tommy Janis and Sergeant Cruz? “The gringos asked about the other two guys that were in the plane,” the young guerrilla Jaison recalls, “but the comrade did not answer them. They asked the same question several times, until the comrade broke the silence and told them not to worry about the situation of their friends, because they were dead.” La Pilosa delivered the line to Tom Howes with a chill in her voice, almost proudly. As the only one of the three who could speak Spanish, Howes turned to Stansell and Gonsalves. “She says she killed Tommy J. herself, and she would kill us, too.”

Without the capability to conduct a nighttime search, Colonel Avendaño airlifted his troops from the area at sunset. Throughout the day, Colonel Keen worked with a team at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá. “We set up an operations center made up of officers from the MILGROUP, members of the country team [U.S. government personnel working out of the embassy], to monitor the situation,” says Keen.
“We worked with the Colombians to focus on the situation. We had briefings to keep SOUTHCOM [Southern Command—a joint command of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard that is in charge of military operations in Central and South America] informed of what we knew, and what the Colombians were finding. The Colombians were trying to get information from the FARC, trying to determine how to locate the Americans, trying to understand what the FARC's intentions were.” By 12:30 a.m. on February 14, the embassy had issued an authorization order to put U.S. agents on the ground in the morning. At 4:00 a.m., Brig. Gen. Remo Butler, commander of Special Operations in Central and South America, arrived with a team of eight people. “We got there; we immediately checked into a hotel, got an hour or so of sleep, and then went over to the embassy for the first briefing. There was a great sense of urgency on getting those Americans back. I worked at the embassy for a while, got in contact with the people in SOUTHCOM, and at my headquarters in Puerto Rico, and kind of gave them my initial assessment.”

Before 7:00 a.m. on February 14, Avendaño's troops returned, to find the crime scene compromised by some local men picking through the wreckage. By 10:45 a.m.—more than twenty-six hours after the crash—Butler, Lawrence “Steve” McCune (the site manager of the company responsible for the Cessna missions), and FBI agent Alejandro Barbeito arrived on the scene. McCune would identify the body of the dead American as that of pilot Tommy Janis, and Barbeito would take possession of the remains. Members of the Colombian prosecutor's office examined the crime scene and took possession of the body of Sgt. Luis Alcides Cruz. An Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) team inspected the equipment left in the wreckage and reported that it had been sufficiently destroyed by the crew before their capture. Within an hour, the bodies of Janis and Cruz were taken to the Larandia base and loaded onto a plane that would take them to Bogotá.

Author Robert Kaplan, who was on the scene in Larandia, writes in
Imperial Grunts
that the Green Berets stationed at Larandia were demoralized by not being allowed to take part in the rescue. “We lost the initiative after we were made to stand down the first night,” Sergeant Pérez told Kaplan. “We were so afraid of getting our guys
killed that we let 'em get captured.” By midmorning of the fourteenth, the situation of the kidnapped Americans had turned from an emergency to a long-haul mission. Kaplan writes:

“You have to remember,” argues General Butler, “Colombia is a sovereign nation and you do not just go into another sovereign nation and attempt to take over.” Butler worked with several Colombian generals and was pleased with how aggressively they were handling the situation. “We all worked together trying to formulate a plan to prevent the FARC from getting the hostages out of the area. Time was of the essence. The Colombians set up a cordon around the area. It was very simple. You look at the terrain, and you say, Okay, there are hostages, don't know their condition. How fast can they move? So we put a cordon at a distance greater than possible for them to move. The strategy was to seal the guerrillas and hostages inside the zone and capture them. If they tried to break through the cordon, the Colombian troops would try to grab them on the way. That area is very dense. It's mountainous, jungles—very difficult terrain to move in. And it looked like no matter what we did, they were always just a half a step in front of us. The Colombians expended an incredible amount of assets. And when you look at the assets that they have, and what they expended, and the amount of money that they spent on this project, it was tremendous. We could not have asked for better support.”

Butler also defends Colonel Keen's handling of the situation and the decision not to let the Special Forces in: “If you ran into there helter-skelter hell-bent, the chances are very great that the FARC
would have ambushed them because they probably were expecting somebody to make an attempt to do that. You don't go into Colombia and just start shooting up. A Special Forces guy will never tell you he can't do something: ‘We can do anything. Just give us a gun and some bullets, and we can do it.' I think it was a military decision, and a political decision, to keep the Special Forces there and let them advise the Colombians, because,
one
, they didn't know where the hostages were, and,
two
, they had no idea what they would've been walking into.”

John McLaughlin, former commander of the State Department Air Wing that oversaw the antinarcotics missions, told BBC News that the poor initial response to the crash was the result of having no “pre-approved agreement among all the participants on how to launch a rescue team.” Had the plane crash occurred in another combat zone outside of Colombia, the crew would likely have come under the protection of the U.S. military. The
Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement
states, “The government at its sole discretion may authorize or may require the use of certain Government-provided logistical or in-country support.” In such hot spots as Bosnia and Somalia, contractors were commonly aided by U.S. troops. However, in Colombia, even though downed aircraft and hostage taking were not uncommon, the U.S. military actually had no direct responsibility to undertake a rescue, because the entirety of the antinarcotics work in Colombia was overseen by the State Department rather than the DOD.