Hostage Nation (9 page)

Although they considered the drug-interdiction work they were doing an important part of America's war on drugs, most of the men took the job for one reason, according to Stansell. “If it weren't for the money,” he wrote in
Out of Captivity
, “we wouldn't have been in Colombia. We were making good coin, and that was important to us—what it brought to our egos, what it might mean down the line for our kids and our retirement. I wasn't so much interested in being a hero with a capital H, as I was being a hero to my family and in my own mind by bringing down some big bucks. Call me shallow. Call me greedy. Call me what you want. I didn't care. I still don't really. All I was doing was living the American dream.” Stansell and his colleagues were hired to work four weeks in Colombia and then be home in the States for two weeks. In Colombia, the men lived in La Fontana, an upscale apartment complex in northern Bogotá. Although most of them weren't single, four weeks away from home was a long time. Many found the local Colombian women—legendary for their beauty and sensuality—irresistible.

The men were tasked with finding drug labs and smuggling routes used by the FARC. They used photographic equipment during the day and infrared remote sensing gear at night. But from five thousand feet, differentiating coca labs from farmers' huts in an endless sea of green wasn't easy. Growers had become so accustomed to the planes that they'd found dozens of ways of disguising labs, including covering them with rain-forest vegetation or building them alongside working farmhouses. The contractors also looked for coca fields. The homogeneous swaths of bright green leaves were easily identifiable in aerial photographs from directly overhead. However, the acreage was so great throughout the region controlled by the FARC, and the crops were so
widely distributed, that finding all of the coca planted in Colombia with the two CMS platform planes was an impossible task. Flying at lower altitudes would make their reconnoitering job easier, but it would also mean that the planes were more vulnerable to guerrilla fire. Because guerrillas had shot down half a dozen crop-dusting planes since the beginning of aerial fumigation in the 1990s, DynCorp made it a policy to have the spray planes followed by SAR forces in Black Hawk or Huey helicopters, ready to intervene in case of a crash or hostile fire. For the CMS missions, however, there were no SAR capabilities at all.

Several of the pilots had complained that the planes they flew on the reconnaissance missions, loaded with heavy equipment, far exceeded the weight limit for the Cessna. In fact, two CMS pilots, Douglas Cockes and Paul Hooper, who had worked for the company for more than two years, had written lengthy letters in November and December 2002 to Northrop Grumman, detailing the problems with the planes and the missions: “The mission aircraft could not reach any suitable landing area if the engine failed over most of the terrain over which the SRS mission is flown. The continued use of this platform invites a catastrophic impact in mountainous terrain if there is an engine failure.…” Cockes and Hooper asked that Northrop Grumman immediately replace the single-engine Caravan with a more powerful dual-engine Beechcraft King Air 300 series aircraft. “This is uniquely an issue of safety and a recommendation that will possibly save lives, limit the companies' exposure and enhance the mission's performance.”

The concerns of Hooper and Cockes were ignored. The two pilots had tried to rally support from Thomas Howes and Tommy Janis (the pilot who was killed by the guerrillas after his successful crash landing on February 13, 2003), but Howes and Janis, although agreeing with Hooper and Cockes to some extent, refused to add their names to the complaint and continued to fly missions. Their decision and the company's refusal to upgrade the aircraft to a dual-engine plane made Hooper and Cockes furious. According to those working at the airport hangars where CMS had its Bogotá offices, the single-engine problem was already well known. In August 2001, the Cessna that Janis was flying lost power at thirteen thousand feet, twenty miles out over the
Caribbean Sea. He was an excellent pilot and was able to glide the plane to a safe landing at the airport in Santa Marta, in northern Colombia. Because Janis had been on a flight to Miami for aircraft maintenance and not on an official reconnaissance mission at the time, there was no report filed or any investigation into the cause of the engine failure.

Although the pilots continued to fly missions, infighting between the pilots and CMS management about safety issues was rampant. Thomas Schmidt, who was a Vietnam veteran, had nearly come to blows with the CMS site manager, Steve McCune, who Schmidt believed had no idea about flying and therefore no business telling pilots what to do. The animosity between the two resulted in write-ups for Schmidt for flying too close to a mountain and endangering the crew. “They never asked for Tommy's side of the story,” says Sharon Schmidt, Tommy Schmidt's wife. “Tommy was pretty angry about that. He said, ‘Why not talk to the guys who were
in
the plane?' But they reprimanded Tommy, which was
really
stupid. It was just another reason why there was so much animosity there.”

At the base where many of the contracting companies had offices, several who knew McCune saw it differently. “McCune was a professional. He was very strict, very competent,” one of McCune's business colleagues said. “Hooper and Cockes were well paid, but they were disconnected because of the way they would rotate in and out of the country. The pilots only flew. They didn't check the airplanes. They would fly, go home, and not work any more than that.” Another point of contention had to do with handguns that had been issued by Northrop Grumman. Although U.S. military Joint Doctrine recommends against giving contractors arms and uniforms, the air force provides that arms should be issued “only in the most unusual circumstances” and states that carrying firearms is strictly voluntary. “It was basically that we would only be issued the weapons when we went out to fly,” says Hooper. “Our position was that we needed them flying and certainly driving around in Bogotá.” Many were afraid that the hour-long commute from their apartments to the airport could turn deadly, since bandits commonly approached drivers in traffic and robbed them at knifepoint, sometimes kidnapping people from their cars. According to Hooper and others, McCune was not happy that his employees were
always armed, especially given the very volatile nature of his relationship with several of them. In early 2002, McCune told his employees that he needed to take away their guns and that they could use them only when they were on an SRS mission. Hooper felt that it was a retaliatory move by the CMS boss. “He just wanted to twist our tails for not agreeing with their inane policies.”

The controversy that erupted because of the safety issues and the handguns stimulated McCune to issue a flurry of write-ups for bad behavior on the part of several of the pilots. In rebuttal, Hooper and Cockes sent a letter to Kent Kresa, chairman and CEO of Northrop Grumman, in December 2002, expounding on the intolerable conditions that those connected with the SRS mission faced. They dubbed the group apartment where the original site manager (McCune's predecessor), sensor operators, and a technician lived together from 2000 to 2001 as the “Animal House,” and blamed the program director, James Hollaway, for failing to correct a toxic working environment that included drug and alcohol abuse by CMS managers, sloppy security with classified documents, and, in one case, the hiring of a local prostitute as a secretary for the company. (Cockes says that after the crash, he had the letter faxed to the U.S. military at SOUTHCOM. He later heard that the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Anne Patterson, had also been given the letter, but he says he was not contacted by anyone from the military or the embassy.)

Hooper and Cockes also complained that when they objected to an operation that they found dangerous, they were threatened with termination. “In our opinion, the Program Director and Site Manager seem to believe that since we are ‘well compensated,' we should accept ever-increasing risks as simply a fact of doing business. They continue to hold this view even though neither of them has ever been on a mission deep into hostile territory. We are not paid to accept an ever-increasing amount of risk, but rather to use our professional training and experience to mitigate risk as much as possible.” The pilots proposed a meeting to discuss their concerns at some mutually agreed-upon location in North Carolina, Tennessee, or Alabama. Northrop Grumman executives invited Hooper and Cockes to meet at the company's headquarters in Maryland but refused to let the Northrop Grumman/CMS flight-operations
manager Douglas Tait (who Cockes said agreed completely with his and Hooper's assessments) attend the meeting. Believing that he would be railroaded into giving a deposition to the corporation's attorneys, Hooper declined to attend the meeting. And with the meeting set to coincide with a two-month trip out of the country, Cockes, who says he would have loved to give a deposition had he been available to, did not attend either.

Despite internal tensions, the missions were considered extremely successful and returned a high yield of reconnaissance data on drug labs and FARC movements, which, in turn, gave credence to the idea that progress was being made in the war on drugs. Orders for missions were coming in from every direction—the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, the U.S. Army, and the Department of Defense, among others. Unfortunately, there was no clear chain of command, and Northrop Grumman and CMS never truly addressed the pilots' concerns about flying single-engine planes that exceeded weight and altitude limits. Cockes and Hooper had planned to work for the company another five years—enough to secure a Northrop Grumman pension—but the dangers of their job mounted, and in December 2002, Cockes and Hooper quit before being fired and left a trail of bad blood behind them.

Two months later, their former colleagues Tommy Janis, Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell, and Marc Gonsalves crashed into the Colombian frontier. For all of the hundreds of hours they had flown over this terrain, the rain forest was completely unknown to the Americans. In the initial days after their capture, the guerrillas constantly pushed the Americans to keep moving to evade the Colombian military. They stumbled on the rough, muddy ground, their hands grasping at thorny tree branches covered with biting ants. Their feet throbbed and blistered. As they moved higher up in the mountains, the temperature dropped and the cold became unbearable. Stansell, who was suffering from broken ribs and constant diarrhea, remembered a conversation he'd recently had regarding a survival course that Northrop Grumman demanded he take. “I told this company guy that I wouldn't do it,” Stansell wrote. “When he asked why, all I said was, ‘With this piece-of-shit aircraft we've been asked to fly in, there's no way I'm going to survive a crash. A dead man doesn't need to know how to survive.'”

O
n February 14, 2003, the families of Keith Stansell, Tom Howes, and Marc Gonsalves were informed of the crash by a Northrop Grumman representative and told that there was no information on the men's whereabouts. For three more days, the status of the Americans remained unknown, but it was assumed that they had been taken hostage by the FARC. For Gary Noesner, who was assisting in handling the situation for Northrop Grumman, the case itself wasn't anything out of the ordinary. Noesner had spent over two decades with the FBI, dealing with terrorism cases and hostage negotiations. Only one month earlier, he'd retired from his position as chief of the Crisis Negotiation Unit of the FBI and taken a civilian position with Control Risks, an international security company that had been under contract to provide security services to Northrop Grumman. What Noesner expected would happen next in the case of the three American contractors was something much like what had been played out dozens of times over the past thirteen years under a protocol that Noesner himself had painstakingly developed.

In 1980, after eight years with the FBI, twenty-nine-year-old Noesner began working as a negotiator. At the time, hostage negotiation was still a fairly new discipline in law enforcement and was essentially an
auxiliary function to SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics). There were no full-time negotiators, so Noesner's Washington, D.C.–based job was twofold: He trained agents in the art of negotiation and he investigated terrorism cases overseas, mostly in the Middle East, where in the 1980s, he led the investigations of the hijackings of TWA Flight 847 and the Italian cruise ship
Achille Lauro
and many other such incidents. During the same period, Noesner honed his negotiating skills, dealing with prison riots, skyjackings, and militia standoffs in the United States. Then on December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 270 people on board. One hundred and eighty-nine of the passengers were Americans, making the attack against American citizens the deadliest on record. It was a turning point for Noesner, who, after so much time abroad, was burned out on terrorism cases. With his wife and three young children at home in Virginia, Noesner decided to take an offer he had turned down several times and become part of an FBI operational and teaching unit based in Quantico, Virginia. In 1990, the ten-year veteran of terrorism and hostage cases became one of only three full-time hostage negotiators for the FBI.