Covert action in Colombia
U.S.
intelligence, GPS bomb kits help Latin American nation cripple rebel forces
By Dana
Priest
The 50-year-old
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), once considered the best-funded
insurgency in the world, is at its smallest and most vulnerable state in
decades, due in part to a CIA covert action program that has helped Colombian
forces kill at least two dozen rebel leaders, according to interviews with more
than 30 former and current U.S. and Colombian officials.
The secret assistance,
which also includes substantial eavesdropping help from the National Security
Agency, is funded through a multibillion-dollar black budget. It is not a part
of the public $9 billion package of mostly U.S. military aid called Plan Colombia,
which began in 2000.
The previously undisclosed
CIA program was authorized by President George W. Bush in the early 2000s and
has continued under President Obama, according to U.S. military, intelligence
and diplomatic officials. Most of those interviewed spoke on the condition of
anonymity because the program is classified and ongoing.
The covert program in
Colombia provides two essential services to the nation’s battle against the
FARC and a smaller insurgent group, the National Liberation Army (ELN):
Real-time intelligence that allows Colombian forces to hunt down individual
FARC leaders and, beginning in 2006, one particularly effective tool with which
to kill them.
That weapon is a
$30,000 GPS guidance
kit that transforms a less-than-accurate 500-pound gravity bomb
into a highly accurate smart bomb. Smart bombs, also called precision-guided
munitions or PGMs, are capable of killing an individual in triple-canopy jungle
if his exact location can be determined and geo-coordinates are programmed into
the bomb’s small computer brain.
In March 2008, according to
nine U.S. and Colombian officials, the Colombian Air Force, with tacit U.S.
approval, launched U.S.-made smart bombs across the border into Ecuador to kill
a senior FARC leader, Raul Reyes. The indirect U.S. role in that attack has not
been previously disclosed.
The covert action program
in Colombia is one of a handful of enhanced intelligence initiatives that has
escaped public notice since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most of these other
programs, small but growing, are located in countries where violent drug
cartels have caused instability.
The roster is headed by
Mexico, where U.S. intelligence assistance is larger than anywhere outside
Afghanistan, as The Washington Post reported in
April. It also includes Central America and West Africa, where
trafficking routes have moved in response to U.S. pressure against cartels
elsewhere.
Asked to comment on U.S.
intelligence assistance, President Juan Manuel Santos told The Post during a
recent trip to Washington that he did not wish to speak about it in detail,
given the sensitivities involved. “It’s been of help,” he said. “Part of the
expertise and the efficiency of our operations and our special operations have
been the product of better training and knowledge we have acquired from many
countries, among them the United States.” A spokesman for the CIA
declined to comment.
Colombia and the FARC have
been in peace negotiations in Havana for a year. They have agreed so far on
frameworks for land reform, rural development and for allowing insurgents to
participate in the political process once the war ends. The two sides are
currently discussing a new approach to fighting drug trafficking.
On the verge
of collapse
Today, a comparison between
Colombia, with its vibrant economy and swanky Bogota social scene, and
Afghanistan might seem absurd. But a little more than a decade ago, Colombia
had the highest murder rate in the world. Random bombings and strong-arm
military tactics pervaded daily life. Some 3,000 people were kidnapped in one
year. Professors, human rights activists and journalists suspected of being
FARC sympathizers routinely turned up dead.
The combustible mix of the
FARC, cartels, paramilitaries and corrupt security forces created a cauldron of
violence unprecedented in modern-day Latin America. Nearly a quarter-million
people have died during the long war, and many thousands have disappeared.
The FARC was founded in
1964 as a Marxist peasant movement seeking land and justice for the poor. By
1998, Colombia’s president at the time, Andres Pastrana, gave the FARC a
Switzerland-sized demilitarized zone to encourage peace negotiations, but its
violent attacks only grew, as did its links with the narcotics trade.
By 2000, the emboldened
insurgency of 18,000 took aim at Colombia’s political leaders. It assassinated
local elected officials. It kidnapped a presidential candidate and attempted to
kill a presidential front-runner, hard-liner Alvaro Uribe, whose father the
FARC had killed in 1983.
Fearing Colombia would
become a failed state with an even greater role in drug trafficking into the
United States, the Bush administration and Congress ramped up assistance to the
Colombian military through Plan Colombia.
Instability
in Colombia
By 2003, U.S. involvement
in Colombia encompassed 40 U.S. agencies and 4,500 people, including
contractors, all working out of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, then the largest
U.S. embassy in the world. It stayed that way until mid-2004, when it was
surpassed by Afghanistan.
“There is no country,
including Afghanistan, where we had more going on,” said William Wood, who was
U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 2003 to 2007 before holding the same post in
war-torn Afghanistan for two years after that.
When Bush became president,
two presidential findings were already on the books authorizing covert action
worldwide. One allowed CIA operations against international terrorist
organizations. The other, signed in the mid-1980s by President Ronald Reagan,
authorized action against international narcotics traffickers.
A presidential finding is
required for the CIA to do things other than collect and analyze overseas intelligence.
Giving spy equipment to a partner, supporting foreign political parties,
planting propaganda, and participating in lethal training or operations all
require a finding and a notification to congressional intelligence committees.
The counternarcotics
finding had permitted the CIA and a technical unit of the clandestine Joint Special
Operations Command (JSOC) to provide support to the years-long
hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, killed by Colombian forces 20 years
ago this month. It also made possible CIA-supported operations against
traffickers and terrorists in Bolivia and Peru years ago.
Under the Colombian
program, the CIA is not allowed to participate directly in operations. The same
restrictions apply to military involvement in Plan Colombia. Such activity has
been constrained by members of Congress who had lived through the scandal of
America’s secret role in Central America’s wars in the 1980s. Congress refused
to allow U.S. military involvement in Colombia to escalate as it had in
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama.
In February 2003, the FARC
took three U.S. contractors hostage after their single-engine Cessna, above,
crashed in the jungle near La Esperanza. A covert CIA program was launched to
find them. (El Tiempo via AP)
The FARC
miscalculates
The new covert push against
the FARC unofficially began on Feb. 13, 2003. That day a single-engine Cessna
208 crashed in rebel-held jungle. Nearby guerrillas executed the Colombian
officer on board and one of four American contractors who were working on coca
eradication. The three others were taken hostage.
The United States had
already declared the FARC a terrorist organization for its indiscriminate
killings and drug trafficking. Although the CIA had its hands full with Iraq
and Afghanistan, Bush “leaned on [CIA director George] Tenet” to help find the
three hostages, according to one former senior intelligence official involved
in the discussions.
The FARC’s terrorist
designation made it easier to fund a black budget. “We got money from a lot of
different pots,” said one senior diplomat.
One of the CIA officers
Tenet dispatched to Bogota was an operator in his forties whose name The
Washington Post is withholding because he remains undercover. He created the
U.S. Embassy Intelligence Fusion Cell, dubbed “the Bunker.”
It was a cramped,
30-by-30-foot room with a low ceiling and three rows of computers. Eight people
sat at each row of consoles. Some scoured satellite maps of the jungle; others
searched for underground FARC hiding places. Some monitored imagery or the
movement of vehicles tagged with tracking devices. Voice intercepts from radio
and cellphone communications were decrypted and translated by the National
Security Agency.
Bunker analysts fused tips
from informants and technically obtained information. Analysts sought to link
individuals to the insurgency’s flow of drugs, weapons and money. For the most
part, they left the violent paramilitary groups alone.
The Bunker’s technical
experts and contractors built the Colombians their own nationwide intelligence
computer system. They also later helped create regional fusion centers to push
tactical intelligence to local commanders. The agency also paid for encrypted
communications gear.
“We were very interested in
getting the FARC, and it wasn’t so much a question of capability, as it was
intelligence,” said Wood, “specifically the ability to locate them in the time
frame of an operation.”
Outside the Bunker, CIA
case officers and contractors taught the art of recruiting informants to
Colombian units that had been vetted and polygraphed. They gave money to people
with information about the hostages.
Meanwhile, the other secret
U.S. agency that had been at the forefront of locating and killing al-Qaeda
arrived on the scene. Elite commandos from JSOC began periodic annual training
sessions and small-unit reconnaissance missions to try to find the hostages.
Despite all the effort, the
hostages’ location proved elusive. Looking for something else to do with the
new intelligence equipment and personnel, the Bunker manager and his military
deputy from the U.S. Special Operations Command gave their people a second
mission: Target the FARC leadership. This was exactly what the CIA and JSOC had
been doing against al-Qaeda on the other side of the world. The methodology was
familiar.
“There was
cross-pollination both ways,” said one senior official with access to the
Bunker at the time. “We didn’t need to invent a new wheel.”
At the urging of President
George W. Bush and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, left, the CIA program to
find the U.S. hostages began targeting FARC leaders with U.S.-provided
intelligence and smart bombs. (Charles Dharapak/AP)
A request
from Colombia’s president
Locating FARC leaders
proved easier than capturing or killing them. Some 60 times, Colombian forces
had obtained or been given reliable information but failed to capture or kill
anyone senior, according to two U.S. officials and a retired Colombian senior
officer. The story was always the same. U.S.-provided Black Hawk helicopters
would ferry Colombian troops into the jungle about six kilometers away from a
camp. The men would creep through the dense foliage, but the camps were always
empty by the time they arrived. Later they learned that the FARC had an
early-warning system: rings of security miles from the camps.
By 2006, the dismal record
attracted the attention of the U.S. Air Force’s newly arrived mission chief.
The colonel was perplexed. Why had the third-largest recipient of U.S. military
assistance [behind Egypt and Israel] made so little progress?
“I’m thinking, ‘What are we
killing the FARC with?’ ” the colonel, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity, said in an interview.
The colonel, a cargo plane
expert, said he “started Googling bombs and fighters” looking for ideas.
Eventually he landed on the Enhanced Paveway II, a relatively inexpensive guidance
kit that could be strapped on a 500-pound, Mark-82 gravity bomb.
The colonel said he told
then-defense minister Santos about his idea and wrote a one-page paper on it
for him to deliver to Uribe. Santos took the idea to U.S. Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld. In June 2006, Uribe visited Bush at the White House. He
mentioned the recent killing of al-Qaeda’s chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
An F-16 had sent two 500-pound smart bombs into his hideout and killed him. He
pressed for the same capability.
“Clearly this was very
important” to Uribe, said retired Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who had
taken over as CIA director just months earlier.
First, there was the matter
of fitting the smart bombs onto a Colombian aircraft. Colombia did not have F-16s.
Raytheon, the kit manufacturer, sent engineers to figure out how to mount the
equipment on a plane. First they tried mounting it on a Brazilian-made Embraer
A-29 Super Tucano, a turboprop aircraft designed for low-flying
counterinsurgency missions. But affixing the cable that ran from the bomb’s
computer brain to the cockpit meant drilling too close to the fuel cell.
Instead, they jerry-rigged it to an older Cessna A-37 Dragonfly, a light attack
aircraft first developed by the U.S. Special Operations air force for Vietnam
and later used in the Salvadoran civil war.
Then the engineers and
Colombian pilots tested the first of three PGMs in a remote airfield near the
Venezuelan border. The target was a 2-by-4 stuck in the ground. The plane
launched the bomb from 20,000 feet. “It landed about a foot from it,” the
colonel said. The results were so good, he thought, “why waste two more kits?”
The smart bombs were ready for use.
But White House lawyers,
along with their colleagues from the CIA and the departments of Justice,
Defense and State, had their own questions to work through. It was one thing to
use a PGM to defeat an enemy on the battlefield — the U.S. Air Force had been
doing that for years. It was another to use it to target an individual FARC
leader. Would that constitute an assassination, which is prohibited by U.S.
law? And, “could we be accused of engaging in an assassination, even if it is
not ourselves doing it?” said one lawyer involved.
The White House’s Office of
Legal Counsel and others finally decided that the same legal analysis they had
applied to al-Qaeda could be applied to the FARC. Killing a FARC leader would
not be an assassination because the organization posed an ongoing threat to
Colombia. Also, none of the FARC commanders could be expected to surrender.
And, as a drug-trafficking
organization, the FARC’s status as a threat to U.S. national security had been
settled years earlier with Reagan’s counternarcotics finding. At the time, the
crack cocaine epidemic was at its height, and the government decided that
organizations that brought drugs to America’s streets were a threat to national
security.
There was another concern.
Some senior officials worried that Colombian forces might use the PGMs to kill
their perceived political enemies. “The concerns were huge given their human
rights problems,” said a former senior military officer.
To assure themselves that
the Colombians would not misuse the bombs, U.S. officials came up with a novel
solution. The CIA would maintain control over the encryption key inserted into
the bomb, which unscrambled communications with GPS satellites so they can be
read by the bomb’s computers. The bomb could not hit its target without the
key. The Colombians would have to ask for approval for some targets, and if
they misused the bombs, the CIA could deny GPS reception for future use.
“We wanted a sign-off,”
said one senior official involved in the deliberations.
To cut through the initial
red tape, the first 20 smart bomb kits — without the encryption keys — came
through the CIA. The bill was less than $1 million. After that, Colombia was
allowed to purchase them through the Foreign Military Sales program.
Ecuador and
the not-forgotten hostages
In February 2008, the
U.S.-Colombian team got its first sighting of the three U.S. hostages. Having
waited five years, the reaction was swift at U.S. Special Operations Command
headquarters in Tampa, which began sending JSOC commandos down, said a senior
U.S. official who was in Colombia when they arrived.
The JSOC team was headed by
a Navy SEAL Team Six commander. Small units set up three operational areas near
the hostages and conducted long-range reconnaissance, the senior official said.
The NSA increased its monitoring. All eyes were on the remote jungle location.
But as initial preparations were underway, operations were heating up
elsewhere.
Just across the Putumayo
River, one mile inside Ecuador, U.S. intelligence and a Colombian informant
confirmed the hideout of Luis Edgar Devia Silva, also known as Raul Reyes and
considered to be the No. 2 in the seven-member FARC secretariat.
It was an awkward discovery
for Colombia and the United States. To conduct an airstrike meant a Colombian
pilot flying a Colombian plane would hit the camp using a U.S.-made bomb with a
CIA-controlled brain.
The Air Force colonel had a
succinct message for the Colombian air operations commander in charge of the
mission. “I said, ‘Look man, we all know where this guy is. Just don’t f— it
up.’ ”
U.S. national security
lawyers viewed the operation as an act of self-defense. In the wake of 9/11,
they had come up with a new interpretation of the permissible use of force
against non-state actors like al-Qaeda and the FARC. It went like this: If a
terrorist group operated from a country that was unable or unwilling to stop it,
then the country under attack — in this case, Colombia — had the right to
defend itself with force, even if that meant crossing into another sovereign
country.
This was the legal
justification for CIA drone strikes and other lethal operations in Pakistan,
Yemen, Somalia and, much later, for the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama
bin Laden.
So minutes after midnight
on March 1, three A-37 Dragonflys took off from Colombia, followed by five
Super Tucanos. The smart bombs’ guidance system turned on once the planes
reached within three miles of Reyes’s location.
As instructed, the
Colombian pilots stayed in Colombian airspace. The bombs landed as programmed,
obliterating the camp and killing Reyes, who, according to Colombian news
reports, was asleep in pajamas.
Colombian forces rushed
across the border into Ecuador to retrieve Reyes’s remains and also scooped up
a large treasure trove of computer equipment that would turn out to be
the most valuable
FARC intelligence find ever.
The bombing set off a
serious diplomatic crisis. Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez called Colombia “a
terrorist state” and moved troops to the border, as did Ecuador. Nicaragua
broke off relations. Uribe, under pressure, apologized to Ecuador.
The apology, while soothing
relationships in Latin America, angered the small circle of U.S. officials who
knew the back story, one of them said. “I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe
they’re saying this,’ ” he said. “For them to be giving up an important
legal position was crazy.”
But the flap did not damage
the deep ties between U.S. and Colombian forces or deter the mission to rescue
the hostages. In fact, the number of JSOC troops continued to mount to more
than 1,000, said the senior official then in Colombia. Officials thought for
sure they would be spotted, but they never were. A U.S.-Colombian military
exercise provided sufficient cover when the International Committee of the Red
Cross showed up at isolated bases and stumbled upon some burly Americans, said
two U.S. officials.
After six weeks of waiting
to find the hostages, most of the JSOC troops left the country for pressing
missions elsewhere. One unit remained. On July 2, 2008, it had the role of
unused understudy in the dramatic and well-documented Operation Checkmate, in
which Colombian forces pretending to be members of a humanitarian group tricked
the FARC into handing over the three U.S. hostages and 12 others without a shot
fired. The JSOC team, and a fleet of U.S. aircraft, was positioned as Plan B,
in case the Colombian operation went awry.
Santos
continues the smart-bomb war
As a sign of trust, in
early 2010 the U.S. government gave Colombia control over the GPS encryption
key. There had been no reports of misuse, misfires or collateral damage from
the smart bombs. The transfer was preceded by quick negotiations over the rules
of engagement for smart-bomb use. Among the rules was that they would be
launched only against isolated jungle camps.
President Santos, who was
defense minister under Uribe, has greatly increased the pace of operations
against the FARC. Almost three times as many FARC leaders — 47 vs. 16 — have
been killed under Santos as under Uribe. Interviews and analysis of government
Web sites and press reporting show that at least 23 of the attacks under Santos
were air operations. Smart bombs were used only against the most important FARC
leaders, Colombian officials said in response to questions. Gravity bombs were
used in the other cases.
Colombia continues to
upgrade its air capabilities. In 2013, the air force upgraded its fleet of Israeli-made
Kfir fighter jets, fitting them with Israeli-made Griffin laser-guided bombs.
It has also fitted smart bombs onto some of its Super Tucanos.
Having decimated the top
FARC leadership and many of the front commanders, the military, with continued
help from the CIA and other intelligence agencies, appears to be working its
way through the mid-level ranks, including mobile company commanders, the most
battle-hardened and experienced remaining cadre. One-third of them have been
killed or captured, according to Colombian officials.
The Santos administration
has also targeted the financial and weapons networks supporting the FARC. Some
critics think the government has been too focused on killing leaders and not
enough on using the army and police to occupy and control rebel territory.
Killing an individual has
never been a measure of success in war, say counterinsurgency experts. It’s the
chaos and dysfunction that killing the leadership causes to the organization
that matters. The air operations against the FARC leadership “has turned the
organization upside down,” said a senior Pentagon official who has studied the
classified U.S. history of Colombia’s war.
Some have fled to
Venezuela. One member of the secretariat hides out intermittently in Ecuador,
according to senior Colombia officials, breaking the important psychological
bond with ground troops and handicapping recruitment.
For fear of being located
and targeted, units no longer sleep in the same place two days in a row, so
camps must be sparser. “They know the government has so much information on
them now, and real-time intelligence,” said German Espejo, security and defense
counselor at the Colombian Embassy. Worried about spies in their midst,
executions are common.
The FARC still mounts
attacks — a car bombing of a rural police station Dec. 7 killed six police
officers and two civilians — but it no longer travels in large groups, and it
limits most units to less than 20. No longer able to mount large-scale
assaults, the group has reverted to hit-and-run tactics using snipers and
explosives.
The weariness of 50 years
of transient jungle life has taken its toll on the FARC negotiating team, too.
Those who have lived in exile seem more willing to continue the fight than
those who have been doing the fighting, said Colombian officials. The
negotiations, Santos said in the interview, are the result of the successful
military campaign, “the cherry on the cake.”
On Dec. 15, the FARC said
it would begin a 30-day unilateral cease-fire as a sign of good will during the
holiday season. The Santos administration rebuffed the gesture and vowed to
continue its military campaign. Later that day, security forces killed a FARC
guerrilla implicated in a bomb attack on a former minister. Three days later,
the army killed another five.
Elyssa Pachico and Julie
Tate contributed to this report.
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