Foreign Pilots Hired to Boost U.S. Drug War

BOGOTA, Colombia —  The State Department has directed its largest private contractor in Colombia to hire foreign pilots to fight the drug war, an order that helps get around Congress’ attempt to keep the U.S. from slipping further into this country’s messy civil war.

Last year, Congress limited to 300 the number of civilian contract workers participating in U.S.-financed drug-eradication efforts in Colombia. But in a little-noticed decision, the State Department only counts U.S. citizens toward that limit.

As a result, more than 400 civilians already are working for private contractors under the U.S. anti-drug program. The largest employer is DynCorp, which has 335 civilians on the payroll. Fewer than a third are U.S. citizens, the contractor’s chief of operations here said Friday.

An estimated 60 to 80 U.S. citizens work for other contractors, including Bell Helicopter Textron, Sikorsky Aircraft, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.

A senior aide to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who has been at the forefront of the battle over U.S. assistance to Colombia, acknowledged that the language passed by Congress specified that the cap applied to “United States individual civilians” and that the State Department is not obliged to include foreigners in its reports to Congress.

“Legally, they may be within the law,” said the aide, Tim Reiser. “But in terms of congressional interest in being informed on what U.S. money is being used for, that is of interest to Congress and it’s something that the Congress should be informed about.”

State Department officials say they are not required to inform Congress that they have ordered DynCorp to hire as many as 50 pilots from Guatemala, Peru, Colombia and other countries to transport Colombian army forces into cocaine-growing zones.

The pilots, most of them former Central and South American air force members who fly the most dangerous anti-drug missions here, also are hired to reduce the risk that an American would be shot down and killed in the drug war, according to U.S. Embassy officials.

“I’m under no illusion what it would mean to have an American shot down here, and no one in the U.S. is,” Ambassador Anne W. Patterson said in a recent interview with reporters.

U.S. lawmakers have long worried that the effort to eradicate cocaine will draw the U.S. deeper into Colombia’s four-decade-old civil war. Both leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary groups fight to protect the coca crops that are their primary source of revenue.

Lawmakers contacted Friday accused the State Department of circumventing congressional intent to limit American involvement in the conflict.

The issue goes to the heart of congressional critics’ fears about Plan Colombia, which was launched last year with a $1.3-billion American contribution: that U.S. involvement will slowly escalate, as happened in Vietnam.

The situation also has historical echoes, touching on controversies surrounding congressional limits on the number of U.S. military advisors in El Salvador during the 1980s and Reagan administration efforts to evade them.

“This seems to be a loophole around the cap, a way to get around them,” said Rep. Janice D. Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who has sought to eliminate the use of private contractors in the region since a U.S. firm was involved in the accidental downing of a private airplane by the Peruvian military in April. That incident resulted in the deaths of an American missionary and her infant daughter.

“Every time we find out more about what goes on in Colombia, a dozen more questions are raised,” Schakowsky said. “Most members of Congress interpreted the cap to mean we will limit to a total of 300 personnel, no matter what their nationality is.”

Private contract workers, who do everything from flying crop dusters to transporting troops to staffing radar stations, long have been controversial. Some lawmakers fear that the U.S. is conducting foreign policy through private companies without adequate public accountability.

Even some of those who have closely followed the debate over Plan Colombia were surprised to learn of the State Department’s practice.

“Nobody knows about this in Washington,” said Adam Isacson, an expert on Colombia at the Center for International Policy, a left-leaning Washington think tank. “If anybody is still concerned about mission creep, this will make them all the more worried.”

The State Department’s International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Bureau, which is overseeing the bulk of the U.S. effort in the region, early on debated whether to count the foreign employees.

At one point, according to an embassy official who was present at the discussion, the State Department acknowledged the sensitivity of the issue and initially discussed being “totally virtuous” and counting the foreign employees in its reporting to Congress. The official and several others interviewed requested that their names not be used, in keeping with State Department policies.

The department subsequently decided to not count foreign employees after what the official called a “hotly debated” discussion. It became apparent by the middle of this year that there would be nearly 300 U.S. citizens working on the program in Colombia by December.

The official added that the State Department discussed the issue with members of Congress before reaching a final decision, but did not specify which lawmakers were consulted.

The issue came up again recently when the Bush administration, responding to State Department fears about reaching the cap by December, tried to remove all limits on U.S. personnel as part of the aid package for the Andean region for the coming fiscal year.

House lawmakers compromised, instead allowing a total of 800 U.S. military and civilian personnel in Colombia. The Senate has so far insisted on maintaining the civilian cap at 300, with a separate cap of 500 U.S. military personnel.

State Department officials defended the move to not count foreign employees, especially since many are Colombians working as secretaries and drivers and in other low-level jobs traditionally given to host country citizens.

These officials noted that if the Colombians were not tallied, the U.S. program would not reach the 300-worker cap even including the Peruvians, Guatemalans and other Latin Americans recruited to transport troops into conflict zones where leftist guerrillas and narco-traffickers are defending cocaine fields.

DynCorp officials interviewed Friday acknowledged that the State Department had specifically directed them to hire the foreign pilots as part of a five-year, $200-million contract to fumigate drug crops in Colombia.

“That was customer-directed,” said the DynCorp director in Colombia, who declined to be identified for safety reasons.

But the director also said that part of the reason for hiring foreign nationals is the lack of qualified personnel in the U.S. Another factor is that the Latin American pilots speak fluent Spanish.

The lack of fluency among contract workers contributed to the April incident in Peru that killed Veronica Bowers of the Assn. of Baptists for World Evangelism and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity.

Some Central American pilots who interviewed for jobs with DynCorp told The Times that they were asked whether they had combat experience. DynCorp officials said military experience played no special role in their hiring decisions.

“They were looking for pilots with 3,000 hours of flying experience and war combat,” said an ex-member of the Salvadoran air force who interviewed with DynCorp nearly a year ago. “When we were flying for El Salvador during the war, we did it for patriotic values, to defeat communism. Now, it’s for money.”

*

Special correspondent Alex Renderos contributed to this report.