Colombia Obtains Mystery U.S. Aid to Help Cripple FARC Rebel Group
The 50-year-old Revolutionary equipped Forces of Colombia (FARC), once
advised the best-funded insurgency in the world, is at its least
significant and most susceptible state in decades, due in part to a CIA
covert activity program that has helped Colombian forces murder at
smallest two dozen rebel leaders, according to interviews with more than
30 previous and present U.S. and Colombian agents.
The mystery aid, which furthermore encompasses considerable eavesdropping help from the nationwide Security Agency, is funded through a multibillion-dollar black allowance. It is not a part of the public $9 billion package of mostly U.S. military help called Plan Colombia, which started in 2000.
The before unrevealed CIA program was authorized by leader George W. wilderness in the early 2000s and has proceeded under President Obama, according to U.S. military, understanding 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 supplies two absolutely vital services to the nation’s assault against the FARC and a lesser insurgent assembly, the nationwide Liberation Army (ELN): Real-time understanding that allows Colombian forces to search down individual FARC managers and, beginning in 2006, one particularly effective tool with which to kill them.
That tool for fighting is a $30,000 GPS guidance kit that transforms a less-than-accurate 500-pound gravity blasting device into a highly accurate smart bomb. intelligent blasting devices, also called precision-guided munitions or PGMs, are capable of murdering an one-by-one in triple-canopy jungle if his exact location can be very resolute and geo-coordinates are programmed into the bomb’s little computer mind.
In March 2008, according to nine U.S. and Colombian agents, the Colombian Air Force, with tacit U.S. approval, commenced U.S.-made smart blasting devices across the boundary into Ecuador to murder a senior FARC foremost, Raul Reyes. The digressive U.S. function in that strike has not been previously revealed.
The covert action program in Colombia is one of a handful of enhanced understanding plans that has escaped public notice since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most of these other programs, little but growing, are established in countries where violent drug cartels have caused instability.
The roster is going by Mexico, where U.S. understanding aid is larger than any place outside Afghanistan, as The Washington mail described in April. It also includes centered America and West Africa, where trafficking routes have moved in answer to U.S. force against cartels in another place.
inquired to comment on U.S. intelligence aid, leader Juan Manuel Santos told The mail during a latest trip to Washington that he did not wish to talk about it in minutia, granted the sensitivities involved. “It’s been of help,” he said. “Part of the know-how and the efficiency of our operations and our exceptional operations have been the product of better teaching and information we have acquired from numerous nations, amidst them the United States.”
A spokesman for the CIA turned down to comment.
Colombia and the FARC have been in calm discussions in Havana for a year. They have agreed so far on structures for land reform, country development and for permitting insurgents to participate in the political method once the war finishes. The two sides are actually considering a new approach to fighting drug trafficking.
On the verge
of disintegrate
Today, a evaluation between Colombia, with its vibrant finances and swanky Bogota communal view, and Afghanistan might appear absurd. But a little more than a ten years ago, Colombia had the highest killing rate in the world. Random bombings and strong-arm infantry methods pervaded every day life. Some 3,000 persons were kidnapped in one year. Professors, human privileges activists and journalists supposed of being FARC sympathizers regularly turned up dead.
The combustible blend of the FARC, cartels, paramilitaries and corrupt security forces conceived a cauldron of aggression unprecedented in modern-day Latin America. almost a quarter-million people have past away throughout the long conflict, and numerous thousands have went away.
The FARC was founded in 1964 as a Marxist peasant action seeking land and justice for the poor. By 1998, Colombia’s leader at the time, Andres Pastrana, provided the FARC a Switzerland-sized demilitarized zone to encourage calm negotiations, but its brutal attacks only grew, as did its connections with the narcotics trade.
By 2000, the emboldened insurgency of 18,000 took aim at Colombia’s political leaders. It assassinated local voted into office officials. It kidnapped a presidential candidate and attempted to murder a presidential front-runner, hard-liner Alvaro Uribe, whose dad the FARC had killed in 1983.
Fearing Colombia would become a failed state with an even larger role in pharmaceutical trafficking into the joined States, the wilderness management and assembly ramped up assistance to the Colombian infantry through Plan Colombia.
By 2003, U.S. engagement in Colombia embraced 40 U.S. agencies and 4,500 persons, encompassing contractors, all employed out of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, then the biggest U.S. embassy in the world. It resided that way until mid-2004, when it was surpassed by Afghanistan.
“There is no country, encompassing Afghanistan, where we had more going on,” said William Wood, who was U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 2003 to 2007 before holding the identical mail in war-torn Afghanistan for two years after that.
When wilderness became leader, two presidential findings were currently on the publications authorizing covert action worldwide. One allowed CIA operations against worldwide terrorist organizations. The other, marked in the mid-1980s by leader Ronald Reagan, authorized activity against worldwide narcotics traffickers.
A presidential finding is required for the CIA to do things other than assemble and analyze overseas understanding. Giving spy equipment to a colleague, carrying foreign political parties, cultivating propaganda, and participating in lethal training or procedures all need a finding and a notification to congressional understanding managing groups.
The counternarcotics finding had allowed the CIA and a technical unit of the clandestine Joint Special procedures order (JSOC) to supply support to the years-long search for Colombian pharmaceutical lord Pablo Escobar, slain by Colombian forces 20 years before this month. It furthermore made likely CIA-supported procedures against traffickers and terrorists in Bolivia and Peru years ago.
Under the Colombian program, the CIA is not permitted to take part exactly in operations. The identical limits apply to military engagement in design Colombia. Such undertaking has been guarded by constituents of Congress who had dwelled through the scandal of America’s mystery function in Central America’s conflicts in the 1980s. Congress denied to permit U.S. infantry engagement in Colombia to increase as it had in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama.
The FARC
miscalculates
The new covert push against the FARC unofficially started on Feb. 13, 2003. That day a single-engine Cessna 208 smashed into in rebel-held jungle. close by guerrillas executed the Colombian agent on board and one of four American contractors who were working on coca eradication. The three other ones were taken hostage.
The joined States had currently announced the FARC a terrorist organization for its indiscriminate killings and pharmaceutical trafficking. Although the CIA had its hands full with Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush “leaned on [CIA controller George] Tenet” to help find the three hostages, according to one previous older understanding official engaged in the considerations.
The FARC’s terrorist designation made it easier to fund a very dark budget. “We got cash from a allotment of different pots,” said one senior diplomat.
One of the CIA agents Tenet dispatched to Bogota was an operator in his forties whose title The Washington Post is withholding because he remains undercover. He conceived the U.S. Embassy understanding Fusion Cell, named “the Bunker.”
It was a cramped, 30-by-30-foot room with a low ceiling and three lines of computers. Eight people sat at each strip of consoles. Some scoured satellite maps of the jungle; other ones searched for below ground FARC concealing places. Some supervised imagery or the movement of vehicles tagged with following devices. Voice intercepts from radio and cellphone communications were decrypted and converted by the nationwide Security bureau.
Bunker analysts fused tips from informants and mechanically got data. Analysts searched to connection individuals to the insurgency’s flow of pharmaceuticals, tools for fighting and cash. For the most part, they left the brutal paramilitary groups solely.
The Bunker’s mechanical professionals and contractors constructed the Colombians their own nationwide intelligence computer system. They furthermore subsequent helped conceive local fusion hubs to impel tactical intelligence to local commanders. The bureau furthermore paid for encrypted communications equipment.
“We were very involved in getting the FARC, and it wasn’t so much a question of capability, as it was intelligence,” said timber, “specifically the ability to find them in the time border of an operation.”
Outside the Bunker, CIA case agents and contractors taught the art of recruiting informants to Colombian units that had been vetted and polygraphed. They gave cash to persons with data about the hostages.
meantime, the other secret U.S. bureau that had been at the forefront of locating and murdering al-Qaeda reached on the view. Elite commandos from JSOC started periodic annual teaching meetings and small-unit reconnaissance missions to try to find the hostages.
Despite all the effort, the hostages’ location verified vague. Looking for certain thing additional to do with the new understanding gear and personnel, the Bunker manager and his infantry deputy from the U.S. exceptional procedures order gave their people a second operation: goal the FARC authority. This was precisely what the CIA and JSOC had been doing against al-Qaeda on the other edge of the world. The methodology was well known.
“There was cross-pollination both ways,” said one senior official with get get get access to to to to the Bunker at the time. “We didn’t need to create a new wheel.”
A demand from
Colombia’s president
Locating FARC leaders verified easier than apprehending or killing them. Some 60 times, Colombian forces had got or been granted reliable data but failed to arrest or murder any person senior, according to two U.S. agents and a retired Colombian older officer. The article was habitually the same. U.S.-provided Black Hawk helicopters would ferry Colombian armies into the jungle about six kilometers away from a camp. The men would creep through the dense foliage, but the bivouacs were habitually empty by the time they reached. subsequent they learned that the FARC had an early-warning system: rings of security miles from the camps.
By 2006, the dismal record captivated the attention of the U.S. Air Force’s freshly reached operation head. The colonel was perplexed. Why had the third-largest recipient of U.S. infantry assistance [behind Egypt and Israel] made so little advancement?
“I’m thinking, ‘What are we killing the FARC with?’ ” the colonel, who spoke on the status of anonymity, said in an interview.
The colonel, a cargo plane professional, said he “started Googling bombs and fighters” looking for concepts. Eventually he landed on the Enhanced Paveway II, a somewhat 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 concept and composed a one-page paper on it for him to consign to Uribe. Santos took the idea to U.S. protecting against receptionist Donald Rumsfeld. In June 2006, Uribe travelled to wilderness at the White dwelling. He cited the latest murdering of al-Qaeda’s chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. An F-16 had sent two 500-pound intelligent bombs into his hideout and slain him. He pushed for the identical capability.
“Clearly this was very significant” to Uribe, said retired Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who had taken over as CIA controller just months earlier.
First, there was the matter of fitting the smart blasting devices onto a Colombian aircraft. Colombia did not have F-16s. Raytheon, the kit constructor, dispatched engineers to figure out how to climb on the gear on a plane. First they endeavoured climbing on it on a Brazilian-made Embraer A-29 Super Tucano, a turboprop aircraft designed for low-flying counterinsurgency missions. But affixing the twisted cord that ran from the bomb’s computer brain to the cockpit intended drilling too close to the fuel cell. rather than, they jerry-rigged it to an older Cessna A-37 Dragonfly, a lightweight strike airplane first developed by the U.S. exceptional procedures air force for Vietnam and later utilised in the Salvadoran municipal conflict.
Then the engineers and Colombian pilots checked the first of three PGMs in a remote airfield near the Venezuelan boundary. The goal was a 2-by-4 attached in the ground. The plane commenced the bomb from 20,000 feet. “It set down about a foot from it,” the colonel said. The outcomes were so good, he considered, “why waste two more kits?” The intelligent blasting devices were prepared for use.
But White House solicitors, along with their colleagues from the CIA and the departments of fairness, protecting against and State, had their own questions to work through. It was one thing to use a PGM to beat an foe on the battlefield — the U.S. Air Force had been doing that for years. It was another to use it to target an one-by-one 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 us doing it?” said one lawyer engaged.
The White House’s Office of lawful Counsel and others eventually determined that the same lawful analysis they had applied to al-Qaeda could be applied to the FARC. murdering a FARC leader would not be an assassination because the association impersonated an ongoing risk to Colombia. Also, no one of the FARC commanders could be expected to submit.
And, as a drug-trafficking organization, the FARC’s rank as a threat to U.S. nationwide security had been resolved years previous with Reagan’s counternarcotics finding. At the time, the crack cocaine epidemic was at its size, and the government decided that organizations that conveyed pharmaceuticals to America’s streets were a risk to nationwide security.
There was another anxiety. Some senior officials concerned that Colombian forces might use the PGMs to kill their seen political foes. “The anxieties were huge given their human privileges problems,” said a previous older military officer.
To assure themselves that the Colombians would not misuse the bombs, U.S. agents came up with a innovative solution. The CIA would sustain control over the encryption key injected into the bomb, which unscrambled communications with GPS satellites so they can be read by the blasting device’s computers. The blasting device could not hit its goal without the key. The Colombians would have to inquire for acceptance for some targets, and if they misused the blasting devices, the CIA could deny GPS greeting for future use.
“We liked a sign-off,” said one older official engaged in the deliberations.
To cut through the primary red strip, the first 20 smart blasting device kits — without the encryption keys — came through the CIA. The account was less than $1 million. After that, Colombia was allowed to buy them through the Foreign infantry Sales program.
A first hit
Tomas Medina Caracas, also renowned as Negro Acacio, the FARC’s chief pharmaceutical trafficker and commander of its 16th Front, was the first man the U.S. Embassy Intelligence Fusion Cell lined up up for a PGM hit.
At about 4:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, 2007, pilots wearing evening vision goggles unleashed several Enhanced Paveway II smart bombs into his bivouac in to the east Colombia as agents in both capitals remained. armies retrieved only a leg. It appeared by its dark complexion to pertains to Acacio, one of the couple of black FARC managers. DNA checks verified his death.
“There was a large deal of excitement,” recalled William Scoggins, counternarcotics program supervisor at the U.S. military’s south order. “We didn’t know the impact it would have, but we considered this was a game changer.”
Six weeks subsequent, smart blasting devices slain Gustavo Rueda Díaz, alias Martin Caballero, leader of the 37th Front, while he was conversing on his cellphone. Acacio’s and Caballero’s deaths caused the 16th and 37th fronts to collapse. They also triggered mass desertions, according to a secret State Department cable antiquated stride 6, 2008, and issued by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks in 2010. This was just the starting of the FARC’s disintegration.
To conceal the use of the PGMs from public breakthrough, and to double-check greatest damage to a FARC’s leaders’ camp, the air force and U.S. advisers evolved new strike tactics. In a usual operation, some A-37 Dragonflys soaring at 20,000 feet conveyed intelligent bombs. As shortly as the planes came inside a three-mile “basket” of the goal, a bomb’s GPS programs would mechanically turn on.
The Dragonflys were pursued by some A-29 Super Tucanos, soaring at a much smaller altitude. They would drop a sequence of dumb blasting devices in a pattern nearby. Their blast force would murder any person close in and furthermore make flat the dense jungle and obscure the use of the smart bombs.
Then, low-flying, Vietnam-era AC-47 gunships, nicknamed Puff the Magic Dragon, would strafe the area with climbed on machine cannons, “shooting the hurt trying to go for cover,” according to one of some infantry agents who described the same scenario.
Only then would Colombian garound forces reach to around up prisoners, assembling the dead, as well as cellphones, computers and hard drives. The CIA furthermore spent three years teaching Colombian close air support groups on utilising lasers to clandestinely guide pilots and laser-guided smart blasting devices to their goals.
Most every operation relied very strongly on NSA pointer intercepts, which fed understanding to troops on the ground or pilots before and throughout an operation. “Intercepts . . . were a game changer,” said Scoggins, of U.S. south order.
The round-the-clock environment of the NSA’s work was apprehended in a mystery State Department twisted cord issued by WikiLeaks. In the spring of 2009, the goal was pharmaceutical trafficker Daniel Rendon Herrera, renowned as Don Mario, then Colombia’s most liked man and to blame for 3,000 assassinations over an 18-month period.
“For seven days, utilising pointer and human intelligence,” NSA assets “worked day and evening” to reposition 250 U.S.-trained and equipped airborne commandos beside Herrera as he tried to escape, according to an April 2009 twisted cord and a older government official who verified the NSA’s function in the mission.
The CIA also trained Colombian interrogators to more effectively question thousands of FARC deserters, without the use of the “enhanced interrogation” methods approved for use on al-Qaeda and subsequent repudiated by assembly as abusive. The bureau also conceived databases to hold pathway of the debriefings so they could be searched and cross-referenced to build a more complete image of the organization.
The Colombian government paid deserters and permitted them to reintegrate into municipal society. Some, in turn, offered precious data about the FARC’s chain of order, benchmark journey paths, bivouacs, provide lines, pharmaceutical and cash sources. They assisted make sense of the NSA’s voice intercepts, which often used cipher phrases. Deserters furthermore occasionally were used to infiltrate FARC bivouacs to vegetation hearing apparatus or beacons that emitted a GPS coordinate for intelligent blasting devices.
“We learned from the CIA,” a peak Colombian national security official said of the debriefing program. “Before, we didn’t pay much attention to details.”
Ecuador and the
not-forgotten hostages
In February 2008, the U.S.-Colombian team got its first viewing of the three U.S. hostages. Having remained five years, the answer was swift at U.S. Special Operations order head office in Tampa, which started dispatching JSOC commandos down, said a senior U.S. authorized who was in Colombia when they reached.
The JSOC group was going by a Navy close Team Six commander. little flats set up three operational localities beside the hostages and conducted long-range reconnaissance, the senior authorized said. The NSA bigger its monitoring. All eyes were on the isolated jungle position. But as primary groundworks were progressing, operations were heating system up in another place.
Just over the Putumayo River, one mile inside Ecuador, U.S. intelligence and a Colombian informant verified the hideout of Luis Edgar Devia Silva, also known as Raul Reyes and advised to be the No. 2 in the seven-member FARC secretariat.
It was an awkward breakthrough for Colombia and the joined States. To conduct an airstrike intended a Colombian pilot flying a Colombian plane would strike the camp utilising a U.S.-made blasting device with a CIA-controlled brain.
The Air Force colonel had a succinct message for the Colombian air operations commander in charge of the operation. “I said, ‘Look man, we all know where this guy is. Just don’t f--- it up.’ ”
U.S. nationwide security solicitors viewed the operation as an proceed of self-defense. In the awaken of 9/11, they had arrive up with a new understanding of the permissible use of force against non-state actors like al-Qaeda and the FARC. It went like this: If a terrorist group functioned from a homeland that was unable or unwilling to halt it, then the homeland under strike — in this case, Colombia — had the right to fight back itself with force, even if that meant crossing into another sovereign homeland.
This was the lawful justification for CIA drone strikes and other lethal operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and, much subsequent, for the raid into Pakistan that slain Osama receptacle Laden.
So minutes after midnight on stride 1, three A-37 Dragonflys took off from Colombia, pursued by five Super Tucanos. The smart bombs’ guidance system turned on once the planes come to inside three miles of Reyes’s position.
As instructed, the Colombian pilots resided in Colombian airspace. The blasting devices landed as programmed, obliterating the bivouac and killing Reyes, who, according to Colombian report reports, was slumbering in pajamas.
Colombian forces hurried across the border into Ecuador to retrieve Reyes’s continues and furthermore scooped up a large treasure trove of computer equipment that would turn out to be the most valuable FARC understanding find ever.
The bombing set off a serious diplomatic urgent situation. Venezuelan foremost Hugo Chávez called Colombia “a terrorist state” and moved armies to the boundary, as did Ecuador. Nicaragua smashed off relations. Uribe, under force, apologized to Ecuador.
The apology, while soothing connections in Latin America, angered the little circle of U.S. agents who knew the back story, one of them said. “I recall thinking, ‘I can’t believe they’re saying this,’ ” he said. “For them to be giving up an important lawful place was crazy.”
But the flap did not impairment the deep binds between U.S. and Colombian forces or deter the operation to release the hostages. In fact, the number of JSOC armies proceeded to mount to more than 1,000, said the older official then in Colombia. Officials considered for sure they would be dotted, but they never were. A U.S.-Colombian infantry exercise provided adequate cover when the worldwide Committee of the Red traverse showed up at isolated bases and staggered upon some burly Americans, said two U.S. agents.
After six weeks of waiting to find the hostages, most of the JSOC armies left the country for pushing missions in another place. One unit stayed. On July 2, 2008, it had the function of unused understudy in the spectacular and well-documented procedure Checkmate, in which Colombian forces pretending to be members of a humanitarian assembly deceived the FARC into presenting over the three U.S. hostages and 12 other ones without a shot fired. The JSOC team, and a fleet of U.S. aircraft, was positioned as design B, in case the Colombian operation went awry.
Santos continues
the smart-bomb conflict
As a signalal of believe, in early 2010 the U.S. government gave Colombia command over the GPS encryption key. There had been no accounts of misuse, misfires or collateral impairment from the intelligent bombs. The transfer was preceded by fast discussions over the directions of engagement for smart-bomb use. amidst the rules was that they would be commenced only against isolated jungle bivouacs.
President Santos, who was protecting against minister under Uribe, has substantially increased the stride of operations against the FARC. nearly three times as numerous FARC leaders — 47 vs. 16 — have been slain under Santos as under Uribe. meetings and analysis of government Web sites and press reporting show that at smallest 23 of the attacks under Santos were air procedures. Smart bombs were utilised only against the most important FARC leaders, Colombian officials said in response to inquiries. Gravity blasting devices were utilised in the other cases.
Colombia extends to improvement its air capabilities. In 2013, the air force upgraded its fleet of Israeli-made Kfir combatant jets, fitting them with Israeli-made Griffin laser-guided blasting devices. It has also fitted intelligent blasting devices onto some of its Super Tucanos.
Having decimated the peak FARC leadership and numerous of the front commanders, the infantry, with continued help from the CIA and other understanding bureaus, seems to be working its way through the mid-level ranks, encompassing wireless business commanders, the most battle-hardened and skilled remaining cadre. One-third of them have been slain or apprehended, according to Colombian agents.
The Santos administration has furthermore aimed at the financial and tools for fighting networks carrying the FARC. Some critics believe the government has been too concentrated on killing managers and not sufficient on using the armed detachment and policeman to occupy and command rebel territory.
murdering an individual has not ever been a measure of achievement in conflict, say counterinsurgency experts. It’s the disorder and dysfunction that murdering the leadership causes to the association that affairs. The air procedures against the FARC authority “has turned the association upside down,” said a older Pentagon authorized who has investigated the classified U.S. annals of Colombia’s war.
Some have escaped to Venezuela. One member of the secretariat hides out intermittently in Ecuador, according to older Colombia agents, shattering the significant psychological bond with ground armies and handicapping recruitment.
For worry of being established and targeted, units no longer doze in the same location two days in a strip, so camps should be sparser. “They know the government has so much information on them now, and real-time intelligence,” said German Espejo, security and protecting against counselor at the Colombian Embassy. concerned about spies in their midst, executions are widespread.
The FARC still mounts attacks — a car bombing of a rural police position Dec. 7 slain six police agents and two civilians — but it no longer travels in large assemblies, and it limits most flats to less than 20. No longer adept to mount large-scale assaults, the assembly has reverted to hit-and-run methods utilising snipers and explosives.
The weariness of 50 years of transient jungle life has taken its toll on the FARC negotiating group, too. Those who have dwelled in exile appear more willing to extend the battle than those who have been doing the battleing, said Colombian officials. The negotiations, Santos said in the interview, are the outcome of the successful military crusade, “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 throughout the vacation time of the year. The Santos management rebuffed the gesture and promised to extend its infantry campaign. subsequent that day, security forces slain a FARC guerrilla implicated in a bomb strike on a previous minister. Three days subsequent, the army slain another five.
The mystery aid, which furthermore encompasses considerable eavesdropping help from the nationwide Security Agency, is funded through a multibillion-dollar black allowance. It is not a part of the public $9 billion package of mostly U.S. military help called Plan Colombia, which started in 2000.
The before unrevealed CIA program was authorized by leader George W. wilderness in the early 2000s and has proceeded under President Obama, according to U.S. military, understanding 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 supplies two absolutely vital services to the nation’s assault against the FARC and a lesser insurgent assembly, the nationwide Liberation Army (ELN): Real-time understanding that allows Colombian forces to search down individual FARC managers and, beginning in 2006, one particularly effective tool with which to kill them.
That tool for fighting is a $30,000 GPS guidance kit that transforms a less-than-accurate 500-pound gravity blasting device into a highly accurate smart bomb. intelligent blasting devices, also called precision-guided munitions or PGMs, are capable of murdering an one-by-one in triple-canopy jungle if his exact location can be very resolute and geo-coordinates are programmed into the bomb’s little computer mind.
In March 2008, according to nine U.S. and Colombian agents, the Colombian Air Force, with tacit U.S. approval, commenced U.S.-made smart blasting devices across the boundary into Ecuador to murder a senior FARC foremost, Raul Reyes. The digressive U.S. function in that strike has not been previously revealed.
The covert action program in Colombia is one of a handful of enhanced understanding plans that has escaped public notice since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most of these other programs, little but growing, are established in countries where violent drug cartels have caused instability.
The roster is going by Mexico, where U.S. understanding aid is larger than any place outside Afghanistan, as The Washington mail described in April. It also includes centered America and West Africa, where trafficking routes have moved in answer to U.S. force against cartels in another place.
inquired to comment on U.S. intelligence aid, leader Juan Manuel Santos told The mail during a latest trip to Washington that he did not wish to talk about it in minutia, granted the sensitivities involved. “It’s been of help,” he said. “Part of the know-how and the efficiency of our operations and our exceptional operations have been the product of better teaching and information we have acquired from numerous nations, amidst them the United States.”
A spokesman for the CIA turned down to comment.
Colombia and the FARC have been in calm discussions in Havana for a year. They have agreed so far on structures for land reform, country development and for permitting insurgents to participate in the political method once the war finishes. The two sides are actually considering a new approach to fighting drug trafficking.
On the verge
of disintegrate
Today, a evaluation between Colombia, with its vibrant finances and swanky Bogota communal view, and Afghanistan might appear absurd. But a little more than a ten years ago, Colombia had the highest killing rate in the world. Random bombings and strong-arm infantry methods pervaded every day life. Some 3,000 persons were kidnapped in one year. Professors, human privileges activists and journalists supposed of being FARC sympathizers regularly turned up dead.
The combustible blend of the FARC, cartels, paramilitaries and corrupt security forces conceived a cauldron of aggression unprecedented in modern-day Latin America. almost a quarter-million people have past away throughout the long conflict, and numerous thousands have went away.
The FARC was founded in 1964 as a Marxist peasant action seeking land and justice for the poor. By 1998, Colombia’s leader at the time, Andres Pastrana, provided the FARC a Switzerland-sized demilitarized zone to encourage calm negotiations, but its brutal attacks only grew, as did its connections with the narcotics trade.
By 2000, the emboldened insurgency of 18,000 took aim at Colombia’s political leaders. It assassinated local voted into office officials. It kidnapped a presidential candidate and attempted to murder a presidential front-runner, hard-liner Alvaro Uribe, whose dad the FARC had killed in 1983.
Fearing Colombia would become a failed state with an even larger role in pharmaceutical trafficking into the joined States, the wilderness management and assembly ramped up assistance to the Colombian infantry through Plan Colombia.
By 2003, U.S. engagement in Colombia embraced 40 U.S. agencies and 4,500 persons, encompassing contractors, all employed out of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, then the biggest U.S. embassy in the world. It resided that way until mid-2004, when it was surpassed by Afghanistan.
“There is no country, encompassing Afghanistan, where we had more going on,” said William Wood, who was U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 2003 to 2007 before holding the identical mail in war-torn Afghanistan for two years after that.
When wilderness became leader, two presidential findings were currently on the publications authorizing covert action worldwide. One allowed CIA operations against worldwide terrorist organizations. The other, marked in the mid-1980s by leader Ronald Reagan, authorized activity against worldwide narcotics traffickers.
A presidential finding is required for the CIA to do things other than assemble and analyze overseas understanding. Giving spy equipment to a colleague, carrying foreign political parties, cultivating propaganda, and participating in lethal training or procedures all need a finding and a notification to congressional understanding managing groups.
The counternarcotics finding had allowed the CIA and a technical unit of the clandestine Joint Special procedures order (JSOC) to supply support to the years-long search for Colombian pharmaceutical lord Pablo Escobar, slain by Colombian forces 20 years before this month. It furthermore made likely CIA-supported procedures against traffickers and terrorists in Bolivia and Peru years ago.
Under the Colombian program, the CIA is not permitted to take part exactly in operations. The identical limits apply to military engagement in design Colombia. Such undertaking has been guarded by constituents of Congress who had dwelled through the scandal of America’s mystery function in Central America’s conflicts in the 1980s. Congress denied to permit U.S. infantry engagement in Colombia to increase as it had in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama.
The FARC
miscalculates
The new covert push against the FARC unofficially started on Feb. 13, 2003. That day a single-engine Cessna 208 smashed into in rebel-held jungle. close by guerrillas executed the Colombian agent on board and one of four American contractors who were working on coca eradication. The three other ones were taken hostage.
The joined States had currently announced the FARC a terrorist organization for its indiscriminate killings and pharmaceutical trafficking. Although the CIA had its hands full with Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush “leaned on [CIA controller George] Tenet” to help find the three hostages, according to one previous older understanding official engaged in the considerations.
The FARC’s terrorist designation made it easier to fund a very dark budget. “We got cash from a allotment of different pots,” said one senior diplomat.
One of the CIA agents Tenet dispatched to Bogota was an operator in his forties whose title The Washington Post is withholding because he remains undercover. He conceived the U.S. Embassy understanding Fusion Cell, named “the Bunker.”
It was a cramped, 30-by-30-foot room with a low ceiling and three lines of computers. Eight people sat at each strip of consoles. Some scoured satellite maps of the jungle; other ones searched for below ground FARC concealing places. Some supervised imagery or the movement of vehicles tagged with following devices. Voice intercepts from radio and cellphone communications were decrypted and converted by the nationwide Security bureau.
Bunker analysts fused tips from informants and mechanically got data. Analysts searched to connection individuals to the insurgency’s flow of pharmaceuticals, tools for fighting and cash. For the most part, they left the brutal paramilitary groups solely.
The Bunker’s mechanical professionals and contractors constructed the Colombians their own nationwide intelligence computer system. They furthermore subsequent helped conceive local fusion hubs to impel tactical intelligence to local commanders. The bureau furthermore paid for encrypted communications equipment.
“We were very involved in getting the FARC, and it wasn’t so much a question of capability, as it was intelligence,” said timber, “specifically the ability to find them in the time border of an operation.”
Outside the Bunker, CIA case agents and contractors taught the art of recruiting informants to Colombian units that had been vetted and polygraphed. They gave cash to persons with data about the hostages.
meantime, the other secret U.S. bureau that had been at the forefront of locating and murdering al-Qaeda reached on the view. Elite commandos from JSOC started periodic annual teaching meetings and small-unit reconnaissance missions to try to find the hostages.
Despite all the effort, the hostages’ location verified vague. Looking for certain thing additional to do with the new understanding gear and personnel, the Bunker manager and his infantry deputy from the U.S. exceptional procedures order gave their people a second operation: goal the FARC authority. This was precisely what the CIA and JSOC had been doing against al-Qaeda on the other edge of the world. The methodology was well known.
“There was cross-pollination both ways,” said one senior official with get get get access to to to to the Bunker at the time. “We didn’t need to create a new wheel.”
A demand from
Colombia’s president
Locating FARC leaders verified easier than apprehending or killing them. Some 60 times, Colombian forces had got or been granted reliable data but failed to arrest or murder any person senior, according to two U.S. agents and a retired Colombian older officer. The article was habitually the same. U.S.-provided Black Hawk helicopters would ferry Colombian armies into the jungle about six kilometers away from a camp. The men would creep through the dense foliage, but the bivouacs were habitually empty by the time they reached. subsequent they learned that the FARC had an early-warning system: rings of security miles from the camps.
By 2006, the dismal record captivated the attention of the U.S. Air Force’s freshly reached operation head. The colonel was perplexed. Why had the third-largest recipient of U.S. infantry assistance [behind Egypt and Israel] made so little advancement?
“I’m thinking, ‘What are we killing the FARC with?’ ” the colonel, who spoke on the status of anonymity, said in an interview.
The colonel, a cargo plane professional, said he “started Googling bombs and fighters” looking for concepts. Eventually he landed on the Enhanced Paveway II, a somewhat 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 concept and composed a one-page paper on it for him to consign to Uribe. Santos took the idea to U.S. protecting against receptionist Donald Rumsfeld. In June 2006, Uribe travelled to wilderness at the White dwelling. He cited the latest murdering of al-Qaeda’s chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. An F-16 had sent two 500-pound intelligent bombs into his hideout and slain him. He pushed for the identical capability.
“Clearly this was very significant” to Uribe, said retired Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who had taken over as CIA controller just months earlier.
First, there was the matter of fitting the smart blasting devices onto a Colombian aircraft. Colombia did not have F-16s. Raytheon, the kit constructor, dispatched engineers to figure out how to climb on the gear on a plane. First they endeavoured climbing on it on a Brazilian-made Embraer A-29 Super Tucano, a turboprop aircraft designed for low-flying counterinsurgency missions. But affixing the twisted cord that ran from the bomb’s computer brain to the cockpit intended drilling too close to the fuel cell. rather than, they jerry-rigged it to an older Cessna A-37 Dragonfly, a lightweight strike airplane first developed by the U.S. exceptional procedures air force for Vietnam and later utilised in the Salvadoran municipal conflict.
Then the engineers and Colombian pilots checked the first of three PGMs in a remote airfield near the Venezuelan boundary. The goal was a 2-by-4 attached in the ground. The plane commenced the bomb from 20,000 feet. “It set down about a foot from it,” the colonel said. The outcomes were so good, he considered, “why waste two more kits?” The intelligent blasting devices were prepared for use.
But White House solicitors, along with their colleagues from the CIA and the departments of fairness, protecting against and State, had their own questions to work through. It was one thing to use a PGM to beat an foe on the battlefield — the U.S. Air Force had been doing that for years. It was another to use it to target an one-by-one 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 us doing it?” said one lawyer engaged.
The White House’s Office of lawful Counsel and others eventually determined that the same lawful analysis they had applied to al-Qaeda could be applied to the FARC. murdering a FARC leader would not be an assassination because the association impersonated an ongoing risk to Colombia. Also, no one of the FARC commanders could be expected to submit.
And, as a drug-trafficking organization, the FARC’s rank as a threat to U.S. nationwide security had been resolved years previous with Reagan’s counternarcotics finding. At the time, the crack cocaine epidemic was at its size, and the government decided that organizations that conveyed pharmaceuticals to America’s streets were a risk to nationwide security.
There was another anxiety. Some senior officials concerned that Colombian forces might use the PGMs to kill their seen political foes. “The anxieties were huge given their human privileges problems,” said a previous older military officer.
To assure themselves that the Colombians would not misuse the bombs, U.S. agents came up with a innovative solution. The CIA would sustain control over the encryption key injected into the bomb, which unscrambled communications with GPS satellites so they can be read by the blasting device’s computers. The blasting device could not hit its goal without the key. The Colombians would have to inquire for acceptance for some targets, and if they misused the blasting devices, the CIA could deny GPS greeting for future use.
“We liked a sign-off,” said one older official engaged in the deliberations.
To cut through the primary red strip, the first 20 smart blasting device kits — without the encryption keys — came through the CIA. The account was less than $1 million. After that, Colombia was allowed to buy them through the Foreign infantry Sales program.
A first hit
Tomas Medina Caracas, also renowned as Negro Acacio, the FARC’s chief pharmaceutical trafficker and commander of its 16th Front, was the first man the U.S. Embassy Intelligence Fusion Cell lined up up for a PGM hit.
At about 4:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, 2007, pilots wearing evening vision goggles unleashed several Enhanced Paveway II smart bombs into his bivouac in to the east Colombia as agents in both capitals remained. armies retrieved only a leg. It appeared by its dark complexion to pertains to Acacio, one of the couple of black FARC managers. DNA checks verified his death.
“There was a large deal of excitement,” recalled William Scoggins, counternarcotics program supervisor at the U.S. military’s south order. “We didn’t know the impact it would have, but we considered this was a game changer.”
Six weeks subsequent, smart blasting devices slain Gustavo Rueda Díaz, alias Martin Caballero, leader of the 37th Front, while he was conversing on his cellphone. Acacio’s and Caballero’s deaths caused the 16th and 37th fronts to collapse. They also triggered mass desertions, according to a secret State Department cable antiquated stride 6, 2008, and issued by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks in 2010. This was just the starting of the FARC’s disintegration.
To conceal the use of the PGMs from public breakthrough, and to double-check greatest damage to a FARC’s leaders’ camp, the air force and U.S. advisers evolved new strike tactics. In a usual operation, some A-37 Dragonflys soaring at 20,000 feet conveyed intelligent bombs. As shortly as the planes came inside a three-mile “basket” of the goal, a bomb’s GPS programs would mechanically turn on.
The Dragonflys were pursued by some A-29 Super Tucanos, soaring at a much smaller altitude. They would drop a sequence of dumb blasting devices in a pattern nearby. Their blast force would murder any person close in and furthermore make flat the dense jungle and obscure the use of the smart bombs.
Then, low-flying, Vietnam-era AC-47 gunships, nicknamed Puff the Magic Dragon, would strafe the area with climbed on machine cannons, “shooting the hurt trying to go for cover,” according to one of some infantry agents who described the same scenario.
Only then would Colombian garound forces reach to around up prisoners, assembling the dead, as well as cellphones, computers and hard drives. The CIA furthermore spent three years teaching Colombian close air support groups on utilising lasers to clandestinely guide pilots and laser-guided smart blasting devices to their goals.
Most every operation relied very strongly on NSA pointer intercepts, which fed understanding to troops on the ground or pilots before and throughout an operation. “Intercepts . . . were a game changer,” said Scoggins, of U.S. south order.
The round-the-clock environment of the NSA’s work was apprehended in a mystery State Department twisted cord issued by WikiLeaks. In the spring of 2009, the goal was pharmaceutical trafficker Daniel Rendon Herrera, renowned as Don Mario, then Colombia’s most liked man and to blame for 3,000 assassinations over an 18-month period.
“For seven days, utilising pointer and human intelligence,” NSA assets “worked day and evening” to reposition 250 U.S.-trained and equipped airborne commandos beside Herrera as he tried to escape, according to an April 2009 twisted cord and a older government official who verified the NSA’s function in the mission.
The CIA also trained Colombian interrogators to more effectively question thousands of FARC deserters, without the use of the “enhanced interrogation” methods approved for use on al-Qaeda and subsequent repudiated by assembly as abusive. The bureau also conceived databases to hold pathway of the debriefings so they could be searched and cross-referenced to build a more complete image of the organization.
The Colombian government paid deserters and permitted them to reintegrate into municipal society. Some, in turn, offered precious data about the FARC’s chain of order, benchmark journey paths, bivouacs, provide lines, pharmaceutical and cash sources. They assisted make sense of the NSA’s voice intercepts, which often used cipher phrases. Deserters furthermore occasionally were used to infiltrate FARC bivouacs to vegetation hearing apparatus or beacons that emitted a GPS coordinate for intelligent blasting devices.
“We learned from the CIA,” a peak Colombian national security official said of the debriefing program. “Before, we didn’t pay much attention to details.”
Ecuador and the
not-forgotten hostages
In February 2008, the U.S.-Colombian team got its first viewing of the three U.S. hostages. Having remained five years, the answer was swift at U.S. Special Operations order head office in Tampa, which started dispatching JSOC commandos down, said a senior U.S. authorized who was in Colombia when they reached.
The JSOC group was going by a Navy close Team Six commander. little flats set up three operational localities beside the hostages and conducted long-range reconnaissance, the senior authorized said. The NSA bigger its monitoring. All eyes were on the isolated jungle position. But as primary groundworks were progressing, operations were heating system up in another place.
Just over the Putumayo River, one mile inside Ecuador, U.S. intelligence and a Colombian informant verified the hideout of Luis Edgar Devia Silva, also known as Raul Reyes and advised to be the No. 2 in the seven-member FARC secretariat.
It was an awkward breakthrough for Colombia and the joined States. To conduct an airstrike intended a Colombian pilot flying a Colombian plane would strike the camp utilising a U.S.-made blasting device with a CIA-controlled brain.
The Air Force colonel had a succinct message for the Colombian air operations commander in charge of the operation. “I said, ‘Look man, we all know where this guy is. Just don’t f--- it up.’ ”
U.S. nationwide security solicitors viewed the operation as an proceed of self-defense. In the awaken of 9/11, they had arrive up with a new understanding of the permissible use of force against non-state actors like al-Qaeda and the FARC. It went like this: If a terrorist group functioned from a homeland that was unable or unwilling to halt it, then the homeland under strike — in this case, Colombia — had the right to fight back itself with force, even if that meant crossing into another sovereign homeland.
This was the lawful justification for CIA drone strikes and other lethal operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and, much subsequent, for the raid into Pakistan that slain Osama receptacle Laden.
So minutes after midnight on stride 1, three A-37 Dragonflys took off from Colombia, pursued by five Super Tucanos. The smart bombs’ guidance system turned on once the planes come to inside three miles of Reyes’s position.
As instructed, the Colombian pilots resided in Colombian airspace. The blasting devices landed as programmed, obliterating the bivouac and killing Reyes, who, according to Colombian report reports, was slumbering in pajamas.
Colombian forces hurried across the border into Ecuador to retrieve Reyes’s continues and furthermore scooped up a large treasure trove of computer equipment that would turn out to be the most valuable FARC understanding find ever.
The bombing set off a serious diplomatic urgent situation. Venezuelan foremost Hugo Chávez called Colombia “a terrorist state” and moved armies to the boundary, as did Ecuador. Nicaragua smashed off relations. Uribe, under force, apologized to Ecuador.
The apology, while soothing connections in Latin America, angered the little circle of U.S. agents who knew the back story, one of them said. “I recall thinking, ‘I can’t believe they’re saying this,’ ” he said. “For them to be giving up an important lawful place was crazy.”
But the flap did not impairment the deep binds between U.S. and Colombian forces or deter the operation to release the hostages. In fact, the number of JSOC armies proceeded to mount to more than 1,000, said the older official then in Colombia. Officials considered for sure they would be dotted, but they never were. A U.S.-Colombian infantry exercise provided adequate cover when the worldwide Committee of the Red traverse showed up at isolated bases and staggered upon some burly Americans, said two U.S. agents.
After six weeks of waiting to find the hostages, most of the JSOC armies left the country for pushing missions in another place. One unit stayed. On July 2, 2008, it had the function of unused understudy in the spectacular and well-documented procedure Checkmate, in which Colombian forces pretending to be members of a humanitarian assembly deceived the FARC into presenting over the three U.S. hostages and 12 other ones without a shot fired. The JSOC team, and a fleet of U.S. aircraft, was positioned as design B, in case the Colombian operation went awry.
Santos continues
the smart-bomb conflict
As a signalal of believe, in early 2010 the U.S. government gave Colombia command over the GPS encryption key. There had been no accounts of misuse, misfires or collateral impairment from the intelligent bombs. The transfer was preceded by fast discussions over the directions of engagement for smart-bomb use. amidst the rules was that they would be commenced only against isolated jungle bivouacs.
President Santos, who was protecting against minister under Uribe, has substantially increased the stride of operations against the FARC. nearly three times as numerous FARC leaders — 47 vs. 16 — have been slain under Santos as under Uribe. meetings and analysis of government Web sites and press reporting show that at smallest 23 of the attacks under Santos were air procedures. Smart bombs were utilised only against the most important FARC leaders, Colombian officials said in response to inquiries. Gravity blasting devices were utilised in the other cases.
Colombia extends to improvement its air capabilities. In 2013, the air force upgraded its fleet of Israeli-made Kfir combatant jets, fitting them with Israeli-made Griffin laser-guided blasting devices. It has also fitted intelligent blasting devices onto some of its Super Tucanos.
Having decimated the peak FARC leadership and numerous of the front commanders, the infantry, with continued help from the CIA and other understanding bureaus, seems to be working its way through the mid-level ranks, encompassing wireless business commanders, the most battle-hardened and skilled remaining cadre. One-third of them have been slain or apprehended, according to Colombian agents.
The Santos administration has furthermore aimed at the financial and tools for fighting networks carrying the FARC. Some critics believe the government has been too concentrated on killing managers and not sufficient on using the armed detachment and policeman to occupy and command rebel territory.
murdering an individual has not ever been a measure of achievement in conflict, say counterinsurgency experts. It’s the disorder and dysfunction that murdering the leadership causes to the association that affairs. The air procedures against the FARC authority “has turned the association upside down,” said a older Pentagon authorized who has investigated the classified U.S. annals of Colombia’s war.
Some have escaped to Venezuela. One member of the secretariat hides out intermittently in Ecuador, according to older Colombia agents, shattering the significant psychological bond with ground armies and handicapping recruitment.
For worry of being established and targeted, units no longer doze in the same location two days in a strip, so camps should be sparser. “They know the government has so much information on them now, and real-time intelligence,” said German Espejo, security and protecting against counselor at the Colombian Embassy. concerned about spies in their midst, executions are widespread.
The FARC still mounts attacks — a car bombing of a rural police position Dec. 7 slain six police agents and two civilians — but it no longer travels in large assemblies, and it limits most flats to less than 20. No longer adept to mount large-scale assaults, the assembly has reverted to hit-and-run methods utilising snipers and explosives.
The weariness of 50 years of transient jungle life has taken its toll on the FARC negotiating group, too. Those who have dwelled in exile appear more willing to extend the battle than those who have been doing the battleing, said Colombian officials. The negotiations, Santos said in the interview, are the outcome of the successful military crusade, “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 throughout the vacation time of the year. The Santos management rebuffed the gesture and promised to extend its infantry campaign. subsequent that day, security forces slain a FARC guerrilla implicated in a bomb strike on a previous minister. Three days subsequent, the army slain another five.
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