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.
