Leland Aide Criticizes Pentagon Search for Texas Congressman

Aides of Mickey Leland today criticized the Pentagon’s search for the Texas congressman and 13 others missing in Ethiopia since Monday, calling the effort slow and poorly planned and urging President Bush to get involved.

“It has been five days, and we appear to be no closer now than we were when we started,” Alma Newsom, Leland’s press secretary, told reporters.

Bush, asked at a White House picture-taking session about Newsom’s comments, said he understood the anxiety felt by Leland’s associates. “A lot is being done” to find him, Bush said.

Bush’s Interest Noted

State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III have taken a personal interest in Leland’s case

“The President and the secretary of state deeply and sincerely empathize with the frustration, with the tension, with the situation (Newsom is) having to deal with,” Tutwiler said at a briefing.

“The President has said on the record that he is personally very, very interested not only in the congressman but in the other eight Americans” aboard the missing plane, Tutwiler said.

Newsom said the staff is worried that because of the time that has elapsed, Leland and his party would try to walk to safety, making the search more difficult.

Meanwhile, a weather satellite picked up a signal that may be a distress call from the congressman’s plan, but a second signal proved to be a false alarm.

‘Confirmed Contact’

“We had a confirmed contact, but whether that was indeed from the congressman’s plane we can’t say,” said Jack Koeppen, a weather satellite official.

He said a sound picked up on a second pass over Ethiopia turned out to be radio interference, a third pass heard nothing and the next good passes will not come until Saturday morning and after Saturday midnight Washington time.

Leland, a 44-year-old Democrat who chairs the House Select Committee on Hunger, and 13 other people have been missing since Monday when their plane failed to arrive at a refugee camp near the Ethiopia-Sudan border on a flight from Addis Ababa.