Attempted Coup Stirs Doubts on Intelligence : Philippines: U.S. officials and others ignored or misinterpreted warnings of the coming uprising.

Officials of the Philippine military, the U.S. Embassy and several American allies are reevaluating their intelligence operations here after they ignored or misinterpreted direct and indirect warnings of the coup attempt that nearly overthrew President Corazon Aquino 10 days ago.

One Western diplomat said he had been told that the military uprising, which began just before midnight on Dec. 1, would start in the first 10 days of December.

“I just blew it off,” he conceded Monday. Asked if his embassy would now step up indirect contact with the rebels, he replied, “Of course.”

A second Western diplomat said the CIA and other foreign intelligence agencies had been approached by rebel contacts seeking indications of support before the latest coup attempt, the sixth against Aquino. He said no one had given such indications, but now the contacts are being reexamined.

He said the CIA had merely “monitored” the contacts and viewed them as “low key.” As a result, he said, “they didn’t have control over those contacts and assigned too low a priority to them.”

94 Killed

The Philippine government announced Monday that at least 94 died in the coup, which ended Dec. 9 with the surrender of rebel holdouts at Mactan air base in Cebu.

Since even Philippine officials acknowledge that still another coup attempt is likely, accurate intelligence is critical. But U.S. diplomats and intelligence operatives find themselves handicapped in their quest for it.

The White House has staunchly supported Aquino, virtually saving her government by scrambling F-4 Phantom jets to pin rebel planes on the ground on the first morning of the rebellion. Washington has long banned direct contacts between U.S. officials and likely coup ringleaders lest any contact be construed as undermining that support and lead to further complications in the talks to extend leases for Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, the two largest U.S. military facilities overseas.

Shortly after a coup attempt on Aug. 28, 1987, for example, the United States recalled its deputy Army attache from Manila after a local newspaper published a photograph of him talking to a rebel soldier during the revolt.

The intelligence failure has been exacerbated because the Philippine armed forces have repeatedly misread coup signals. In the latest attempt, for example, no special preparations were made to secure key military bases that were obvious targets despite a confession from a commando leader captured after he prematurely dynamited an air force communications facility outside Manila 24 hours before the full-scale attacks began.

As a result, renegade troops quickly captured the army and marine headquarters, the air force headquarters and a key air base, all in metropolitan Manila, as well as three regional air bases. In two cases, at Villamor Air Base and at Ft. Bonifacio, both in Manila, the rebels also captured groups of commanders meeting to discuss the coup warnings.

“Three hours they’d been talking, and they hadn’t done a damn thing,” the second diplomat said angrily. He said an air force commander captured at Villamor had looked up in surprise when the rebels entered the third-floor conference room, saying, “You’re not supposed to arrive for another 15 minutes.”

The diplomat called the Philippine intelligence failure “staggering.”

“A number of agencies were aware of plotting and scheming,” he said. “They just weren’t processing the information.”

Also, it is now apparent that neither Malacanang Palace nor Defense Secretary Fidel V. Ramos were involved in negotiations that led to the release last Thursday of hundreds of foreigners trapped in bitter fighting in the Makati financial district, or in talks that led to the rebel withdrawal from Makati the next day.

In the latter case, Philippine and Western officials said, Army Brig. Gen. Arturo Enrile, superintendent of the Philippine Military Academy, flew to Manila from Bagio in central Luzon and negotiated with rebel leaders on his own, only later informing Ramos and Aquino of the withdrawal agreement.

The agreement allowed the rebels to parade down Makati’s main avenue last Friday morning brandishing bazookas, grenade launchers and other weapons and defiantly boasting that they had not surrendered.

Many of those who withdrew subsequently disappeared, including army Maj. Abraham Puruggunan, who had appeared as a rebel spokesman moments before on national television. Government officials said that only about 15 key officers, of 34 identified as coup ringleaders, have been captured.

Estimating the total rebel force at about 3,000, Ramos told reporters at a news conference Monday that 1,485 renegade soldiers, including 128 officers and 73 trainees, were “under detention or under control,” but he repeatedly refused to say if any were behind bars.

He said most of the enlisted men already have been sent to regional units far from Manila in the central and southern Philippines, “where they are in the middle of much bigger forces loyal to the government.”

Ramos, who has defended Aquino through all six coup attempts, offered only a mild defense of the Philippine intelligence and military operations. One problem, he indicated, was that coup rumors had circulated for months, and officials were never sure which ones were real.

“Even if they told us, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ we can’t be sure,” Ramos said of the rebels.

One of the civilians who had voiced support for the rebels, Juan Ponce Enrile, a former defense minister for Aquino and now an opposition leader in the Senate, attacked Aquino’s use of U.S. warplanes as “intervention in the internal affairs of the Philippines” and predicted that it would cause a political backlash against extending the U.S. base leases.

“The Americans will certainly demand their pound of flesh from her,” he said. Exploratory talks to consider extending the leases, now set to expire in September, 1991, were originally planned for this month but have been pushed back to early next year, government officials said.

But Ramos said the talks would be “affected in a positive way” by the U.S. assistance during the coup. “Nobody went out of bounds,” he said.

Reading memoranda that he said had been written shortly after the U.S. planes were called, he said he had indicated to U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Platt in a series of phone calls that the air assistance should be “non-lethal.”

But a diplomat confirmed that the Phantoms were fully armed with air-to-surface and air-to-air missiles and were prepared to use them. “They had orders to shoot if necessary,” he said.

And an Aquino aide who heard Aquino’s calls to Ramos and Platt said she never spelled out what Washington should do, leaving it deliberately vague with a request for “air support.”