U.S. Agency Heeded Warnings of a Coup : Philippines: Americans shifted a conference away from Manila before the rebellion. Officials are asking why others did not take similar measures.

Officials of the U.S. Agency for International Development took warnings of an attempted coup against President Corazon Aquino so seriously that they quietly banned travel to the Philippines two weeks before the rebellion erupted Dec. 1, derailing a long-planned 12-nation conference on narcotics control that would have taken place at the height of the fighting.

According to documents obtained by The Times, AID officials in Washington issued an order prohibiting AID employees, consultants and sponsored students from traveling to the Philippines beginning Nov. 13, the day after Aquino returned to Manila from a visit to the United States and Canada.

The order, apparently the first time AID has prohibited visits here, raises questions about why no other U.S. agency or the Philippine military took steps to prepare for the uprising, the sixth and most serious against the Aquino government. In interviews, Philippine officials said the decision adds to growing evidence that key warnings were ignored or not shared.

The Philippine military was caught off guard when about 3,000 rebellious soldiers attacked and quickly secured key military bases in Manila. The failure, or sabotage, of intelligence has led several embassies, including the United States’, to re-evaluate their intelligence operations and step up indirect contacts with the rebels.

Several embassies, including West Germany’s and New Zealand’s, have started preparing contingency plans to evacuate their citizens in the event of another attempted coup.

Scuttled Workshop

The AID ban on travel effectively scuttled an AID-funded drug-prevention workshop planned since 1987 and scheduled for Nov. 27 to Dec. 2 at the University of the Philippines. Officials from 11 other countries, including Thailand, Laos and Afghanistan, which account for more than 80% of the heroin sold in the United States, had accepted invitations.

A second AID-funded conference on public health, scheduled for Dec. 11 at the University of the Philippines, was also canceled.

The drug conference was shifted to Bangkok, Thailand, at an additional cost to the United States of several thousand dollars. Philippine narcotics officials boycotted the Bangkok meeting and have recommended to Aquino that her government lodge a formal protest with Washington.

“We were caught flat-footed with our pants down at the last-minute cancellation,” Manuel M. Supnet, executive director of the Philippine Dangerous Drugs Board, complained.

The travel ban not only rankled Philippine officials but has raised suspicions as well. “As early as that date, the U.S. knew something was going to happen,” a Philippine official said.

AID officials in Manila said the travel ban was brought on not by secret information but by widespread, unconfirmed reports of plotting, including local newspaper accounts. One official said other U.S. agencies, including the embassy in Manila, had the same information but that “other agencies didn’t come to that conclusion.”

“If anything,” he said, “it was a delayed reaction to the Aquino visit to the U.S.”

He said that any suspicion that AID, an arm of the U.S. State Department, knew more than other agencies is “incredibly fanciful.”

“It was embarrassing to have these conferences canceled,” he added. “The (U.S.) ambassador was not pleased.”

Caused Hard Feelings

Another AID official said the cancellation had caused “hard feelings and irritation.” He agreed that AID officials in Washington had no special warnings, and added, “We don’t think Washington is that smart.”

David Andresen, a U.S. Embassy spokesman, said Thursday that neither Ambassador Nicholas Platt nor the AID mission here, the third-largest in the world, had recommended or agreed with the travel ban.

“It sort of took us by surprise,” Andresen said. “What basis they had, I really don’t know.”

A top Aquino aide in the presidential palace also sought to minimize the significance of the AID decision.

“I’m sure the Americans were hearing the same information we were and discarding it the same way we were,” he said. He noted that other U.S. agencies, including the CIA, apparently ignored the coup warnings. The CIA knew, he said, “but they didn’t give it much credence.”

A senior U.S. Embassy official, in a briefing earlier this week, defended the embassy’s apparent inaction. He said the embassy had recorded 700 coup warnings in 1988 and 900 this year.

Philippine officials first heard of the AID travel ban on Nov. 15, when Joel M. Jutkowitz, a Virginia-based subcontractor running the drug workshop for AID, suddenly insisted in a letter transmitted by facsimile that the Nov. 27 conference be moved to Bangkok, citing “reasons beyond our control.”

Supnet said he spoke with Jutkowitz by telephone on Nov. 16, the day after the letter arrived, and that Jutkowitz was vague about the reason behind the decision. “He told me they received instructions from the U.S. Department of State for a total embargo on travel by U.S. AID (to the Philippines),” Supnet said. “At that time, no one (here) expected there would be a coup.”

According to the documents, Jutkowitz, who is the director of the Asia/Near East Regional Narcotics Education Program of Development Associates Inc., of Arlington, Va., apologized to Philippine officials for the decision to move the conference.

Expressing his “profound regret,” Jutkowitz offered to send an unlimited number of Philippine officials to Bangkok, with all expenses paid by the U.S. government.

Describing it as “a junket to Bangkok,” an angry Supnet said that his Dangerous Drugs Board decided at an emergency meeting to boycott the meeting.