CIA Misidentified Plane Downed in Peru as Possible Drug Runner

A CIA crew flying a narcotics surveillance mission over the Amazon misidentified a small aircraft carrying a family of U.S. missionaries as a possible drug smuggling operation, prompting the Peruvian air force to shoot down the plane, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Sunday.

But the official insisted that the CIA-hired pilot, co-pilot and systems analyst repeatedly tried to convince a Peruvian air force officer aboard their jet that he was acting too quickly in ordering an attack on the single-engine floatplane.

The three Americans then watched from a mile away as a two-seater Peruvian fighter jet fired machine-gun rounds into the unarmed Cessna and forced it down onto a river. A Baptist missionary and her infant daughter were killed. Peruvians in a dugout canoe rescued the dead woman’s husband and son and the injured pilot.

Details of the incident were described by U.S. authorities Sunday as the three survivors returned to the United States and President Bush announced that similar surveillance flights were being canceled until the cause of the accident could be determined.

The three Americans on the surveillance mission were not full-time CIA staffers but work under contract for the agency, according to the senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity as a matter of government policy. Many covert CIA operations hire pilots and other operatives through contracts or front companies. U.S. officials declined to identify the three.

The incident, which occurred at midday Friday in northern Peru, was a stark reminder of the series of targeting errors by the CIA that led a U.S. bomber to mistakenly strike the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 Kosovo conflict in Yugoslavia.

In this case, the senior intelligence official insisted that the CIA had done nothing wrong because the crew had repeatedly warned that the plane’s identity was in doubt.

“Everybody regrets the loss of life, but from what I’ve seen, our people acted professionally and appropriately,” the official said.

Bush, speaking to reporters at the conclusion of the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, said the United States was still trying to determine what caused the deadly mistake.

“We’ve suspended such flights until we get to the bottom of the situation, fully understand all the facts, to understand what went wrong in this terrible tragedy,” he said.

Bush said U.S. personnel have been assisting Latin American allies by tracking and identifying aircraft that could be ferrying cocaine and other narcotics and by passing information on to local military authorities.

Congress passed a law in 1994 that allows the CIA and other U.S. government employees to assist foreign nations in the interdiction of aircraft when there is “reasonable suspicion” that the plane is primarily engaged in illicit drug trafficking.

The law limits U.S. assistance to those countries with “appropriate procedures . . . to protect against innocent loss of life” and that “at a minimum include effective means to identify and warn an aircraft” before an attack is launched.

Peru was approved for such assistance on Dec. 8, 1994. Since then, the Peruvians have shot, forced down or strafed more than 30 drug-running aircraft and seized more than a dozen on the ground, according to U.S. officials. None of these incidents were known to involve innocent civilians, until now.

Several U.S. agencies are involved in the program, including the State Department, the CIA, the Defense Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

In this case, the CIA crew members were aboard a small two-engine surveillance jet on patrol at 9:43 a.m. Friday when they notified their base--which U.S. officials refused to identify--that their sophisticated radar was tracking a small aircraft that had crossed three or four miles into Brazilian territory.

The Americans radioed a second report 12 minutes later, as the unidentified aircraft reentered Peruvian airspace. At that point, following standard procedures, the Americans requested that the Peruvian air force officer in charge at an air base at Pucallpa determine whether the plane was on an approved flight plan.

The U.S. intelligence official said the officer could not find an approved flight plan for a plane in the border area, which is covered by airspace known as the Air Defense Identification Zone.

Under procedures approved by the commanding general of the Peruvian Air Force 6th Territorial Air Region, the Peruvian air force then launched a fighter jet to visually identify the aircraft, verify its registry, attempt to establish radio contact and, if necessary, force it to land or shoot it down.

The aircraft was quickly identified as a single-engine, high-wing floatplane.

The Peruvian lieutenant colonel aboard the U.S. plane then tried to communicate in Spanish with the aircraft over three separate radio frequencies but heard no response. The Americans did not try to communicate in English.

“Our guys would never try to communicate with the suspect aircraft,” said the U.S. intelligence official. “In any case, we’re told the pilot was fluent in Spanish. But we didn’t hear anything. If he was transmitting, we weren’t hearing it in English or Spanish.”

The Peruvian officer aboard the U.S. plane had flown numerous similar flights over the last nine months or so. He told the pilot of the Peruvian fighter, an aging A-37, to go to “Phase 2” and fire warning shots at the floatplane.

It was unclear Sunday whether the pilot actually fired a warning with tracer rounds or, if they were fired, whether the pilot or passengers saw them. The U.S. intelligence official said the CIA crew did not see any warning shots fired.

The Peruvian officer then quickly requested permission from his commander on the ground to order the fighter to move to “Phase 3”--to fire his weapons with the goal of disabling the Cessna. If that failed, the plane could be shot down.

The U.S. intelligence official said the CIA crew “attempted repeatedly to slow the intercept process” and “voiced objections” and expressed “serious concerns” when the fighter plane was authorized to fire.

The CIA crew members were “not in the chain of command,” the official said. “They just kept questioning him. They kept saying: ‘Are you sure? It’s not clear to us.’ ”

The U.S. crew then asked the Peruvian fighter pilot to note the suspect plane’s tail number and to fly alongside it to ensure that the other pilot saw him. For reasons still unclear Sunday, the tail number was not radioed back to the Peruvian officer in Pucallpa.

But at 10:43 a.m., an hour after the plane was spotted by the CIA crew, Peruvian military authorities on the ground authorized the shoot-down..

The U.S. official said “well-established procedures . . . may not have been fully or properly adhered to” by Peruvian air force authorities.

An official at the destination airport in Iquitos said the missionaries’ plane did not have a flight plan when it took off Friday morning from Islandia near the Brazilian border, the Associated Press reported. But the pilot relayed the necessary information when he radioed the control tower in Iquitos, airport chief Mario Justo was quoted as saying.

During the brief radio conversation, the missionary pilot said a military plane was nearby, according to the AP report. “He added in his report that there had been a military plane, but that he did not know what it wanted,” Justo said.

In Pennsylvania, an official with the Assn. of Baptists for World Evangelism said it appeared that the accident occurred because the missionary plane was using a civilian radio frequency to communicate with the Iquitos airport, while the Peruvian air force personnel were using a military frequency.

Neither side could hear the other’s transmissions, said Hank Scheltema, the Baptist association’s aviation director, according to a Reuters report.

The missionary pilot “was saying to the tower: ‘They’re going to kill us! They’re killing us! They’re killing us! And he tried to communicate [with the Peruvian plane], but they were on different frequencies,” Scheltema said.

The attack killed Veronica Bowers, 35, a missionary with the Baptist group, and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity.

Veronica Bowers’ husband, Jim, 37, and their son, Cory, 6, were aboard the plane but escaped injury. They arrived in Raleigh, N.C., Sunday to stay with relatives.

The Baptist group said the plane’s pilot, Kevin Donaldson, suffered gunshot wounds to both legs and was admitted to the Reading Hospital and Medical Center in West Reading, Pa. He was undergoing surgery late Sunday.

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Times staff writers Janet Hook in Washington and Robin Wright in Quebec City contributed to this report.