Pubdate: Mon, 26 Aug 2002
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2002 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Vernon Loeb, Washington Post Staff Writer

BEHIND THE PERUVIAN SHOOTDOWN

Nearly an hour before a Peruvian Air Force A-37 fighter jet shot down a 
single engine float plane carrying American missionaries from the 
Association of Baptists for World Evangelism in April 2001, a CIA contract 
pilot flying a spotter aircraft said he was "a little nervous" about the 
Peruvians' assumption that drug traffickers were flying the plane.

The CIA man's hesitation is documented in a Senate Select Committee on 
Intelligence report that was recently made available on the committee's Web 
site. The chronology in the report lays bare a fatal chain of mistakes that 
took the lives of two Americans.

Several minutes later, the CIA pilot told a Peruvian "host nation rider" 
aboard his Cessna Citation that the float plane, capable of landing on 
water, might not be a bad guy at all and then discussed with his co-pilot 
how the plane's flight path did not match that of a drug plane.

Half an hour later-about 10 minutes before the shoot down-the Peruvian 
fighter jet radioed the "host nation rider" with the tail number of the 
float plane. The "host nation rider" had with him a list of all registered 
tail numbers in Peru. It showed that OB-1408 was registered to the 
Association of Baptists for world Evangelism. But in his rush to trigger 
the fighter attack, he never checked the list.

The CIA pilot, increasingly alarmed, radioed back to a U.S. official on the 
ground whose job it was to monitor the joint U.S.-Peruvian drug 
interdiction program, in which only the Peruvians were authorized to shoot 
down suspected drug traffickers.

"I understand this is not our call, but this guy is at 4,500 feet, he is 
not taking evasive action," the pilot said. "I recommend we follow him. I 
do not recommend phase three [a shoot down] at this time."

Finally, a minute and a half before the shoot down, the CIA pilot tried one 
last time to stop the attack, telling the "host nation rider" that he had 
just heard the pilot of the float plane talking to air traffic controllers 
at the airport in Iquitos, Peru. But by the time the "host nation rider" 
finally instructed the fighter jet to back off, the fatal shots had been 
fired, killing missionary Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter, Charity.

Bowers' husband, Jim, and her son, Cory, survived the attack after pilot 
Kevin Donaldson managed to land the stricken plane on the Amazon River 80 
miles south of Iquitos despite bullet wounds that shattered two bones in 
his leg.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that, while CIA, 
State Department and National Security Council officials "failed to 
adequately monitor the operation of this risky program," the CIA pilots had 
repeatedly tried to stop the shoot down and "expressed strong reservations 
to their own chain of command" once the Peruvians initiated military action.

"Recognition by any of the Peruvian officials of Mr. Donaldson's flight 
profile and route alone would have precluded the precipitous rush to 
authorize use of lethal force," the committee's report states. "Instead, 
the Peruvian host nation rider and his chain-of-command never questioned 
their initial presumption that Mr. Donaldson's plan was a narcotics 
trafficker."

Frontrunners for Intelligence Post

While Rich Haver, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's special assistant 
for intelligence, is being mentioned as the frontrunner to become 
undersecretary of defense for intelligence if the new post is approved by 
Congress, one well-informed government source predicts the job will go to 
Rumsfeld aide Steve Cambone.

Cambone has his boss's trust. The former director of research for the 
Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University 
in Washington, he served as staff director on two blue- ribbon commissions 
Rumsfeld chaired in the 1990s (on missile proliferation and space). When 
Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon last year for a second stint as defense 
secretary, he brought Cambone with him. As principle deputy undersecretary 
of defense for policy, Cambone was put in charge of managing military 
"transformation," Rumsfeld's signature initiative for creating a 21st 
century fighting force.

A little over a month ago, Rumsfeld made Cambone director for Program 
Analysis and Evaluation (PA&E), a key Pentagon post. Cambone said he would 
use it to make Rumsfeld's transformation agenda happen. But the government 
source, plugged into the Bush administration at a high level, said Cambone 
took the PA&E job knowing it might only be a short-term assignment if the 
undersecretary of defense for intelligence job were created.

Cambone himself took legislative language creating the post to the Senate 
on Rumsfeld's behalf and helped convince senators to make it part of the 
fiscal 2003 defense authorization bill. A House-Senate conference committee 
could make the post a reality later this year.

Another Pentagon source said that he thought the job would go to Haver or 
someone else, given Cambone's important new responsibilities as PA&E director.

"Steve is in a pretty pivotal position as it is and Rich is undeniably the 
big thinker when it comes to intelligence," the source said. "He certainly 
has the background for the job, but the issue that some raise is his 
interest and talent [in] managing."

Whoever gets the job will have enormous responsibility and clout overseeing 
and coordinating the Pentagon's 85 percent share of the nation's $35 
billion intelligence budget. When the directors of the National Security 
Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Imagery and Mapping Agency 
and Defense Intelligence Agency now have a problem, they look for answers 
in numerous Pentagon offices, all of which lead eventually to Rumsfeld's. 
Soon, they could be reporting to one very influential new official, 
particularly if that new official is Steve Cambone.

Genetic Imagery Exploitation

With the intelligence community girding for congressional hearings into 
failures related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it's worth remembering 
that the federal government's spy apparatus occasionally works to perfection.

Consider the development of Genetic Imagery Exploitation software, or 
Genie, now being used in the global war on terrorism by government imagery 
analysts to find concealed terrorist camps and hidden manufacturing sites 
for biological and chemical weapons.

Genie is the stuff of science fiction-computer software that "mimics 
evolution" by mutating through a computerized process of survival of the 
fittest. Genie was developed by scientists at Los Alamos National 
Laboratory in New Mexico, which exists to produce just this kind of cutting 
edge technology for government use.

Then the National Reconnaissance Office, the supersecret spy satellite 
agency headquartered in Chantilly, Va., stepped in and tapped a three- 
year-old venture capital fund called the Director's Innovation Initiative 
to finance adaptation of the technology for use in combing through vast 
quantities of spy satellite imagery.

And now Genie resides in the desktop computers of imagery analysts at the 
National Imagery and Mapping Agency. They play the part of god in the 
process of computer evolution by drawing on their screens with colored 
marking pens.

Once they find a feature they are looking for-an airfield, for 
example--they circle it in green and send their computers off on a search. 
Genie starts the process using a set menu of existing search formulas and 
provides examples of what they find. As the analysts identify the best 
examples, Genie's formulas "evolve" into those best able to identify what 
the analysts are searching for.

In the air field example, Genie would focus on more specific types of 
runways, say those with runways that are more than 10,000 feet, or on 
hangars that are within 500 feet of those runways, or on buildings emitting 
certain types of smoke plumes.

"Remote sensing offers a lot of information, but it overwhelms the end 
user," one NRO official said in a recent interview. Genie solves this 
problem by enabling analysts to scan thousands of miles of terrain and have 
computers find precisely what they are looking for.

In one recent test, the official said, NRO analysts used Genie to train a 
computer to find not just any golf courses, but PGA-caliber golf courses, 
throughout the United States. The task, the official added, took about an hour.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens