Law of the jungle, p.1
Law of the Jungle, page 1
Law of the Jungle
The Hunt for Colombian Guerrillas, American Hostages, and Buried Treasure
John Otis
For Alejandra, Martín, and Lawrence of Colombia
The jungle has swallowed them.
—JOSÉ EUSTASIO RIVERA, The Vortex
Contents
Epigraph
Chapter 1 Air America
Chapter 2 El Gordo
Chapter 3 Into the Wild
Chapter 4 The Great Divide
Chapter 5 God’s Little Gift
Chapter 6 Blade Creep
Chapter 7 Three Gringos
Chapter 8 The Lion’s Den
Chapter 9 Bonfires
Chapter 10 Community Chest
Chapter 11 The Messenger
Chapter 12 Land of Oz
Chapter 13 Miracle Fishing
Chapter 14 The Round-up
Chapter 15 The Eighth Plague of Valledupar
Photographic Insert
Chapter 16 Joan of Arc
Chapter 17 The Dirty Thirty
Chapter 18 Fall Guys
Chapter 19 The One Who Got Away
Chapter 20 Sideshow Hugo
Chapter 21 The Masked Avenger
Chapter 22 Neck and Neck
Chapter 23 Eyes On
Chapter 24 The Unthinkable
Chapter 25 Checkmate
Chapter 26 Passports
Epilogue Living to Tell the Tale
Acknowledgments
Notes
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER 1
AIR AMERICA
AS IF ANNOUNCING NOTHING MORE MOMENTOUS than a patch of turbulence, Tommy Janis calmly confirmed the worst. The three-blade prop had spun to a halt. The cataclysmic scenario, the one Janis and the other three American military contractors aboard the aircraft had shrugged off for so long, was now unfolding over Colombia’s imposing Andes Mountains. Their single-engine Cessna 208 Grand Caravan, packed to the gunnels with radios, high-tech cameras, and automatic rifles, was going down.
All the crew members could do was buckle their shoulder harnesses and put their faith in Janis, a first-class flyboy with an uncanny knack for survival. A thirty-two-year army veteran who served in the Vietnam War and was awarded a Bronze Star, Janis viewed his job as another way to be a soldier, another way to make a difference. He had earned his stripes in Colombia—and the moniker “ace of the base”—two years earlier when the engine of his Cessna surveillance plane quit over the Caribbean Sea. He simply pointed the plane toward the coastal city of Santa Marta, twenty-five miles away, and began gliding.
“Tommy made it look easy,” said Douglas Cockes, a former U.S. Customs Service pilot and private contractor who worked with Janis in Colombia. “If an engine quits right next to an airport, probably half of all pilots would still miss the runway. But Tommy was able to get in there from twenty-some miles out. He made a perfect landing, rolled to the end of the taxiway, then jumped out and lit a cigar.”
This time, Janis had two options. He could try to keep the Cessna aloft long enough to clear the mountain ridge and reach their original destination, a nearby Colombian military base. Or if that didn’t work, he would have to put her down somewhere in the wilds of southern Caquetá state.
And that would not be good.
Like much of Colombia’s Deep South, Caquetá was enemy territory. Home to cattle ranches, cowboys, and twisting, muddy rivers that drain into the Amazon, the region was better known for all the things that ail Colombia. Glossy green coca bushes, the raw material for cocaine, dotted the flatter parts of the landscape. The Colombian government didn’t have enough troops in Caquetá to provide much security, which made it possible for Marxist rebels to extort businessmen, kidnap farmers, and manage the local drug trade. But if the rebels’ kingdom was vast, their subjects were few. Only a handful of Colombians set foot in these parts and for good reason: Caquetá was Colombia’s Sunni Triangle.
The Americans aboard the Cessna were there to help change this dynamic. Though not active-duty military, they were, in effect, the tip of the U.S. spear in the long-running war on South American drugs. They worked for California Microwave Systems, a little-known subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, the Maryland-based aerospace giant which was a major client of the U.S. Defense Department. In the days before the Pentagon began contracting out some of its military and intelligence chores, their work might have been handled by the CIA.
Their missions were classified. As high-tech eyes in the sky, the Americans were supposed to find and photograph cocaine laboratories. The guerrillas were deeply involved in the cocaine trade, thus the data collected aboard the Cessna could also be used for counterinsurgency operations. The contractors were always on the lookout for clandestine airstrips and makeshift river ports used to evacuate bricks of cocaine. From the air, the crew could also spot fifty-five-gallon drums, chemical stains on the jungle floor, and maceration pits where coca leaves were mixed with uric acid and other toxic ingredients to make the white powder. They also had forward-looking infrared. Known as a FLIR, the pod that protruded from one side of the plane could identify heat given off by people, engines, even the microwave ovens drug makers used to dry cocaine. Whenever antidrug agents found a microwave oven deep in the Colombian rain forest, they could be pretty sure the cook wasn’t zapping popcorn.
The Americans recorded what they saw on video and digital cameras and fed the data to the fortresslike U.S. embassy in Bogotá. The information was then relayed to Colombian ground forces that would move in to torch the labs and track the rebels. Then, the whole chain of events started again, with peasant farmers planting more coca, Jungle alchemists building more labs, and gung ho drug warriors launching more raids. This self-perpetuating game had been going on for years due, in part, to the overwhelming U.S. focus on cutting off the narcotics supply at its source rather than reducing demand and treating drug addicts at home.
Now Washington was wading deeper into the Colombian war.
These surveillance missions were part of a multibillion-dollar program, known as Plan Colombia, that had made the Andean nation the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid outside the Middle East and Afghanistan. Much of the $700 million in annual assistance was funneled into programs to eradicate coca fields, blow up cocaine factories, and intercept drug-laden aircraft. Unfortunately, the effort had failed to roll back narco-acreage in any substantial way or to curb the flow of cocaine into the United States. Attacking illegal drugs was like plowing the sea. But Plan Colombia did produce in the early days hundreds of high-risk, high-paying jobs for American contractors.
THE MEN IN THE CESSNA THAT sunny Thursday morning, February 13, 2003, believed they were fighting the good fight. But truth be told, they were mostly in it for the money. Next to Janis in the right seat was copilot Thomas Howes. A quiet, gray-haired Yankee from Cape Cod, Howes nonetheless wielded a sly sense of humor. One of his colleagues compared him to a master doctor “who could give you the needle so expertly that you wouldn’t know you’d been jabbed.” After a stint flying DC-9 commuter jets out of New York’s La Guardia Airport, Tom had gravitated south where he’d gotten hooked on the warm weather, good food, and pretty girls of Latin America. At one point while hanging out in Lima, Peru, Howes missed seven consecutive flights back to the United States. “It was such a change of pace and flavor,” Howes said. “I was mesmerized. And I lost that drive to move up the aviation ladder back in the States.”
Over the years, Howes had logged thirteen thousand hours flying for private contractors in Guatemala, Haiti, Peru, and Colombia. Along the way he married a Peruvian woman and together they had a boy named Tommy. Howes was thrilled to be earning upwards of $150,000 with California Microwave on a schedule that took him to Colombia for four weeks at a time, with two weeks off back home. Howes sometimes told his friends: “I want to keep these paychecks coming until I’m too old and feeble to read them.”
In the back of the plane operating the cameras and the FLIR was Marc Gonsalves. A thirty-year-old native of Bristol, Connecticut, who often wore a goatee, Gonsalves was an eight-year veteran of the air force who worked as an intelligence analyst. As a young NCO, he had married an exotic dancer named Shane whom he’d met at a bar near MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The couple had three kids they were raising in the Florida Keys. Though Marc loved his job, the promotion cycle was slow and he was earning only about $28,000 a year. The prospect of putting his kids through college worried him. Thus, when California Microwave offered him a job and a gigantic raise, he eagerly made the switch to the private sector.
Alongside Marc in the back was Keith Stansell, a six-foot-two-inch former marine, avionics whiz, outdoorsman, and self-described southern redneck. Keith had used his fat salary to climb out of debt and was now enjoying life in his free time by fishing in the Gulf of Mexico or disappearing into the Montana outback to hunt deer. Still, he sometimes mused about quitting so he could spend more time with his fiancée and their two young children in rural Georgia. His master plan was to open a crop-dusting business, then kick back on the weekends with his family, his dog, Buck, and a tall glass of Jack Daniel’s and Coke. Or was it? Keith, it seems, had built up an exotic, if complicated, parallel life in Colombia. He was dating a Colombian flight attendant and shortly before Thursday’s mission he’d found out that she was pregnant—with their twins.
The fifth member of the crew was the so-called host-nation rider, a Co
When the Cessna accelerated down the runway at Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport at 7:24 a.m., the crew figured they were in for a routine, six-hour sortie, an average day in the war on drugs.
“Just a routine flight,” copilot Tom Howes recalled months later. “Everyone was in good spirits. I just got word I was going home a week early to the States, so I was in very good spirits.”
But the Americans were heading into the badlands in a bird that was more Spirit of St. Louis than AWACS. A stretch version of the Cessna Caravan, the Grand Caravan is the minivan of civilian aviation, and California Microwave had leased two of them for the missions in Colombia. Slow, boxy, and butt-ugly, the aircraft can carry 4,500 pounds of gas, gear, and people and take off and land on tight runways. The plane is a workhorse for bush pilots in Alaska, miners in Argentina, and air-ambulance crews in Third World shit holes. Federal Express runs a fleet of 260 Caravans out of its Memphis hub. Sometimes called a Swiss Army knife with wings, the plane can be found just about any place where there’s two thousand feet of dubious grass strip. The Grand Caravan was ubiquitous and in that sense it was perfect, like using a Dodge Caravan on an undercover drug stakeout.
Built in 1994 and purchased secondhand for about $1 million, the Americans’ blue-and-white Grand Caravan—tail number N1116G—had initially served as a puddle jumper air taxi in the Caribbean. But since 2000 when the surveillance program kicked off in Colombia, N1116G had huffed and puffed over the Andes Mountains and logged hundreds of hours floating above the Amazon jungle, turning itself into the Little Turbo-Prop That Could.
The weak point of the Grand Caravan was under the hood. The 675-horsepower Pratt & Whitney PT6A turbine engine was a decent-enough power source if the mission was to deliver express mail to Columbia, South Carolina. But Colombia, South America, was a war zone, and when the bullets were flying, one motor might not be enough. Twin-engine aircraft could usually limp home if one side gave out. But a fully loaded Grand Caravan, might glide for a short spell before it eventually began to lose about one thousand feet of altitude per mile.
“Any single-engine airplane by itself over the jungle is dangerous. Any single-engine airplane over the jungle where they’re shooting at you is extremely dangerous,” said Jorge Sanjinés, an American contractor who flew helicopter gunships—equipped with twin engines—in Colombia. “That’s because you only need one, tiny, itty-bitty bullet to take you down.”
There had been plenty of warnings, like Tommy Janis’s dead-stick landing into Santa Marta on the other Grand Caravan leased by the company. But no one paid much attention because there were no casualties. The Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, the branch of the military that oversaw the surveillance program, was largely unaware of the incident. According to Cockes, Janis had made it look too easy. “If he landed on a beach somewhere, then had to get out and fight some guerrillas, then maybe people would have said: ‘Well, goddamn, this is dangerous. Maybe we should go to a twin-engine plane.’”
Then, there was the weather. In the frosty, thin air of the Andes, ice sometimes formed on the Grand Caravan’s wings. Descending was not an option, yet the Cessna often lacked the power to climb out of the moisture-laden clouds causing the problem. But even in clear skies, the plane was a flying beast of burden that handled like a Hummer.
That’s because the back of the plane was usually jammed with rifles, pistols, water, food, books, laptop computers, extra clothes, and survival gear. The Cessna had received a special exemption from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly five hundred pounds overweight. The contractors even brought along thick coils of rope in case they crashed into the treetops and had to lower themselves to the ground. All that was missing, it sometimes seemed, was a guitar and a set of golf clubs strapped to the wing struts.
“You can’t put twenty pounds of shit in a two-pound bag, and that’s what they had,” said Ronnie Powers, the owner who had leased the two Grand Caravans to California Microwave. “It was way too heavy but they learned to fly it like that.”
As a result, just getting to their jungle targets was a logistical circus act. The Americans took off from Bogotá with their tanks just half-full of jet fuel because a full load of 335 gallons would have made them too heavy to climb over the mountains that stood between them and the cocaine labs to the south. Once on the other side of the range, they dropped down to Larandia, a Colombian military base in Caquetá, to top off their tanks before resuming their reconnaissance chores in the thicker air of the flatlands.
At a November 1999 meeting, months before the program kicked off, Paul Hooper, one of the California Microwave pilots, complained to his bosses that the Grand Caravan was the wrong plane for the job and suggested upgrading to a twin engine. When it became clear that the company had no interest in trading up, Hooper and Doug Cockes put their concerns in an eerily prescient November 14, 2002, letter. They warned Northrop Grumman and California Microwave that operating a single-engine aircraft invited “a catastrophic aviation mishap.” The Grand Caravan, they wrote, “could not reach any suitable landing areas if the engine failed over most of the terrain” where the missions were flown. The two pilots implored the company to consider the Beechcraft King Air, which had a pressurized cockpit, more power to escape icy conditions, and an all-important second engine. But upgrading to King Airs would have cost a couple of million dollars more and California Microwave liked to run things on the cheap, prompting some employees to call their surveillance program Econ-Recon. California Microwave dismissed the warnings and Cockes and Hooper quit a few months later.
“There was a letter that was written by some of the pilots and I did see that after the fact,” said Anne Patterson, who was U.S. ambassador to Colombia at the time and is now Washington’s envoy to Pakistan. “We use Cessna Caravans here in Pakistan. I fly in them. We put senators in them. The airplane has a good safety record. So would I have changed? No.”
But Keith Stansell remained unconvinced. At one point, the company urged him to take a survival training course in case the plane ever went down but he said no. “With this piece-of-shit aircraft we’re being asked to fly in, there’s no way I’m going to survive a crash. A dead man doesn’t need to know how to survive.”
IT WASN’T JUST THE CHOICE OF aircraft that raised eyebrows. The missions themselves were becoming more hazardous. At first, the contractors flew only during daylight hours and over flat terrain. But their success at spotting drug labs and cocaine-laden aircraft bred mission creep. If their daylight missions went so swimmingly, the corporate thinking went, why not fly in the cooler nighttime hours when it would be easier to detect the body heat of guerrillas? Soon, the ban on mountain flying also went out the window.
Once again, it had all been spelled out in the letter Cockes and Hooper wrote to company executives. “When pilots and flight crews are successful in mission performance, payload, distance and location are added or stretched to more difficult scenarios,” they wrote. “We now are telling you that this mission creep coupled with [the company’s] attitude towards safe flight operations has made this mission very dangerous.”
Even as Cockes and Hooper raised hell, most of their colleagues at California Microwave viewed the disgruntled pilots as whiners. Three of the four men on the Cessna that Thursday morning were former U.S. military, so it was in their DNA to lean forward, to put aside misgivings and follow orders whether they came from a crew-cut commanding officer or a middle-level manager from Maryland. In the private sector, however, going way out on a limb is usually considered a bad thing.
