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Colombia Raid Frees U.S. Hostages - Front Page WSJ

Colombia Raid Frees U.S. Hostages
By DAVID LUHNOW and JOSÉ DE CÓRDOBA
July 3, 2008; Page A1

BOGOT�?, Colombia -- In a cunning jungle raid, Colombian special forces rescued 15 hostages held by the country's Communist rebels, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three U.S. military contractors and 11 Colombian soldiers and policemen.

Wednesday's rescue mission arrived at a critical moment for Colombian President �?lvaro Uribe, who has been hounded in recent weeks by a growing political bribery scandal. The raid also came just hours after U.S. presidential candidate Sen. John McCain visited Colombia to show his support for Mr. Uribe, a conservative who is Washington's biggest ally in the region. Sen. McCain was in Colombia in part to urge the U.S. Congress to pass a free-trade deal with the Andean nation. (Please see related article.)

After years in captivity, officials said French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and three Americans had been rescued from leftist guerrillas by Colombian troops. In total, 15 were rescued.

The hostage rescue was a crippling blow for Latin America's largest and oldest guerrilla group, known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. In the last few months, the FARC lost three of its top seven officials, including its leader Manuel Marulanda, who died of a heart attack in late March. The group had hoped to use Ms. Betancourt and the three Americans to increase its leverage against the Colombian government.

The rescue also represented a setback for Hugo Chávez, president of neighboring Venezuela. Mr. Chávez had publicly portrayed himself as uniquely positioned to persuade the rebels to give up their hostages. But last year, as emails from captured guerrilla computers show, Mr. Chávez was providing political, financial and logistical support to the FARC.

As the news spread through Colombia's capital, Bogotá, car horns honked in unison. "I burst out crying when I heard," Ascencio Bermeo, the father of one of the rescued hostages, told Colombian television. His son, Juan Carlos Bermeo, is a Colombian army captain who was kidnapped by the FARC nearly 10 years ago.

The rescue mission apparently involved tricking the guerrillas who held the hostages. The Colombian military, explaining that it infiltrated the FARC's ruling secretariat, says it sent messages to the FARC guards to expect two helicopters flown by rebel-friendly parties to pick up the hostages as part of a negotiation. The helicopters were white and bore no military markings.

Ms. Betancourt, speaking from a Bogotá military base after the rescue, said the men who descended from the helicopters were dressed in Che Guevara T-shirts and greeted the rebels like comrades. They tied the hostages' hands behind their backs and bundled them forcibly onto the helicopter. Ms. Betancourt said the hostages believed they were being taken to another FARC camp.

Only after the helicopters were in the air did the captors identify themselves as undercover Colombian military officers, telling the hostages they had been freed, Ms. Betancourt and Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said from the base, in comments aired on Colombian television.

"This is a miracle, a miracle," Ms. Betancourt said. "We have an amazing military. I think only the Israelis can possibly pull off something like this."

The three freed American hostages were flown late Wednesday to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, according to William Brownfield, the U.S. ambassador in Colombia. Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell, employees of a Northrop Grumman Corp. subsidiary who worked as Defense Department contractors, were captured when their antidrug surveillance plane went down in FARC-held territory in 2003. At the time a fourth American, Thomas Janis, was found shot to death.

U.S. Aid

The commander of Colombia's military forces, Gen. Freddy Padilla, said the operation had taken years to plan, and involved infiltrating the FARC's most dangerous military units.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said the U.S. aided the Colombian operation but would give few details. One official said the U.S. provided the Colombian-led operation with "sigint," or signals intelligence, which included intercepted telephone calls from the FARC as well as sophisticated satellite imagery. The U.S. has lavished about $5 billion on mostly military aid to Colombia during the past five years, and helped retool the country's army from a static force into a powerful fighting machine.

Associated Press
U.S. hostages (l. to r.) Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves and Thomas Howes, in 2003 during their capture by the FARC. They were rescued Wednesday.
"This was a tremendous Colombian operation, brilliantly worked, brilliantly executed," a U.S. official in Bogotá said.

Sen. McCain, who was returning from Colombia by way of Mexico during the raid, told reporters that the timing of the mission wasn't related to his visit, which was announced last month. "These things require incredibly long planning and coordination," he said. "There's no way possible it could have had anything to do with our visit."

Sen. McCain said that on Tuesday night, President Uribe and Mr. Santos personally briefed him on the next day's planned raid. Mr. McCain said he spoke from his plane by phone with the Colombian leader Wednesday after the mission.

Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council, said President George W. Bush congratulated President Uribe by phone Wednesday afternoon.

The U.S. and the European Union consider the FARC a terrorist group. It funds itself largely through drug trafficking and kidnapping. All but about 40 of its roughly 700 hostages are held for ransom.

Wednesday's rescue plan was dubbed Operation Check, for the chess move that precedes checkmate. That is appropriate given recent setbacks suffered by the guerrilla group in recent months. The raid's organizers apparently capitalized on disarray among the rebels. Its success raises hopes that the group could be on the verge of collapse or peacemaking after decades of fighting.

On March 1, the group's No. 2 leader, Raúl Reyes, was killed in a cross-border raid on his camp in Ecuador. Days later, another member of the FARC's seven-man ruling secretariat was killed by his bodyguard, who took his boss's severed hand to Colombian authorities to claim a $2.5 million reward. Weeks later, the FARC's legendary 78-year-old leader Mr. Marulanda -- known as Tirofijo, or "Sureshot" -- died of a heart attack, a guerrilla spokesman acknowledged in May.

Getty Images
Ingrid Betancourt, middle, next to her mother, Yolanda Pulecio, and her husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte, at an air base in Bogota Wednesday.
After the attack on Mr. Reyes, the Colombian police recovered several of his laptop computers, which yielded a trove of intelligence. Among other things, it was clear from messages -- many viewed by The Wall Street Journal -- that the hostages were pawns in a complex political game played out by the FARC and Venezuelan President Chávez against Mr. Uribe.

Numerous emails revealed that the FARC and Mr. Chávez had agreed to use the selective release of the hostages, six of whom had been let go earlier this year, to better the international image of the FARC. Mr. Chávez planned to exert diplomatic pressure to obtain de facto recognition for the FARC from governments closely allied with him, such as Nicaragua and Ecuador. Such a move would have undercut Mr. Uribe's military campaign against the guerrillas.

The FARC's most valuable hostage was arguably Ms. Betancourt, a minor presidential candidate when she was abducted in 2002. Ms. Betancourt, who holds dual Colombian and French citizenship, had become the face of Colombia's captives. In Europe, she is a cause célèbre, so famous that she is simply known as "Ingrid." Her portrait hangs on the facade of the Paris City Hall and in Milan's main piazza. Across the world, more than 1,000 cities and towns have declared her an honorary citizen. Coincidentally, the Italian Parliament passed a resolution Wednesday demanding her release.

In France, television channels stopped their regular programming to air special programs on Ms. Betancourt's release. French President Nicolas Sarkozy gathered Ms. Betancourt's children and sister Astrid at the Elysée Palace to give a televised address.

"This is the moment we've been waiting for....I can't find the words," Ms. Betancourt's 22-year-old daughter, Melanie Delloye, said in a trembling voice, grasping the hand of her brother, 19-year-old Lorenzo. "I am waiting for the moment when I can hold my mother."

Critical of the Government

Some of the freed hostages, and many relatives of those still in captivity, had been very critical of Mr. Uribe's refusal to accept the FARC's conditions to negotiate the release of hostages in exchange for FARC guerrillas held in government prisons. Mr. Uribe had adamantly refused to withdraw troops from a Manhattan-size area to permit the negotiations to take place.

Former hostage Luis Eladio Pérez, who was freed earlier this year, had criticized the government and consistently demanded that they not attempt a rescue mission because it was too risky. "I owe an apology to the president and to our country's military," Mr. Pérez said Wednesday. "I have to tip my hat to them, because they pulled it off," he told Colombia's Caracol TV.

The rescue couldn't have come at a better time politically for Mr. Uribe. Last week, Mr. Uribe said he would ask Colombia's Congress to approve a referendum to redo the 2006 presidential election that allowed him to run for an unprecedented second term. Mr. Uribe took the action after Colombia's Supreme Court ruled that the congressional vote allowing the referendum had been tainted by government bribery. Late Wednesday, after news of the raid, Colombia's top constitutional court said the corruption case didn't affect the legitimacy of Mr. Uribe's re-election, handing him a victory.

Some Colombians suspected the timing of the rescue had to do with the brewing political crisis. "The rescue is great news," said Rafael Ilus, a garbage worker. "But it clearly comes at the best possible time for Uribe because it distracts everyone from the corruption scandal."

Fans of Mr. Uribe said he deserves the benefit of the doubt. "Everything he has done has turned out well," said 24-year-old auditor Kimberly Unas. "He's not a saint, but he gets the job done."

By tejasmarcos on Jul 3, 2008, 06:04 in Friendly Talkzone.

billyb says on Jul 3, 2008, 06:08:

What gets me tejas, is that fact thet FARC chose to trust one of these (imaginary as it might be) ONGs. It just proves what Uribe and a lot of us have been saying, that these euro ONGs are in cahoots with the terrorists.

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miamimike says on Jul 3, 2008, 06:18:

BillyB-- as days pass, what "other" info concerning the lead-up to the mission do you think will come out? I mean, look at the JFK Dallas Assasination, a large % of the American Public feel the Truth still isn't completely revealed 40 years later,,,and our society is a more transparent one to boot with laws like the Freedom of Information act ect not mention C-Span, Independent Commissions like the 9/11 commission. As the days pass, it should prove to be interesting. Like the 3 Americans sleeping in a real bed and downing a Cold Beer in peace,,,

"Wait a minute. What did you just say? You're predicting $4-a-gallon gas? That's interesting. I hadn't heard that." -- Feb. 28, 2008 --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C.

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billyb says on Jul 3, 2008, 06:25:

I don't for a second think that there weren't a lot of backroom dealings that we probably never hear about. Anybody that thinks that the mltary will release all the details of an operation like this are fooling themselves. For, i will just celebrate and not worry about the details, I'll leave that to the "truthseekers" ;))

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tejasmarcos says on Jul 3, 2008, 06:26:

hmmm, interesting point, BB.

* i like these exerpts from the article,

"Late Wednesday, after news of the raid, Colombia's top constitutional court said the corruption case didn't affect the legitimacy of Mr. Uribe's re-election, handing him a victory"

- amazing how success seems to smooth over other distractions. when all is said and done, to win is the single most important thing. politics and diplomacy is a game in which anybody and everybody can have a say so without having to be qualified or even correct. uribe is playing the game like a master chess player.

"He's not a saint, but he gets the job done."

- what a great one liner and effective way to end this story...

trying to walk a straight line on sour mash and cheap wine...

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billyb says on Jul 3, 2008, 06:30:

yup, politics has never had a relationship with right or wrong, only with winning and losing.

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tejasmarcos says on Jul 3, 2008, 06:32:

How 'Operation Check-Mate' Worked
By DAVID LUHNOW and JOSÉ DE CÓRDOBA
July 3, 2008

Here's how "Operation Check-Mate" worked. Details of the rescue mission are from Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's defense minister, and Ingrid Betancourt, one of the freed hostages.

Colombia's army, having infiltrated the FARC's highest ranks over the past few years, sent coded messages to various guerrilla commanders in recent months that the commanders believed were from the FARC's highest ruling body, the secretariat.

The messages told them that the hostages were to be transferred to an area where Alfonso Cano, the new FARC leader after the death in March of the FARC's founder Manuel Marulanda, would be in charge of them. The commanders were told the hostages would be used by Mr. Cano in on-again, off-again negotiations with the government.

Since the guerrilla group doesn't have helicopters of their own, the hostages were to be transferred to Mr. Cano on helicopters used by a sympathetic non-governmental organization. The organization, in fact, didn't exist and was really the Colombian military. To avoid arousing suspicion of the local FARC commanders that held the hostages, the military told them that two FARC commanders would accompany the hostages during the transfer.

In the weeks that followed, the hostages were being held in three separate groups, and were moved by the rebels to one site, where they were to be picked up by the fictitious non-governmental group.

On Wednesday, two helicopters turned up at an arranged time in the jungle. Ms. Betancourt said the sound of helicopters terrified the hostages – because the sound of helicopters usually meant the Colombian army was close by, something that provoked the rebels to hide the hostages quickly in dense jungle. But this time, Ms. Betancourt said, the rebels acted as if they were expecting the arrival.

One helicopter waited nearby while another landed in a clearing near the rebel camp. Undercover military agents, dressed in Che Guevara T-shirts and looking like leftist sympathizers of the rebels, descended from the helicopter and warmly greeted the rebels holding the hostages.

The undercover army officers told the hostages they were being taken to a very important person in the FARC and treated them brusquely. The undercover agents then handcuffed the hostages and loaded them aboard the helicopter. Two of the FARC commanders who had long been charged with overseeing their captivity also boarded the helicopter.

Shortly after the helicopter took off, there was a sudden scuffle, after which the two FARC commanders were subdued. "I saw the commander who for four years had been cruel so many times, who had humiliated us so many times,...on the floor naked," Ms. Betancourt said.

The undercover officer in charge of the operation turned to the hostages and said: "We're the Colombian army. You are now free." Said Ms. Betancourt: "The helicopter almost fell from our cheers. It was a miracle."

trying to walk a straight line on sour mash and cheap wine...

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Tinto (Moderator) says on Jul 3, 2008, 06:36:

Contrary to my earlier brilliant military analysis, the two helicopters were not painted in Barney the Purple Dinosaur paint, but plain white.

Sounds like the Army used a couple of their Russian made MI-17s and had forty other helicopters nearby in case things went wrong.

Will be interesting to hear in coming days how frequently the hostages took helicopter rides and who provided the helicopters -- from Ingrid's comments, this wasn't the first time.

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billyb says on Jul 3, 2008, 06:43:

It will show NGO/ONG complicity with the FARC.

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