Small aircraft regularly fly coca paste across the Andes Mountains from Peru. That's why a CIA plane, contracted to do intelligence as part of a drug interdiction operation with the Peruvian government, suspected on Friday that a small Cessna carrying a family of Baptist missionaries was running drugs. The U.S. crew communicated only with the Peruvian air force liaison on board the surveillance plane. By agreement, U.S. personnel are not in the Peruvian chain of command and have no authority to control their actions. Despite the American objections, the Peruvian officer on board the CIA plane instructed the jet crew to fire on the suspicious Cessna, according to the official.
Many questions still linger about what exactly led to the fatal events.
But onlookers say that they saw the jet fire machine-gun rounds into the Cessna, and watched the tiny plane crash into the river. Very few questions have been answered at this point, and it will likely be weeks before an investigation can offer the public more information. Contributing to the confusion is the fact that drug interdiction flights, like all of our military anti-narcotics operations in Latin America, are secretive and complex. They involve not only the military operations of the home governments, which themselves lack transparency, but an elaborate system of U.S. foreign aid from a variety of agencies, including the departments of Defense and State, the U.S. Customs Service, the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Agency, which provide host nations with military training, equipment and intelligence. Making matters even murkier is the presence of numerous American mercenaries, hired as freelance pilots, ground crews and intelligence personnel by both the host nations and the United States.