Investigation into missionary plane shooting faults Peruvian Air Force

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Peru's air force failed to follow accepted U.S.-Peruvian drug interdiction procedure in the incident that led to an American missionary plane being shot down, a U.S. investigation has found.

Senior administration officials told CNN on Tuesday that U.S. authorities tried to persuade the Peruvians to proceed cautiously and take time to get a firm identification of the plane before a Peruvian officer ordered a Peruvian fighter pilot to open fire.

Missionary Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter were killed in April when the Peruvian Air Force shot down the single-engine Cessna flown by her husband, after the crew of another plane -- owned by the U.S. Department of Defense and chartered by the CIA as part of a joint Peru-U.S. drug interdiction program -- spotted the plane and notified the Peruvian officer aboard that plane.

The officer, a lieutenant colonel, notified the Peruvian air force, which in turn authorized the shoot-down by a Peruvian air force craft.

A U.S. investigation into the accident was conducted jointly with the Peruvian government, and involved all of the agencies participating in the US-Peru interception program, including the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA.

Tuesday, State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said the investigation was not yet complete.

"We just need to wait for the report to be done. This is not a finger-pointing game," he said. "This is to try to establish what happened, so that we can put in to place the best safeguards possible so that it doesn't happen again."

The Clinton administration instituted procedures at the beginning of the joint US-Peruvian "force-down" intercept program, however senior administration officials tell CNN that procedures weren't followed at the time of the accident in April.

In 1994, at the program's inception, a long and rigid list of procedures was developed to avoid any shooting down of civilian crafts. Those procedures required Peruvian air force pilots to make checks of the flight plan of aircrafts traveling through the drug interdiction areas, trail suspicious aircrafts through a significant amount of territory, check their serial numbers and attempt radio communication.

The Peruvians were then expected to attempt visual contact by tilting or "wiggling" the wings of their own plane to signal the suspicious plane to land. Only after all of those methods failed were the Peruvians permitted to fire a warning shot at the plan, and only with the permission of the regional air force commander himself.

But as the investigators went through the chronology of the accident, "they found the procedures had been adjusted," one senior official said. This official said that over time, the number of steps which the Peruvians had to take before firing disabling shots was shortened.

Officials further found that even the new abridged version of procedures was not followed by the Peruvian Air Force on the day the accident took place.

The CIA-contracted flight crew, who tracked the plane before the Peruvian air force pilot shot it down, was cited in the report as also bearing some responsibility for the accident, officials said.

"There is some comment as to whether additional steps, over and above the procedures set in place, that the crew could have taken when they saw clearly that the Peruvian air force was acting precipitously," one senior administration official said. He added that the investigation poses the question as to whether the missionary plane should have even caught the attention of the US crew, "other than for the fact that it was flying in a zone it shouldn't have been."

Additionally, the investigation found a "communication difficulty" between the US flight crew whose Spanish was "extremely marginal," the Peruvian air force liaison aboard the CIA flight, whose English was also "marginal and the Peruvian air force pilots in the intercept plane, whose English was "non-existent."

One official said that the investigation showed that the pilot of the plane, American missionary Jim Bowers, did not file a customary return flight plan and did not respond to radio calls from the Peruvian air force, warning him to land the plane. The official said either Bowers did not have his in-flight tuned to the right frequency, or simply did not respond.

"Somehow, either through technical issues or human error, he failed to respond to several warning messages," the official said. But he added that the report only gives a "very light touch" to Bower's errors during the tragic accident.

"He appears to be an expert pilot who flew the region quite a bit," the official said.

All aerial interdiction programs in the region have been suspended since the April accident, and officials fear the longer this remains the case, drug traffickers will take advantage of the lull. Already they say the see an increase in movement and air activity in areas where the programs have been halted.

"The longer this state of uncertainty goes on, the greater the risk" one senior administration official said. "If the aerial interdiction program is not resumed, we could build alternatives, although they won't be as good. But we are ending our third month without the program, and with the window of opportunity, some confident drug traffickers are taking advantage of it."

Officials said that the force-down element of the interception program is an essential part of the total US counter narcotics efforts in the region, and that while the April accident was indeed a tragedy, the program has largely been a success. They point to a near elimination of cocaine production in Peru and Bolivia over the last several years because the traffickers were not able to fly out of the country as a result of the program.

While the investigation into the April accident is complete, a review of the force-down intercept programs in Latin America is still underway, and could take a few more weeks. Officials said the review, led by former US Ambassador to Colombia Morris Busby, will look at the larger picture of how the program impacts overall US cooperation on counter-narcotics in the region and will make recommendations on whether to renew the program, end it or modify it.

Officials said the Busby will likely recommend a modified force-down program with enhanced safeguards and procedures to President Bush's national security advisers. One official said Busby is expected to offer a "series of options" for the timing and sequence of the program and for what the CIA role in tracking the flights should be.

"The loss of two people who were obviously, utterly and completely innocent is a tragedy," one senior administration official said. "So we better insure the likelihood of this happening again is as close to zero as humanly possible.