US FINANCED KILLER GROUPS

The CIA was established in 1947 as a frontline institution against the Soviet Union. After the Berlin Wall fell, the agency is seeking a new purpose to justify its $26.7 billion annual subsidy.

Besides the crime and narcotics center, the CIA runs a counterterrorism center, a center to stymie the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and even an ecology center to monitor global warming and weather patterns, including El Niño. In the name of fighting drugs, the CIA financed new militar intelligence networks i Colombia in 1991. But the new networks did little to stop drug traffickers. Instead, they incorporated illegal paramilitary groups into their ranks and fostered death squads.

One of its most deadly policies is treating coca cultivation as a crime rather than an economic problem. These squads killed trade unionists, peasant leaders, human-rights monitors, journalists and other suspected "subversives."

The evidence, including secret Colombian military documents, suggests that the CIA may be more interested in fighting a leftist resistance movement than in combating drugs. Thousands of people have been killed by the death squads, and the killings go on.

In April 1998, one of Colombia's foremost human-rights lawyers, Eduardo Umaña Mendoza, was murdered in his office. Umaña's clients included leaders of Colombia's state oil-workers' union.

Human-rights groups suspect that the murder may have been carried out by members of the security forces supporting or operating in unison with paramilitary forces. At the Bogotá funeral, attended by 10,000 people, a Colombian government official who was a friend of Umaña's said Umaña had alerted authorities that state security officials were planning to kill him. In February 1998, a death squad mowed down another leading human-rights activist, Jesús María Valle Jaramillo. He had accused the military and some politicians for sponsoring death squads.

"There is a clear, coordinated strategy of targeting anyone involved in the defense of human rights," says Carlos Salinas of Amnesty International. "Every statement of unconditional support by U.S. lawmakers only encourages these kinds of attacks."

The administration has escalated military aid, making Colombia the hemisphere's leading recipient of U.S. military aid. Now the administration is considering even more.

Colombia did not figure prominently on the world stage back in late 1990 and early 1991. But the Bush administration was increasing the number of U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Beret) advisers there. And the CIA was adding agents to its Bogotá station, which soon became its biggest station in Latin America.

The United States formed an interagency commission to study Colombia's military intelligence system. The team included representatives of the U.S. embassy's Military Advisory Group in Bogotá, the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, the DIA and the CIA. In May 1991, Colombia completely reorganized its military intelligence networks "based on the recommendations made by the commission of U.S. military advisers," according to the secret Colombian reorganization order. The U.S. commission backed the reorganization plan ostensibly as part of the drug war. Yet the secret Colombian order itself made no mention anywhere in its 16 pages or corresponding appendices about gathering intelligence against drug traffickers. Instead, the order instructed the new intelligence networks to focus on leftist guerrillas or "the armed subversion."

The 41 new intelligence networks created by the order directed their energies toward unarmed civilians suspected of supporting the guerrillas. One of these networks, in the oil-refinery town of Barrancabermeja in Colombia's strife-torn Magdalena Valley, assassinated at least 57 civilians in the first two years of operation. Victims included the president, vice president and treasurer of the local transportation workers union, two leaders of the local oil workers union, a leader of a local peasant workers union, two human-rights monitors and a journalist.

The secret Colombian order instructed the military to maintain plausible deniability from the networks and their crimes. Retired military officers and other civilians were to act as clandestine liaisons between the networks and the military commanders. All open communications "must be avoided." There "must be no written contracts with informants or civilian members of the network; everything must be agreed to orally." And the entire chain of command "will be covert and compartmentalized, allowing for the necessary flexibility to cover targets of interest."

Facts about the new intelligence networks became known only after four former agents in Barrancabermeja began testifying in 1993 about the intelligence network there. What compelled them to come forward? Each said the military was actively trying to kill them to cover up the network and its crimes. By then the military had "disappeared" four other ex-agents to keep the network and its operations secret. Since the military was already trying to kill them, the agents decided that testifying about the network and its crimes might help keep them alive.

Saulo Segura was one ex-agent who took this gamble. But rather than prosecuting his superiors over his and others' testimony, Colombia's judicial system charged and imprisoned Segura. In a 1996 interview in La Modelo, Bogotá's maximum-security jail, Segura explained that he hadn't killed anyone and that his job within the network was limited to renting office space and handling money. Two months later, on Christmas Eve, Segura was murdered inside his cellblock. His murder remains unsolved; the whereabouts of the other three ex-agents are unknown. No Colombian officers have been prosecuted for ordering the Barrancabermeja crimes.

In 1994, Amnesty International accused the Pentagon of allowing anti-drug aid to be diverted to counterinsurgency operations that lead to human-rights abuses. U.S. officials including Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the Clinton administration "drug czar" who was then in charge of the U.S. Southern Command, publicly denied it. But back at the office, McCaffrey ordered an internal audit. It found that 13 of 14 Colombian army units that Amnesty had specifically cited for abuses had previously received either U.S. training or arms.

Amnesty made these documents public in 1996. Colombian military officers, along with some of their supporters in the United States, say the line between counterinsurgency and anti-drug operations in Colombia is blurry, as Colombia's leftist guerrillas are more involved today than ever before in drug trafficking. For years, indeed, about two-thirds of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) forces and about half of National Liberation Army (ELN) forces have been involved in the drug trade, mainly protecting drug crops, according to both U.S. intelligence and leftist sources. Colombia's rightist paramilitary groups, however, are even more involved in the business, and they have been for a decade.

Back in 1989, Colombia's civilian government outlawed all paramilitary organizations after a government investigation found that the Medellín drug cartel, led by the late Pablo Escobar, had taken over the largest ones. At the time, Escobar and his associates were fiercely resisting U.S. pressure on the Colombian government to make them stand trial in the United States on trafficking charges. They took control of Colombia's strongest paramilitaries and used them to wage a terrorist campaign against the state.

These same paramilitaries, based in the Magdalena Valley, were behind a wave of violent crimes, including the 1989 bombing of Avianca flight HK-1803, which killed 111 passengers. Investigators concluded that Israeli, British and other mercenaries, led by Israeli Reserve Army Lt. Col. Yair Klein, had trained the perpetrators in such techniques. In February, Klein and three other former Israeli reserve officers, along with two Colombians, were indicted in absentia for their alleged involvement in these crimes. The CIA bears some responsibility for drug trafficking in the Magdalena Valley since it supported rightist counterinsurgency forces that run drugs.

But the CIA has also helped combat drug trafficking in Colombia. In other words, different units within the agency have pursued contrary goals. But most other agency counterdrug operations have yielded few breakthroughs. The net result of CIA involvement in Colombia has not been to slow down the drug trade. Mainly, the agency has fueled a civil war that has taken an appalling toll on civilians.