Hostage Nation by Victoria Bruce

(SRS) program that employed Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell, and Marc Gonsalves in 2003 was no different. Lockheed Martin was selected by the DOD as the prime contractor, which then subcontracted to Northrop Grumman, which then subcontracted to California Microwave Systems. The practice created an absence of oversight or protocols for the CMS employees. A 2003 U.S. Navy investigation found that there had been no written set of standard operating procedures at CMS. Pilotsand systems operators had to learn procedures largely by word of mouth. DynCorp (which ran the fumigation missions) was the biggest U.S. contractor in Colombia and had the largest budget, the most planes, and a fleet of SAR helicopters. However, the positions at CMS were coveted because they paid nearly 25 percent more than what the DynCorp pilots were making for similar work. (According to former CMS pilot Doug Cockes, pilots were paid $160,000 per year and systems analyst, slightly more.)
    Although they considered the drug-interdiction work they were doing an important part of America’s war on drugs, most of the men took the job for one reason, according to Stansell. “If it weren’t for the money,” he wrote in
Out of Captivity
, “we wouldn’t have been in Colombia. We were making good coin, and that was important to us—what it brought to our egos, what it might mean down the line for our kids and our retirement. I wasn’t so much interested in being a hero with a capital H, as I was being a hero to my family and in my own mind by bringing down some big bucks. Call me shallow. Call me greedy. Call me what you want. I didn’t care. I still don’t really. All I was doing was living the American dream.” Stansell and his colleagues were hired to work four weeks in Colombia and then be home in the States for two weeks. In Colombia, the men lived in La Fontana, an upscale apartment complex in northern Bogotá. Although most of them weren’t single, four weeks away from home was a long time. Many found the local Colombian women—legendary for their beauty and sensuality—irresistible.
    The men were tasked with finding drug labs and smuggling routes used by the FARC. They used photographic equipment during the day and infrared remote sensing gear at night. But from five thousand feet, differentiating coca labs from farmers’ huts in an endless sea of green wasn’t easy. Growers had become so accustomed to the planes that they’d found dozens of ways of disguising labs, including covering them with rain-forest vegetation or building them alongside working farmhouses. The contractors also looked for coca fields. The homogeneous swaths of bright green leaves were easily identifiable in aerial photographs from directly overhead. However, the acreage was so great throughout the region controlled by the FARC, and the crops were sowidely distributed, that finding all of the coca planted in Colombia with the two CMS platform planes was an impossible task. Flying at lower altitudes would make their reconnoitering job easier, but it would also mean that the planes were more vulnerable to guerrilla fire. Because guerrillas had shot down half a dozen crop-dusting planes since the beginning of aerial fumigation in the 1990s, DynCorp made it a policy to have the spray planes followed by SAR forces in Black Hawk or Huey helicopters, ready to intervene in case of a crash or hostile fire. For the CMS missions, however, there were no SAR capabilities at all.
    Several of the pilots had complained that the planes they flew on the reconnaissance missions, loaded with heavy equipment, far exceeded the weight limit for the Cessna. In fact, two CMS pilots, Douglas Cockes and Paul Hooper, who had worked for the company for more than two years, had written lengthy letters in November and December 2002 to Northrop Grumman, detailing the problems with the planes and the missions: “The mission aircraft could not reach