Hostage Nation by Victoria Bruce Page B

needed to take away their guns and that they could use them only when they were on an SRS mission. Hooper felt that it was a retaliatory move by the CMS boss. “He just wanted to twist our tails for not agreeing with their inane policies.”
    The controversy that erupted because of the safety issues and the handguns stimulated McCune to issue a flurry of write-ups for bad behavior on the part of several of the pilots. In rebuttal, Hooper and Cockes sent a letter to Kent Kresa, chairman and CEO of Northrop Grumman, in December 2002, expounding on the intolerable conditions that those connected with the SRS mission faced. They dubbed the group apartment where the original site manager (McCune’s predecessor), sensor operators, and a technician lived together from 2000 to 2001 as the “Animal House,” and blamed the program director, James Hollaway, for failing to correct a toxic working environment that included drug and alcohol abuse by CMS managers, sloppy security with classified documents, and, in one case, the hiring of a local prostitute as a secretary for the company. (Cockes says that after the crash, he had the letter faxed to the U.S. military at SOUTHCOM. He later heard that the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Anne Patterson, had also been given the letter, but he says he was not contacted by anyone from the military or the embassy.)
    Hooper and Cockes also complained that when they objected to an operation that they found dangerous, they were threatened with termination. “In our opinion, the Program Director and Site Manager seem to believe that since we are ‘well compensated,’ we should accept ever-increasing risks as simply a fact of doing business. They continue to hold this view even though neither of them has ever been on a mission deep into hostile territory. We are not paid to accept an ever-increasing amount of risk, but rather to use our professional training and experience to mitigate risk as much as possible.” The pilots proposed a meeting to discuss their concerns at some mutually agreed-upon location in North Carolina, Tennessee, or Alabama. Northrop Grumman executives invited Hooper and Cockes to meet at the company’s headquarters in Maryland but refused to let the Northrop Grumman/CMS flight-operationsmanager Douglas Tait (who Cockes said agreed completely with his and Hooper’s assessments) attend the meeting. Believing that he would be railroaded into giving a deposition to the corporation’s attorneys, Hooper declined to attend the meeting. And with the meeting set to coincide with a two-month trip out of the country, Cockes, who says he would have loved to give a deposition had he been available to, did not attend either.
    Despite internal tensions, the missions were considered extremely successful and returned a high yield of reconnaissance data on drug labs and FARC movements, which, in turn, gave credence to the idea that progress was being made in the war on drugs. Orders for missions were coming in from every direction—the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, the U.S. Army, and the Department of Defense, among others. Unfortunately, there was no clear chain of command, and Northrop Grumman and CMS never truly addressed the pilots’ concerns about flying single-engine planes that exceeded weight and altitude limits. Cockes and Hooper had planned to work for the company another five years—enough to secure a Northrop Grumman pension—but the dangers of their job mounted, and in December 2002, Cockes and Hooper quit before being fired and left a trail of bad blood behind them.
    Two months later, their former colleagues Tommy Janis, Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell, and Marc Gonsalves crashed into the Colombian frontier. For all of the hundreds of hours they had flown over this terrain, the rain forest was completely unknown to the Americans. In the initial days after their capture, the guerrillas constantly pushed the Americans to keep moving to