DynCorp's Drug
Problem
by JASON
VEST
Could the State Department's
antidrug contractors in South America possibly
be
dabbling in narcotics trafficking? A
key part of the US's $1.3 billion contribution to
Plan
Colombia--the scheme that will supposedly expedite the end of Colombia's
civil
war--calls for the use of private contractors (as opposed
to actual US military assets) to fly
airborne missions against
both the fields that grow coca and poppy and the labs that
process them. While some contractors, like Aviation Development Corporation
of
Montgomery, Alabama, fly surveillance missions for the CIA,
those that fly on retainer for
other US government agencies are
a bit more expansive in their
missions.
Consulting giant
DynCorp's private pilots in the
Andes fly everything from
fixed-wing fumigation runs
to helicopter-borne interdiction
missions ferrying
troops into hot spots. If you take DynCorp's
word
for it, any notion of the organization's being
involved
in drug trafficking is ludicrous. "Whether or not
you
believe this, we are a very ethical company," said
a
senior DynCorp official, who insisted on being
quoted off the record. "We take steps to make sure
the people we
hire are ethical."
Yet the existence of a
document that The Nation
recently obtained (under the Freedom of
Information
Act) from the Drug Enforcement
Administration--combined with the unwillingness of
virtually any
US or Colombian government agency to elaborate on the
document--has
some in Washington and elsewhere wondering if,
like virtually every other entity charged
with fighting the drug
war, DynCorp might have a bad apple or two in its barrel.
According
to a monthly DEA intelligence report from last year,
officers of Colombia's National Police
force intercepted and
opened, on May 12, 2000, a US-bound Federal Express package
at
Bogota's El Dorado International Airport. The parcel "contained two (2) small
bottles of
a thick liquid" that "had the same consistency as
motor oil." The communiqu?oes on to
report that the liquid
substance "tested positive for heroin" and that the "alleged
heroin
laced liquid weighed approximately 250 grams." (Freebase
heroin, it bears noting, is
soluble in motor oil, and can
therefore be extracted without much
trouble.)
But perhaps the most
intriguing piece of information in the DEA document is the
individual
to whom it reports that the package belonged:an
unnamed employee of DynCorp, who
was sending the parcel to the
company's Andean operations headquarters at Patrick Air
Force
Base, Florida. More interesting still is the reluctance of DynCorp and
the
government to provide substantial details in
su
pport of their
contention that this situation isn't really what it seems. According to
DynCorp
spokeswoman Janet Wineriter,the viscous liquid that the
Colombians tested was not, in
fact, laced with heroin; it was
simply "oil samples of major aircraft components" that
DynCorp
technicians are required to take and send to the US "on a periodic
basis."
Explaining that the drug test was conducted "with
apparently faulty equipment" that
produced "an incorrect
reading," Wineriter could not specify what testing procedures or
equipment were used. She identified her source for the explanation as Charlene
A.
Wheeless, DynCorp's Vice President for Corporate
Communications.
Unable to cite any
source other than Wheeless ("I'm assuming when someone passes
along
this information that it's accurate"), Wineriter told The
Nation to call the Colombian
National Police and the State
Department for further details. The State Department liaison
with DynCorp did not return phone calls, and when the Colombian National Police
in
Bogota were contacted, an official informed The Nation that
the CNP would not comment
on the matter, referring all queries
to the DEA. A DEA spokesman in Washington said the
matter was
not a DEA case, and referred calls to the US Embassy in
Bogota.
It took six days for
the embassy to produce a terse, 143-word response to The
Nation's
queries--a response that echoed, but did not
mirror,DynCorp's account. The embassy did
confirm that the vials
of oil are "routinely shipped to DynCorp facilities at Patrick AFB
for
analysis related to proper maintenance" of aircraft, and
confirmed that "several aircraft
motor oil samples" were
confiscated by Colombian police who used "NARCOTEX
equipment
[and] detected the presence of heroin in unspecified amounts." Unlike
Dyncorp,
the embassy did not blame the test results on a false
positive caused by faulty equipment;
what's odd is that the
embassy has no idea what ultimately became of the seized oil.
"The
samples seized at the airport were sent to the CNP's
Forensic Institute for further analysis,
but the CNP did not
subsequently pursue the matter with the U.S. Embassy or DynCorp
personnel in Colombia," the embassy said, adding that the embassy has "asked the
CNP to
clarify the status of any investigation of this
matter."
Many questions remain
about the CNP interception of the DynCorp package in Bogota
last
year. While there's nothing unusual about sending aircraft oil samples to
DynCorp's
main base in the US, DynCorp's assertion thatpoorly
calibrated drug testing equipment
caused a false positive has
experts scratching their heads--as does the US Embassy's
description of the testing
itself.
When asked to specify
what, exactly, "NARCOTEX equipment" is and what testing
methodologies it uses, an embassy official responded that he had "no idea." A
veteran
DEA agent said he had "never heard of anything called
NARCOTEX," and after a hard
round of research, staffers at the
International Association of Chiefs of Police's Drug
Recognition
Experts Section told The Nation they couldn't find evidence of any drug
testing
technology with the name. And according to a number of
scientists with backgrounds in
chemical testing and opiate
research, the information provided by DynCorp and the US
Embassy
in Bogota isn't nearly enough to ascertain independently just what was in
those
bottles seized by the Colombian
police.
Peter Facchini, a
University of Calgary biochemist and leading expert on opiates, notes
that
any number of several types of tests may or may not have
been conducted, and without
knowing specifics or lab protocols,
it's impossible to render a scientific conclusion. But, he
and
others add,it's unlikely that any testing apparatus would errantly identify
something as
heroin in motor oil. Drug tests for coca and
opiates look for the presence of alkaloids--and
alkaloids, says
Facchini, aren't naturally present in fuel oils. "I can't imagine any
reason
there should be even a trace of an alkaloid in aircraft
oil or motor oil--that doesn't make
any sense at all," he
says.
Thomas Tullius, chair
of Boston University's chemistry department (and author of the
study
refuting the US government's claim of possessing reliable
evidence that the al-Shifa
pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was
producing nerve gas), also finds DynCorp's explanation
curious.
"Maybe there is something in motor oil that might cross-react, but I would
be
surprised to find that true," says Tullius. "This is like the
al-Shifa thing--people aren't telling
you precise methods used
or numbers found."
And according to Adam
Isacson, senior associate and Latin America specialist at the
Center for International Policy, DynCorp and State's handling of the situation
doesn't
exactly inspire confidence. "It sounds like they have no
idea what the outcome of this case
was, and it doesn't look like
they have much of a burning desire to find out what
happened,"
observes Isacson. "They have an interest in sweeping this under the rug.
They
don't want anything to derail Plan Colombia, and key to
that is the willingness to let
contractors operate in almost
complete secrecy. Anything that raises questions is to be
avoided like the plague--they don't want people to think about DynCorp, because
then
people might actually look at the whole
policy."
Which is what critics
of Plan Colombia are hoping will happen over the next few weeks.
On June 27, the Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the House
Appropriations
Committee began crafting next year's overseas
budget package, which includes funding for
the Andean
Counterdrug Initiative, a measure that essentially expands Plan Colombia
to
neighboring Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil and
Panama. While the Bush
Administration has requested more money
for development assistance, the bulk of the
money still goes to
military assistance (71 percent, in Colombia's case), and there
is
continued financing for the fumigation and manual eradication
of coca and poppy crops that
DynCorp carries out under contract
for State.
A number of amendments
have been offered to the appropriations bill that would do
everything from imposing a moratorium on fumigation to reining in US
military
spending in the Andes, and activists are hopeful that
some of these amendments may
actually pass. While the Republican
ranks are full of proud drug warriors, even some
conservatives--such as House Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan
Burton--are
growing increasingly leery of DynCorp's operations;
Burton is reportedly so irked by what
he sees as lack of the
contractor accountability that he's considering taking legislative
action
himself. Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky,
meanwhile, is championing a bill that
would impose a ban on the
use of private military contractors like DynCorp, citing
everything from State's intransigence in answering Congressional queries to the
possibility
of the US's getting more involved in a foreign war
that is conducted largely out of the public
eye.
"All these concerns
reinforce my views that the US should immediately terminate its
contract with DynCorp and all other private companies conducting sensitive,
military-like
operations in the Andean Region,"says
Schakowsky."Reports that DynCorp employees
have been implicated
in drug trafficking, the very thing they are paid to help prevent,
only
strengthens my conviction that outsourcing is the wrong
policy. It's frustrating for reporters,
but outrageous for
members of Congress not to have access to information about US
involvement in the Andean region and how taxpayer dollars are being spent--most
of the
information we have is from investigative news reports
that raise more questions than
answers."
thenation.com
Webmanager | Subscribe | Subscription Help |
Privacy
© 2001 The Nation Company,
L.P.
Permissions | Letters to the
Editor
(For more on DynCorp's Latin American ops, feel free to
check out Vest's previous
offering: State
Outsources Secret War www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&
s=vest20010523
