Undercover Officers Got Acting Lessons; 'Crocodile Dundee'

By DAVID LUHNOW and JOSÉ DE CÓRDOBA

BOGOTA, Colombia -- New details have emerged about an important supporting role for the U.S. in Colombia's daring rescue of 15 hostages held by the country's Marxist guerrillas. One area where the Americans were directly involved: Giving Hollywood-style acting classes to the Colombian undercover military officers who duped the guerrillas into handing over the hostages.

Preparation for the rescue mission, which freed three Americans and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, involved mounting a makeshift studio on an army base and drilling the undercover military officers in their acting roles, according to senior Colombian military officials.

One Colombian officer played the role of an Australian leftist who supposedly belonged to a nongovernmental group sympathetic to the rebels.

"I swear, he was right out of 'Crocodile Dundee,'" said Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's defense minister, in an interview late on Thursday.

Washington helped in other ways, too. The U.S. military also signed off on every aspect of the plan before it was carried out, Mr. Santos said. That was important for Colombia, given that three of the hostages were Americans whose lives might be in jeopardy from the operation.

"We fully supported the plan," said White House spokesman Carlton Carroll. The U.S. and Colombian governments were in consultation the entire time, Mr. Carroll said, but he reiterated that the mission was "their [Colombia's] initiative."

The three Americans -- Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves -- spent the Fourth of July with their families at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. A U.S. military statement said the three were still undergoing an "integration" process, presumably giving information about their captivity and their captors, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

U.S. involvement in the mission underlines the close ties between Washington and Bogotá, the Bush administration's closest regional ally. Colombia is the third-biggest recipient of U.S. military aid behind Israel and Egypt, receiving some $5.4 billion in U.S. aid since 2000. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and President George. W. Bush speak regularly by telephone, Colombian officials say. Trust between both sides is so strong that Mr. Uribe told Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain, who visited Colombia this week, about the mission on Tuesday night, the night before it took place.

"I think it was a sign of confidence of President Uribe and the defense minister in Sen. McCain and maybe the two of us that they were prepared to share this information...which was highly classified," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent who accompanied Sen. McCain to Colombia along with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.).

The successful rescue has boosted Mr. Uribe's political standing abroad in capitals other than Washington. Since he took office in 2002, the conservative has launched an aggressive military campaign against the FARC, which funds itself largely through drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping, holding nearly 700 hostages in the dense Colombian jungles.

Mr. Uribe's campaign has decimated the FARC and earned him high approval ratings at home, but also has drawn criticism from many Latin American and European governments that the Colombian leader has relied solely on a military solution to the insurgency at the expense of negotiations. Mr. Uribe, whose father was killed by the FARC in a botched kidnapping attempt, firmly believes the group won't negotiate unless it is forced to its knees.

Those differences also came into play over how to deal with some 40 hostages the FARC held for political purposes rather than for ransom, a number that until last week included the Americans and Ms. Betancourt, a dual French-Colombian national. Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and France's Nicolas Sarkozy urged the Colombian government to avoid any rescue mission that could endanger the hostages and negotiated directly with the FARC. This year, that approach gained momentum when the FARC released a handful of hostages through Mr. Chávez's offices.

But things changed dramatically March 1, when the Colombian military killed the FARC's No. 2 man, Raul Reyes, in a bombing raid on his camp just across the border in Ecuador. Laptop computers that belonged to Mr. Reyes showed that Mr. Chávez and the FARC were using the negotiation process to try to gain international legitimacy for the rebels and force Mr. Uribe to call off his military offensive.

Emails in the laptops also revealed that the FARC had no intention of releasing either the three Americans or Ms. Betancourt, calling her their most valuable negotiating card. But in one dramatic stroke this week, the rescue mission won support for Mr. Uribe's get-tough approach.

"I have to recognize that the strong hand has prevailed," said human-rights activist Robert Menard, founder and secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders. "Our insistence on the need to negotiate with the FARC, hoping they would release their most valuable card, was foolish."

Governments from Havana to Caracas to Paris moved closer to backing Mr. Uribe's campaign against the FARC. In Cuba, retired dictator Fidel Castro on Thursday praised the Colombian action and said the hostages should never have been held to begin with. Such a "cruel" detention was not justified by any "revolutionary purpose," Mr. Castro said.

Mr. Chávez, chastened by the revelations from the captured computers, also praised the rescue and called for the FARC to free all hostages and lay down their arms.

A high-ranking Colombian Army officer said the successful rescue operation could be a "tipping point" for the FARC, which in recent months has lost three of its top leaders and experienced the defections of hundreds of rebels, who are giving the Colombian military valuable information about the group's inner workings. "It's a brutal psychological hit," says the officer, who said he believes the rescue will lead to mutual recrimination among the rebels and sharpen rivalries between top FARC commanders, leading to further desertions.

Ms. Betancourt, kidnapped in 2002, has pledged she will lead a crusade to get foreign governments to increase their pressure on the FARC to give up the fight. On Friday, she arrived in France to a hero's welcome. Standing in a gilded room at the Elysée Palace, surrounded by supporters who had campaigned for her release, she expressed her gratitude for the country's support.

Ms. Betancourt, who said she will write about her experience in captivity, also defended France's decision to push for negotiations with the FARC, saying that a traditional army attack to free her would have failed. France's decision to push for a bloodless resolution "allowed discussions with the Colombian government, which led Mr. Uribe to undertake a different type of operation which led to our freedom."

The rescue had to rely on cunning rather than firepower. The hostages were held by veteran FARC guerrillas, who had orders to kill the hostages at first sight of an army rescue mission. On two prior occasions, once in 2003 and the last time in 2007, the guerrillas had massacred hostages in their control when approached once by the army and the other time by a force they thought were members of a rival band of guerrillas.

But in late May, an army captain and two colonels in Colombia's military intelligence came up with a solution: bluff the rebels into handing over the hostages willingly by making them think they were being transferred by a rebel-friendly third party to Alfonso Cano, the FARC's new leader. The idea was that Mr. Cano would use the hostages to restart the negotiation process with France and other nations.

The plan had a chance of working because, for months, in an operation one army officer likened to a "broken telephone," military intelligence had been able to convince Ms. Betancourt's captor, Gerardo Aguilar, a guerrilla known as "Cesar," that he was communicating with his top bosses in the guerrillas' seven-man secretariat. Army intelligence convinced top guerrilla leaders that they were talking to Cesar. In reality, both were talking to army intelligence.

Initially, the three officers who devised the scheme were told by their boss that the plan was simply too outrageous. But the men persisted, eventually winning over their boss and others higher up the chain of command. By the time it got to the defense minister, Mr. Santos, in early June, the plan was solid enough that he jumped at it.

Mr. Santos and Mr. Uribe believed that there was little risk the hostages would be killed if things went wrong. If the guerrillas felt it was a trick, they would move the hostages away without harming them. If something did go wrong, the worst that could happen was that the soldiers involved would be killed, but not the hostages.

Once given the green light, the military set up training facilities at a base a few hours from Bogotá. The ploy included a pair of undercover officers pretending to be rebels and about eight others, including a woman, to play the role of leftist sympathizers helping carry out the transfer. Former FARC guerrillas working for the military coached the soldiers playing guerrillas on how their former comrades walked and talked.

The undercover officers cultivated an unkempt appearance. Playing a convincing role was crucial because the undercover agents were to be unarmed during the mission. The military got two Russian-made helicopters and painted them in white and red, similar to ones used by Venezuela during the hostage release in January.

The timing of the raid was an open question. Some high-ranking military officers wanted to wait another 10 days to continue training the undercover agents. But Mr. Santos said he wanted to strike fast.

A few days before the operation, two delegates from the European Union came to ask the Colombian government for permission to speak to the FARC precisely to start negotiating more hostage releases. The Colombian government gave them permission and then leaked word to the press, which helped reinforce the impression to the rebels holding the hostages that the story about Mr. Cano was right.

"When that happened, I said 'God is on our side.' Let's do this operation now," Mr. Santos said.

Things went perfectly on the day of the operation. When the helicopter landed, one undercover soldier strolled off to take pictures of the jungle, as a tourist might do. Another two, disguised as television news crew wearing the red shirts and black vests usually worn by reporters from Mr. Chávez's Telesur network, who have been along on prior hostage releases, rushed Mr. Aguilar, and started interviewing him. "It inflated his ego," says a Colombian military officer.

Once the helicopter took off the undercover officers had to overpower the two FARC commanders accompanying them on the ride. The video released Friday shows the moment after the Colombian soldiers had overpowered the two guerrillas. "Ten years we've been waiting for the army," yells one newly freed captive as the others cry and hug each other.