Hostage Nation (25 page)

As he was transported from the helicopter and taken by car to Cómbita prison outside of Bogotá, Simón Trinidad cheered to the television cameras for Simón Bolívar and for FARC commander in chief Manuel Marulanda. After he was placed in solitary confinement, his only friendly visitors were his lawyer and, once, his mother. (After her visit, his mother received death threats from sources she believed to be close to the government, so she decided to leave the country.) Trinidad did have other “visitors”: a pale parade of U.S. government agents passed through his cell. Some of the gringos acted friendly; some were threatening. All of them asked him to collaborate, to give them information about the FARC, and to tell them where the American hostages were being held. If Trinidad knew, he did not tell them. (Eight months earlier, on April 27, 2003, the FARC had released a communiqué, in which it named Trinidad as a FARC representative to negotiate for the Americans and other political prisoners. The memo put Trinidad high on the radar of U.S. intelligence.)

Shortly after his capture, the call to extradite Trinidad to the
United States came as a joint effort by the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the State Department. Whether his extradition would hurt the situation of the American hostages “was toiled over on an interagency basis,
a lot,”
said a State Department counterterrorism official who was involved in the case. “The bottom line was: Will we further endanger the hostages beyond the danger they're in now by bringing Trinidad up here and trying him? There was some spirited conversation, but it was decided that, based on the FARC's previous activities, we could [extradite Trinidad] without endangering the hostages. Anyway, the likelihood of them ever letting these guys out, we knew, was between zero and zero point one percent.” The official said that he and his counterterrorism colleagues believed that the FARC were already angry with the United States for helping fund the Colombian army, which was bombing the guerrilla camps. “It's probably not much of a stretch to say that indicting one guy [Simón Trinidad] who's been out of circulation for a while is not going to further tick them off.”

On December 31, 2004, Trinidad's nightmare of being exiled from his country became a reality. From the window of a U.S. government Gulfstream jet, as the clock struck midnight and the new year began, the guerrilla commander gazed out at the lights of Bogotá. Alejandro Barbeito was one of the FBI agents on board the plane. He had been on the hostage case since the beginning, when he collected Tommy Janis's body from the crash site. On the airplane, Trinidad talked openly with Barbeito about his life in the FARC and his reasons for traveling to Ecuador. He also told Barbeito that he did not believe in the policy of kidnapping because it was difficult and costly to the guerrillas. He also tried to give Barbeito advice on dealing with the hostage situation. “He said, ‘Why doesn't the U.S. government establish official contact with the FARC?'” says Barbeito. “And I explained to him that, no, I was not allowed to do that because the FARC is a designated terrorist organization. And then that's when he suggested that we do things—and he said,
‘por debajo de la mesa'
—‘under the table,' which means,
unofficially.”
Barbeito asked Trinidad if he could be of any assistance in that regard. “I was hoping that he would cooperate with us, given his status in the FARC and his being named as the FARC negotiator involving our three hostages.”

One month after Trinidad's celebrated arrest, in February 2004, another FARC member would become an actor in the international hostage drama. While traveling to a meeting with other FARC commanders, Sonia (the commander who controlled the river outpost Peñas Coloradas) and two fellow guerrillas, Juancho and Pantera, decided to spend the night at her brother's farm. There wasn't even the slightest indication of Colombian military in the zone, so they decided that no one needed to stand guard. Sonia went to bed in her underwear, left her weapon tossed on the floor, and fell into a deep sleep. Her comrades slept in various areas of the house. About three in the morning, a terrible roar reverberated through the house. Sonia knew immediately that it was a helicopter. She peeked through a crack in the curtain at enormous rotors practically grazing the house. Soldiers descended from a rope ladder like spiders. Sonia dressed in an instant and grabbed her weapon, her radio, and a book full of details of her business dealings in Peñas Coloradas. In complete darkness, the three guerrillas moved like shadows, trying to find an escape route. If they were able to head for the mountains, Sonia knew, they could escape. But their only exit was blocked by a chicken coop, so the three hid in the bathroom and made a pact to escape or die. Sonia quickly shoved her book into a space in the ceiling. As the soldiers entered the house, Sonia whispered that they should fire shots as they exited and search for a way to escape. When the commandos were less than three feet away, Juancho jumped out, with his pistol ready to fire, but before he could, he was hit by a direct shot to his face and fell dead. The tip of Sonia's rifle reflected a bit of light and a soldier pushed his hand into the bathroom and grabbed the AK-47 by the barrel.

“He told me to let go of it,” Sonia says. “They threw me down on the floor and a soldier put his foot on my neck.” When she saw them stepping on her comrade Pantera, who had been taken down and handcuffed, she protested. “I told them, ‘You already have him under control. Take your foot off his neck.'” Sonia prayed that the soldiers tearing the house apart would not find the book she'd hidden in the bathroom ceiling, which would implicate her and many other FARC members. After searching the house for two hours, the commandos loaded Sonia, Pantera, and Juancho's corpse into the helicopter. Then
they grabbed Sonia's brother and sister-in-law, the farm's cook and her two-month-old baby, and a sick woman who had been staying in the house and forced them into the helicopter as well. They also confiscated several kilos of cocaine paste and 27 million pesos (approximately ten thousand dollars) that belonged to Sonia's brother, a midlevel drug runner. The group arrived at the military base in Larandia blindfolded and handcuffed and then were taken to a large office where, she says, “some agents harassed us with obscene gestures with their fingers. They called me by my name, and they were celebrating the success of their operation, which included the infiltration of satellite telephones into our ranks.”

Sonia was then transferred to the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá for further questioning, specifically about the three kidnapped Americans: Where were they being held? Who had them? Who kidnapped them? But Sonia had had nothing to do with the kidnapping and could tell them nothing. The U.S. agents also drilled her about the guerrilla organization and asked her for the names of the FARC Secretariat. “They told me that I should collaborate, should talk. They offered to bring my child and family to the United States in exchange for providing information. Otherwise, I would be extradited, locked in a dark room, and I would have to spend many years without seeing my family. They tried to pressure me by saying that the Secretariat was going to have me killed because I knew so much.” Sonia was transferred to a women's prison in Bogotá. The guards at the Buen Pastor jail had rarely seen a prisoner like her; she acted almost like a rabid animal when they approached her cell. After a brief trial, a judge sentenced Sonia to fifty-six months in prison. The conviction was for “rebellion.” What was much worse than the relatively light sentence was that Sonia awaited extradition to the United States on charges of narco-trafficking. “The biggest narco-traffickers are strolling around the streets, sitting in the Congress of the Colombian Republic and in high positions of power,” Sonia told a reporter after hearing of her pending extradition. “My only crime is to have rebelled against the violent, anti-democratic, and inhumane State.”

After several months in solitary confinement, she was abruptly taken from her cell. “When they woke me up, it was barely dawn. They
told me to pack some clothes and they put me into a military vehicle. The guard who took me said, ‘This is for your security,
mamita.'”
When they forced her onto an airplane, Sonia had no idea where they were taking her. But on the trip, she looked out the window and saw a large expanse of deep blue water, which she assumed was the ocean. The plane landed after an hour, and Sonia recognized she was at the Juanchaco military base on Colombia's Pacific coast. She'd seen the area on television in 1994 when the then president, César Gaviria, had invited U.S. forces to build a school for antinarcotics training on the military base without seeking the approval of the Colombian Congress. The move had caused a public outcry, and the court ruled that allowing American troops to enter Colombia without congressional approval was unconstitutional. An angry Gaviria told the media, “I am surprised that Colombians demand more international cooperation in the fight against drugs and then criticize such operations.” At the same time, American and Colombian officials admitted only that the work on the base was an “army exercise,” and denied that the operation involved antinarcotics activities.

From Juanchaco, Sonia was forced into a helicopter and delivered to what she believes was a U.S. Navy frigate. “On the frigate, I spent more than twenty horrible days, vomiting everything I ate, with an eternal dizziness.” But there was something that gave the untraveled guerrilla a sizable amount of pride as well. Two years later, from her jail cell in Washington, D.C., she would brag to Jorge Enrique Botero, “I had the good fortune to see the ocean. What do you think of that, journalist?”

At Control Risks, just a few miles from the D.C. Jail, Gary Noesner was incensed by the charade that had brought Trinidad to the United States, and he felt that his former colleagues at the FBI were totally mishandling the case. “The strategic incompetence of extraditing Trinidad in the middle of what was going on with the Americans ran smack in the face of all these government people who stand in front of the families and say, ‘The freedom of your guys is the most important thing in the world to us.' That was pure crap, and their actions certainly didn't support their words.” Noesner believed that Trinidad's extradition would be a nail in the coffin for the three Americans. Months
before, he'd helped Northrop Grumman craft a letter to the Department of Justice, begging that they not make such a grave mistake. Noesner believed that the FARC would demand Trinidad's return in exchange for the Americans, and he was sure that the U.S. government would never let that happen. Two months after Trinidad landed on U.S. soil, Sonia was also in the D.C. Jail, and Noesner's prediction had come true. The FARC demanded that, as a condition to release the “exchangeables” (which included Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes), all incarcerated FARC members must be freed, including Sonia and Trinidad. It was all becoming an inconceivable mess.

FBI negotiator Chris Voss would disagree with his former mentor about extraditing Trinidad. “That was one of the things that I actually thought was a smart move. Your adversary has to respect you. The FARC is not going to deal with anyone who they think is weak,” he says. After nearly two years had passed, Voss was not afraid that the FARC would kill the Americans, because they considered them to be so valuable. However, he was still gravely concerned for their safety. “We completely changed our threat assessment to include
all
peril that they faced. And the real threat to these guys was from disease and dying in the jungle. And absent the change in the [U.S.] government's approach, the risk that these guys would end up dying in the jungle was very high.”

While the former FBI colleagues did not see eye-to-eye on the subject of Trinidad, Voss completely agreed with Noesner's take on the FARC as “an organization that never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Days prior to Trinidad's scheduled departure for the United States, Álvaro Uribe had offered to cancel his extradition if the three Americans were released, but the FARC did nothing. “Imagine the world's response if the FARC's response to the extradition and prosecution of Trinidad and Sonia was to hold a very public humanitarian, spontaneous, unconditional release of one of the American hostages,” Voss says. “How much pressure would there have been? It would have embarrassed the U.S. government and the Colombian government. Nobody would have known what to do with that.” However, it would be another two years after Trinidad's extradition before the guerrillas would consider the idea of releasing one of the hostages in the hope of just the reaction that Voss was predicting.

B
y mid-2004, a year had passed since Botero's interview with the three Americans, and the fact that they were still stuck in the jungle along with forty-seven other political prisoners continued to haunt him. Many times he awoke terrified and sweating, recalling the beige shawl that captive congresswoman Consuelo González de Perdomo had given him to take to her daughters; the desperate letters from Gloria Polanco, a woman who had been kidnapped with her two teenage sons and then separated from them while in captivity; the perpetual smile of Alan Jara, the former governor of Meta, who taught Russian and English to his companions in captivity. “The images of Marc, Keith, and Tom appeared to me at all hours of the day, becoming a kind of torture. Almost no one was interested in the case of the hostages. My stories were broadcast on television and radio and published in newspapers or magazines. But the following day, other news buried them and everything returned as it was before: into oblivion.”

The only interest in the hostage situation came from Canada and several European countries, including France, Belgium, Spain, and the Netherlands, where private citizens formed Ingrid Betancourt support committees and various lawmakers made public calls for the FARC to release the hostages. Support came most strongly from the French government and President Jacques Chirac, who, because of a groundswell of public pressure to free Betancourt, pushed Uribe's government to make an exchange happen. Chirac even offered to allow FARC guerrillas released from prison to emigrate to France. Uribe denied Chirac's requests, and diplomatic ties between France and Colombia were severely strained when French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin tried to coordinate the release of Betancourt without the authorization of the Colombian government.