Hostage Nation Read Online Free Page A

Hostage Nation
Book: Hostage Nation Read Online Free
Author: Victoria Bruce
Pages:
Go to
operations in Central and South America] informed of what we knew, and what the Colombians were finding. The Colombians were trying to get information from the FARC, trying to determine how to locate the Americans, trying to understand what the FARC’s intentions were.” By 12:30 a.m. on February 14, the embassy had issued an authorization order to put U.S. agents on the ground in the morning. At 4:00 a.m., Brig. Gen. Remo Butler, commander of Special Operations in Central and South America, arrived with a team of eight people. “We got there; we immediately checked into a hotel, got an hour or so of sleep, and then went over to the embassy for the first briefing. There was a great sense of urgency on getting those Americans back. I worked at the embassy for a while, got in contact with the people in SOUTHCOM, and at my headquarters in Puerto Rico, and kind of gave them my initial assessment.”
    Before 7:00 a.m. on February 14, Avendaño’s troops returned, to find the crime scene compromised by some local men picking through the wreckage. By 10:45 a.m.—more than twenty-six hours after the crash—Butler, Lawrence “Steve” McCune (the site manager of the company responsible for the Cessna missions), and FBI agent Alejandro Barbeito arrived on the scene. McCune would identify the body of the dead American as that of pilot Tommy Janis, and Barbeito would take possession of the remains. Members of the Colombian prosecutor’s office examined the crime scene and took possession of the body of Sgt. Luis Alcides Cruz. An Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) team inspected the equipment left in the wreckage and reported that it had been sufficiently destroyed by the crew before their capture. Within an hour, the bodies of Janis and Cruz were taken to the Larandia base and loaded onto a plane that would take them to Bogotá.
    Author Robert Kaplan, who was on the scene in Larandia, writes in
Imperial Grunts
that the Green Berets stationed at Larandia were demoralized by not being allowed to take part in the rescue. “We lost the initiative after we were made to stand down the first night,” Sergeant Pérez told Kaplan. “We were so afraid of getting our guyskilled that we let ’em get captured.” By midmorning of the fourteenth, the situation of the kidnapped Americans had turned from an emergency to a long-haul mission. Kaplan writes:
    In a hostage situation akin to a kidnapping, the first 24 hours are crucial, particularly the first night following the abduction. It may be the only time when a rescue squad can effectively keep the perpetrators from moving their prey out of the vicinity. All the satellite and other high-tech surveillance that the Americans would subsequently bring to bear on the crisis would never make up for that original 24-hour delay. The middle level officers had been ready to move, but then “Washington” took over.
    â€œYou have to remember,” argues General Butler, “Colombia is a sovereign nation and you do not just go into another sovereign nation and attempt to take over.” Butler worked with several Colombian generals and was pleased with how aggressively they were handling the situation. “We all worked together trying to formulate a plan to prevent the FARC from getting the hostages out of the area. Time was of the essence. The Colombians set up a cordon around the area. It was very simple. You look at the terrain, and you say, Okay, there are hostages, don’t know their condition. How fast can they move? So we put a cordon at a distance greater than possible for them to move. The strategy was to seal the guerrillas and hostages inside the zone and capture them. If they tried to break through the cordon, the Colombian troops would try to grab them on the way. That area is very dense. It’s mountainous, jungles—very difficult terrain to move in. And it looked like no matter what we did, they
Go to

Readers choose

Ham

Sam Harris

Chad Pelley

Lynn Costa

Dee J. Stone

Fern Michaels

Katia Nikolayevna

Ismaíl Kadaré

Tonya Ramagos

Diana Norman