Hostage Nation

by Victoria Bruce

  But the dual-engine plane did not arrive before Tommy Schmidt, Ralph Ponticelli, and the remaining crew members were ordered back to work. “Tommy felt that if they could find [Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes], the Special Forces—the Delta Force that was down there—would go in and get them,” says Sharon Schmidt. “Ralph was one of these cheerleader guys who says, ‘Come on, guys. We’ve gotta go save ’em. It’s gotta be us.’ And I think Tommy just kind of got caught up in that. The U.S. Embassy was saying, ‘Oh, they’re here, they’re there. Go. And if you can confirm it, we can send someone in’—which was all lies. They weren’t going to send anybody in.”

  When the missions resumed, there were only two pilots in Colombia at the time, and Tommy Schmidt had to fly every mission. According to former CMS pilot Paul Hooper, Schmidt had always found it impossible to sleep during the day. Although Northrop Grumman denies that they were responsible for the CIAO employees, Patricia Tomaselli, Northrop Grumman’s director of security, spoke to Ponticelli and expressed her concern about the night flights, which she considered too dangerous. (Ponticelli had been the assistant site manager at CMS at the point the company became CIAO, Inc.) The possibilities for successful night reconnaissance were dubious because although the infrared instruments could show a temperature differential and identify the presence of humans, it would be impossible to tell who they might be. Tomaselli said that Ponticelli seemed determined regardless of the fact that the effort would probably not be successful. “He told me, ‘If they hear us above, at least they’ll know that we haven’t forgotten them.’”

  The March 25 departure—the eleventh day in a row of flying the night missions—was scheduled for late afternoon. Ponticelli and Schmidt would fly with the newest CMS pilot, James “Butch” Oliver, who had been on the job for just two weeks. Oliver was a good friend of Tommy Janis and had told his father that one of the main reasons he took the job was to help find Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes. Although Tommy was not superstitious, his wife says he felt an impending sense of doom about the entire operation. For her part, Sharon Schmidt wasn’t too worried; she’d always considered her husband to be invincible. Schmidt had been shot at several times before in Colombia. Once, a bullet came through the floor and went right up in front of him, about six inches from his crotch; another bullet lodged in the armrest. “They take ground fire and they don’t even know it, because with the roar of the engine, you don’t even really hear it. So taking ground fire is just something that you hope doesn’t hit anything critical.”

  Possibly because he was exhausted by the ceaseless schedule, Tommy Schmidt sat as copilot to the less experienced Oliver as they took off on March 25 from the Bogotá airport. Checking the instruments, Ponticelli noticed that something on the aircraft’s transponder was not working. He likely wasn’t particularly worried—small fixes to the planes were needed after many of the flights—he would report it to home base when they arrived in Larandia to refuel. Everything went as planned, and two and a half hours later, they were at the base. The sun dropped down behind the mountains just before they landed, and dusk quickly turned to darkness.

  Soon after the plane arrived in Larandia, several Colombian witnesses heard a terrible argument break out among the Americans. None of the witnesses knew English and therefore they couldn’t understand what the fight was about. At 7:00 p.m., with the Cessna fuel tanks at their capacity, Schmidt, Oliver, and Ponticelli readied for departure. Although the flight plan on file noted that there was a Colombian host-nation rider on board, there was no such person. The plane lifted into the darkness. Moonrise was a long way off, and cloudy skies hid the stars. To avoid potential gunfire from nearby FARC guerrillas and to clear the foothills, they were on a trajectory to climb to five thousand feet above the airport before heading out over the terrain. They should have been on the same flight path that Schmidt had taken nearly a hundred times before.

  Ten minutes after takeoff, Colombian soldiers posted on a ridge heard the plane approaching. It was on a totally different trajectory than the one the Cessnas usually flew when leaving the airstrip. One soldier would report that it seemed from the irregular sound that something was wrong with the plane’s engine. Then he heard the engine shut down, and the plane began to descend. Through the darkness came a loud crack as the plane’s wing collided with a tree. The Cessna dipped sharply left and spun into a nosedive. Weighed down with fuel, heavy equipment, and the three crew members, the plane plunged three hundred feet into a gully. A deafening noise echoed through the rocky mountain slopes as the Cessna crashed nose-first into a shallow creek bed and erupted into a fireball. On the ridge, the soldiers watched, knowing there was nothing they could do. “It was a huge explosion,” says one witness. “There were no indications that anyone had survived.”

  In California that evening, Sharon Schmidt saw news about the crash on the Internet. She spent the next few hours frantically searching for word of her husband. At 2:00 a.m. she read a report that said three Americans aboard the plane were dead. She called CMS headquarters in Bogotá, and Steve McCune told her that the Internet reports were false. “He told me, ‘No, that’s not true. That’s not them. We haven’t heard from them on the radio, but it’s not crashed.’” McCune told Sharon Schmidt that he would call when he found out more, but she says, “He never called back to tell me that the plane had crashed. He never did. I got it all from the Internet. McCune was denying it, and he told me, ‘No, don’t come down here. No, there’s no reason for you to come.’” Sharon would find out later, when she went to Colombia to investigate her husband’s death, that two men armed with a letter signed by McCune had forced the assistant manager of La Fontana to open the Schmidts’ apartment door. “They took everything from the apartment safe. They took our computer. They took all of our discs. They took all the pictures, which really pissed me off.” Sharon never got any of the discs or the pictures back. “I got the computer back eventually. But just like Ralph’s computer, the hard drive was gone.” Sharon Schmidt was incensed. But a Colombian businessman who worked closely with the CMS crew defended McCune’s actions as necessary to protect the deceased’s privacy in the case of any extramarital relations that the men might have had. “Steve made sure that he did a sweep-up of the apartments to protect any harm to wives and families,” he said.

  The following morning, the Colombian soldiers who had witnessed the crash hiked down to secure the crash site. Later that day, McCune arrived with several others by helicopter to collect the remains of the men. The Cessna’s aluminum fuselage was completely crushed by the impact and blackened by the fire. The bodies were charred trunks strapped into their seats. Tommy Schmidt had been decapitated. The back of Ponticelli’s skull was missing. Former CMS pilot Phill Bragg (who suspects he was terminated by Northrop Grumman in December 2002 for throwing his support to Paul Hooper and Doug Cockes over their concerns about safety) was not surprised when he heard the news of the second crash. “I can only imagine how chaotic the atmosphere was down there after that first crash,” says Bragg, who believes that the accident was due to pilot error. “It just didn’t surprise any of us once we knew Tommy was down there with an inexperienced guy in the cockpit with him, and Ralph in the backseat just egging ’em on. It was just a recipe for disaster.”

  Sharon Schmidt found it impossible to believe the initial reports that the cause of the crash was solely due to collision with a tree. Although Oliver’s remains were found in the left seat, she did not believe that her husband would have let Oliver fly unless Schmidt was completely unable to pilot the aircraft. The autopsy reports on the men were not released, but the Colombian pathologist found multiple bullets in the bodies of all three cadavers. The explanation was that the men’s own weapons exploded in the fire; however, if a ballistics report was ever done, it was never released to the families. Sharon Schmidt was convinced that something happened to the engine, making it impossible for her husband to control the aircraft, and that they could have been taking fire from guerrillas, wh
ich would account for the bullets in the men’s bodies.

  Ralph Ponticelli’s father, Louis, a retired aircraft mechanic, felt that there could have been damage to the engine before the flight, because the engine showed signs of erosion caused by water. “There was no rain the night of the crash; there was no rescue equipment to put a fire out with water. Where did the water come from?” he says. He also wondered whether the crew could have taken accidental fire from the Colombian military. “When I asked the State Department, ‘Were they shot down?’ They told me, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. No, there’s no signs of bullets.’ I said, ‘Look, you jackasses, two-thirds of the aircraft was consumed by fire. How can you say without a reasonable doubt that they weren’t shot down?’” Ponticelli said that the only way his son’s skull could have been blown half off was “by getting hit by a pretty good-size bullet. There was only one heavy machine gun in that valley that night, and it belonged to the Colombian army. And seeing that there were no lights [on the plane], the Colombians get trigger-happy, and they will shoot anything at night. So there’s a damn good possibility that this was friendly fire.”

  Albert Oliver, the father of Butch Oliver, felt that there was something even more sinister behind the bullets found in his son’s remains. “First it was rumored that they had been shot down, but I knew that was a real long-range possibility,” he says. “I really believe that the men [Ponticelli, Oliver, and Schmidt] were having some terrible disagreements when they were conducting the search down there. I firmly believe that if they were as mad at each other as they say they were—we heard tales that they were really going at it—there’s a good possibility that one of them went berserk and shot my son ten minutes after he took off.”

  For the families, finding out exactly why the plane had crashed became all the more essential when they each opened identical letters from Northrop Grumman’s insurance company. “I received a letter from the claims administrator for Gerber Life Insurance, telling me that Northrop had notified them that my husband had been ‘terminated’ and my claim for the personal accident insurance was therefore ineligible,” says Sharon Schmidt. There would be no insurance or benefits for her and her son. It was the same news received by the families of Ralph Ponticelli and Butch Oliver: The families of the crew should expect nothing from the Northrop Grumman Corporation. The company claimed that Schmidt, Ponticelli, and Oliver were not employees of Northrop Grumman when they died. It stated that, instead, they worked for an unaffiliated company called CIAO, Inc. The families would not receive the $350,000 death insurance benefits that the men had under CMS because the policies had expired two days before the crash, and CIAO had not renewed the policies.

  Sharon Schmidt was positive that her husband had refused to sign any paperwork related to transferring his contract from CMS and Northrop Grumman to CIAO. “The fact of the matter is that my husband never received a paycheck from anyone other than Northrop, and a contract between my husband and CIAO never existed,” she says. When news reporters repeatedly called CIAO, Inc., for more information, they reached only voice mail. Calls were never returned, and the company’s address led to an empty office space at a rural Maryland airport. Northrop Grumman also refused to comment on the crash.

  Sharon Schmidt begged Senators John McCain and John Kerry to launch a congressional inquiry into the legality of how the company had handled the crashes and the company turnover. Schmidt said that she hoped such an investigation would also “help lead to a positive course of action to secure the release of Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell and Tom Howes. It would certainly show that Congress is more concerned than the current administration about the three hostages and their safe, expedient return.” Neither war-hero senator (and in the case of McCain, a former prisoner released through a negotiated agreement between the United States and North Vietnam in 1973) pressed for an investigation or made any gesture to find a solution to the hostage crisis. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, who became involved after Schmidt contacted her, told The New York Times, “My complaint about use of private contractors is their ability to fly under the radar and avoid any accountability. Now we’re finding out that because of their low profile, and so little scrutiny, they [corporations] are able to avoid liability or responsibility for these individuals.” But the July 2003 crash report issued by the Department of the Navy would state that the absence of accountability to the U.S. government on the part of Northrop Grumman and CMS was precisely the idea behind having contractors handle the missions.

  While Sharon Schmidt and the families of Butch Oliver and Ralph Ponticelli filed lawsuits against Northrop Grumman, the complex relationships among all of the contractors and subcontractors made it exceedingly difficult for the attorneys pursuing the cases. The SRS contract still remained with Lockheed Martin under a massive megacontract with the Communications and Electronics Command (CECOM) of the U.S. Army. So when Northrop Grumman chose to rid themselves of California Microwave Systems and CIAO was created, it was the responsibility of Lockheed Martin to request the switch from CECOM. The request was a formality that CECOM agreed to without objection. What likely seemed an abomination to the families of the deceased was actually perfectly legal.

  While Northrop Grumman denied any responsibility for those killed in the second crash, the company continued to do everything they could for the families of Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes. It was the U.S. government that garnered the ire of the hostages’ loved ones. The State Department continued to call weekly, always stating that there was nothing new to report but claiming that everything possible was being done to find the men and secure their release. However, sources in Bogotá who worked closely with the American embassy never saw anything being done by the Americans in terms of rescuing the men, although U.S. dollars for Plan Colombia continued flow to antinarcotics missions. Plan Colombia was also funding Special Forces brigades to train Colombian troops in the town of Arauca (on the border with Venezuela), where they were tasked with guarding an Occidental Petroleum pipeline. Dozens of other American troops were training Colombians in counterguerrilla tactics across the country, but the rules of engagement continued to prohibit U.S. forces from entering combat or searching for the American hostages on the ground.

  On July 4, 2003, more than four months after the crash, a letter arrived at the California Microwave Systems headquarters in Bogotá. Colleagues of the hostages felt that the letter was a testimony to how incredibly detached the U.S. military actually was from the case of the missing Americans. It was a birthday greeting to Thomas Howes from the head of the United States military group in Colombia:

  Mary Ellen and I join your family and friends in wishing you a very happy birthday! We hope that there are many happy prosperous years to come. Thank you for all of your hard work and dedication to US Southern Command and US Military Group, Bogotá. Best wishes to you—I hope you enjoy your day!

  P. K. Keen, Colonel, U.S. Army, Commanding.

  12

  Botero

  Two and a half years before the Cessna crash and hostage taking of Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes, forty-four-year-old journalist Jorge Enrique Botero emerged from the jungle of southern Colombia with video interviews of Colombian army soldiers and National Policemen who had been held hostage for as long as three years by the FARC. The shocking images created a firestorm and became the catalyst for a massive prisoner exchange between Pastrana’s government and the guerrillas. Botero was very proud of the work he had accomplished with this story, but the images of those he had recorded would haunt him so intensely that he grew to believe that he would never be released from the grip of the story of the secuestrados (hostages) until all of the captives were free.

  For Botero, the incredible suffering of the hostages and their families was just another in a long list of his country’s human injustices that had tormented him throughout his life and career. Born in 1956, Botero lived with his family in the north of Bogotá—a city divided between the poor south and the rich north. I
t was a world of excess, with large American-style homes full of housekeepers, exclusive golf and tennis clubs, and expensive schools. Nearly every family in the wealthy area of Bogotá left the bustling city each weekend for fincas, sprawling recreational properties, which ranch hands and caretakers ran so that well-to-do owners could enjoy the environmental and social riches of their beautiful country.

  At home, the only son in a family of six children, Jorge Enrique was constantly arguing with his conservative father. “I remember those long debates he had with our father about politics and about human rights and things like that,” says Botero’s youngest sister, Angela. “Our father was politically very right—the son of a minister of public works under President Mariano Ospina in 1948—and very traditional. That’s why sometimes Jorge Enrique and my father had big differences about how they saw life and how they saw politics and economics and even literature. They had very opposite views.” Jorge Enrique was tremendously spoiled by his mother, his five sisters, and his two grandmothers, and he reveled in the attention. Perhaps because of his charm and charisma, which were evident at an early age, Jorge Enrique’s conservative mother became swayed by her son’s passion. “She always listened to him very carefully,” recalls Angela. “And I think she has been very open-minded. She was raised by a very traditional family, but she started changing the way she saw things.”

  Journalist Jorge Enrique Botero (right) covering a conflict for the news program 24 Horas in 1995. More than 100,000 coca growers were marching to protest fumigation and were stopped by Colombian troops with bullets and tear gas. Photo: Felipe Caicedo.

  In college in 1975, Botero joined the Juventud Comunista. “That was a very important political party during that time. And he was really involved,” says Angela. In Colombia, the 1970s were a time of enormous student agitation, and as the president of the student council, Botero led several strikes and street marches, which almost always ended in confrontations with the police. “At the time I entered the university,” Botero says, “I wasn’t only ready but anxious to be part of the student groups that fought alongside the workers, the farmers, and, many times, the guerrillas, to change our country.” The students demanded better salaries for workers, a better educational system in Colombia, and social programs for the poor. They punctuated their cries with violence, throwing rocks at police barricades. In 1978, during a national day of protest against the government, Botero was detained by the National Police. At the time, the city was under martial law. “The police could take you, bring you to prison, and the same police could condemn you,” Botero recalls. “There weren’t judges or anything.” Botero’s family was devastated when they learned of his arrest, but not surprised. “I think my parents already understood that it was going to be a ride for the rest of his existence,” says Angela. “It was tough for everybody, but it was his decision. And he had been doing pretty much what he believed in.” After several days of physical abuse and threats (at one point a gun was put to his head), a police captain sentenced Botero to six months in jail.