Out of Captivity: Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

by Gary Brozek

  Tommy J and Tom were both in a bloodied daze off to the side of the plane. Tom glanced over at Keith.

  “What do you think?” Tom asked.

  Keith didn’t hesitate, figuring it was better to let me, as the newly minted operations officer, know the reality as he saw it.

  “We, sir, are fucked.”

  ONE

  Choices and Challenges

  February 13, 2003

  MARC

  The predawn hours in Bogotá are about as peaceful as the day ever gets there. A chaotic city just about any other time, it is nearly deserted at that hour. Few cars are on the road, and even fewer people. The only living things around seem to be the occasional feral cats and stray dogs who wander the streets—but even most of them know they’d be better off asleep.

  With such light traffic, I always sailed through stoplights on my way to work—we all did. There was an unofficial but spirited drive time competition going on at the office among Keith, Tom, and the other guys. Win or lose, those morning drives were a great way to start my day. They gave me a chance to prepare myself for what was in store.

  Cruising through the desolate Bogotá roads on the morning of the crash, I was thinking about what I had missed the night before when Keith Stansell, our pilot Tommy Janis, and Tommy’s wife, Judith, had asked me to join them for dinner. Living alone, good food wasn’t always easy to come by, but for some reason, I hadn’t gone with them. Now, with a slight grumble in my stomach, I was regretting that choice and realizing my meager breakfast that morning wouldn’t tide me over for long. With my stomach in mind, I listed the inventory of things I’d stuffed into my backpack that morning—a fleece pullover, the expense report I needed to mail that day, and some homework for the Spanish class I was taking. On top of that was my trusty can of tuna just in case Keith didn’t have my back (stomach) by bringing me one of his famous sandwiches and a Snickers bar.

  Mostly, though, I was thinking about how fortunate I was to be doing a job I enjoyed, working with people I liked, and anticipating the remaining twenty-two days of this twenty-eight-day rotation. I hadn’t been on this job for long, but part of its appeal was that it gave me two weeks off for every four weeks of work. Those two weeks between tours in-country had a lot to do with why I’d decided to switch jobs in the first place. No matter how good the work was, nothing could beat spending time with my wife, Shane, and my kids back in the Florida Keys.

  I rolled down the window of my Chevy Rodeo (a re-badged Isuzu) and the cool breeze that came in was crisp and dry. I didn’t mind. I needed anything to stay alert. Ever since I’d been in-country, I’d been struggling to sleep. Tom Howes told me that my response was typical of people adjusting to life at altitude. I’d gone from Florida flat to 8,200 feet high in Bogotá. My body was going to need some time to get used to it. As tired as I was, I enjoyed flying through traffic light after traffic light, the streets empty except for a couple of delivery trucks. That morning was a particularly good one, and I thought I’d be able to end a string of drive-time defeats at the hands of Keith and Tom.

  I wasn’t in a reflective mood that morning, just riding a literal and figurative high. I had a new job that paid me well. I was working with people I had come to respect for their service to our country, but who did not take themselves too seriously. I was also getting to know a culture and a place far different from my own, and a few times a week my coworkers and I would fly over some of the most beautiful countryside I’d seen.

  During those flights, we were mostly looking for coca fields and drug-processing labs under the control of the principal revolutionary group in Colombia, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). The FARC had been around for nearly forty years, beginning initially as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party. Their Marxist insurgency had ebbed and flowed over the years in terms of numbers and influence, but though their ranks had dwindled of late, their tactics had solidified. Their primary means of waging and funding their “war” was through extortion, kidnapping, and drug running. By gathering intelligence on the FARC’s drug connections, I was doing my part in the U.S.’s efforts to eradicate the coca crops and drug-trafficking infrastructure in Colombia. In 2002, 650 metric tons of cocaine were processed in Colombia, and the vast majority of the 494 metric tons of cocaine that made its way into the U.S. came from there. That was down more than 20 percent over 2001 figures, so whatever the joint effort between the U.S. and Colombia had been doing, it had been a success.

  I’d only been on the job since November of 2002, and four months into it, I was still very much in a honeymoon period. I was living in an apartment in the vibrant and historic Colombian capital. Though there were quite a few Americans in the city—embassy workers, contract workers, and other international personnel—our employer arranged for us to live in buildings that were occupied by Colombian nationals to minimize the danger to us.

  As Americans, we were always considered a kidnapping risk, and if anyone suspected that we were doing intelligence work on behalf of the U.S. government, our value as captives would rise. Colombia’s reputation as a place where for-profit kidnapping thrived was well deserved. The number of prominent military, political, and civilian captives being held by various groups, primarily the FARC, was troubling to say the least. By 2003, the number of yearly kidnappings had declined from the more than 3,500 committed in 2000, but the number of hostages still in captivity was among the highest in the world.

  I’d weighed this risk before deciding to go to Bogotá, and despite this threat, I didn’t find the place unsafe once I was there. I never walked around with my head on a swivel, suspecting that around every corner there was someone lurking who wanted to do me harm. In fact, it didn’t take me long to appreciate the culture of the city and the universal friendliness of the Colombian people. During those first few months on the job, there was little doubt in my mind that I had made the right choice for my life and my career. I’d always been told that life was all about the choices you make. While I don’t think that anyone would ever choose to go through a plane crash and become the hostage of a Marxist revolutionary group, I believed then, and do so even more strongly today, that things happen for a reason, that God has a plan for all of us.

  The plan that brought me to the jungles of Colombia on February 13, 2003, began when I joined the air force right out of high school. Eight years later, I left active duty and began working for a private defense contractor doing counternarcotic intelligence analysis. I enjoyed the work, though sometimes sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen and editing hours of video surveillance footage down to a ten-minute presentation got tedious. The rewards, financial and personal, offset whatever boredom I felt. I was doing what I considered to be important work, operating at a crucial rear-command position in America’s war on drugs. Being paid a more than decent wage and being able to provide a comfortable life for Shane; my sons, Cody and Joey; my daughter, Destiney, meant a lot to me. Living in and working in Key West, Florida, at the Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) East was better than slogging through winters back home in Connecticut.

  I’m no adrenaline junkie, so when the opportunity eventually came up for me to switch from intelligence analyzing to intelligence gathering in Colombia, I really had to think about it. The job interest was from a government contractor called California Microwave, which was a subsidiary of a larger government contractor called Northrop Grumman. I would receive a significant bump in pay, but strings were attached. I consulted with Shane. I would have to be separated from my family for weeks at a time. The last thing I wanted was to be away from them, but my father, George, had always drummed it into my head that you have to do whatever is necessary to provide for your loved ones. That’s what he did for my brother, Mike, and me and that’s what I wanted to do for my family. My kids and my wife weren’t starving, but rising prices and the prospect of the enormous cost of a college education for three kids were definitely weighing on my mind and my bank account. Being a
way from them would be hard, but if it meant they’d get the education they needed, it’d be worth it.

  If the separation wasn’t enough, this new job also carried the risk of physical harm, which gave me pause. My old work consisted of sitting behind a computer reviewing footage and documents. Now I would be in the thick of things, in the middle of the intelligence-gathering process, where a whole lot more could go wrong. California Microwave had been contracted to do aerial surveillance on the Colombian drug trade by the Department of Defense. The fact that I’d be working for Northrop reassured me that accepting the offer was the right move. Several subcontractors did this kind of work for the government, but knowing that we had the support of Northrop gave me the quiet confidence I needed to take this potentially hazardous job. Northrop took care of their employees, and I knew that if anything happened, they’d take care of me and my family.

  Ultimately, after assessing the risks and the increased salary with Shane, I signed on with California Microwave, and in November of 2002, I traveled to Colombia to be trained on the company’s Forward Looking Infra-Red (FLIR) surveillance equipment. I’d been flying and working down there—four weeks on, two weeks off—like clockwork ever since.

  When I arrived at the airport on the morning of the thirteenth, I showed my ID and passed through a series of security checkpoints to get to our operations headquarters. The road through the checkpoints was a collection of zigzags, almost like a maze, designed to keep your speed down so you couldn’t get up enough momentum to crash through a barrier. The last checkpoint was at Fast Eddie’s, a cluster of shipping containers that a guy we called Fast Eddie had converted into office space. He’d divided the structure into an administrative section where his daughter and brother handled the paperwork and phones for many of Eddie’s varied operations.

  Not only did Eddie believe in keeping business in the family, he believed in being in everybody’s business all the time—in the best way possible. Eddie was what some would call a fixer. A Colombian-born U.S. citizen who served in our air force, Fast Eddie was a consummate businessman, the real connection between the U.S. State Department and the Colombian government. He was our go-to guy who could make just about anything happen with a phone call. His white button-down and cuff links were his trademark uniform, and he had an air about him that immediately reassured you and made you wonder at the same time. But as fast as Eddie was, he didn’t play both sides—he was there for us and for U.S. efforts 24/7.

  The girls who did the administrative work for Fast Eddie—one of whom was his daughter Natalie—weren’t in yet, and I passed through their space into the recreation area, where the pool table and couches sat unused at this early hour. I walked out onto the tarmac past a row of civilian airplanes, most of them operated by U.S. companies and agencies. My first responsibility was to check the radio on our aircraft to be sure it was operational. After I completed that task, I contacted the folks at JIATF East to let them know the mission was a go and walked back into Fast Eddie’s, where I saw Keith sitting with Tom and Tommy Janis at a table in the rec area.

  Keith had indirectly been a part of my decision to come to Colombia. I had first met him when he came though Key West with another aircraft that California Microwave had set up to do drug interdiction work. Keith was one of the people responsible for overseeing the upgrades necessary to convert the Cessna Grand Caravan into a surveillance plane. For a few years, his outfit at California Microwave had provided my company with the raw intelligence I turned into reports. The first time I met Keith I was struck by his presence. At six foot two, he was nearly four inches taller than I was. He still wore his hair in a Marine’s brush cut, and his authoritative voice was just slightly tinged with a Florida drawl. His ability to convey both a seriousness and a good-ol’-boy casualness was impressive. He’d been there and done a lot of that, but he only told you about it when you asked.

  From the start, I liked and respected Keith, but despite our first meeting, I knew him more through reputation than firsthand knowledge. Still, the respect must have been mutual, since later on he told me that he and a common friend of ours had recommended me for the job at California Microwave. When I joined the crew in Colombia, he said he’d been hoping the company could find someone like me—someone with experience in knowing what the various agencies did with the raw intelligence these field operations gathered.

  In lots of ways, Keith and I couldn’t have been more different. As a northerner geographically and temperamentally, born to two first-generation immigrant parents, I tend to be a little bit quiet and reserved. I like to keep the peace at the expense of expressing my views or desires. Keith had no trouble making his opinions known, and he had the knowledge and experience to back up his claims about the work we were all doing. He’d been in Colombia for four years, first working for DynCorp, where Tom had also worked. Keith had also worked in other parts of the Colombia mission—interdiction through U.S. customs, out of Homestead Air Force Base while in the Marines—in all kinds of avionics-technician and aircraft-maintenance positions through the National Guard and in private industry. In the closed world of our occupation, he was someone with a good reputation who switched from maintenance to operations and had been flying missions for California Microwave the last two years.

  Tom Howes was just as different from Keith as I was. Though he’d never been in the military, on the surface he reminded me of some of my air-force colleagues. Outwardly more quiet and reserved than Keith, Tom possessed a sly sense of humor that you had to pay close attention to. He was like a master doctor who could give you the needle so expertly that you wouldn’t know you’d been jabbed until he walked away. Tom was several years older than Keith and me, and his glasses along with his wide, genial smile always helped his quick-strike wit catch you off guard. Along with his sense of humor came a studied seriousness about aviation and a breadth of knowledge about the region that impressed me. Tom’s passions seemed to be food and flying, and everyone benefited from his experience with both.

  Ever since I’d left the air force, one of the things I’d missed was the camaraderie. While a lot of the people I worked with prior to coming to Colombia were former active-duty military, there was something about being in-country that upped the we’re-all-in-this-together mentality. From my arrival, Keith had included me in the tightly knit group of men that made up the contract workers flying out of Bogotá International Airport. Nobody was outwardly rah-rah and gung ho, but you could tell that the shared experiences and similar dedication to an ideal formed a kind of locker-room bond. I was on my home cycle when a team photo was taken just a couple of weeks before the crash, but I’d seen it. There were a bunch of positive, happy, and good folks in that picture. I was only beginning to learn about the rough-and-tumble, hard living (and I mean that in the best sense) experiences some of them had.

  I’d flown with Keith and Tom only a few times prior to February 13, and both of them were, as far as my limited experience told me, real professionals who knew the coca-plant-eradication spraying programs and surveillance quite well. Essentially, we were providing the intel that would let those spraying units know where the coca fields were, while also giving the intelligence agencies the locations of the cocaine production labs, so that they could be destroyed. Wherever we flew, whatever we photographed or videotaped, the U.S. government had the ultimate control over our activities. Primarily the Department of Defense (DOD) called our shots, telling us where to go and what to look for. Whatever we produced, the DOD was supposed to share that information with other federal agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the FBI. We had some latitude on our flights, but not much. The whole time we had to be in near-constant radio communications with the DOD so they could verify our position.

  There is never a good time for anyone to experience an engine failure, crash landing, and capture, but this was particularly bad timing for both Keith and Tom. Keith was only into the third day of his curr
ent rotation, and after our mission that day, he was scheduled to fly back to the States to do some maintenance work on other aircraft that California Microwave leased. This was to be the only flight mission that Keith would participate in on this rotation.

  As for Tom, he found out shortly before takeoff that he’d be able to go home a week early, because he wouldn’t be flying any more missions this rotation, either. He was happy about the news. Late in 2002, after more than a few years as a vagabond pilot, he’d moved into his dream house in Merritt Island, Florida. Since that time, he’d only spent a total of twelve days in it. He was looking forward to some serious R&R after going through the drama of home-buying and moving.

  Seeing Keith, Tom, and Tommy sitting at Fast Eddie’s, I knew that the day’s flight would be getting under way soon. That morning while I’d been driving in and doing the initial radio check, Keith had gone to the U.S. embassy. Keith and I were to be the rear seaters on this mission, but given Keith’s experience on the job, he was to be the mission commander that day. In a sense, this was a practice mission for me, giving me more time behind the camera actually operating the equipment. Keith had called me the night before to go over some procedures, and with our scheduled 0700 departure, I knew that he had to be at the embassy by 0500 hours to meet with our Tactical Analysis Team (TAT). They would give him our target package—the places we’d be flying over and photographing and videoing—for the day, and these targets came straight from Southern Command, one of the groups within the Department of Defense that guided our missions. Because of the security risk of being in possession of the targets, we always had to go to the TAT on the morning of the flights.

  I’d done all this before, and when Keith and I flew together, we alternated who did the preflight at the airport and who went to our TAT at the embassy. On that morning it had been Keith’s turn, and when I saw him sitting with the two Toms, he had a familiar look on his face.