Army chief under suspicion

WASHINGTON – The CIA has obtained new intelligence that the head of Colombia’s American-backed army collaborated extensively with right-wing militias that the U.S. considers terrorist organizations, including a militia headed by one of the country’s leading drug traffickers.

Disclosure of the allegation about army chief Gen. Mario Montoya comes at a time when the high level of U.S. support for Colombia’s government is under scrutiny from Democrats in Congress. The disclosure could heighten pressure to reduce or redirect that aid because Montoya has been a favorite of the Pentagon and an important U.S. partner in the U.S.-funded counterinsurgency strategy called Plan Colombia. The $700 million a year Colombia receives makes it the third-largest beneficiary of U.S. foreign assistance.

Montoya has a long and close association with Colombia’s president, Alvaro Uribe, and would be the highest-ranking Colombian officer implicated in a growing political scandal in Colombia over links between the outlawed militias and top officials. The scandal has implicated the country’s former foreign minister, at least one state governor, legislators and the head of the national police and has shaken Uribe’s government.

President Bush called Uribe a “personal friend” during a visit to Bogota, the Colombian capital, two weeks ago, and his government is one of the Bush administration’s closest allies in Latin America.

The intelligence about Montoya is contained in a report recently circulated within the CIA. It says that Montoya and a paramilitary group jointly planned and conducted a military operation in 2002 to eliminate Marxist guerrillas from poor areas around Medellin, a city in northwestern Colombia that has been a center of the drug trade.

At least 14 people were killed during the operation, and opponents of Uribe charge that dozens more disappeared in its aftermath.

The intelligence report, reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, includes information from another Western intelligence service and indicates that U.S. officials have received similar reports from other reliable sources.

In addition to his close cooperation with U.S. officials on Plan Colombia, Montoya has served as an instructor at the U.S.-sponsored military training center formerly called the School of the Americas.

There have been rumors that Montoya has worked with the paramilitaries, but no charges have been lodged by authorities.

For decades, Colombia has been wracked by a civil war that pitted left-wing militias against the government. An estimated 3 million Colombians have been forced from their homes and thousands killed during the course of the fighting. Right-wing paramilitary groups, long suspected of links to the government, joined the fight in the 1980s. They were formed ostensibly as defensive forces against leftist groups but soon became involved in massive land grabs, drug trafficking and business takeovers.

After his election in 2002, Uribe offered a plan to end the civil war under which 31,000 right-wing fighters have given up their weapons and dozens of their leaders have surrendered in exchange for the promise of light sentences.

But Uribe has faced a steady stream of disclosures about links between the paramilitaries and officials close to him. Allegations that the militias’ links reached to the top of the military probably will intensify efforts by Democrats to cut the Colombian military’s portion of a pending, multiyear, $3.9-billion aid package, congressional aides and regional analysts said. Eighty percent of U.S. aid to Colombia currently goes to the military and police.

In addition to the aid package, the administration is seeking congressional approval of a separate U.S.-Colombian trade deal that has met stiff opposition from Democrats.

The CIA document alleging Montoya’s ties to the paramilitaries was made available for review by the Times by a source who refused to identify himself except as a U.S. government employee. He said he was disclosing the information because he was unhappy that Uribe’s government had not been properly held to account by the Bush administration.

The CIA did not dispute the authenticity of the document, although agency officials would not confirm it. At the CIA’s request, the Times has withheld details of the document which agency officials said could jeopardize intelligence sources and methods. A spokesman urged against disclosure of the findings, saying that some are considered to be “unconfirmed” intelligence.

A key finding contained in the CIA document was that an allied Western intelligence agency reported in January that the Colombian police, army and paramilitaries had jointly planned and conducted the military sweep in 2002 around Medellin, known as Operation Orion.

The allied intelligence agency said its informant was a yet-unproven source, and cautioned that the report was to be treated as raw intelligence.

But the document also included a comment from the defense attaché of the U.S. embassy in Bogota, Col. Rey A. Velez, saying: “This report confirms information provided by a proven source.”

According to the document, the attaché said information from the proven source “also could implicate” the head of the Colombian Armed Forces, Gen. Freddy Padilla de Leon, who commanded the military in Barranquilla, in northeast Colombia, during the same period.

In an interview, U.S. officials said they have investigated whether Uribe himself has collaborated with the right-wing paramilitaries in illegal activities and have so far found no proof. But they emphasized that they also cannot rule it out.

One of the officials said that it would have been “unusual” for Uribe to be personally involved in the details of a military activity like Operation Orion.

One longtime Colombia analyst, Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said that any collaboration between Montoya and paramilitaries “would bring the army right into the heart of the scandal.” U.S. and Colombian officials have insisted that any links between the Colombian military and the militias were between only low-level, renegade officers.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has claimed that the scandal shows the need for a reassessment of U.S. support for Uribe. Many in Congress have contended that if aid to Colombia is not cut, it should at least be shifted so that more goes to nonmilitary purposes.

One of the U.S. officials interviewed said there are signs that the scandal will focus increasingly on the military, including Gen. Montoya.

“A lot of people in the political class are very nervous,” he said.