Hostage rescue plan 'was bold and inventive'

Bogota: Colombian Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos told a special team of intelligence agents assigned with drawing up a hostage rescue operation to be inventive and bold.

The country's largest rebel group held more than 700 hostages throughout the vast jungle, and Santos knew that the insurgents would have the advantage in the face of a conventional rescue. Other army rescues had failed miserably, with guerrillas immediately shooting their captives dead as military helicopters approached.

"I told them, 'Use your imagination, be audacious and catch the enemy off guard'," Santos said in an interview.

"I said, 'Be creative so we can land an out-of-the-ordinary blow.'"

"The agents devised a complex operation that on July 2 tricked the rebels into handing over their four most prized hostages, including three Americans, along with eleven other prisoners. Since then, attention has focused on how Colombian intelligence officers hatched a ruse with no apparent precedent and what its success says about the internal disorder in what was once Latin America's most powerful rebel group.

State of deterioration

Analysts familiar with Colombia's long conflict say the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) is in a rapid state of deterioration that will result in its fragmentation into autonomous drug-trafficking bands or push its leaders into peace talks.

These analysts say the group is unlikely ever to recover the power it once had.

"It's a very hard blow against the guerrillas, the latest of many delivered all this year," said Carlos Lozano, editor of the weekly newspaper Voz and a Communist Party official who in the past was in frequent contact with rebel commanders.

Luis Eladio Perez saw confusion and even panic within the group during the seven years he spent as a hostage. Perez, who was recently freed in a unilateral gesture, said a string of military successes is "creating catastrophe inside the Farc, and that catastrophe is going to lead to defeat."

"In the Defence Ministry, the group of intelligence officers - including a colonel, a captain and lower-ranking officials - had worked diligently since January.

Perhaps their best weapons, officials familiar with the operation said, were reports that painted a guerrilla group in deep disarray, undergoing its worst crisis in its 44-year history.

Just a decade ago, the Farc had nearly 18,000 fighters, thousands of urban operatives, a formidable war chest and influence in more than a third of the country.

Now, hundreds of fighters are deserting each month, some fleeing with guerrilla funds and valuable strategic information.

Paranoia reigns inside the group's ranks, as commanders worry about who will abandon the group next, former rebels and military officials say.

One demobilised guerrilla commander recently told intelligence officials about the growing use of tribunals. In one unit, he said, 26 of 70 fighters were executed in five months.

The Farc's tactics have sparked criticism among some of the standard-bearers of the radical left in Latin America.

In Cuba, Fidel Castro wrote in his column that the Farc "never should have kidnapped civilians", calling the strategy cruel.

"No revolutionary purpose could justify it," he wrote. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who earlier this year said the Farc's goals merited respect, congratulated Colombian President Alvaro Uribe for the successful operation and reiterated recent comments calling for an end to the armed struggle in Colombia.

The most important development for the intelligence unit planning what would be the Farc's most humiliating defeat was the group's faltering communications system. Guerrilla commanders once openly talked on satellite phones. But with military operatives increasingly listening in, rebel communications have been reduced to couriers and carefully planned, succinct radio messages.

Computer found

One key message from January 18, discovered in the computer of a dead rebel commander, was of particular interest to the military high command because it showed the extent to which even members of the Farc's seven-man directorate are cut off from the units they command.

In the message, Jorge Briceno, a powerful leader known as El Mono Jojoy, wrote about how the guerrillas had misplaced a baby boy who was to have been liberated in a carefully orchestrated hostage release.

The unit that lost track of the boy was an important player in the drug trade - and authorities had thought Briceno would have kept closer tabs on its operations.

"Jojoy doesn't even know what happens in his own house," said Sergio Jaramillo, the vice-minister of defence.

"You see that and you say, 'These people don't even talk.' You see command-and-control breaking down."

The Farc's communications crisis provided rescue planners with a eureka moment - the idea for a sophisticated con that would plant a false message to prompt Gerardo Antonio Aguilar Ramirez, the head of the rebel unit guarding a group of high-profile hostages, to simply hand over his prisoners. Aguilar would be led to believe that a relief organisation sympathetic to the Farc would arrive in white helicopters - the same kind that Venezuela's government had used twice earlier this year in hostage handovers that Chavez and Farc leaders had planned.

The prisoners would then be transported to the rebel group's maximum leader, Alfonso Cano, according to the ruse.

"It was elaborate but based on a simple idea - how to get a message to them that they could not verify," Jaramillo said.

"We used their communications system and put a message on the other side saying it was an order from Cano."