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American spy planes carrying sophisticated jamming equipment blocked frantic attempts by a Colombian rebel commander to contact his superiors about last week's hostage handover, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt. Gerardo Aguilar RamÃrez, known to Ingrid Betancourt and her fellow captives by his alias, César, wanted to confirm orders delivered by hand to him by courier to transfer the hostages to a "humanitarian" mission arriving by helicopter on Wednesday.
The jamming operation, high above the Amazonian rainforest canopy, was the key, final element in an elaborate plan to hoodwink César into surrendering the communist rebels' most prized assets: the former presidential candidate Ms Betancourt, 46, three American defence contractors and 11 Colombians.
At a rendezvous point in a jungle opening he was told they were to be ferried by helicopter supplied by the "International Humanitarian Group" to a base where Alfonso Cano, the overall supremo of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), wanted to question them. César, a commander notorious for his cruelty, decided to comply with the instructions. He had tried to contact Cano on four separate occasions, unaware that intelligence aircraft were intercepting or blocking his radio and satellite phone communications.
In fact the orders were fake, sent to him by Colombian intelligence teams that had infiltrated the Marxist rebel force with well-paid double agents.
The audacious rescue in Operation Checkmate involved "a combination of electronic penetration of Farc's command and control and human infiltration into its guerrilla units", said John Marulanda, a Colombian special forces officer.
The Colombian mission was backed by a multi-billion dollar US spy operation and dozens of American officials who worked full-time at the US embassy in Bogota on rescuing the three anti-narcotics contractors, captured when their plane crashed in 2003.
The rebels, who are in an increasingly demoralised state after a series of recent raids against their high command, have been so well infiltrated that their communications by satellite, mobile phone and radio are routinely picked up by US monitoring. "The guerrillas thought that they were talking to their leaders when they were in fact talking to us," said the Colombian army chief, Gen Mario Montoya. |