WASHINGTON — A CIA crew flying a narcotics surveillance mission over the Amazon misidentified a small aircraft carrying a family of U.S. missionaries as a possible drug smuggling operation, prompting the Peruvian air force to shoot down the plane, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Sunday.
But the official insisted that the CIA-hired pilot, co-pilot and systems analyst repeatedly tried to convince a Peruvian air force officer aboard their jet that he was acting too quickly in ordering an attack on the single-engine floatplane.
The three Americans then watched from a mile away as a two-seater Peruvian fighter jet fired machine-gun rounds into the unarmed Cessna and forced it down onto a river. A Baptist missionary and her infant daughter were killed. Peruvians in a dugout canoe rescued the dead woman's husband and son and the injured pilot.
Details of the incident were described by U.S. authorities Sunday as the three survivors returned to the United States and President Bush announced that similar surveillance flights were being canceled until the cause of the accident could be determined.
The three Americans on the surveillance mission were not full-time CIA staffers but work under contract for the agency, according to the senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity as a matter of government policy. Many covert CIA operations hire pilots and other operatives through contracts or front companies. U.S. officials declined to identify the three.
The incident, which occurred at midday Friday in northern Peru, was a stark reminder of the series of targeting errors by the CIA that led a U.S. bomber to mistakenly strike the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 Kosovo conflict in Yugoslavia.
In this case, the senior intelligence official insisted that the CIA had done nothing wrong because the crew had repeatedly warned that the plane's identity was in doubt.
"Everybody regrets the loss of life, but from what I've seen, our people acted professionally and appropriately," the official said.
Bush, speaking to reporters at the conclusion of the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, said the United States was still trying to determine what caused the deadly mistake.
"We've suspended such flights until we get to the bottom of the situation, fully understand all the facts, to understand what went wrong in this terrible tragedy," he said.
