By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer

When a Colombian army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed in October, the government in Bogota blamed pilot error. But according to a Pentagon review of
the incident, the loss was a guerrilla kill, pure and simple.

The army, carrying reinforcements to the besieged northwest Colombian town of Dabeiba, flew straight into an ambush by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, a senior Pentagon official said. As the first of two Black Hawks hovered at about 15 feet to check the landing zone, waiting rebels opened fire,
pumping at least 25 rounds into the pilot, he said. When the aircraft, with 22 soldiers on board, slammed to the ground, all who were still alive were shot and killed.

"The military hadn't done adequate reconnaissance, and the guerrillas kicked their [rear end]," said the official, who asked not to be identified. "If you let the FARC
sit there for a couple of months and plan an ambush, and you're dumb enough to walk into it, you're going to get whacked. And that's what's been happening in
Colombia."

Within the next several weeks, the United States will begin to find out whether months of U.S.-provided training, new equipment and better intelligence tools can
reverse that years-long pattern. Two U.S.-trained Colombian battalions are gearing up to launch their initial offensive against cocaine production in the southern part
of the country, where leftist guerrillas and a right-wing paramilitary army guard vast coca fields, clandestine drug laboratories and export routes.

"We're approaching crunch time," said the Pentagon official. "We'll find out in January" whether the military's southern offensive will demonstrate, for the first time in
Colombia's protracted guerrilla war, that it can seize and hold the initiative.

This crucial moment comes as the Clinton administration prepares to turn the problem of Colombia policy over to new White House stewardship. Senior officials at
the Pentagon and State Department, and within the White House, have been working on a transition document spelling out the complicated state of play in Colombia,
what is supposed to happen next and what could go wrong.

Virtually all U.S. officials closely involved in the policy have either announced their intention to leave government -- including Undersecretary of State Thomas R.
Pickering and the White House drug policy chief, Barry R. McCaffrey -- or are political appointees eligible for replacement by the new administration.

President-elect Bush said during the campaign that he generally supports President Clinton's $1.6 billion Colombia initiative. The plan received bipartisan support in
Congress last summer. But none of Bush's senior advisers -- including newly designated secretary of state Colin L. Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza
Rice -- has experience in Latin America or international drug policy.

Bush's one campaign speech on Latin America, delivered in Miami in August, dealt primarily with trade issues. Remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations by Bush
foreign policy adviser Robert B. Zoellick in October, released in summary form, led some to conclude a Bush administration was prepared for an even bigger
commitment to Colombia.

"We cannot continue to make a false distinction between counterinsurgency and counternarcotics efforts," the summary quoted Zoellick as saying. If Colombian
leaders have the political will to "take their country back from killers and drug lords . . . then the U.S. should offer serious, sustained and timely financial, material and
intelligence support."

Although McCaffrey estimates it will take the U.S.-backed strategy in Colombia five years to begin stemming the growth of cocaine and heroin exports, funding for
the program runs out at the end of this fiscal year. New budget figures being drawn up by Clinton officials for proposal to Bush contemplate maintenance for the
Colombia program and, according to Pickering, major new expenditures and increased U.S. involvement in surrounding countries.

The plan envisions significant new anti-drug funding for Peru, where previous military successes against traffickers may have played out and there are indications that
peasant farmers are once again growing coca, said a senior State Department official who asked not to be named. In Bolivia, farmers have rebelled against
government efforts to force them into crop substitution, and President Hugo Banzer wants more money to support the effort.

Ecuador is a major staging point for U.S. drug reconnaissance flights in the region and is facing a growing threat of incursions by guerrillas, displaced peasants and
drug crops over its border with Colombia. The planning also envisions participation by Panama and Venezuela, both of which have vulnerable borders, although
neither has indicated it wants to be part of a comprehensive U.S. plan.

The extent to which the new administration may alter the Clinton program is likely to be influenced by a group of powerful House Republicans -- including
International Relations Committee Chairman Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.) -- who voted for it despite deep disagreements over the way the Colombia money was
distributed and who have complained ever since.

At the same time, there have been significant changes in Colombia since the U.S. aid program was drawn up nearly a year ago. They will make any U.S.-Colombian
strategy more difficult.

Current policy has been lubricated by the close relationship between the Clinton administration and the government of Colombian President Andres Pastrana. But
with violence against civilians escalating and the economy still troubled, Pastrana is barely afloat politically.

One of the few available tools to boost his standing -- Clinton-supported legislation, introduced by Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), that would have eased U.S. duty on
imported Colombian textiles -- died an unremarked death at the messy end of the 106th Congress this month.

Government peace negotiations with the FARC, begun by Pastrana last year, have come to a standstill, even as guerrillas and paramilitaries have increased their
numbers and firepower. The negotiations -- never popular with the Americans -- have been based in part on the semi-fiction that the guerrillas are fighting a political
battle in which drug trafficking is only tangentially involved. But they are likely to become more complicated with recent allegations, supported by Mexican and U.S.
intelligence, of direct dealings between the FARC and Mexico's ruthless Tijuana cartel.

Pastrana cannot run again for president, and no viable candidate has emerged from his Conservative Party. Among the three opposition figures who have already
staked a claim on the job, growing attention is being paid to Alvaro Uribe Velez from the Liberal Party's conservative wing. A recent cover story in the newsweekly
Semana noted Uribe's rising poll numbers, although they are still barely in the double digits, and described his image of right-wing toughness as increasingly
"fashionable" in the climate of escalating violence.

Uribe has been tied in the Colombian media to the paramilitaries. Founded in the 1980s as "self-defense" militias to aid in the fight against the powerful drug cartels of
the day, the once-disparate right-wing groups have coalesced into an 8,000-strong clandestine fighting force whose main targets are the FARC and the smaller
Marxist National Liberation Army (ELN). According to U.S. and Colombian officials, the paramilitaries now derive the bulk of their income from drugs and
extortion; many of their battles with the guerrillas are over control of coca territory and lucrative mining and ranching regions.

But an increasing number of middle- and upper-class Colombians have started to look at paramilitaries and their leader, Carlos Castano, as the only force capable of
defending them. Such popularity is dangerous for Pastrana, who must demonstrate to U.S. human rights activists and their congressional supporters that the
Colombian military is fighting the illegal paramilitaries as hard as it is fighting the guerrillas.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has alleged that senior officials in many Colombian army divisions have ties to the right-wing forces. Last summer,
congressional opponents of the aid succeeded in making it conditional on Pastrana's efforts to sever those alleged links and punish human rights violators within the
military. By fall, progress was so slight that Clinton was forced to waive the conditions to release money to the military.

Additional certification is due before the next aid payment can be released, and administration officials expect it will be among their last Colombia-related acts before
the change of power in Washington. Seeking to avoid the need for another waiver, Pastrana's Defense Ministry this month put out a 31-page report attesting to its
low opinion of Castano's troops and its successes in combating them.

Despite their smaller size, compared with the estimated 22,000 members of the combined guerrilla forces, the paramilitaries have been responsible for the majority of
large-scale massacres and forced displacements of civilians in Colombia in recent years, the report says. It says military forces have killed 150 paramilitary members
and captured 934 since 1997 -- a better proportional record than military efforts against the guerrillas.

The military is likely to have an opportunity to directly confront both the paramilitaries and the guerrillas in the southern state of Putumayo, where the anti-drug
offensive will begin. Designed as one part of a three-pronged government effort to retake the province, it is supposed to coincide with massive aerial spraying of
plantation-size coca fields and a program to encourage smaller farmers to switch to non-drug crops.

The three are "all related to one another," said the State Department official. "All have to move in roughly the same time."

So far, alternative development has gotten off to a slow start as the FARC continues to block roads in Putumayo and threaten peasants who agree to participate.
And the timing for the launch of the spraying "is not determined yet," the official said.

The Pentagon official insisted that "the Colombians must begin the . . . spraying on time, in late December or early January in Putumayo. There's no question about
that in our mind. What [the Colombian military] is trying to do is hit [the traffickers and their protectors] from all sides as hard as they can." When the spraying starts,
he said, "the battalions can hit the large labs and disrupt air, river and ground movement."

But other U.S. officials acknowledge that while the anti-drug battalions can begin selective hits, they will not be ready for large-scale engagements because they will
lack reinforcement capability for most of the coming year. The first of 16 new Black Hawks and up to 30 Bell Huey II helicopters that make up the bulk of the army's
U.S. aid package will begin arriving next summer, but no pilots will be available to fly them until months later, officials said. In the meantime, the two counternarcotics
battalions, and a third that begins training next month, will have to depend on a fleet of 33 smaller, UH-1N helicopters with limited lift and range.

"If [battalion forces] would get into a major encounter," one official said, the existing fleet "would not be enough that a military commander would feel comfortable
that he could move in a significant reinforcement force. . . . The last thing anybody wants is for the counternarcotics force to run into a real ambush situation and be
defeated at the onset of this kind of activity."