A costly call to Chavez

Oliver North:

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Last Saturday, just hours after Chavez talked by telephone with Reyes, the Colombian Armed Forces and National Police raided a FARC sanctuary two miles across the Ecuadorian border. During the operation, Colombian commandos killed Reyes and nearly two dozen other FARC operatives. The Colombians also seized a treasure-trove of intelligence on the terror organization's internal and international connections and contacts. The computers, records and documents seized in the raid reveal extraordinary complicity by the Chavez regime in sustaining and supporting the FARC.

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Chavez, as he does every Sunday, took to the airwaves in Caracas, promising, "Ecuador can count on Venezuela for whatever it needs, in any situation." He then announced that he was ordering "10 additional battalions, tanks and war planes" to the Venezuelan frontier and baldly stated, "This could be the start of a war in South America."

That's just nonsense. Neither the pitifully outfitted Ecuadorian nor Venezuelan militaries are capable of conducting operations against the well-trained, equipped and combat-experienced Colombian armed forces. A former intelligence officer told me in the aftermath of the Chavez bluster: "The Venezuelan military can't go on a camp out without a caterer."

Another old friend -- a former military officer with long and current contacts in the region -- put it this way: "Chavez is trying to distract the Venezuelan people from their disastrous economic straits -- despite record prices for petroleum -- and divert the international community from focusing on what's in the captured FARC computer records." As for the troop deployments, "any Venezuelan soldiers ordered to the border region will be there to make sure that FARC founder Manuel Marulanda Velez -- 'Tirofijo' -- doesn't get 'taken out' by the Colombians like Reyes was last week."

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Was it an intercept of Reyes's communication with Chavez that gave away his location? North's report certainly suggest that it was one source of information although other stories have indicated that a paid informer gave up the location of the terrorist. Either way it has to make the terrorist paranoid about their associates and their communications. That is a good thing because it screws up their command and control making it more difficult to order and control attacks.