Planning for rescue included a seating chart

Houston Chronicle:

The visitors, wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and official-looking ID badges, landed in a white helicopter and offered soft drinks and handshakes to the rebel kidnappers.

Then, after the guerrillas put 15 hostages on board the aircraft, the outsiders requested that the rebels kindly hand over their 9 mm pistols. After all, they explained, this was a humanitarian mission.

Except it wasn't.

The chopper belonged to the Colombian army, and the visitors were highly trained commandos. They pounced on the disarmed guerrillas as the pilots flew the hostages, including politician Ingrid Betancourt and three American military contractors, to freedom.

"The hand of God was working through our armed forces," said Betancourt, a former presidential candidate kidnapped in 2002. "They are extraordinary, valiant heroes."

Every detail of the operation, dubbed "Checkmate," was chewed over. The army even drew up a seating chart for the chopper to make sure the rebels were wedged between the commandos.

"Nothing was improvised," a triumphant President Alvaro Uribe said at a late-night television appearance in which he grilled his generals about the operation.

...

Ironically, Operation Checkmate was inspired, in part, by a trap sprung by the guerrillas in 2002.

Posing as security guards, rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, abducted 13 state legislators off the streets of downtown Cali in broad daylight.

Colombian intelligence agents decided to cook up a misdirection play of their own. And their Trojan horse would be a Russian-made MI-17 transport helicopter, its military green hue obscured by thick coats of white paint.

"When the intelligence agents first proposed it, people said they were crazy," Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said. "But they managed to convince us."

...

Last year, John Frank Pinchao, a Colombian police officer, escaped from a rebel camp and provided information about the whereabouts of the other prisoners.

More details emerged when authorities captured two rebel envoys dispatched to Bogota with proof-of-life documents.

In January and February, the FARC agreed to release six hostages, and the army was able to track them as they were marched through the jungle to a rendezvous point in southern Guaviare state.

In February, troops spotted the three Americans bathing in the Apaporis River, but they were not prepared to launch a rescue. By then, the army had managed to infiltrate the FARC units operating in Guaviare, a longtime rebel stronghold.

Operation Checkmate was designed to persuade the guerrillas to unwittingly turn over the hostages through the ruse of a fictional meeting with FARC commander Alfonso Cano to discuss a possible prisoner release.

Government infiltrators persuaded the rebels to bring the hostages, who were held in three groups about 20 miles apart, to a single rallying point and told them that a humanitarian group that sympathized with the rebels would airlift them all to the meeting.

...

This story adds new details of the successful operation. Its success was not only about the infiltration of the FARC. What is clear from the operation is that the Colombia intelligence and its operatives know more about the FARC than FARC does at this point. Otherwise they would not have been able to pull this off.

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