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Commando unit was ready to rescue hostages By Melissa Martin Delta Force, the most elite commando unit in the U.S. military, was put on a two-hour alert for a possible rescue attempt of the hostages in Ecuador, the Miami Herald reported this week. But the plan was called off when the ransom settlement was reached. Soldiers were to be packed and ready to deploy from a Southern U.S. base within two hours, wrote Juan Tamayo, a Miami Herald reporter based in Bogota, Colombia. "It was all �Go� when I went to bed on the 14th. I expected to wake up the next morning, turn on the TV and watch the reports on CNN," a U.S. official told Tamayo. But on Feb. 14, negotiators and kidnappers agreed on a $13 million ransom, halting the plan to bring in the special forces. The U.S. State Department and the FBI would not confirm or deny the newspaper report. "In terms of whether we actually had rescue teams ready to go in, it�s not something we can comment on," said Beth Anne Steele, of the FBI�s public affairs office in Portland. "Whatever we did or didn�t do in this case would impact future negotiations when the next set of Americans are kidnapped. "We don�t want to do anything to jeopardize future negotiations by giving kidnappers advance information on possible tactics," Steele said. A Rogue Valley resident who has been trained for a Delta Force team said he doesn�t know whether an elite crew had been summoned to rescue four Americans held for 141 days in the Amazon jungle. The hostages included Erickson Air-Crane employees Steve Derry, Arnie Alford and Jason Weber, of Gold Hill, and Dennis Corrin, of New Zealand, as well as several who worked for other companies: David Bradley of Casper, Wyo., Germ�n Scholz of Chile and Juan Rodriguez of Argentina. Two French pilots escaped and Missouri hostage Ron Sander was murdered. The "D-crew," as Delta Force is known, likely would have been made up of Spanish-speakers familiar with triple-canopy forests, encounters with constrictors such as the anaconda and other dangers of the Amazon jungle. "They probably would have gone in at night and set up snipers," the special operations team member said, speaking on condition that his name not be used. But the rescue risks would have been enormous even for the group that the Miami Herald described as a "35-member team from a super-secret U.S. Army intelligence unit." They would have been up against 30 kidnappers, ages 16 to 40 years old and armed with "assault rifles, grenade launchers, shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons and night vision goggles," the Miami Herald reported. The guerrillas kept a gun pointed at the hostages at all times. "With everybody on a guard, if (the kidnappers) would have caught a whiff of abnormality, the opportunity for death would have obviously been there," said the member of a special operations military team. Safety of the hostages and safety of the elite team would have been the greatest concern, he said. "You want to bring them back. There�s a saying, �Twelve go in and 12 come back�." In 1995, the United States was prepared to send in a rescue team for American missionary Donald Coks, the Miami Herald reported. But the Ecuadorean police Anti-Kidnapping and Extortion Unit (known as UNASE) discovered the kidnappers� camp in northern Ecuador and rescued Coks. They did the same for a victim in 1996. In the two cases, gun battles left eight kidnappers dead, the Miami Herald reported. This time, however, the seven hostages were freed March 1 after negotiators hired by Erickson Air-Crane and the oil companies packed $100 bills in seven boxes and pushed them off a helicopter as it hovered over a jungle clearing, the Miami Herald reported. The crisis isn�t over, according to the U.S. State Department. "The kidnapping last fall in Ecuador was a serious crime and the murder of Ron Sander was a tragic and senseless act," a spokesman told the Mail Tribune Tuesday. "The U.S. government, in cooperation with the Ecuadorean government, is committed to bringing to justice those responsible. There is an on-going investigation regarding the hostage situation in Ecuador." Reach reporter Melissa Martin at 776-4497, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.