CIA role is faulted in air crash over Peru

Central Intelligence Agency officers involved with a secret counternarcotics mission in the Peruvian jungle routinely violated agency procedures, tried to cover up their mistakes, and misled Congress immediately after a missionary plane was accidentally shot down in 2001, according to a blistering C.I.A. internal report released on Monday. The declassified 2008 report by John L. Helgerson, then the C.I.A.'s inspector general, documents a culture of negligence and deceit inside the C.I.A. program in Peru. The report also details a pattern of C.I.A. stonewalling that included keeping results of a C.I.A. review of the 2001 downing of the plane from the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee. The 2001 episode, which resulted in the killing of an American missionary and her infant daughter, occurred when C.I.A. officers misidentified the missionary plane as a drug-smuggling aircraft and ordered the Peruvian military to shoot it down. The missionary's husband, their son and the pilot survived. Parts of Mr. Helgerson's report were released in 2008, so the broad conclusions of the Peru investigation were already known. But the full 300-page report paints a detailed portrait of the troubled covert program. The report concluded that top C.I.A. officers misled members of Congress when they portrayed the April 2001 episode as an anomaly in an otherwise well-run program, and that C.I.A. lawyers repeatedly intervened with Justice Department officials to prevent prosecutions in the case. The report also said that the spy agency had concealed internal findings from victims of the downing of the plane and their relatives, who had sued the government.