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Q: Colombia.
A: Not the District of.
Q: No. Wilhelm said last week that his staff was working on an assessment of the insurgency situation in Colombia. Is there any sort of high level thought being given in the building to a new strategy in terms of assistance to the Colombian government vis-à-vis the insurgency, not the counterdrug stuff?
A: Our primary focus in Colombia now, and I believe in the future, will be on counternarcotics. We now have 216 people working in Colombia. There are military, civilians and contractors. Most of them are involved in running three radar stations that police, monitor air traffic into and out of Colombia. A lot of the narco-trafficking takes place by plane.
The number of Americans in Colombia has varied between 175 and 275 in the last year or so, depending on what operations we have there.
Our work with the Colombian military has been in the counternarcotics area, and we have not been engaged in counterinsurgency training with them. My expectation is that that is likely to continue.
Q: Isn't it hard to separate the two sometimes? Because the guerrillas seem to be heavily involved in narcotic activities.
A: The guerrillas do seem to be supported to some degree, and sometimes a considerable degree, by their involvement with narco-trafficking or their protection of narco-traffickers. They also derive money from kidnapping and extortion. So they have -- I guess they have multiple income sources.
These are sometimes difficult distinctions to draw, but we are trying to focus as best we can on countering the narco-trafficking.
Q: There have been some reports that instead of fixing their old Huey helicopters, that there's some plans to really give them a substantial qualitative improvement of more advanced helicopters.
A: There has been some talk about their need for Cobra helicopters, for instance. We have not received a request from the Colombian government for Cobra helicopters. If we were to receive such a request we'd have to make a decision on how to respond to it.
We'd have to evaluate their need for advanced weapons as well as their ability to maintain them and their ability to fly them. But we haven't gotten a request yet, so we haven't started that type of analysis.
.................Q: Any new guidance on the Cuba threat assessment? I see Fidel Castro's been reading about it anyway.
A: Well, and may be listening to broadcasts about it. I don't know whether he can do that or not, whether the Cubans protect him from listening to your broadcasts or not. But at any rate, the last I heard, the report was about to go to Secretary Cohen. His concern remains that the unclassified version of the report reveal as much as possible of the flavor and information in the classified version. His staff has been working hard to make that happen. I don't know whether he's had a chance to read the reports yet. If he hasn't, I assume he'll do it relatively soon.
I believe that he will make the report available to those who requested it in Congress before he makes it available to the public, but ultimately, the unclassified version will be public.
Q: Has this report become somewhat of a political football?
A: Only in the press. I think in the building, we don't see it as a political football at all. This is an intelligence analysis that was done at the request of Congress. It's pretty straight forward. And as I pointed out here last week, much of the information in the report was made public two years ago in basic information about the size of the Cuban military, its defensive posture, the fact that it spends a lot of its time supporting itself by growing food and provisioning itself in other ways rather than doing exercises. It has some equipment problems that you might expect in a country that's encountering economic difficulties. So many of these facts have been out there for some time.
Q: Is the report supposed to be just a conventional order of battle kind of military assessment, or does it go beyond that to survey symmetrical kinds of threats that Cuba might pose?
A: Actually, the Congress made fairly specific -- laid out fairly specific requirements that had to be considered. We had to look at Cuban military capabilities. We had to look at threats that Cuba could pose to U.S. national security including but not limited to unconventional threats such as encouragement of massive destabilizing waves of immigration into the United States, attacks on citizens or residents of the United States if they're carrying out protests near Cuban territorial lines. We were supposed to look at the potential that Cuba has for developing chemical or biological weapons. We were instructed to look at the potential for internal strife in Cuba that could involve citizens or residents of the United States. So there were a number of issues that were required by Congress. It's not just looking at the size and the equipment of the Cuban military, it's much broader.
I suppose also the report will look at Cuba's intelligence gathering techniques, what can be said about that in the unclassified report, I'm not sure, but that's one of the issues we'll look at as well.
..............Press: Thank you.