Out of Captivity : Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

Homecoming 443and one of the reasons we’d spent so much agonizing time wanderingaimlessly was that the FARC realized their communications securityhad been breached. As a result, they had to resort to using couriers tohand-carry messages from the Front commanders to the guys in thefield. Whether it was Mono JoJoy or César who were issuing them,those orders were slow in arriving and that gave the military anotheredge.As much as it seemed we were hustling from place to place and beingtracked, we didn’t know how close we’d come to friendlies on theground. Finding the camera and the battery pack was a good indicationof that and so were the helos overhead, but at a reception held for us, Ilearned that some U.S. Special Forces guys had spotted us once whilewe were bathing in one of the rivers. Another told me that he’d beenon the ground and the strangest thing had happened—he could smellpopcorn. I couldn’t believe that Enrique’s attempt to calm his outfit wassending smoke signals to our guys in-country. Even knowing all thatafter the fact made me feel better.But while the U.S. Special Forces were behind the scenes and inthe shadows, the Colombians were the masterminds. They were smartenough to know that they had to test whether or not their spy/courierswould be effective. They forged orders to see if the FARC would actuallyfollow them, and a few of our movements from site to site were theproducts of those fake orders to Milton and Enrique. In fact, it was theColombian government and not anyone in the FARC high commandwho issued the order for William Pérez and Ingrid Betancourt to rejoinus shortly before the rescue.The Colombian military also took advantage of something else. Independentof their efforts, an actual humanitarian organization was onthe ground in our area searching for us on foot. Those remarkably committedfolks inadvertently played a big role in the ruse that the militarycreated to rescue us. We had been hearing on news reports that this