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As an experienced bush pilot, Cleilton de Abreu has flown some shady characters around the Brazilian outback in his time. Two of the worst, he says, come to mind immediately - a couple of armed drug dealers who tried to hijack his plane a few years ago. Both were shot by his co-pilot, who killed one, wounded the other.
But something about the four Frenchmen who last month offered de Abreu pounds 3,500 to fly them from Manaus, the capital of the Amazon region, to a remote airstrip near the border with Colombia put him on guard. Half an hour earlier, on the morning of July 9, de Abreu had watched them disembark at Manaus with some military- looking types, from a Hercules C-130 troop carrier bearing French markings. Three of the party he was to fly were big, hard-looking men in their 40s with cropped hair, each wearing heavy boots and toting bulging rucksacks. The fourth looked as if he would have been more comfortable behind a desk but was clearly the leader of the group. "They wanted me to believe they were going on a hiking trip in the interior, but they didn't strike me as the kind of backpackers we sometimes drop off there," de Abreu recalls. "In any case, where they were heading was far better known for narco- trafficking than nature lovers."
What de Abreu could never have guessed as he gunned the eight- seater Caraja down the runway was that he was carrying French secret service agents and a high-ranking government official. They were the advance unit of an extraordinary mission to rescue Ingrid Betancourt, a Colombian politician who was kidnapped by the Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, or Farc, while campaigning as a candidate in a presidential election 17 months ago.
But the operation went spectacularly wrong - from the initial over-reaction by the French government, to the panicked actions of the pilot and the no-show of the rebels. Now France stands accused of secretly negotiating with one of the world's most dangerous terrorist organisations behind the backs of the governments of Brazil and Colombia, which insist that they were not informed about the proposed rescue mission in their territories. Despite vigorous official...