America’s Forgotten Hostages

American officials deny allegations of having abandoned the contractors, who at the time of their abduction were working for a subsidiary of the defense contractor Northrop Grumman. The State Department has offered a $340,000 reward and a possible U.S. visa to anyone with information leading to "the successful resolution of this hostage crisis." A captured FARC commander was sentenced last month in a U.S. federal court to 60 years in prison for conspiring to abduct the Americans, whose detention is more than four times the length of captivity of the U.S. diplomats who were taken hostage at the embassy in Tehran in 1979.

U.S. officials have defended the policy of no talks with the FARC and other terrorist groups on practical as well as moral grounds. "The U.S. policy to grant no concessions is designed to make the FARC and other hostage holders understand that there will be no benefit to taking American hostages," said U.S. Ambassador to Colombia William Wood in 2006. "We have to think of our hostages today as well as potential hostages in the future."

"B.S.," says Jo Rosano. The 59-year-old mother of former Air Force intelligence officer Marc Gonsalves says the U.S. government would have expended far greater energy and resources on her son's behalf if he had still been in the military. "They don't care, that's why they use contractors, to avoid accountability," fumes Rosano, an Italian-born resident of Bristol, Conn., who has visited Colombia on three occasions for information on Marc's health and whereabouts. "They say 'We don't leave our own behind,' so I guess these are not their own. But they are our own, and I certainly don't appreciate the way the U.S. government has treated Marc, Tom and Keith."

Northrop Grunman says it is still working with the U.S. Congress, U.S. agencies and other groups to work toward freedom for the hostages. "Throughout this ordeal, the company has and will continue to provide support and assistance to the hostages' families, such as continuance of full salary and benefits and access to various other company benefits, resources and services," said a company statement released to NEWSWEEK. "Meanwhile, all of us at Northrop Grumman continue to hope and pray for the day when Tom, Keith and Marc are safely reunited with their families back home in the U.S."

Compounding the human tragedy of the hostages and their families is how easily their five-year-long nightmare could have been averted. In the fall of 2002, two pilots who were also carrying out anti-drug aerial surveillance missions under Northrop Grumman's contract with the Pentagon wrote letters to company executives urging them to replace the single-engine Cessnas with twin-engine aircraft that would give the crews a backup motor in the event of a mechanical malfunction. "The failure to address these safety concerns will catch up to the company and could possibly result in loss of human life," read one of the letters penned by pilot Douglas Cocker. Two months later it did, when the engine of the plane carrying the doomed Americans started making a strange whirring sound only minutes away from their destination, an air base in the guerrilla-infested wilds of southern Colombia. "It's easy to look back on what happened five years ago with 20/20 hindsight," says a State Department spokesperson.

Rosano and the Stansells got a glimmer of hope last spring when a captured Colombian police sergeant escaped from a FARC camp and confirmed that the American contractors were alive. Their outlook brightened further in January when the FARC released two high-profile Colombian women hostages, and still more encouraging news emerged this month when the guerrilla movement, which has been implicated in extensive drug trafficking to finance their insurgency, said it would soon free three former Colombian lawmakers.

But relatives of America's forgotten captives remain guarded in their optimism. "Any time anyone is released, it tends to make us more hopeful because it had been many years since they had released anybody until just recently," says Gene Stansell. "But for the past five years, our life has been on a roller coaster of hopeful news and worrisome events. It's been quite an ordeal." And there's no sign that it will end any time soon.

© 2008