February 29, 1996
Web posted at: 9:30 p.m. EST
From Correspondent Jamie McIntyre
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- At a hearing before a House committee Thursday morning in Washington, Rep. Dan Burton, R-Indiana, questioned whether a request for jets to intercept a Cuban MiG that shot down two American civilian planes near Cuba had been denied.
The Pentagon said Thursday that U.S. F-15s at Homestead Air Force Base would have intercepted the MiGs if they had threatened the United States, or if the military had known about Saturday's impending attack.
Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon said the F-15As from the Florida National Guard had pilots in them and engines running and would have launched if the Cuban fighter planes approached the 24 parallel, the border of the U.S. and Cuban Air Defense Zones.
"Our planes were in what are called battle stations -- pilots in them, engines running, ready to take off ... as the Cuban planes appeared to approach the 24th parallel from the south," Bacon said.
He said that the mission of the planes at Homestead is to protect the United States, not civilian planes in international airspace, but said even if the United States had known the planes were about to be shot down, it would have been impossible for the U.S. warplanes to have responded in time.
"I think it is fair to say it would have been impossible for U.S. planes to get from Homestead to where this vicious, illegal act occurred in time to prevent it."
-- Ken Bacon, Pentagon spokesman
Sources say that the U.S. military was not aware that an attack on the small private planes was in progress at the time, and Bacon said it was not clear if other government intelligence agencies were aware of the shootdown as it was happening, or simply reconstructed the events after the fact from tapes of recorded radio transmissions.
"We are on a peacetime footing," said one official at the hearing. "The Cubans have perfect right to fly their planes in international airspace, but when they head toward the United States we always send our planes up as a precaution."
At the time of the incident Saturday, sources said, U.S. military commanders in Florida did not have the benefit of hearing the cockpit-to-tower conversations during which the MiG was authorized to shoot down the unarmed planes. The conversations were monitored and translated by the National Security Agency. Transcripts of the conversations were later released by the United States at the United Nations.
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