by Mark Bowden
Within the first fifteen days, thirty of the colonel's two hundred men were killed. Despite elaborate precautions to protect the men and hide their identities, Pablo's army of sicarios picked them off one by one, often with the help of the Medellín police. They shot them down on the street, on their way home from work, even at home with their families when they were off duty. The funerals for these slain officers left the PNC reeling. At police headquarters in Bogotá the top command considered pulling the plug on the Search Bloc. The colonel and his top commanders asked that they be allowed to stay. While the killings grieved and frightened them, it also angered them and hardened their resolve. Instead of withdrawing, the PNC sent the colonel another two hundred men.
Martinez was proud that, as bad as things were in that first month, his men had managed to mount one impressive raid. Informed that Pablo was staying at a finca in the jungle that was about a two-hour helicopter flight from Medellín, the Search Bloc planned an assault. But the maps showed that on the way to the targeted finca, the choppers would have to fly over a Colombian army base. If they attempted to do so without getting permission from the base commander, it was likely the base defense forces would try to shoot them down. Martinez suspected that if he informed the commander of an army base in Antioquia of their mission, Pablo would be tipped off immediately. So he risked it. To avoid radar they flew over the base fast and low, so low that the colonel feared they would hit electric and telephone wires. But they made it. They hit the jungle finca from the air, coordinating the assault with ground troops who had moved in quietly the night before. Pablo escaped, but only narrowly. Under the circumstances, the colonel considered the raid a triumph.
Still, at the end of October 1989, according to the rotation plan, the colonel asked to be replaced. He was told he had done such a good job, the department wanted him to stay. His request the following month was similarly rejected.
Pablo's response to the Search Bloc's initial raid was swift and pointed. A car bomb was discovered in the basement of the apartment building in Bogotá where the colonel's family lived. His oldest son, Hugo Jr., was now a cadet at the national police academy, but his wife, daughter, and two younger sons had been home. The bomb had been found after someone telephoned a tip to the police, so it probably had been just a warning. But it was a chilling one. Pablo should not have been able to find them. Nearly all the residents of their building were high-ranking national police officers, the only ones who knew of the colonel's dangerous new job. Obviously someone among them had passed the word. The betrayal was aggravated when, instead of rallying around their besieged colleague, the other families in the apartment building held a meeting and voted to ask the colonel and his family to leave.
The day after the bomb was found, the colonel boarded a helicopter in Medellín and flew home to help his family pack. He told only his commander, General Octavio Vargas, where he was going that morning.
He was stuffing boxes bitterly in the apartment when a retired police officer, someone he had known since his days in the academy, arrived at his door. The colonel was surprised and alarmed. How had this man known to find him in Bogotá?
"I come to talk to you obligated," the retired officer said with a pained expression. Martinez asked what he meant.
"If I did not agree to come talk to you, they could easily kill me or my family," he said.
Then he offered the colonel $6 million, a bribe from Pablo Escobar to call off the hunt. Better yet, the officer explained, "Continue the work, but do not do yourself or Pablo Escobar any real damage." Pablo also wanted a list of any snitches inside his own organization.
Sometimes the fate of an entire nation can hinge on the integrity of one man. The bribe came at the lowest point in the colonel's career. He had been given a suicide mission, one with little chance of success. He attended funerals almost every day. The national police had constructed special funeral chapels in Medellín and in Bogotá just to handle the demand. The bomb in the basement of the apartment building had made it clear that Pablo could find the colonel's wife and children. This move was not going to protect them; it was designed to protect the apartment building's other residents. His own department was, in effect, abandoning him and his family to their fate.
And for what? Martinez could not even see the wisdom in going after Escobar. Cocaine was not Colombia's problem; it was the norteamericanos' problem. And even if they did away with El Doctor, as the United States insisted, it was not going to curb the cocaine industry.
Here was a generous ticket out. Six million dollars. Enough money to support himself and his family in luxury for the rest of their lives. But the colonel did not consider the bribe for any longer than it took him to have those thoughts. His gut rebelled against it. He cursed at his former friend, and then his anger turned to pity and disgust.
"Tell Pablo that you came but did not find me here, and then leave this matter as if it had never occurred," he said.
Martinez had known other police officers who took bribes, and he knew that money was just the hook on El Doctor's line. Once he had accepted the bribe, Pablo would own him, just as he owned his friend who had approached him with the offer—I come to talk to you obligated. Martinez could see himself forced into a similar humiliating betrayal somewhere down the road. It would be like handing over his whole career, all the years of work and study, all the things he took professional pride in, to this thug. It would be like turning over his soul.
After he dismissed his old friend, Martinez drove to police headquarters and informed Vargas of the bribe. They agreed it was a good sign.
"It means we're getting to him," said Martinez.
They were—in part because they had a new kind of help.
2
On the first night he spent in Bogotá, in September 1989, the American popped open a beer in his upstairs room at the Hilton and started counting explosions. He was too keyed up to sleep, so he pulled a chair up to his window and peered down, looking for flashes. The city was surprisingly modern. In recent years he had spent a lot of time in Central American cities, in San Salvador and Tegucigalpa, and these had been hardship posts, dingy, dangerous, and decidedly Third World. Bogotá reminded him more of some modern European capital, with its high-rises and distinctive architecture and wide, busy avenues humming with traffic that lit up the night in all directions. It reflected a muscular modernity with deep roots in an exotic and, to the American, a mostly unknown past. He was excited. Colombia was a new mystery to unravel, a new package to unwrap, the kind of challenge he relished. The Hilton was in the northern sector, where the dense cityscape was creeping ever higher up the hills. There were fine old cathedrals dating back to the sixteenth century and modern glass-skinned office buildings. To the south the city opened into a smoggy sprawl of shantytowns, housing the influx of refugees who'd started pouring into the city decades ago to escape violence and had since swollen the city's population to seven million. But the American couldn't see that the first night. What he saw was the elegant glow of Bogotá's skyline and the lights along the busy highways. He didn't see any flashes from the explosions, even though they sounded close. Some even rattled the windows.
He knew that weeks before, a popular presidential candidate named Luis Galán had been murdered and that the Barco government had cracked down on the Medellín cartel. These bombs were part of the cartel's response. They kept going off for hours. The American, an army officer, had been fully briefed on the situation, so one or two explosions wouldn't have surprised him, but when his count passed twenty, and then thirty, and finally reached forty-four, he told himself, Damn, this is going to be fun.
The blasts that night were mostly pipe bombs, none of them very large, strategically placed at the entrances to banks, shopping centers, office buildings—places where Bogotános would be sure to see damage the next morning, but no place where there might be people working at night, even security guards. Bogotá, along with ten other Colombian cities, was under curfew from dawn to dusk
. This night of the explosions—it was not the first or last that summer—was meant as a message to the government. We can attack anywhere we want as often as we want.
From the briefing he had been given before making this trip, it certainly sounded like the country was coming apart. It had included a chronology of outrages committed just in the previous five months:
• March 3: José Antequera, leader of the Unión Patriótica Party and candidate for president, assassinated.
• March 11: Hector Giraldo, lawyer and adviser to the newspaper El Espectador, whose editor Guillermo Cano had been murdered, was himself kidnapped and murdered.
• April 3: An active-duty Colombian police colonel is stopped at a roadblock and four hundred kilos of cocaine are found in the trunk of his car.
• April 21: Bucaramanga's popular radio newsman Luis Vera is murdered.
• May 4: The father of self-exiled investigative judge Martha Gonzales is murdered, and her mother is injured in the attack. Gonzales had fled Colombia after indicting Pablo Escobar and José Rodríguez Gacha for murder.
• May 30: A powerful car bomb explodes in Bogotá in an apparent effort to kill DAS Director General Miguel Maza, killing six onlookers but leaving the general unscathed.
• June 3: The son of President Barco's secretary-general is kidnapped.
• June 15: A well-known Medellín radio reporter, Jorge Vallejo, is killed.
• July 4: The governor of Antioquia, Antonio Roldan, is assassinated in Medellín when his car is destroyed by a remote-controlled bomb.
• July 28: A judge who had issued warrants for the arrests of Escobar and José Rodríguez Gacha is murdered.
• August 16: Carlos Valencia, magistrate of the superior tribunal, is assassinated. He had ratified lower-court indictments of Escobar and Gacha.
• August 17: More than four thousand appeals court judges begin a national strike protesting their vulnerability.
A day after the judges' strike began, Galán and Colonel Franklin had both been killed. There were reportedly British and Israeli mercenaries training narco killers in more sophisticated tactics. Given this bloody record, the American felt that the night of the pipe bombs actually showed some restraint. Evidently the traffickers were trying to avoid farther alienating the public, which had taken Galán's assassination hard. The idea evidently was not to strike a blow but to send a message. The audacity made it clear why Colombia had asked the United States for help. The American was part of the military package.
He was part of a secret unit in Bogotá headed by an army major who, at least according to his current identity papers, was named Steve Jacoby. Members of the unit were new kinds of spies, surveillance experts selected and trained by the army to provide "operational" intelligence during planning for the ill-fated Iran hostage rescue mission ten years earlier. The idea was to plug what the army saw as a critical gap in the spying services provided by the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA). These established spook bureaucracies, created and lavishly nourished by the Cold War, were primarily responsible for gathering intelligence for broad foreign-policy making. More and more, small-scale, specialized military operations were being launched in exotic places on short notice. What military leaders needed for these was timely, specific information, things like How many doors and windows does the target building have? What kind of weapons are carried by the bodyguards? Where did their target like to eat dinner? Where did he sleep last night, and the night before that? They needed someone to provide detailed local logistics, information about indigenous vehicles, safe houses, hiding places, and so on. This kind of information was not a specialty of the big spy outfits. Over the decade since its creation, the army's own small spy unit had changed its name often, in part to protect its secrecy. It had been called ISA, for Intelligence Support Activity, the Secret Army of Northern Virginia, Torn Victory, Cemetery Wind, Capacity Gear, and Robin Court. These days it was called Centra Spike.
Centra Spike was designed to offer an array of support intelligence, but its primary specialty was finding people. Eavesdropping on radio and telephone conversations from the air, its members were capable of pinpointing the origin of a radio or cellphone call with amazing accuracy within seconds. Radio direction finding had long been one of the military arts, but only in recent years had it become accurate enough for tactical purposes. During World War II, surveillance teams could do little more than determine the general direction of a radio signal. Using three different ground-based receivers, monitors could at best triangulate a signal back to a region of a country. The German army tried this technique in France in mostly vain efforts to track resistance fighters sending messages to England. From each position on the triangle, they projected lines toward where the signal was strongest. Where the three lines intersected was the radio, or at least its broad vicinity. Twenty years later, during the Vietnam War, army direction finders had so improved both equipment and technique that they could place the origin of an intercepted signal to within a half mile. Twenty years after that, Centra Spike could pinpoint a radio or cell-phone signal to within a few hundred meters. What was more remarkable was the electronic package now used to accomplish that feat. Instead of triangulating from three receivers on the ground, they did it from one small aircraft. The airborne equipment substituted the three separate ground locations by taking readings from different points along the plane's flight path. As soon as a target signal was received, the pilot would begin flying an arc around it. Using computers to do precise, instantaneous calculations, they were able to begin triangulating off points in that arc within seconds. If the aircraft had time to complete a half circle around the signal, the location of its origin would be known to within two hundred meters. This could be done regardless of weather conditions or preventative measures taken by targets on the ground. Even a coded radio signal could not disguise its point of origin.
At first, this method required a very large aircraft, because the various antennae used to triangulate the signal had to be kept far apart. The ability to accomplish the task with a smaller plane meant you could be less conspicuous. So Centra Spike's precision and its low profile made it feasible for the first time to find people without attracting attention, even over a crowded city. This was the idea anyway. The unit's previous missions had primarily been against rebel units in mountains or jungles. Here in Colombia, against the Medellín cartel, they were going to stretch themselves.
Various American agencies had been working out of the embassy in Bogotá for years, relying on more conventional ways of gathering intelligence. The CIA had its own long-standing connections, but they had always been oriented more toward the Marxist insurrections in the hills. The counternarcotics stuff had only recently been redefined as a CIA mission, and there were plenty of chiefs back at headquarters who were not sold on the idea. But the agents in Colombia were fully engaged. With deep pockets and a strong reputation for secrecy, the spy agency was already playing on murderous rivalries between the Cali and Medellín cartels. The DEA worked mostly with the Colombian police and had become skillful at exploiting divisions between it and the army or the separate secret police agency DAS, as well as internal hostility between the DAS and its own plainclothes investigatory agency, the DIJIN. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had an agent in Bogotá, and the FBI had made some headway infiltrating the cartels with informants captured in the United States, traffickers offered a chance to avoid long prison terms by returning to Colombia to play the very risky game of double-cross. All these efforts were extremely difficult. The cartels had such a brutal reputation that it was exceedingly hard to find anyone willing to spy or inform on them. Reward money was only marginally effective, because those motivated by money could make a lot more by selling drugs or taking bribes. Cultural differences made penetrating the cartels with American agents virtually impossible; even Hispanic Americans found the Colombian dialect and culture vastly different than Mexico's or Puerto Rico's. The agencies were not always sm
art about who they sent down, either. Steve Murphy, a big, aggressive DEA agent from West Virginia, was assigned to Bogotá with only a hasty, weeks-long introduction to Spanish. He spent most of his first year in Bogotá at a desk in the embassy, thumbing through a thick Spanish-English dictionary, trying to make himself useful by translating articles from the various Bogotá dailies. Centra Spike offered a seemingly magical shortcut to the dangerous, time-consuming, and difficult task of intelligence gathering. Its agents could literally pluck information out of the air.
For the first month, Centra Spike's team lived in hotel rooms, moving frequently. Those who worked at the embassy commuted back and forth to work in armored, unmarked cars with an armed escort. They avoided restaurants and bars and did their professional best to blend in colorlessly. Secrecy was not just Centra Spike's protection; it was an essential part of its strategy. So long as their target remained unaware of Centra Spike, the unit would hear and see a lot more. In time, the unit's goal was to electronically infiltrate the cartel and crawl inside the heads of the men who ran it. Only a handful of people at the U.S. embassy, the ambassador and the CIA station chief, and maybe one or two trusted aides, knew Steve Jacoby's mission in Bogotá. The host government wouldn't know. They were informed only that the United States, at Colombia's invitation, was going to begin some fairly sophisticated surveillance. To the world at large, Jacoby and the men who worked with him in Bogotá were just midlevel bureaucrats in the six-hundred-man workforce, at work on something to do with the computers, something administrative and mundane.
For the men of Centra Spike, flying to a new place just meant pulling out a different passport and a different set of credit cards and other carefully falsified documents, all of them as official as a newly minted hundred-dollar bill, complete with backup files, photos, history…for anyone who cared to check. Shifting identities had been hard at first, but by now for these men it was like putting on a new pair of shoes. They might pinch a little for the first few days, but then they loosened up and you didn't even notice them. Jacoby himself was a study in nondescript, the kind of face and body your eye would pass over without a second thought: with average height, a broad face, big soft hands, built thick but not fat, the kind of guy with more pressing and important things to do than work out, and a manner that seemed self-absorbed and quiet unless he had reason to turn his heavy-lidded eyes on you. Then you might see an active, cynical sense of humor. He would appear to be a clever man but not a serious one, skeptical of authority but in a safe, grumpy, amusing sort of way. Harmless. Currmidgeonly. A workaholic. You could tell that about him. He had the pasty complexion and rumpled shirt and suit coat of a man who had sat too many hours in an office chair behind a desk or computer. He seemed distant at first and gruff, but then warm and likable. He did not appear to be a complicated or particularly accomplished man. Within his top-secret world, he was considered the best.
