Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

by Mark Bowden

  Telecommunications was often the critical weakness of criminal, guerrilla, or terrorist organizations. Jacoby's unit succeeded by staying one or two steps ahead in a rapidly evolving field. When it was impossible to penetrate an organization with a spy, Centra Spike could get inside from a distance, placing "ears on target." It still meant that guys like Jacoby would have to move in and stay, often in very dangerous places. In San Salvador, members of the team would leave their hotels in the morning and drive to their airport base as fast as they could go, speeding ninety miles an hour through railroad underpasses where guerrillas liked to lob grenades. For techies like them, few jobs offered the same mix of intellectual stimulation and heart-pounding danger and excitement. If a detachment of Marxist guerrillas was hiding in the hills of Nicaragua, there wasn't time to do laboratory experiments and write papers and wait for peer reviews. Centra Spike had to come up with a way to find them and track them, for as long as necessary. The unit had ample funding to move fast, adapt, and improvise, and its members enjoyed the urgency and importance men feel when others' lives depend on their work. Add to that the sense of doing good, of making the world a better place, of serving the United States of America. The work was so compelling that it had undone more than one marriage in the unit, and made some of the men strangers to their children.

  This Colombian mission was not a cold start-up. CIA station chief John Connolly had begun thinking about the logistics before the team arrived. First off, they had to get their aircraft into the country. Anyone looking for America's most sophisticated eavesdropping equipment would be watching for something high-flying and fancy, something with great bulbous features on the top or bottom, probably bristling with antennae. They wouldn't be searching for two perfectly ordinary-looking Beechcrafts, an older model 300 and a newer 350. Inside and out, the Beechcrafts looked like standard two-prop commercial planes, outfitted for about six passengers, the kind of plane employed by charter services or big companies with enough money to fly their executives from place to place without getting slick. In a country with mountain roads as iffy as Colombia's, such transports were typical.

  But these were no ordinary Beechcrafts. Modified by Summit Aviation in Delaware, at the northernmost tip of the Chesapeake Bay, they were $50 million spy planes crammed with state-of-the-art electronic eavesdropping and direction-finding equipment. If someone looked very closely—for instance, with a tape measure—they would discover the Beechcrafts' wingspans to be about six inches longer than that of the normal models, because the plane's two main eavesdropping antennae were installed inside. Five more antennae could be lowered from the belly of the plane once it was in flight. Inside, until they took off, the planes looked like standard models. Centra Spike's operators would board carrying laptop computers, and set up for listening only after the plane had reached an altitude of twenty to twenty-five thousand feet. Then antennae would be lowered, panels folded down from the inner walls, and the computers plugged into the plane's mainframe and power center. The two operators wore headsets with earphones, one in each ear, so they could monitor four frequencies simultaneously. The computer screens before them displayed graphically the plane's position and the estimated position of the signals they locked on to. Since the plane flew so high and could listen through cloud cover, there was no tip-off below.

  There was another nifty secret feature to Centra Spike's capability. So long as their target left the battery in his cell phone, Centra Spike could remotely turn it on whenever they wished. Without triggering the phone's lights or beeper, the phone could be activated so that it emitted a low-intensity signal, enough for the unit to get a fix on its general location. They would activate the phone briefly when their target was most likely sleeping, then move the plane into position to monitor any calls he might make when he awoke.

  It was important that it not be obvious who owned these planes, so a dummy corporation called Falcon Aviation was created, which would have a contract to do something entirely innocuous. What the CIA set up was ingenious. Falcon Aviation would be officially conducting an aviation safety project, a survey of Colombia's VOR (VHF omnidirectional radio range) beacons. These are transmitters located at all airports to help pilots find their way to runways. VOR beacons are a standard feature of international air safety, and it would not appear unusual for the U.S. embassy, with the agreement of the local authorities, to be running routine checks on the equipment. It would give Centra Spike' s pilots an excuse to fly just about wherever they wanted. There were only a few dozen VOR beacons in Colombia, so anyone who understood the details of aviation-industry infrastructure would know such work would take only weeks, but so few people paid attention to such things that the contract would serve as sufficient cover for the unit for years if necessary.

  Centra Spike found blocks of hotel rooms for Jacoby, his pilots, and the highly skilled eavesdroppers (mostly native Spanish-speaking soldiers) who would man the planes and work the equipment, as well as for the support personnel who would work at the embassy sorting, collating, translating, and interpreting the daily haul of conversations, beeper transmissions, faxes, e-mails, and so on. Arrangements were made to transfer money, sometimes in large amounts, without attracting attention or suspicion. By early October 1989, at about the same time Colonel Martinez's Search Bloc began working in Medellín, Falcon Aviation was flying and listening. The pilots would file a flight plan at Palencaro Air Base north of Bogotá, but as soon as they were out of that tower's tracking range, they would fly off to begin the hunt.

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  In the fall of 1989, the U.S. embassy in Bogotá was not sure exactly how the Medellín cartel worked, or even who was in charge. Pablo was considered just one of the big names. The Colombian authorities believed he was the boss, but information from the local police and army was regarded with suspicion by the Americans. All of the cartel leaders were now infamous. Fortune magazine listed them annually with the richest men in the world, but José Rodríguez Gacha, "El Mexicano," the fat man who often sported a Panama hat with a snakehead on its band, was thought to be the richest and most vicious of them all. Fortune had put Gacha on its cover, estimating his worth at $5 billion. Before Centra Spike landed, their briefing indicated that Gacha was the real power atop the cartel. U.S. intelligence agencies believed it was he, not Pablo, who had ordered the hit on Galán.

  So the fat man was Centra Spike's first target, and it didn't take them long to find him. He had been hiding from the national police ever since they had seized his estate north of Bogotá immediately after Galán's murder. A well-placed police informant revealed that Gacha had regular phone conversations with a woman in Bogotá. That information was passed to the U.S. embassy through the DEA, and Centra Spike started listening for the calls. They found him immediately, in a finca on a hilltop southwest of Bogotá. It was the only dwelling on the hill and was conspicuously elegant for a such a remote spot. Jacoby passed on the location to the CIA station chief, and it was given to President Barco.

  The response was immediate and surprising, and answered any uncertainty the Americans had about Barco's intentions. The coordinates were given to the Colombian air force, which launched a squadron of T-33 fighter-bombers on November 22 to destroy the finca and everyone in it. Embassy officials were taken aback. No one had anticipated that the Colombians would simply kill the people Centra Spike had helped them find.

  As it happened, the bombing sortie never forced the issue, because the lead pilot, a Colombian colonel, noticed that just beyond the finca, over the lip of the hill, was a small village. If any of the bombs overshot by even a small margin, they were certain to hit the thirty or forty smaller homes below. To avoid a tragedy, the colonel called off the bomb run at the last minute, but not soon enough to stop all four fighters from streaking about fifty feet over the rooftop of a severely startled Gacha. The cocaine boss was on the phone (with Centra Spike listening in) when the jets boomed overhead. He shouted with surprise and anger and immediately fled. A number of his key l
ieutenants stayed, however, and were arrested the next day when a police unit assaulted the house from helicopters. The army seized $5.4 million in cash at the finca. A judge promptly found fault with the legal basis for the raid, and most of these men were released; some of them would later be identified by Centra Spike as key figures in the cartel.

  The last-minute decision to abort the bombing brought heavy criticism on the pilots and on the air force, which was accused of selling out, of letting Gacha get away. There was some reason to suspect this because he had long-standing friends within the Colombian military who had collaborated with his paramilitary squads against the Communist guerrillas. The national police, who were the most serious go-getters in the war against the cartel, accused the air force of intentionally bungling the mission, tipping off Gacha and enabling him to escape. The U.S. embassy found itself adjudicating the dispute, reviewing imagery of the hill, approach speeds, and likely bomb trajectories. The air force even offered to fly Jacoby in the backseat of a T-33 over the site. He declined. The review concluded that the colonel had been prudent.

  The hunt for Gacha and the other cartel leaders assumed an even higher level of importance to the United States when, just five days later, an Avianca airliner was blown out of the sky shortly after taking off from Bogotá for Cali. The bombing had been planned two weeks earlier at a meeting attended by Pablo, Gacha, and some of their top lieutenants and sicarios. They'd discussed two bombings, the most important of which was an attack on the DAS building in Bogotá. Plans for this were set in motion, and then Pablo suggested the Avianca bombing. He said wanted to kill César Gaviria, the candidate who had taken up Galán's standard and was now the front-runner in the campaign for president. Gaviria had been serving as Galán's campaign manager, and at the funeral Galán's son had asked him to finish off the run.

  This session also produced a new communiqué from the Extraditables, written by Pablo: "We want peace. We have screamed out loud for it, but we cannot beg for it…. We do not accept, nor will we ever accept, the numerous arbitrary raids on our families, the ransacking, the repressive detentions, the judicial frame-ups, the anti-patriotic and illegal extraditions, the violations of all our rights. We are ready to confront the traitors."

  Carlos Alzate, one of Pablo's veteran sicarios, recruited a young man in Bogotá to do a job for them. He was to carry a briefcase on the flight that they told him contained a recording device. Once aloft, he was instructed to secretly tape the conversation of the person seated next to him. In fact, the briefcase contained five kilograms of dynamite. The hapless bomber—Alzate called him the "suisso" or suicide—was instructed, once in flight, to flip a toggle switch on top of the suitcase to activate the recorder. All 110 passengers were killed. Gaviria was not on the plane. He had a ticket, but his staff had decided weeks earlier to avoid all commercial flights—for safety reasons, but also because Gaviria's presence on a commercial flight tended to panic the other passengers, who did not want to fly with someone who was so clearly a target for assassination.

  Ever since the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, the year before, threats to air travel had been elevated to a primary concern by the United States and other world powers. International air travel was regarded as vital to the civilized world and also highly vulnerable to anyone unscrupulous enough to attack it. Deterring and punishing those who would take aim at commercial airplanes had become a priority in the counterterrorism community worldwide. Concern about the Medellín cartel heightened when some of Pablo's men were caught trying to buy 120 Stinger antiaircraft missiles in Florida. Weeks after the Avianca bombing, President Bush released a strenuously reasoned opinion by the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel concluding that it would not violate the Posse Comitatus Act for the army to be used against criminal suspects overseas. The Avianca bombing was significant for another reason. In the eyes of the Bush administration, it marked Pablo Escobar, Jose Rodríguez Gacha, and other cartel leaders as a direct threat to American citizens—two of those on the doomed flight had been American citizens. As such, the narcos were now men who, in the eyes of the Bush administration, could legally be killed.

  For nearly two decades in the United States, the issue of targeting foreign citizens for death had been governed by Executive Order 12333, the pertinent parts of which read as follows:

  2.11 Prohibition on Assassination

  No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.

  2.12 Indirect Participation

  No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order.

  The executive order dated back to 1974, when it was issued by President Gerald Ford to effectively preempt legislation gathering steam in Congress, which was investigating abuses by American intelligence agencies. It was a compromise designed to prevent left-wing lawmakers from carving such a prohibition into law and, as an executive order, presumably preserved the right of the president to make exceptions. Soon after Bush took office in 1989, the chief of the international law branch of the army's judge advocate general's office, W.Hays Parks, began work on a formal memorandum to further clarify Executive Order 12333. Dated November 2, and signed off on by legal counsels for the State Department, CIA, National Security Council, Department of Justice, and Department of Defense, it concluded:

  The purpose of Executive Order 12333 and its legal predecessors was to preclude unilateral actions by individual agents or agencies against selected foreign public officials, and to establish beyond any doubt that the United States does not condone assassination as an instrument of national policy. Its intent was not to limit lawful self defense options against legitimate threats to the national security of the United States or individual U.S. citizens. Acting consistent with the Charter of the United Nations, a decision by the president to employ clandestine, low visibility or overt military force would not constitute assassination if the U.S. military forces were employed against the combatant forces of another nation, a guerrilla force, or a terrorist or other organization whose actions pose a threat to the security of the United States [emphasis added].

  The opinion eased concerns among soldiers in the covert ops community, including the men of Centra Spike, that their work would not someday be labeled criminal. If the Colombians were going to simply kill cartel leaders that Centra Spike found, so be it.

  The situation in Colombia was clearly war. On December 6, just nine days after José Rodríguez Gacha fled his mountaintop finca, the second of the two bombings planned with Pablo weeks before took place. A bus loaded with five hundred kilograms of dynamite was detonated outside the DAS building. It carved a crater four feet deep in the pavement outside the building and tore off its front. Seventy people were killed, hundreds more injured, and the explosion caused more than $25 million in property damage. One target of the explosion was General Miguel Maza, who had miraculously survived the car bombing in May. He emerged from the ruins of the building, again unscathed.

  The blasts were swiftly avenged. Centra Spike traced Gacha over the next few weeks as he fled north from finca to finca, but he never stayed in one place long enough for the Colombians to launch a raid. He settled eventually into a cabin in the departamento of Chocó, in a remote, heavily forested area near the border of Panama. He was picked up on a radio phone arranging for women to be trucked to this remote spot. The location wasn't precise—the portion of the intercepted call had been too brief—but elite police units were deployed to search the area. They were finally led to Gacha's finca by a man named Jorge Velasquez, a cocaine smuggler from Cartagena who had been working as a spy for the Medellín cartel's rivals in Cali. The Cali cartel leaders had a lot to gain by the destruction of their Medellín rivals and had begun quietly assisting the Colombian police. Once Velasquez pointed out Gacha's precise location, a coordinated assault was planned for early the next morning, December 15, 19
89. Just in case, the United States readied a task force of Delta Force operators and SEALs on the USS America, sailing just off the coast. As the police-assault helicopters, AH-6 Little Birds armed with Israeli miniguns, descended on Gacha and his teenage son Freddy and five bodyguards, they fled the house and ran for a nearby banana grove. According to the official report, they fired on the choppers with automatic weapons and the miniguns cut them down. Their bodies were placed on display afterward. The lower half of El Mexicano's face had been shot completely away. It was a grotesque way of serving notice that this time, the drug war was for keeps.

  Gacha was publicly mourned by thousands in his hometown of Pacho, about twenty-five miles north of Bogotá. At his estate there police found a working gallows, machine guns, grenades, and a gold-plated, personalized 9mm pistol with monogrammed bullets. His death would do little to curb the flood of cocaine leaving Colombia for the United States, but to the vast majority of Colombians, cowed by years of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations, it marked a major victory for the state, for President Barco, and, quietly, for the United States.