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

by Mark Bowden

  Busby was used to the president's gusty temper. He admired Gaviria's courage, but he did not find him an especially charismatic man. Squeaky-voiced, moody, and introspective, Gaviria didn't convey much that was obviously impressive or presidential to the ambassador, even though he was almost classically handsome, with his dark hair and strong chin. Busby found the president and the others in his administration to be pleasant, well educated, idealistic, and hopelessly naive. They tended to be polite upper-middle-class sophisticates who trusted that everyone down deep was basically decent and well-meaning. They hadn't stood a chance bargaining against a tough, streetwise gangster like Pablo Escobar, who was as well-meaning as a scorpion. To someone like Pablo, the trusting nature of a man like Gaviria was an invitation. The narcos played with these effete Bogotá boys.

  Still, Busby had hopes for Gaviria. He had nice manners, but he was also powerfully ambitious. He had risked his life to get this job, braving intense, real danger daily. To do that required principled toughness, and this was what gave the ambassador hope. A man like that, if he was frustrated and angry enough, could turn cold and calculating.

  "An entire brigade!" Gaviria shouted in amazement. "And the general allows two officials inside the prison to talk to him! For what? To notify him that he was going to be taken? What did he expect would happen! Such a stupid thing! I mean, such a stupid thing!"

  The scene at La Catedral remained chaotic. One guard had been killed in the raid, a sergeant who had been employed by the Bureau of Prisons. Two Bureau of Prisons guards had been wounded. Five of Pablo's men had been captured. The army was insisting that Pablo must still be inside the jail in a carefully prepared hiding place, so their forces were tearing the place apart. Hoping to collapse a tunnel, they were detonating explosives out on the soccer field. Mendoza, the hapless vice minister Pablo had held captive the night before, was back in Bogotá and, at Gaviria's insistence, telling his story to all who would listen. "We must hide nothing in this," the president had told him. "Don't take time to prepare a response; just get out there and tell people exactly what happened."

  It hadn't dawned on Mendoza yet how bad this was all starting to look for him. So he did as instructed. After briefing the generals and the Americans he went before microphones and cameras and told his story on national TV.

  Wagner then invited the shaken vice minister over to his house, and Mendoza told the story of the whole episode again while it was still fresh in his mind. Unshaven, haggard, and up for nearly two days without sleep, he still had a sense of humor. He told the CIA man that he would be surprised by how much of a man's body could be hidden behind a toilet. He said that while he waited for the raid to begin, he had heard the steady sound of a pickax being used in an adjacent room, which supported the theory that Pablo had escaped by way of a tunnel.

  Bogotá was in a frenzy of blame. Defense Minister Rafael Pardo was arguing that despite the abysmal performance of the army, if Pablo had escaped through a tunnel, the escape was the fault of the Justice Ministry, which supervised the Bureau of Prisons. Meanwhile, Mendoza's boss the justice minister was blaming the army for failing to act until Pablo got away, and for apparently looking the other way as he walked off. Journalists were asking if the escape had resulted from corruption or incompetence or both, and how high up it went. There would be investigations, indictments, heads would roll, and people were going to go to jail. Everyone assumed the narco violence was about to resume.

  At the U.S. embassy the night before, while the standoff at the prison had still been under way, DEA chief Toft had been more excited than alarmed by these events. Bolivian by birth, he was a tall, lean man with a leathery, deeply lined face. An avid tennis player with short-cropped, spiky hair, he cultivated a flashy, tough-guy look, with his leather jacket and his handgun strapped to his belt. Toft had grown up in the Bay Area of California and had started out as a customs agent. He had been one of the first men assigned to the DEA when it was established in 1973. He was one of the administration's first foreign agents, having worked in Rome and Madrid before coming back to the States to take over the Latin America desk. He was known to be fearless and ambitious, someone who welcomed dangerous work, so he was a natural choice for the job in Bogotá. It was the world capital of cocaine, the front line of the war on drugs. Toft embraced the risk. His marriage had broken up just before he left for Colombia, so he plunged into the work alone, sleeping behind steel-reinforced doors with an automatic pistol by his side. For the bureaucrats in Washington, the drug war was an abstraction, a game of tons seized and traffickers indicted. For Toft and his men, it was real war, with bullets and blood. He recognized Pablo's escape as an opportunity. The drug boss would be fair game again, and the DEA chief was a man who thrilled to the chase. So long as Gaviria didn't capitulate, this time they would hunt Pablo down. In a cable to headquarters in Washington, D.C., hours before he had gotten confirmation of Pablo's escape, Toft had written:

  The BCO [Bogotá country office/the U.S. embassy] feels that Escobar may finally have overstepped his self-perceived illegitimate boundaries and has placed himself in a very precarious position. Escobar's gall and bravado may lead to his ultimate downfall. But then again, the GOC [government of Colombia] has always bowed to Escobar's demands in the past. This current situation again provides the GOC with an opportunity to demonstrate its dedication to bring all narco-traffickers to justice, including the most notorious and dangerous cocaine trafficker in history, Pablo Escobar.

  Gaviria seemed insulted and embarrassed enough to see the effort through this time, no matter how rough or distasteful. He told the Americans that as far as he was concerned, the door was now open. Despite constitutional barriers to foreign troops on Colombian soil, Gaviria said he would welcome any and all help the Americans could give.

  "This is critical, please," he told the ambassador. "Help us get this guy as soon as possible."

  Pablo had done his enemies a favor. There were three indictments awaiting him in the United States. President Bush's Justice Department had determined that U.S. military forces had the authority to arrest foreign nationals and bring them back to the States for trial. They had done it with Manuel Noriega. For several years Colombia had now accepted military training and eavesdropping assistance from the United States, including Centra Spike, but the U.S. military had always been kept at arm's length, and very low-key. There was enough historical resentment of U.S. power and interference in Latin America to cause serious political consequences for Gaviria if a major American presence became public.

  The help requested would be needed fast. If Pablo was not apprehended soon, before he had a chance to securely set himself up as a fugitive, the search might drug on for months, or years. He had spent a lifetime building criminal associations, and he had virtually limitless resources. His wealth and reputation for violence ensured loyalty where his popularity did not Ensconced in his home city of Medellín, in his home state of Antioquia, he was king of the mountain.

  Like Toft, Ambassador Busby relished the opportunity provided by Pablo's escape. It was the kind of task he was cut out for. He originally had been a military man, joining the navy after graduating from Marshall College with a degree in physical education. Busby had served with a navy special forces unit that predated the SEALs, but he was often described as a "former SEAL," a mistake he was always quick to correct but that nevertheless added to his mystique. Busby did have close connections with American special forces, but they stemmed not from his service in uniform as much as from the years he had served as ambassador at large for counterterrorism in the State Department, a job that involved coordinating American diplomatic and covert military action throughout the world. He was a military man who had adopted diplomacy as a second career, which made him a new kind of diplomat.

  To Colombians he looked like Uncle Sam himself, minus the white goatee. He was tall and tan, with graying sandy hair and the long, powerful arms and hands of a man who was a skilled carpenter and who loved to sail t
he waters of the Chesapeake Bay. In his first week in Bogotá, the newsweekly Semana ran an article about him with a full-page photograph showing the new ambassador from head to toe, eyeing the camera as if he meant business. The story said that America had sent not a diplomat but a warrior. It was not meant as a compliment, but Busby took it as one.

  So did the new president, who asked Busby in their first meeting if he had seen the piece. Busby said he had.

  "Let me tell you something," said Gaviria. "You're just what we need."

  The president and the article had Busby pegged right Diplomacy and war spring from different philosophical wells. The underlying premise of diplomacy is that people, no matter what their differences, are well-intentioned and can work together. Warriors believe in intractable evil. Certain forces cannot be compromised with; they must simply be defeated. Busby could go either way, but he had the stomach for a fight if it came to that. There was something about him that responded to the moral simplicity of confrontation. He was an American patriot, a true believer, and few circumstances in his career were more clear-cut than the challenge posed by this man he considered a monster, Pablo Escobar.

  6

  On the day Pablo Escobar walked out of jail, the men of Centra Spike were back in the United States. They had all been living off and on in Bogotá under assumed names for more than two years. Ever since Pablo had retired to La Catedral the year before, the pace of the narco violence had slowed, and the urgency of their mission had temporarily throttled back. So after years of shuttling back and forth to work, along deliberately varied routes in armored unmarked cars, shifting residences every few months, climbing back stairs to barren apartments locked down like bunkers, Major Steve Jacoby had used the slack time to pull most of his men and equipment out. Marriages and machines were in need of repair.

  Word came as it usually did, on one of the bulky black phones they hauled everywhere like a ball shackled to their ankles, the STU-3, which was for secure calls.

  "Get your act together and get back down to Bogotá."

  The call came, you packed, you apologized, and you drove to the airport.

  This time, though, Centra Spike was just a small part of the summons. Once word was relayed to Washington that Gaviria had opened the door to anything, everyone and his dog wanted in on the chase. Ever since Pablo's men had blown that Avianca flight out of the sky, the drug boss had been among the most wanted men in the world. There were fears that Pablo's sicarios planned a bombing campaign in America, and even that he had targeted the president of the United States.

  Apart from these direct concerns, combating drugs had become a top national priority. In September 1989, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had sent a memo to all top military commanders directing them to define counterdrug efforts as "a high-priority national mission" and requesting them to submit plans for increased military involvement. This was an invitation for various commands to define their relevance in the changing world. With the threat of worldwide communism evaporating, America' s military and espionage community had become a high-priced, highly skilled workforce in search of a role. Not every general at the Pentagon or executive at the CIA was eager to get involved in combating narcotics, which many regarded as an expensive, difficult, and ultimately futile endeavor, but going after someone like Pablo Escobar was another story. He was a new kind of target for a new world, a narco terrorist. It didn't take a genius to foresee that big budget cuts loomed at the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA. One way to ensure survival in the era of deficit reduction was to prove how vital you were to this new struggle. Every overt and covert intelligence unit in the arsenal would want to prove that it was flexible and smart enough to be effective against this new kind of target. Pablo offered a test case, an opportunity for these agencies to prove themselves—the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), the DEA, and the army, navy, and air force. All would want a piece.

  Major Jacoby was back in Bogotá the next day, July 23, 1992. He joined a meeting in the fifth-floor vault with the ambassador. Busby looked like he hadn't slept.

  "How long do you think it's going to take for you to find him?" the ambassador asked.

  It had never taken Centra Spike long. Jacoby said maybe a day or two. Remembering the first war, they knew that the hard part wasn't finding Pablo; it was getting the Colombians to act. The Americans had little respect for the Colombian police or military. After the escape, the joke at the embassy went: "How many Colombian prison guards and soldiers does it take to let Pablo Escobar escape?" Answer: "Four hundred. One to open the gate and three hundred and ninety-nine to watch."

  "No matter how good our intelligence is, and how hard they try, they just can't close the last thousand meters," said Jacoby. "With these guys, it just ain't gonna happen."

  Busby pondered the resources at his disposal. The CIA was good at long-term intelligence gathering, not special ops. The DEA was law enforcement; they were good at street work, recruiting snitches, and building cases. The FBI in foreign countries did mostly liaison work. What they needed for this mission were manhunters, Delta Force, the army's elite and top-secret counterterrorism unit. Busby was familiar with the unit from his years as ambassador for counterterrorism. Nobody in the world could plan and perform a real-world op better than those guys. Colombian law forbade foreign troops on their soil, and it would really be pushing Gaviria's invitation, but the ambassador felt it was doable on the Colombian end. Delta was stealthy enough that the Colombian press would never find out they were involved. But he wasn't as sure about the American side of things. He felt it was unlikely that General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was the man to order such a move.

  "What we need is Delta, but we could never get them," Busby said.

  "Why not?" asked Jacoby. "I think you're wrong. If you ask, I think you'll get what you ask for."

  In fact, General Wayne Downing, who headed the army's Special Operations Command, had expressed interest in such a mission several years earlier. In a meeting at Fort Bragg in 1989, he had asked one of Centra Spike's men to describe the kind of missions Delta might be able to perform in Colombia.

  "What are our chances of going in and not getting anybody killed?" Downing had asked.

  "Almost zero," he was told.

  So the general had backed off. A dead American sergeant from Delta would provoke a major shit storm in Washington, bringing down all sorts of scrutiny he was not prepared to accept.

  "None of these narcosis going to surrender peacefully," he was told. "If you go in you either have to take them all or kill them all."

  But Downing had remained interested and had asked to be kept apprised of opportunities. At the meeting in Bogotá Jacoby's response encouraged the ambassador.

  "I guess there's no harm in asking," he said.

  "Don't say you want them to come in here and go after Pablo themselves," Jacoby suggested. "That will never fly. Say you want them to offer training and advice."

  They all agreed that Delta was the answer.

  7

  When Pablo walked out of jail, the hopeful Gaviria administration began to splinter. Every day a new official investigation began. The Ministry of Justice accused the army of accepting bribes to allow Pablo's flight; one widely circulated report held that Pablo had paid huge sums to the soldiers around La Catedral, and walked out dressed as a woman. President Gaviria had already fired all the guards and army officers associated with the disaster, as well as the air force general whose pilots had kept the assault force waiting for hours on the ground in Bogotá after they were ordered to attack the prison, but now the generals were demanding that heads also roll in the executive branch.

  And whose head was stretched out and waiting on the block? Eduardo Mendoza was in shock. The eager young vice minister of justice suddenly found every finger of blame pointed at him. Hadn't he been in charge of Pablo's imprisonment from the start? Didn't it seem fishy that it was Mendoza who had flown up to La Catedral to tip off
the drug boss? Wasn't he the one who told the general outside the prison to wait, to raid the prison the next day, and then had gone in to confer with Pablo?

  The accusations started in the press, and soon there was a new official probe announced every day, with him as the prime target. First there was the Senate investigation. That would last for four months, with Mendoza on TV every day along with all the generals and prison guards who let Pablo go. Then the comptroller's office announced that he was going to investigate all of the contracts Mendoza had handed out to build a new prison for Pablo; somehow the difference between the existing "prison" and the real one Mendoza had hoped to build got twisted together, and in the press he became the architect of Pablo's luxurious accommodations. Then the Procuraduria's office (a kind of internal-affairs unit for the government) decided to investigate him on allegations of negligence. Then came the scary one. Gustavo de Greiff, the attorney general, announced that he was beginning a criminal investigation and named Mendoza a target. In a land of suspicion, the vice minister of justice suddenly looked like the most guilty character of all.

  Less than a week after his escape he got a call from President Gaviria's chief of staff.

  "Eduardo, the time has come," his friend said sadly.

  Mendoza was asked to resign, as was the general who had refused to storm the prison and the chief of the air force, which had taken hours to find planes to fly the strike force to La Catedral. The jail guards who had turned on Mendoza and Navas were arrested on suspicion of having accepted bribes.

  Mendoza was now jobless and unhirable. He had become a pariah. He felt as though all of the country's anger and embarrassment over Pablo's escape was focused on him. It was worse than his experience at La Catedral. Every day for months he and his lawyer showed up before the Senate committee and listened to the elected officials hurl insults and accusations. Before his family and all his friends he was disgraced, humiliated. He began mentally preparing himself to go to jail.