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

by Mark Bowden

  Pablo had, in fact, walked out. He and his brother Roberto had led a small group of his men uphill, past the camouflaged cabanas, cut a hole in the wire fence, and walked over the top of the hill—and right past soldiers either too friendly or too intimidated to stop them. The "tunnel" spoken of in the intercepted phone conversations was, of course, the inmates' sarcastic term for the covered truck that had been used to roll contraband—women, weapons, money, bodies, alcohol—up and down the mountain, right under the studiously disinterested noses of prison guards and army patrols.

  In a taped statement he had delivered to select TV and radio reporters two days after his escape, Pablo offered his own version of the night he escaped, and the reasons for it. He complained that he and his men (the inmates) had generously agreed to "lose control over more than half of the jail and our rights" when the government had started construction of the new fence around La Catedral, and he was shocked when a large army force suddenly showed up at the jail on July 22. He denied having taken Mendoza and Navas hostage and that the two officials had been threatened, calling Mendoza "a liar." His statement concluded: "As for the aggression carried out against us, we won't take violent actions of any nature yet and we are willing to continue with the peace process and our surrender to justice if we can be guaranteed to stay at the Envigado jail, as well as handing control of the prison to special forces of the United Nations."

  The statement was signed, "Colombian jungle zone, Thursday, July 24, 1992. Pablo Escobar and comrades."

  The day after his disappearance, Pablo's lawyers presented the government with a surrender offer, which basically called for him to be returned to La Catedral under the same terms, with no additional charges against him. Much to the satisfaction of the U.S. embassy, Gaviria had flatly refused, but then de Greiff muddied the waters by promptly announcing that he was willing to bargain.

  The following day an odd explanatory communiqué was broadcast by the national radio station Caracol, from someone calling himself "Dakota," who claimed to speak for the Extraditables. The enumerated items included the claim that a bribe of one billion pesos had been paid to the army to allow Pablo's escape. The threatening statements made by Popeye (statements like "I've always wanted to kill a vice minister," reported by Mendoza after his release) were "the result of nervousness," and while there would be retaliation against high officials, there would be no acts of violence against the public. The statement said there were no tunnels beneath La Catedral, that seventy armed men had met Pablo when he left the prison early in the morning. It said that the murders that had prompted Gaviria's decision to move Pablo to a different prison (the Moncada and Galeano brothers) were nothing more than an "internal war" within the Medellín cartel and that Pablo could not understand why the government was "involving itself"

  Adding to the mix was a fax received at the U.S. embassy on the day of Pablo's escape. It was vintage Escobar: The ugly threat issued politely:

  We, the Extraditables declare: That if anything happens to Mr. Pablo Escobar, we will hold President Gaviria responsible and will again mount attacks on the entire country. We will target the United States Embassy in the country, where we will plant the largest quantity of dynamite ever. We hereby declare: The blame for this whole mess lies with President Gaviria. If Pablo Escobar or any of the others turn up dead, we will immediately mount attacks throughout the entire country. Thank you very much.

  Trying to cut through all this noise—it was hard to tell what was true and what wasn't—the embassy was lucky to have Centra Spike in the air high over Medellín. Any lingering doubts about a tunnel were erased when the unit picked up Pablo talking at length on a cell phone and pinpointed his location to an area about four miles from the prison, in a wealthy suburb of Medellín called Tres Esquinas. Evidently assuming that the government was not yet geared up enough to have gotten surveillance units on his tail, Pablo was doing a lot of talking, using as many as eight different cell phones.

  Predictably, he saw himself as the victim in all this. He had been very content with the deal he had struck with the government. The last thing he wanted was to be back out of jail and on the run once more. It was clear from his phone conversations that he desperately wanted back in. He explained as much in a long lecture (intercepted by Centra Spike) to his lawyers, just two days after his escape.

  Pablo didn't believe that the government had intended only to transfer him to Itagui, a maximum-security prison in Medellín, just as he had disbelieved the reassurances of Vice Minister Mendoza on the night of his escape. He felt Gaviria's stated reason for this supposed transfer was a ruse—he viewed the Galeano and Moncada murders as a strictly private, business affair. What was really behind the move on La Catedral, he insisted, was an American-backed assassination attempt.

  "[Let us] give this a little bit more clarity," Pablo explained. "The situation arose because they went in there shooting and all, and we were defending our lives, but our intention was to comply with the government until the end…. It is possible that one or two persons were smuggled into the jail. I won't deny it…that happens in jails all over the country and the world, and, in reality, I am not to blame. The person to blame is the person who lets them in…. So that if people entered [La Catedral] shooting and all and we had information that Americans were participating in the operation, we have to put our lives first, we have families!"

  Accepting imprisonment anywhere other than La Catedral would compromise their safety, Pablo explained.

  "Yes, yes," said one of the lawyers. "That was the first issue that I explained to the president."

  Pablo objected to Mendoza's efforts to build a new prison around the existing one. "There was a delineation of the jail," he said. "It had been arranged. We made the design, we reworked the map, so the only thing that we didn't bargain for was a jail different from that one. And we need a public guarantee from the president that he will not take us out of the country."

  "No, he already said that…we'd be protected, that the same protection guarantee would be maintained," said one of Pablo's representatives. "He continues to reiterate that."

  "The problem is, I have some information…that there were some gringos," said Pablo. "So what happens is that there's a combined force. The army and the gringos [are] looking for Bush's reelection, so we need their [Gaviria's administration's] guarantee in this respect…. Do me a favor. Tell Señor President that I know he is misinformed. Now, they say that I am perpetrating crimes from jail." Pablo explained that if he was convicted of committing another crime while in jail, "[The government can] make me stay here all of my life. But they can't move me from there because that's the deal I made with the government."

  "Perfect," said the lawyer.

  "Anyway, accept my apologies," said Pablo, winding up the oration with typical deference.

  "No, sir. It is my pleasure. And we'll see that all this works out. We are very interested in working this out."

  "We are well disposed to come back," said Pablo. "There will be no more acts of violence of any nature, although some resentful people have been making some phone calls. People want to create chaos. But anyway, we are well disposed and we want to get this thing resolved…. Tell the president that we were very uneasy because the gringos were going to be a part of the operation."

  "We saw the tapes of the gray uniforms and all that," said another of the lawyers. Pablo and his men believed that the CIA employed agent-soldiers who wore gray uniforms.

  "Of the gringos?" asked Pablo. "And how many were there?"

  "Well, we could see some uniforms on TV. This afternoon we asked for tapes from the evening news program."

  Pablo knew that the accusation that American soldiers had been involved would create big political problems for Gaviria.

  "There are two things that are very important," said Pablo, now addressing Santiago Uribe (no relation to lawyer Roberto Uribe). "When you have a chance of making a statement, say that what caused the biggest concern to us was the pres
ence of the gringos. The fact that the army would be going along with the gringos. What explanation can be given for that?"

  "Yes. The press is already after that. We're on top of that."

  "Okay. And another thing. The president has to say it officially and make an official commitment. Everything is a contract. Now it's going to be a contract signed by the minister who makes the commitment that if tomorrow or the day after tomorrow I kill the warden and get thirty more years, they don't transfer me from here. That this is a commitment."

  "Yes. Yes," said Uribe.

  "Okay, gentlemen, good hick then."

  8

  There is no evidence that American soldiers and CIA agents—gray-uniformed or otherwise—had been involved, but if that was one of Pablo's fears, his escape would make it come true. Four days after he left La Catedral, a team of Delta Force operators led by Colonel Jerry Boykin arrived in Bogotá. Ambassador Busby's request for Delta, much to his surprise, had sailed through Washington. The State Department had approved it and passed it up to the White House, where President Bush had consulted with Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and then instructed Secretary of Defense Cheney to give Busby anything he needed.

  Eight very fit men dressed in civilian clothes were met at El Dorado Airport by midlevel embassy officials and driven downtown, moving swiftly along roads that in daylight would be choked with traffic. Busby, Toft, and Wagner were waiting in the vault. Busby and Boykin were old friends, and after a few minutes of getting caught up, the ambassador began briefing Boykin on the situation. It was, to say the least, confusing.

  Boykin's team had taken the assignment hoping to go after Pablo themselves, especially given the clumsy track record of the Colombians in the months before his surrender. Delta specialized in this kind of quick, dirty strike. They trained constantly and could move rapidly on any target anywhere, day or night. Their official orders typically explained the what and why of the mission without spelling out the how. Their commanding officer, General William F.Garrison, was a veteran at these kinds of covert ops, ever since his work on the Phoenix program in Vietnam, where suspected Vietcong leaders were assassinated in retaliation for killings of village leaders who were less than enthusiastic about communism. Garrison was not one to shy away from an assassination mission. But Delta's plan had been vetoed emphatically by U.S. Army Southern Commander, General George Joulwan when he'd met with Boykin before the men flew down.

  "No, you're not going to do it yourself," he had instructed Boykin. Joulwan knew how easy it was for these "black" special ops guys to fly beneath the army's command radar, and he knew they wanted to do the job themselves. As far as he was concerned, the potential political and legal fallout of such a mission would eclipse its benefits.

  But if the Colombians took all this training, intelligence, and guidance and went out and shot somebody while trying to arrest Escobar, the U.S. mission stayed comfortably within the law. Officially, the Delta operators were not to participate in raids. Joulwan wanted them to get out there and show the Colombian police how to track this son of a bitch down.

  Busby also conveyed the urgency of the situation. He and the staff at the embassy had been working around the clock ever since Pablo's escape. Steve Murphy, the DEA agent with the well-worn Spanish-English dictionary, had subsisted on coffee and donuts for so long, without sleep, that when he felt his heart fluttering oddly in his chest he took a break to go have his heart checked at the embassy dispensary. He thought he might be having a heart attack. He was advised to cut down on the sugar and caffeine.

  Pablo had been free for four days. He was already assembling the support system he would need to live underground. If they didn't catch him quickly—specifically, in the next few days—they were going to face a much harder task.

  The following day, Monday, Boykin and the ambassador went off to meet with President Gaviria, to tell him the United States was putting up a $2 million reward for information leading the authorities to Pablo. Two high-ranking Colombian officers came to the embassy to meet with the remaining newly arrived Americans, Colonel Luis Montenegro and Lieutenant Colonel Lino Pinzon, the man assigned to head the search effort.

  "You're going back with these guys, and they're going to help you locate Escobar," Colonel Montenegro told Pinzon.

  Members of the Delta team inflated their rank to avoid embarrassing the higher-ranking Colombians. Gary Harrell, one of the largest line officers in the American army, was a lieutenant colonel with an aggressive personality to complement his lineman's physique. He was a country boy with a very direct, forceful style, and a handshake that people warned you about. He was introduced as a general, and he managed to fill the room with his take-charge, can-do personality. This was a mistake, aggravated when the Americans refused to allow Pinzon to see the command center in the vault. It didn't bother Montenegro, a slender, dark, nervous man, who was delighted to have this American support. Montenegro kept repeating, "No me dejes solo" (Don't leave me alone), but Pinzon was insulted. He was a dignified man with a crisp salt-and-pepper crew cut. He was regarded as something of a ladies' man, played a good game of tennis, and kept a manicurist and pedicurist on his staff. The DEA agents who had been working with him regarded Pinzon as a clever dandy with more ambition for rank than actual accomplishment, but they liked him. These same traits were anathema to the Delta operators. They sized up Pinzon as a "ticket puncher," the kind of officer who was content merely to appear as though he were doing his job. Harrell was strictly a results man, with Delta's legendary disdain for rank or privilege. If ever two men were designed to conflict, it was these two.

  Pinzon and Montenegro were told that the embassy had found Pablo at a hilltop finca in Tres Equinas. Pinzon was unconvinced. His own intelligence indicated that Pablo was still near the prison, probably someplace underground, but Montenegro agreed that if another call came from the same place, Pinzon's forces should be ready to move in. Four members of the Delta team would travel to Medellín the next day to assist with the assault.

  One of the first two operators to leave for Medellín was a man who the Colombians would know as Colonel Santos. None of the men who stayed in the country used their real names. While Boykin was the commander and Harrell was initially in charge in Medellín, it was Santos, whose real rank was sergeant major, who would end up staying on for most of the hunt, supervising the Delta operators and SEALs who rotated in and out. Santos also acted as liaison between the embassy and the Search Bloc. He was a slender, exceedingly fit former track star who had grown up in New Mexico speaking both Spanish and English. He had been one of the first men selected for Delta when it was formed in 1978, and its first Hispanic recruit.

  In what had proved to be his final interview for the unit, General Charlie Beckwith had tried to bait him.

  "Why, shit, Sergeant, you're a wetback, aren't you? What makes you think we'd be stupid enough to select someone like you for a sensitive unit like this? You're no American, you're a fucking Mexicano."

  Even though Santos knew he was being goaded deliberately, the insult got under his skin.

  "I was born and raised in the American system and I am an American citizen, sir," he said calmly.

  "All right, Sergeant," said the squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis H. "Bucky" Burruss. "What if I were to tell you that you did okay but we've decided not to select you? If you want to get into this unit, you'll have to do the whole thing all over again. Would you do that?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Why?"

  "Because I want to be here, in this kind of unit."

  "Okay, Sergeant Wetback, we have three days before the next class comes in," said Beckwith. "You better get ready to do it again. You're excused."

  Santos had exited the room, silent but horrified. The physical-selection process had been the most difficult experience of his life. The prospect of having to go through it again was daunting and clearly unfair. He was still standing in the hallway wrestling with those feelings when the door ope
ned and he was invited back in.

  "Okay, Sergeant," said Beckwith. "You are accepted. You will not have to go through it again."

  Santos and another operator boarded a plane to Medellín the following evening, laden with top-secret high-tech equipment, portable GPS satellite positioning devices, microwave visual imagery platforms, and video cameras with powerful lenses for remote ground surveillance (both day and night). The idea was to link up with Colombian forces; pinpoint the target where Pablo's phone calls had originated, using coordinates supplied by Centra Spike; put the camera on it; and begin watching for signs of the fugitive's presence. The microwave transmitter would send real-time images back to the Colombian police, so there would be no mistaking the target.

  They unloaded all this gear at one end of a runway at Rionegro, a remote landing strip outside Medellín. There were supposed to be police officers waiting for them there, but the landing strip was empty. Santos and his partner sat on their classified cargo and waited.

  About a half hour after their plane had taken off to return to Bogotá, the two operators grew concerned. This was hardly an auspicious beginning. Here they were, two American secret operatives laden with some of their unit's fanciest gear, unarmed, unescorted, sitting out in the heartlands of narco territory with no radio. They hadn't even worked up a good cover story. It was hours before members of the Search Bloc came to pick them up—the Colombians had gone to the wrong airport.

  The Carlos Holguin School, an old police training academy, had a broad green campus surrounded by high fences and barbed wire, set on a residential hillside overlooking the city from the west. They slept that night in sleeping bags on the floor of one of the school's storehouses.