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

by Mark Bowden

  Even DEA agents Peña and Murphy felt compelled to go along on raids. They would ride in choppers with Martinez or whichever of his men was leading the assault. Sometimes the Search Bloc would ask the agents to accompany them with a video camera to record payoffs to informants. There was such suspicion about corruption that the agents were asked to keep the camera running on the bag of money from the minute they left the base until it was handed over to the informant. On one occasion, when word got back to the embassy that Murphy had left the compound, he was told, "If you do it again, you will be back in the United States before your luggage arrives."

  There was stiff competition among all the American agencies in Medellín. Each organization was out to prove that its men, equipment, and methods were the most useful. The winner in this chase would likely become a prototype for such deployments—and funding—in the future. The two groups most directly pitted against each other were the CIA and Centra Spike. The spy agency operated two kinds of aerial surveillance: it flew the wide-winged, silent Schweizer to provide imagery, and it had its own version of Centra Spike, code-named Majestic Eagle, to electronically eavesdrop on targets and pinpoint their locations. Centra Spike's Beechcrafts performed the same service. At the Pentagon and in the White House, the unit that got credit was usually the one that delivered fresh intelligence first.

  Peña remembers seeing the CIA and Centra Spike men actually racing to telephone back new information. And sometimes on its way to Washington, the source of new information got confused. Centra Spike's Major Jacoby got angry on one occasion when data collected by his unit showed up in a CIA report as agency-developed intelligence. He complained about it bitterly to the ambassador. As far as Centra Spike was concerned, the CIA radiotelemetry was inferior. Its equipment had cost far more to develop and deploy, and had been designed to find secret narco and guerrilla airstrips in the jungle. Centra Spike's system had been perfected by actually tracking individual targets. In 1990, when Pablo had started using digital cell phones with scrambling devices, it had taken Centra Spike just fifteen days to adapt. Now, with Pablo at large again, the two systems were competing head to head. Since budget dollars would grow much scarcer in 1993 and the years ahead, it was more than just galling to see the CIA taking credit for Centra Spike's success. It was a threat to the army unit's survival.

  So Busby authorized a competition. The two units ran field trials to see which could do a better job of pinpointing targets. They set up phony targets over Medellín and flew a series of missions in late 1992. The contest wasn't even close. Centra Spike pinpointed the signal to just under two hundred meters. The best the CIA plane could do was seven kilometers, even after allowing the agency team to try three separate telemetry methods. That settled things, and the CIA backed off its claims for Majestic Eagle. Centra Spike got another boost in congressional funding, and could look forward to getting new equipment in the coming year that would double the system's accuracy.

  There was little that Centra Spike's operators missed. Up in their Beechcrafts over Medellín, they monitored dozens of communications channels simultaneously, and sometimes they were shocked by what they heard. On one occasion, after picking up a brief radio transmission from Pablo, they sent the coordinates they plotted for him on a secure line down to the teams at the Holguin base. Within minutes, after the new data was shared with the colonel and he had huddled with his top commanders, they picked up a phone call from the base. Someone was calling from the Search Bloc headquarters to alert Pablo that he needed to move. There was evidently what the Colombians called a soplo, or snitch, within Martinez's inner circle.

  The operators recorded the soplo's phone warning—"They're on their way, they're coming for you"—which went to an Escobar associate called Pinina. Several days later, after the raid failed, a Centra Spike technician visited Martinez at the base and played him the tape. The colonel didn't recognize the voice, but he knew it had to be one of the men on his command staff. So he dismissed all but his two or three most trusted men, sending the others back to Bogotá for reassignment. Eight days later, after briefing only his top commander, Major Hugo Aguilar, about a pending raid, Martinez was again called by the man from Centra Spike. They had picked up another telephone warning to Pinina from the base!

  "If it isn't you," the American said, "it has to be one of the men who are right there with you."

  Martinez was angry and frightened. It had only been two minutes! He knew he could trust Aguilar…or could he? He summoned the major to his office and confronted him. Aguilar looked like he was in shock. He swore he had made no such call and was wounded to be accused. Martinez felt wounded, too. Aguilar said that he had conveyed the colonel's plans to three other top officers, but that was it. The information had not traveled outside the Search Bloc's newly proscribed inner circle.

  The colonel was spooked and bewildered. If he couldn't carry on a conversation with his most trusted officer in his office at Holguin without Pablo finding out about it minutes later, what hope did he have of ever catching the man? Within the half hour he was on a helicopter to Bogotá, where he once again turned in his resignation. He explained to the generals that the situation was completely out of his control and hopeless, and that he wanted out. The generals refused his resignation and ordered him back to Medellín to straighten things out.

  When he returned the following day, Aguilar met him at the helicopter and said they had found the soplo. When Martinez had left, Aguilar had stormed out to confront the officers he had spoken with. All three had angrily denied the betrayal, but as they spoke they'd noticed that an auxiliary policeman, one of the regular force assigned to guard the perimeter of the base, was standing near enough to overhear them. He had been standing at the same spot when they had spoken earlier.

  "That's got to be him," said Aguilar.

  Before accusing the man, they set a trap. With the colonel back in his office the next day, they ran through the same scenario. Aguilar emerged from Martinez's office and consulted with his three officers, standing close enough for the guard to overhear. Sure enough, minutes later Centra Spike recorded another phone call forwarding the false information. The guard was confronted, and he confessed. In a panic, fearing for his life, he explained that he had been recruited by a second lieutenant, one of the men Martinez had banished from Holguin nine days earlier. He said he had even been paid to kill Martinez. He had been given a pistol with a silencer and had actually climbed a tree several nights before, outside the window where the colonel often sat reading late into the evening. The guard was too far away to feel confident of his aim and, fearing that an errant shot would prompt return fire and his death, he had resolved to spend a few days practicing with the pistol before his next attempt. He had planned to try again the night before, but the colonel had not returned from Bogotá.

  Martinez knew that the Americans distrusted all Colombians, even him, so the phone calls had distressed him. When the soplo was discovered, Martinez was more relieved at being able to shift suspicion from himself and his top men than he was to learn how closely he had escaped an assassin. Still, the incident reinforced how insidious Pablo's influence was, even within his own ranks.

  After this soplo was uprooted, there was still reason to believe that Pablo had sources inside the Holguin base. A massive raid on November 5 in an area just west of the old Nápoles estate had turned up nothing, even though the colonel believed Pablo had been there, and another one two days later likewise came up empty. During the same period, raids on some of the cartel's midlevel management routinely got results. The successes confirmed the accuracy of the intelligence and telemetry, yet when it came to Pablo, the raids were always too late.

  Over the Christmas holidays at the end of 1992, Pablo made another surrender offer in a letter to two sympathetic Colombian senators. He offered to turn himself in if the government would agree to house him and sixty members of the "military and financial arms" of his organization at a police academy in Medellín, to be supervise
d by an integrated group of Colombian army, navy, and air force personnel. He also demanded that all members of the Search Bloc be fired. In the letter, he accused Colonel Martinez of routinely torturing those he arrested in an effort to gather new information. Pablo the humanitarian demanded an investigation of these "human-rights abuses," and then made a threat: "What would the government do if a 10,000 kg bomb were placed at the Colombian prosecutor general's office?" He concluded by promising a new wave of kidnappings, threatening members of the "diplomatic community," and warning that he would plant bombs at the government-owned radio and television station (Intravision), the national tax offices, and the newspaper El Tiempo.

  Gaviria responded in early January by calling the demands "ridiculous" and dismissed Pablo's charges of human-rights abuses as a public relations ploy. Still, the warnings spread fear throughout official Bogotá. Attorney General Gustavo de Greiff asked Busby to help relocate his family to the United States for safety.

  For all the misery Pablo had caused, Colonel Martinez could not help but admire the man's talents. His enemy never seemed to lose his temper, especially when he was in danger. At those moments, in secretly recorded conversations with his associates, Martinez noted that Pablo seemed to radiate calm. He had a talent for managing several problems at the same time, and never made a move that had not been carefully thought through. Pablo was flexible and creative. During the months when Martinez imposed a blackout on all cellular-phone use in Medellín, hoping to make it more difficult for Pablo to contact his organization, the drug boss just switched over to radio or communicated by messenger through a series of couriers so that recipients would have no idea where they originated. To ensure that there would be no mistake about the message's author, Pablo signed with his thumbprint. He had a good feel for human nature. He was able to anticipate how others would react, and to plan accordingly. The colonel also admired Pablo's mind. Conversing on open lines with his family or friends, he employed elaborate impromptu codes that required remembering specific dates, places, and events. Often Pablo's fluency with these facts tripped up his associates, who couldn't keep up with their boss's agile memory.

  There was another thing about Pablo that everyone noticed, when reading his messages and listening to his radio and phone calls. He was comfortable. He clearly believed he could play this game indefinitely. He would stay one step ahead of the colonel for as long as it took until the Gaviria administration, or Attorney General de Greiff, or maybe the next administration, capitulated to his demands. Despite all the resources arrayed against him, Pablo didn't even seemed rattled. It was galling, that comfort. Maybe there was something that could be done about that.

  2

  In January, one day after the terrible bookstore bombing in Bogotá, La Cristalina, a hacienda owned by Pablo's mother, Hermilda, was burned to the ground. Then two large car bombs exploded in the El Poblado section of Medellín in front of apartment buildings where Pablo's immediate and extended family members were staying. A third bomb exploded at a finca owned by the drug boss, injuring his mother and his aunt Several days later, another of Pablo's country homes was torched. All of these acts were against the law, and they targeted individuals who, while related to Pablo, were not themselves considered criminals. No one was killed or even seriously injured, but the message was clear. In the timeless hammerlike prose of the police teletype, DEA agent Javier Peña explained:

  The CNP[Colombian National Police] believe these bombings were committed by a new group of individuals known as "Los Pepes" (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar) [People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar]. This group…has vowed to retaliate against Escobar, his family, and his associates, each and every time Escobar commits a terrorist act which injures innocent people…. Obviously the CNP and the GOC [government of Colombia] cannot condone the actions of "Los Pepes," even though they may secretly applaud these retaliatory acts.

  Officially, the embassy was silent on the appearance of Los Pepes, but the gang in the vault on the fifth floor—Busby, Wagner, Jacoby, and Toft, the DEA agents, Centra Spike, and Delta Force operators—were not displeased. And why should they have been? What could be better than a homegrown vigilante movement against public enemy number one? All along, Pablo's official pursuers had fought at a disadvantage. Pablo had long hidden behind the law and his "rights," which he vigorously policed. Why not spread a little fear on Pablo's side for once? Hit him where it hurt most?

  What was needed was some extralegal muscle, some hands-on players who didn't mind crossing the lines of legality and morality that Pablo so blithely ignored. The drug boss certainly didn't lack for bitter enemies, but they had no commonality. They ranged from some of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Bogotá to rival street thugs in Medellín and Cali. What if someone were to give them a push, some organization, some money, some intelligence, some training, planning, and leadership…?

  Los Pepes were so perfect they were…well, too perfect.

  After the frustrations of the first six months, the manhunt needed to shift gears. If Pablo stood atop an organizational mountain that consisted of family, bankers, sicarios, and lawyers, then perhaps the only way to get him was to take down the mountain.

  The bookstore blast had just about finished off what was left of Pablo's popular following outside Medellín. The government, responding to public outrage, officially declared him "public enemy number one." They dropped their reluctance to post a reward and offered the unprecedented sum of 5 billion pesos ($6.5 million) for information leading to his capture. DEA agent Peña felt a definite shift in mood at the Holguin base, where he was doing one of his regular monthly rotations. On the day of the blast he encountered a group of Martinez's top men emerging from a meeting with the colonel. They told Peña that "things have changed now." The hunt, already bloody and terrible, was about to take an even darker turn.

  In the weeks following the bookstore blast, bodies of Pablo's associates began turning up all over Medellín and Bogotá. Sometimes they were victims of Los Pepes, sometimes of the Search Bloc. Some of his closest partners had already managed to give up. On October 8, Pablo's brother Roberto and "Popeye," Jhon Velasquez, had surrendered and were promptly locked up at Itagui, the nation's conventional maximum-security prison. But in most cases, where the police were involved, the reports read, "Killed in a gun battle with the Colombian police."

  The official forces arrayed against Pablo were not always at pains to disguise their preference for killing him rather than taking him alive. Santos, Vega, and the other Delta operators at the Holguin base were not distressed by this attitude; they embraced it. The debacle of Pablo's first imprisonment had illustrated the futility of bringing him to justice. As they saw it, there was a race going on between Attorney General de Greiff, who had hopes of negotiating surrenders for all the country's narcos, and the embassy and the police, who wanted Pablo dead.

  No one would say that, of course. In the DEA memos over these months, the agents employed an amusing kind of doublespeak. A September DEA memo noted that both the national police and the U.S. embassy hoped that somehow Escobar would be "located" before he struck another deal with the government, "which could amount to the beginning of a new farce." In a memo drafted by DEA agent Murphy in October, he wrote, "It should be noted that the CNP remains optimistic in their effort to capture Escobar if they can ‘buy' some time by preventing his surrender. The BCO will continue to offer any and all assistance available."

  If the hunt was going to turn ugly, the Americans in place knew how to get the job done. CIA chief Wagner was no stranger to the dark underside of South American affairs. He had begun his service in 1967 in Chile, leaving shortly before the agency-backed overthrow of socialist president Salvador Allende by Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Wagner had served in Uruguay battling the sophisticated Tupamaro urban guerrillas, and had then opened a CIA station in Haiti before becoming acting chief of the agency's Miami office, where he'd helped supervise operations in twenty-six nations, including Cuba. Dur
ing his tenure in Miami, there were bloodless coups in Grenada (1979) and Suriname (1980). He was a reticent but worldly man, an avid gun collector and outdoorsman who didn't look the part, with his pale complexion, glasses, and easy, informal manner. But beneath his laid-back style, there was nothing passive about Wagner. He knew how to play hardball, both in the field and in Washington. He had been assigned to antinarcotics work up at headquarters in Langley, Virginia, back in the early eighties, before the agency got very interested in it, and in a few short years he had shepherded the effort into one of the agency's primary missions. One of his goals in Colombia was to establish a link between cocaine trafficking and the FARC and ELN, links that would justify pushing antinarcotics work from the realm of law enforcement into the realm of war. This was the bigger picture Wagner had had in mind when he arrived in Colombia in January 1991, and Pablo's escape a year and a half later had hastened the transition. Now Wagner had the kind of resources in Colombia needed to wage war against the narcos, and for him the hunt had become a full-time job.

  He was not alone. General William F.Garrison, head of the Joint Special Operations Command and the direct authority over Delta Force and Centra Spike, had a long history in covert U.S. operations. He had been involved with the Phoenix program in Vietnam and was known throughout the army as an officer who could navigate beneath the radar. Counterinsurgency had always flirted with extralegality, whether in the Congo, El Salvador, or Nicaragua. The death squads were horrible, but nothing equaled them for striking fear into the hearts and minds of would-be Marxists. Ambassador Busby was no stranger to this world, either. He had been the State Department's ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism. He believed that virtuous goals sometimes demanded hard methods, and he had seen the advantages of playing ugly. It was always a temptation. There would always be powerful, well-intentioned men who believed that protecting civilization sometimes required forays into lawlessness.