by Mark Bowden
In debt, disgraced, and with his future still clouded, he spent three months looking for work, applying at law firms that handled work from Colombia, hoping his experience there would be considered valuable. But there was no demand for a disgraced former vice minister of justice from Colombia. No one would hire him. His legal education was useless to him. In the winter of 1993, he found a job as foreman in a Miami warehouse, for a company that manufactured airplane parts, and one day that summer on his way to work, driving a battered used car and listening to a Spanish news station, he learned that he had been officially summoned for indagatoria in Bogotá.
Having helped draft the country's criminal statutes, Mendoza knew well what indagatoria meant. It was roughly equivalent to being summoned to appear before a grand jury in the United States, except in Colombia the questioning was done by a prosecuting judge, and even more than under the American system, such a summons was a prelude to indictment and imprisonment.
His friends urged him not to return. He had started a new life in America. In those lonely New York months he had met Adriana Echavarria, a young woman whose father was Colombian but whose mother was American, and they were in love. Adriana had grown up in the United States with her mother, and while she had maintained ties with her Bogotá family, she saw the country as most Americans did, a violent, corrupt, dangerous place. Having survived such an experience there, what kind of crazy man would go back, knowing he was going to be indicted and jailed?
But Mendoza knew he had to go back. He was innocent of the charges against him. His only hope of regaining the life he had lost was to prove it. The Senate had not yet issued its report. The investigation of the comptroller's office into the prison contracts had found nothing illegal in Mendoza's work. Ironically, the one misstep they found he had made was in ordering the luxury items removed from La Catedral in the months before Pablo's escape. Technically, as he had determined himself, Pablo's big-screen TVs, stereo equipment, waterbeds, and other amenities had all been legal. Mendoza was censured, and the seized goods were given to Pablo's family. The procuradoria investigation had found Mendoza, along with a lineup of others in the Justice Ministry and the army, negligent but not complicit in the chain of events that enabled Pablo's escape. It was recommended that he be fired, which, since he had already resigned, was moot.
The indagatoria pertained to the most serious of the probes, the attorney general's. It was the only one that carried the threat of criminal charges and prison. If Mendoza stayed in the United States, he knew Colombia would attempt to have him arrested in Miami and fight to extradite him. That would just make him look more guilty. He saw only two alternatives. He could break completely with his past and live as a fugitive in the United States, or he could go back and face the judges.
Adriana and his friends thought the first alternative was best. Colombia was a mad place, they argued with him. An honest man could not survive there. There was no moral imperative to answer charges brought by such a corrupt, misguided country. But Mendoza would not agree with them. He could not so completely renounce his country or his past. On the July day he flew back to Bogotá, almost a year to the day since he had flown up to Medellín and confronted Pablo, Adriana drove him to the airport in Miami and they both sat for a long time clinging to each other in the car. Mendoza was convinced he was throwing away his future. He would lose her, his reputation, everything. He was going to jail. But he felt he had no choice.
On the first day of indagatoria in Bogotá he brought along a small tube of toothpaste and toothbrush. The judges grilled him from 8:00 A.M. until midnight. They accused him of masterminding the whole thing, of building Pablo's fake prison, of covering up evidence of his supposed tunnel, of plotting and facilitating his escape—why else would he have flown up to La Catedral that evening? Why was a vice minister of justice needed to move a prisoner? They asked Mendoza how much money he had been paid and where he had hidden it. He held his ground as best he could. "Why would I have had to fly up to the prison to help him escape if I had been orchestrating the whole thing all along? Why wouldn't I have just let him out whenever he wished?" he asked. At the end of the session, much to Mendoza's surprise, the chief judge simply told him, "Okay, Señor Mendoza, we'll see you tomorrow morning at eight A.M."
He had so completely expected to be locked up that he had no place to stay. He slept that night on the sofa at his lawyer's house. His only consolation was that Adriana showed up. As afraid of Colombia as she was, as set against his going as she had been, she had defied her mother and flown to Bogotá to be with him. She was not allowed in the chamber when he was being questioned. She stayed at her aunt's house, sent word to him, and waited for him to call. He went to see her briefly after the first day's grilling. When he saw her for the first time there in Bogotá he was overcome by her courage, love, and loyalty. Her being there was both good and bad. He decided that if he somehow escaped this, he would ask her to marry him. But the prospect of marrying this smart, beautiful, and loyal woman was so sweet that it made the likelihood of his indictment and imprisonment all the more bitter. Look what a future was being taken from him!
The next morning the questioning resumed, and after another long day, he was again curtly instructed to return the following morning. He visited Adriana and told her about the day, then went back to his friend's couch. On the third day he noticed a shift in the tone used by his questioners. They were no longer as accusatory. Now the questions they asked seemed to be seeking insight and information. Mendoza told them everything he could remember about his year in the Justice Ministry, and about that night. They sent him home again and asked him to return a fourth time, and at the end of the fourth day the chief judge told him, "Okay, Señor, we suggest you get on a plane and leave and just forget about all this."
It was the happiest day of his life.
3
It was during the summer of 1993, as Mendoza was undergoing this ordeal, that most of the Centra Spike unit departed Colombia for two months. The unit joined the hunt for Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.
The Somalia adventure lasted until October 3, when the task force's mission erupted into a fierce, fifteen-hour-long gun battle in the streets of Mogadishu that left eighteen American soldiers dead and scores more wounded. The battle had caught the Clinton White House by surprise, and in the weeks afterward, the administration began taking a harder look at covert operations worldwide.
It was in this climate that journalist Alma Guillermoprieto wrote a prescient article for The New Yorker, published on October 25, called "Exit El Patrón," that detailed the rapidly declining fortunes of the fugitive Pablo Escobar. It was a surprising look at the recent events in Colombia, far more insightful than anything previously published in the United States and certainly a far cry from the translated, summarized accounts from the Colombian press delivered by the embassy to the State Department. Guillermoprieto named the most likely individuals behind Los Pepes, the Moncadas, Galeanos, and Fidel Castaño, but also linked the illicit terror campaign against Escobar directly to Colonel Martinez's Search Bloc in Medellín. Describing her source as "a recently lapsed member of Los Pepes," a man she called "Candido," she explained, "At the time the Pepes began their operations, Medellín was so crisscrossed with Search Bloc patrols and checkpoints that it would have been impossible for any group of Escobar's former associates—most of whom are wanted by the government, of course—to operate against him undetected. The logical solution was to ask for police and army volunteers to moonlight against their common enemy…. Candido, who seemed as boyishly enthusiastic about Los Pepes as if he were still in their ranks, explained that both the Search Bloc and the regular police were frustrated by the legal and logistical restrictions on their operations against Escobar and were eager to join an effective organization like Los Pepes, who operate in small patrols, with sure targets and with trial- and paper-work-free executions to show for their efforts."
Guillermoprieto's story failed to draw a link between the m
urderous exploits of Los Pepes and the American units assisting the Search Bloc, but the connection leaped out at Lieutenant General Jack Sheehan, who as J-3 in the Pentagon was director of all current operations overseas, including special operations activity. Sheehan already strongly suspected that Delta and Centra Spike were overstepping the strict limits of their deployment order, which confined them to the Holguin base—the "forward staging base"—and restricted their role to training, intelligence gathering, and analysis. Sheehan was not a big fan of special operators anyway, and he regarded the men in charge, Generals Downing and Garrison and Ambassador Busby, as aggressive. He called such men "forward leaners," by which he meant that in their eagerness to succeed they sometimes tended to stray beyond the strict parameters of their missions. He had heard back-channel talk about Delta operators going out on raids with the Search Bloc, and he worried about a possible U.S. relationship, direct or indirect, with Los Pepes.
There wasn't just the fear that Delta operators were running around Colombia killing people. Sheehan doubted that was going on, although there was no telling. Delta's snipers were the best in the world. They would not have to actually be with raiding parties to play a lethal role, and if they were willing to let the Colombians take credit and the Colombians were happy to accept responsibility, who would ever know? What was more likely, even evident, was that information being gathered and analyzed by Centra Spike and Delta was being used to guide Los Pepes. That fell into the category of supplying "lethal information," something allowed only with authorization from the president and notification of Congress. The Clinton administration had just gotten badly burned by Garrison and his special operators in Somalia. The deployment order for sending the special ops units to Colombia in 1992 had been very clear. They were there to provide training. If they were going out on missions, even legitimate ones, they were exceeding their authority. What would happen if one of Colonel Santos's men got hurt or killed out on one of the raids? It would raise an unholy stink in Congress, which had not been consulted. Beyond these concerns, Sheehan felt that what was at issue was civilian control of the military, something both he and his boss, General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took very seriously.
While the hunt for Pablo went on in Colombia, the American involvement had created a string of issues inside the Pentagon. When it was decided that chopper pilots for Colonel Martinez's Search Bloc needed training to fly at night with night-vision goggles, American pilots were sent to Medellín. The pace of the hunt was demanding, so any training would have to be given on the job. This provoked a big fight over whether sending pilots along to conduct training violated the prohibition against sending American soldiers along on raids. The pilots got permission to go.
So now there were American pilots going out on raids, which opened the door slightly for Garrison. After the repeated frustrations in the fall of 1992, Garrison wanted to send Centra Spike's skilled operators with their portable direction-finding equipment out with the American pilots on the Search Bloc choppers. Steering a raid to a specific spot required smooth coordination between the technician and the pilot, something the Americans had perfected. Here Garrison saw an opportunity to get official permission to send Delta operators out on raids (which they had been doing unofficially for many months with winks up and down the chain of command). The joint special operations commander argued that with an American pilot and technician accompanying the Search Bloc, Delta needed to go along, too, to provide protection.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the request, but an under secretary of defense, Keith Hall, refused to concur without approval from the White House. Officers on Hall's staff were waiting at the White House for a meeting with President Clinton's staff when a colonel with the joint Chiefs of Staff called to say they had decided to withdraw the request.
As time went by, Sheehan's misgivings about Colombia grew. He took his concerns to Powell, and the chairman, shortly before leaving the job in late September, asked him to look into it. Sheehan also discussed his concerns with Brian Sheridan, the deputy assistant secretary of defense who had met with Busby in Bogotá in August. Sheridan told Sheehan about that conversation, about how the ambassador had assured him there was no connection between Los Pepes and the legitimate forces pursuing Pablo. But acting on Sheehan's concerns, Sheridan started shaking the tree at the State Department and discovered the Busby cable about the vigilante group.
That cable and the New Yorker article seemed to confirm their worst suspicions. Then, in November, two CIA analysts met with Sheehan, Sheridan, and other top brass to report that Los Pepes were, in fact, Colonel Martinez's Search Bloc. The death squad's tactics matched those taught by Delta, which suggested that members of the Search Bloc were actually comitting the Los Pepes murders and bombings, which meant that the United States had bought, trained, and, in part, led the group. "These guys have gone renegade, and we're behind it," the analyst told Sheehan.
Others at the meeting criticized the report.
"Bullshit," one of them said, explaining that Ambassador Busby had been monitoring the situation and was convinced American forces hadn't been involved.
Sheehan believed the CIA report. He said he was taking the matter to the chairman and that all American special forces engaged in this hunt for Pablo were going to be pulled out of Colombia. Sheridan concurred. He expressed concern about how the revelation, or even suspicion, of an American military link to Colombian death squads would harm President Clinton.
It was late on a Friday afternoon, and the only hope of stalling the immediate withdrawal was to find someone on the Defense Department staff to countermand Sheehan. A young female staffer at the meeting, an aide to a two-star admiral on the defense secretary's staff, took off her shoes and sprinted down the hallway to quickly deliver the news.
Busby was furious when he learned of Sheehan's decision. As he understood it, the analysts who had briefed the Joint Chiefs were from the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, not its Directorate of Operations. The two factions were often at odds, and the ops side usually prevailed. Whatever suspicions the ambassador had about Los Pepes, they were not sufficient to pull the plug on the manhunt. An American pullout at this point would almost certainly end the effort. Pablo would win. The ambassador was angry about not having been consulted. President Gaviria had stuck his neck out a long way politically for this operation, and Busby knew that his friend's administration probably wouldn't recover if the Americans backed out on him now. If Sheehan got his way, in Busby's view, it would amount to an unforgivable American betrayal. What allies would believe promises of American support in the future?
Busby had plenty of clout in Washington. He started making phone calls. As Sheehan would later remember it, the ambassador called Dick Clark, an assistant on the National Security Council in the White House. Clark intervened with Deputy Defense Secretary Walter B.Slocumbe, and a compromise was worked out with Sheehan. The lieutenant general still wanted Delta and Centra Spike out of Colombia, but he agreed to back off for a few weeks. Sheehan noted the irony. The general concerned about upholding civilian control of the military had been temporarily outflanked by civilians.
Sheehan was convinced that the mission in Colombia had strayed beyond its legal bounds. It was shaping into a first-rate blowup in Washington, but the issue would never come to a head. It was about to be overtaken by events in Colombia.
4
After the initial failures of the portable direction-finding kits in Medellín, the unit's leaders were sent packing, and Colonel Martinez placed his son Hugo in command. The Search Bloc continued to provide security for them, although the team was now considered a joke. Hugo himself was regarded with amused contempt.
Determined to redeem themselves, he and the other men began working round-the-clock shifts with the CIA agents, monitoring the known frequencies on the radio used by Juan Pablo. With Centra Spike gone, the Colombians placed an antenna on a hilltop just outside the city that helped the mobile un
its fix on the signal from Juan Pablo's radio. This effort showed that Pablo was now talking one hour each evening, roughly between 7:15 and 8:15. Hugo assigned one scanner to monitor the frequencies most often used, and another to scan the entire 120 to 140 MHz range. They listened night after night.
Through trial and error, they were able to break the code employed by father and son. If Pablo said, "Let's go up to the next floor" or "The evening has ended," it was a signal to shift to a specific frequency. Once the police units knew the code, they were able to follow the signal as it shifted. It was clear to Hugo that Pablo and his son believed their clever precautions made it impossible for their conversations to be tracked for more than a few moments at a time.
Still, in early October they had more setbacks. Working with the CIA agents, Hugo's team tracked Pablo's location to San José Seminary in Medellín. The CIA plane had tracked the fugitive's radio signal to that neighborhood, and the mobile units had placed him inside the large seminary complex. Pablo had a long-standing cordial relationship with the Catholic church in Medellín, and his son had attended San José's elementary school years before, which meant that his father likely knew people there. It was considered a promising target, and the colonel planned a big raid.
The next day, when Pablo's voice came up on the radio at the appointed time to talk with his son, the tracking equipment again pointed to the seminary. The signal on the screen and in his headphones told Hugo that Pablo was speaking from inside the complex's main building. The raid was launched while Pablo was still talking. Doors were blown off, flash-bang grenades exploded, assaulters loudly descended…and Pablo kept talking, as though nothing were happening. Apparently, wherever he was, nothing was. When the leaders of the assault teams came to Hugo with the news that they had found nothing, Pablo was still talking on the radio.
