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

by Mark Bowden

  "He's in there!" Hugo insisted, trusting his equipment and his ability to read the signals.

  "He's not in there," the major in charge of the raid said. "We're in there. We've done our search."

  Pablo was still talking. There was no background noise, nor had he been startled. By the evidence in his ears, Hugo had to conclude that the raid had not even come close. Yet his equipment pointed him straight to the seminary! The assault teams, more convinced than ever that they were wasting their time, and with deepening scorn for the teams' worthless gizmos, continued searching on the chance that Pablo had a secure hiding place somewhere on the grounds. Over the next three days five hundred men proceeded to take the seminary and the attached school apart. They poked holes in walls and ceilings, probed the buildings next door, looked for secret rooms, tunnels. They found nothing and left behind a furious archdiocese.

  Hugo remained convinced that Pablo had been close. He had listened to the drug boss talk until he'd ended his conversation that evening and quietly hung up, and that was it. The next day, Juan Pablo came on the air at the appointed time and Pablo did not. This convinced Hugo that the raid had spooked him. But why hadn't they found him?

  It was not possible to fail more spectacularly. Hugo was a laughingstock at the Holguin base. Disappointment overcame his usual enthusiasm. He grew demoralized. He gave up his command over the surveillance teams, turning the main effort back over to the CIA men, and prevailed on his father to let him keep just his small Mercedes van and two men to work on the equipment alone. Working with the kits had always been Hugo's favorite part of the job anyway.

  Now there were competing groups in the city trying to track Pablo, Hugo's vehicle and the ones coordinated by the CIA. Over the next few weeks they picked up Pablo's signal several times, and even though the force itself had no faith in the equipment, again and again they were ordered to conduct raids. The colonel protested that they needed to marshal their intelligence and men, to wait until the fix was certain and the opportunity was right. But his superiors in Bogotá had grown suspicious and impatient. Even the U.S. embassy wanted more raids.

  The most spectacular of these came on October 11, after Centra Spike found Pablo in a finca on a high hill near the village of Aguas Frías, an affluent suburb. The hilltop finca had a clear line of sight to the high-rise apartment building where Pablo's family was staying, which would explain why he would have chosen it. It had taken a few days for his voice to come back up on the radio after the ill-fated seminary raid. The Search Bloc feared that the raid might have scared him off the airwaves. But he had made another call days later, coming on again at one of the regular times with his son. He gave no indication that anything untoward had happened.

  Actually, Pablo was in bad shape. Just as Guillermoprieto had written, his fabulously wealthy and powerful organization had been dismantled and continued to be terrorized by Los Pepes. Just in the past two weeks, five members of his extended family had been killed, presumably by the vigilante group, and several of his remaining key business associates had been kidnapped and killed. Whoever was not dead was in prison, or running and hiding. In an effort to raise money for his war against the state and to continue his flight, Pablo's bankers were selling off his assets around the world. A DEA cable in October noted that an Escobar family physician was traveling and selling off the family's properties, a seventy-thousand-acre timber farm in Panama, estates in the Dominican Republic, and two twenty-acre lots in southern Florida. Efforts were also under way to sell his art collection, jewelry, and precious stones, including a collection of uncut emeralds valued in excess of $200,000. Pablo's primary link with the rest of the world was now his loyal teenage son. Just as the colonel hunted Pablo with his son at his side, the drug boss and his son conspired daily to evade them. They were now talking by radiophone four times daily. So long as the Search Bloc knew where the son was and could monitor his communications lines, the colonel felt he would never completely lose track of the father.

  For two days running, both Centra Spike and Colombian telemetry teams traced Pablo's radio to the top of the hill in Aguas Frías. It was a spectacular locale, a small, heavily wooded mountain in the vast range of the Occidental Cordillera—rugged, lush green country. There was only one road up the mountain to the finca, which was actually a collection of small cottages around a main house. The colonel ordered a surveillance team to load a radiotelemetry kit on a helicopter and fly over the area. As it happened, they were passing directly overhead at the moment Pablo made another call. The kit indicated that the radio call had come from directly below. Alarmed, the major in charge of the exercise immediately ordered the chopper back to Holguin base. When he returned, he told the colonel good and bad news. Pablo had definitely been there, but he might not be there any longer. The colonel decided to launch a raid on the finca immediately if Pablo made another call that afternoon.

  Martinez could sense the ring closing around Pablo. When Delta sergeant Vega had left Medellín in November for his regular rotation out, the colonel had warned him.

  "You will miss it," he said. "We are going to find him soon."

  He consulted daily his stones and other ritual objects and saw omens of a resolution. It was a gut feeling, but also a calculation. The colonel knew Pablo couldn't hold out much longer. His ability to run was now very limited, and their ability to find him was improving every day. Now, at Aguas Frías, it felt like the whole effort was coming together. The electronic surveillance had tracked Pablo to a likely hideout and monitored his presence there. All of the direction-finding equipment agreed. This was the day they would get him.

  The usual time for Pablo's call was four o'clock, so with choppers circling near the hilltop just out of earshot, and with forces poised to move quickly up the hill, the colonel and his top officers gathered in his operations center around a radio receiver, waiting for Pablo's voice to crackle on the air. There was no call at four. The men waited breathlessly. Five minutes later there still was no call. It was beginning to look like the fugitive had slipped the noose again. But at seven minutes after the hour, Pablo's voice came up, and the assault force hit the finca.

  He wasn't there.

  The colonel cordoned off the mountain for four days, establishing an outer perimeter, an inner perimeter, roadblocks, and search teams. Late on the day of the raid, Search Bloc helicopters dropped tear gas and raked the forests around the finca with machine-gun fire. More than seven hundred police officers and soldiers searched the mountain with dogs, but did not find Pablo. He had managed another miraculous escape. The assault teams had assumed that Pablo would be in the main house. It turned out—they learned this listening to Pablo's phone calls in the coming days—that in order to improve the signal, every time he called his son he would hike away from the finca into the woods farther up the hill. So he'd had a ringside seat as the choppers descended. He'd hidden in the woods and then fled down in darkness, evading the men looking for him. He later sent his wife a battery from the flashlight he'd used to light his way down, telling her to keep it "because it saved my life."

  Despite its failure, the Aguas Frías raid gave a boost to the electronic-surveillance teams, because there was ample evidence that Pablo had been where they'd said he was. In the primary house, the base for a radiophone was found, turned on, with the portable handset missing. The radio was preset to the frequency Pablo had been using for the last four weeks in his talks with Juan Pablo. The house was run-down except for the usual gleaming, newly installed bathroom. The assaulters found two women at the house; they said Pablo had been staying there for several days. They explained, quaintly, that Pablo had been "dating" the youngest, who was eighteen. The other had been his cook. Both women confirmed that Pablo had been nearby when the choppers came down, and they gave the Search Bloc a description. He had been wearing a red flannel shirt, black pants, and tennis shoes. His hair, they said, was clipped short, but he wore a long black beard with no mustache. In the house the police found eight jo
ints, a large quantity of aspirin ("suggesting a great deal of stress," speculated the DEA memo describing the raid), a wig, a videocassette of the apartment building housing his wife and children, several music cassettes, two automatic rifles (an AK-47 and a CAR-15), just over $7,000 in cash, and photos of Juan Pablo and Manuela. They also found false ID documents and a list of license plate numbers Juan Pablo had evidently compiled of vehicles driven by officers assigned to the Search Bloc.

  The documents they found confirmed that Pablo was struggling and was very worried about his family. One letter said Maria Victoria needed money to continue supporting the attorney general's forces and bodyguards hired to protect her and the children. She complained that it was very expensive to feed sixty people and that she'd had to purchase beds for them. The letter blamed Colonel Martinez for the recent grenade attack on the apartment building, for which Los Pepes had taken credit. There were unsent letters Pablo was preparing for former associates in Medellín demanding money, threatening, "We know where your families are." There was one from a friend indicating that the government of Israel had agreed to accept and shelter Pablo's family. (The Israeli government later denied it.) DEA agent Murphy wrote:

  On a positive note, intelligence obtained at the search site and recent Title III intercepts [electronic surveillance] indicates that Escobar no longer enjoys the financial freedom he once had. While he may continue to be a Colombian land baron, Escobar and his organization are extremely short of cash. This is supported by some of the extortion letters seized at the search site and the fact that Roberto Escobar is firing some of his workers.

  The day after the raid, the surveillance teams waited for Pablo to come back on the radio. He did not. Juan Pablo was heard frantically trying to make contact with his father at the appointed hours. He urged his father to simply key the microphone once to indicate he was alive if it was too dangerous to speak. Receiving no response, Juan Pablo began cursing and threatening the Search Bloc, which he correctly assumed was listening.

  Whenever the teams returned empty-handed from a raid, the colonel would lead them into his operations room and ask them all to name the coordinates they had pinpointed for Pablo beforehand. In late October Centra Spike had returned, so the Search Bloc was now getting a confusing array of data. Martinez would pull from his stack of aerial photographs the appropriate portion of the city, pin the photo to the wall, and ask each group to mark their coordinates with a grease pen. All of the marks on the photo were close together, but they were never exactly the same. The coordinates given by Centra Spike and Hugo were usually significantly at odds with the CIA's. The agency men were convinced their reading had been correct, and Hugo and Freddie Ayuso, the Centra Spike representative, defended their own. Because of bad blood between the agency and Centra Spike, Ayuso had begun sharing information directly with Hugo, an arrangement that eventually prompted the agency team to complain and then to leave Medellín in anger. Their departure mattered little at the time. Ever since the Aguas Frías raid, Pablo's voice had vanished from the airwaves.

  After fifteen months of futile searching, Martinez and his men were under increasing attack in the press. How could they not have found him by now? Attorney General de Greiff was their loudest public scourge, calling them inept and privately still urging that Martinez be removed and prosecuted along with the rest of Los Pepes. In mid-November there were new allegations that Colonel Martinez and others on the Search Bloc were corrupt. In a tape-recorded conversation with Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, one of the leaders of the Cali cocaine cartel, a Colombian senator working as a DEA source was told that the southern trafficking group had a good "working relationship" with Martinez, and with General Octavio Vargas, second in command of the national police.

  "Rodríguez Orejuela told [the informant] they had bandits working within the Search Bloc and identified two of these individuals as ‘Alberto' and ‘Bernardo,'" wrote Agent Murphy. "Rodríguez Orejuela described Bernardo as a very ugly looking person with no tact or conscience. The informant advised that Rodríguez Orejuela states they had made an arrangement with PNC General Vargas and Colonel Martinez regarding a reward for Escobar's capture. According to Rodríguez Orejuela, the Cali cartel will pay a total of $10 million immediately following Pablo's capture and/or death. Of this, $8 million has been promised to the Search Bloc and $2 million for the informants who provide the information that leads to a successful operation."

  This information particularly disturbed DEA chief Toft, who saw that the great concentration of effort on Pablo might actually be strengthening the cocaine industry in Colombia.

  In Medellín, Hugo was ready to give up. He had failed, let his father down, even exposed him to ridicule and accusation. All the lieutenant's naive enthusiasm and confidence had worn away. The damned equipment didn't work. He felt that it never would.

  But Hugo hadn't counted on what a strong convert he had made.

  "The only way we will ever find Pablo is with your equipment," his father insisted. "The technology! It is our advantage over him. Technology!"

  The colonel set about bucking up his son's spirits by sending him after an easier target. Martinez had a friend in Bogotá who was a shortwave-radio nut, and for months he had been listening in on the conversations of a man named Juan Camilo Zapata, a flamboyant Bogotá cocaine dealer who had built himself a replica of a castle on the eastern outskirts of the city. Zapata was a middleman in the Medellín operation, and even though he was now living there, he was far enough removed from the inner circle of Pablo's empire to have escaped the dragnet of the Search Bloc and Los Pepes. He was a relatively small operator. But because the colonel's friend had a fix on him, knowing what frequencies he used and when he normally talked on the radio, it gave Hugo a real-world target to work with while they waited for Pablo to break his silence.

  Hugo went to work first on tape recordings his father's friend had made, familiarizing himself with Zapata's voice and the code words he used when talking business. Tracking Pablo was especially hard because the drug boss, understandably, was so wary that he spoke only very briefly on the radio, varied his frequencies, and moved often from place to place. Zapata was, by comparison, a sitting duck.

  One of the drawbacks to taking this detour, however, was that the colonel could not afford to give his son the usual backup support. Since nobody expected the Search Bloc to be looking for Zapata and, indeed, no one in the police department cared a great deal about catching him just then, Hugo and his two-man team spent days cruising alone in their white Mercedes van, far more exposed than they normally would have dared to be. They drove and parked in high-risk neighborhoods, places where Pablo remained a popular figure and where policemen were routinely gunned down. At one point, Hugo stayed for too long in one spot listening to one of Zapata's calls. A child on skates rolled up to the car and handed him a piece of paper. "We know what you're doing," it read. "We know you are looking for Pablo. Either you leave or we're going to kill you."

  Hugo was more careful after that, but he tinkered daily with his equipment, playing with Zapata's signals in order to fine-tune his antennae and dials. He got to where he could discern subtle shifts in the line displayed on the monitor. He could tell if the signal was being reflected off a wall, and he learned to distinguish the interference patterns caused by electrical wires or nearby water. He could detect different reasons why a signal was weak, whether it was farther away or just emanating from a smaller power source. These were all things he had worked on in the past, but as he practiced on Zapata's signals, Hugo felt his months of learn-ing coming together. He knew that no one else could read the monitor as well as he could at that point, and day by day his confidence was restored.

  Zapata made it easy. He was a very superstitious man, and every day he spoke at length to a witch, a fortune-teller, in whose judgment he placed great weight. With others, his conversations were usually brief, like someone who suspected his calls might be monitored. His brevity was calculated to protect informatio
n about his dealings. Zapata clearly never suspected that something other than the content of his calls would betray him. So when he spoke to his witch, he believed that nothing of interest or importance could be given away, and he stayed on the line for so long that Hugo could take his time perfecting his direction-finding technique. Eventually, he and his father planned an operation to arrest Zapata, positioning squads throughout the neighborhood and then waiting for him to make another call to his witch. He made the call but, coincidentally, this time from a different place. The witch told him to be very careful because she suspected something bad was going to happen, a message that spooked Hugo. The raid was called off, and Hugo once again endured the silent scorn of his father's men.

  "It was just bad luck," the colonel told his son. "The important thing is that you found him. When he comes back on the radio, we'll prove it."

  Less than a week later, Hugo had traced his location once more. An assault team raided the house and killed Zapata.

  Hugo was ebullient. He had done it. There had been a lot of hype about his unit and its equipment, but he knew this was the first time he had actually pinpointed a target with it. At the Holguin base he walked once more with his head held high. It was November 26.

  5

  That night the U.S. embassy learned that Pablo's wife and children were planning once more to flee Colombia. They were going to fly to either London or Frankfurt. The family had become increasingly desperate. They had been under around-the-clock protection by agents from Attorney General de Grieff's office ever since the failed effort to fly Juan Pablo and Manuela to Miami in March. In the intervening months, Los Pepes had killed members of their extended family and burned most of the family's properties. The vigilante group seemed to be toying with the Escobars, picking off cousins, in-laws, and friends, including some who had been living in Altos del Campestre, demonstrating that they could hurt Maria Victoria, Juan Pablo, or Manuela whenever they chose to. The rocket-propelled grenade that had been fired at the building in October and another grenade that went off outside the front doors in early November were more like warnings than actual attempts on their lives. It felt like the threat was closing in. The Colombian government was officially protecting Pablo's family, but they were also effectively holding them in place. So long as Pablo was worried about them, his voice would keep popping up on the radio.