by Mark Bowden
A curious thing happened after Gacha was killed. His death prompted a torrent of phone calls to and from Pablo Escobar. One of the other things Centra Spike did, besides finding people, was track communication patterns. A fairly comprehensive chart of the power structure of any large organization can be built by monitoring the flow of electronic communication over time. None of the top people in the cartel used standard landline telephones, the central Colombian telephone network. The police and the secret police, both the DIJIN and the DAS, were both known to monitor it closely. But none of the cartel leaders apparently suspected that anyone was listening in on their cell-phone and radio calls.
It was during those days that Centra Spike got its first chance to listen to Pablo. The intercepted conversations were recorded in the Beechcrafts by Centra Spike's technicians, who would then forward the tapes to the embassy, where Jacoby and his team would study them. Unlike Gacha, who was uneducated and crude, Escobar appeared to be a man of some refinement. He had a deep voice and spoke softly. He was very articulate, and even though he could slip into the familiar paisa patois, he usually used very clean Spanish, free of vulgarity and with a vocabulary of some sophistication, which he was fond of sprinkling with English words and expressions. He was painstakingly polite and seemed determined to project unruffled joviality at all times, as though trying to keep things light, even though it was very clear that everyone who spoke to Pablo was afraid of him. With his intimates his standard greeting on the phone was "Qué mas, caballero?" or "What's happening, my man?"
Both the pattern of these calls and the content changed the unit's understanding of the Medellín cartel. Instead of scrambling to fill the leadership void or feuding between those thought to be José Rodríguez Gacha's equals or underlings, what Centra Spike heard was Pablo Escobar coolly at work, like a chief-executive officer who had lost a key associate. People called him to make decisions, and he did so calmly, redistributing Gacha's interests and responsibilities. The more Centra Spike listened over the next few weeks, the more they realized that Pablo had been the man in charge all along. Always deeply concerned about his public image, he had evidently been content to let Gacha be perceived as the chief bad guy.
What also came through was Pablo's casual cruelty. It hit home when, not long after Gacha's death, Pablo ordered his men to kidnap a Colombian officer, a commander in the army's Fourth Brigade. Angered over his associate's killing, Pablo ordered the officer be not just killed but tortured to death slowly, just to make a statement to the Colombian government.
Pablo was infuriated by Gacha's death. The government had clearly upped the stakes. In one intercepted conversation with his cousin Gustavo Gaviria, he was captured in a rare unguarded rant that offered insight into how he saw his predicament. He viewed himself as a victim, caught in a class struggle between the power elite in Bogotá and the common people of Medellín. He intended, he said, to use the public's weariness with violence to his benefit. He planned to turn up the violence until the public cried out for a solution, a deal.
"We will begin to go for the oligarchs and burn the houses of the rich," Pablo said. "It is very easy because the house of a rich person has only one watchman and one goes in with three gallons of gasoline, and with that we shit on them and make them cry and beg for mercy…. You know, brother, that is the only way. This country is asking for peace and every day there are more people asking for peace. So we have to apply much harder pressure."
A communiqué from the Extraditables not long after hammered home the point:
We are declaring total and absolute war on the government, on the individual and political oligarchy, on the journalists who have attacked and insulted us, on the judges that have sold themselves to the government, on the extraditing magistrates…on all those who have persecuted and attacked us. We will not respect the families of those who have not respected our families. We will burn and destroy the industries, properties and mansions of the oligarchy.
By now Pablo was the man in Centra Spike's crosshairs. In January 1990, on a trip home to the United States, Jacoby searched out a $300 bottle of Rémy Martin cognac. He told his team in Bogotá that he had placed the bottle unopened on a shelf in his Maryland apartment and vowed that he would drink it only after Pablo Escobar was dead.
4
Trouble at once began closing in on Pablo. Three tons of dynamite planned for his stepped-up bombing campaign were seized in a police raid on a warehouse in Bogotá. Five more tons were seized at a finca owned by Pablo near Caldas. In February, the day before President Bush arrived in Cartagena to attend a hemispheric antidrug conference, police raided three big cocaine labs in Chocó, the state just south of Antioquia. In the two months after José Rodríguez Gacha's death, the PNC seized $35 million in cash and gold. Pablo's men started falling, too.
Pablo concluded that there was a spy in his inner circle. Clearly somebody was informing the police of his whereabouts and plans. Pablo had a number of his security force tortured and executed in his presence in early 1990 to set an example. In one intercepted conversation, Centra Spike recorded the screams of a victim in the background as Pablo spoke calmly to his wife.
The U.S. embassy jealously guarded the secret of Centra Spike. Jacoby and his staff literally worked in a vault, a secure room on the windowless fifth floor of the embassy building. The vault had reinforced walls and a six-inch-thick steel door. There was strict secrecy even within the building. The Centra Spike men employed there had cover jobs on the ambassador's staff, and the entire area where they worked was off-limits to most embassy employees. So long as Pablo and the other cartel leaders didn't know anyone was listening, they would continue to talk freely on their radios and cell phones.
But Pablo did find out that his calls were being overheard. In March 1990, the Colombian government inadvertently tipped him off.
It happened because Centra Spike intercepted a phone conversation between Pablo and Gustavo Mesa, one of his sicario gang leaders, plotting the murder of another presidential candidate.
"What's up? How's everything going?" Pablo asked.
"Everything's going fine," said Mesa. "What you ordered to be done is going ahead well."
"But don't you do it, because you're in charge of one and only one job. Understand?"
"Yeah, I've got the people who will do the job. I'm doing well with the task and I've already presented the bill. They'll pay me Friday, everything's fine."
They went on to discuss the payment (about $1,200), promising that the young killer's family would be provided for in the event he was killed in the attempt. Mesa explained that other gunmen would take care of the bodyguards around the candidate, that the assassin need only focus on the main target. Half of the money would be paid in advance, the other half when the job was done. They mentioned the exact date and time of the hit but, maddeningly, never mentioned which candidate was to be killed or where the hit would take place.
The embassy decided that this information would have to be shared with the Colombian government, so a transcript of the tape was given to President Barco, and the government began scrambling to prevent the killing. The most likely target was assumed to be Gaviria, because he was the front-runner, he had spoken out in favor of extradition, and he was the only candidate who had publicly ruled out negotiating with the traffickers (a promise, as it happened, that he wouldn't keep). Several more attempts had been made on his life since the Avianca bombing. So Gaviria and several other likely targets were given intensive security on that day. When the appointed hour came, the victim was the least likely candidate: Bernardo Jaramillo, the minor Unión Patriótica candidate, was gunned down in the lobby of El Dorado Airport. The police immediately blamed drug traffickers for the killing, but the link was not apparent. Jaramillo had not been an outspoken opponent of extradition, nor a likely winner in the election. Through his lawyers, Pablo immediately issued a denial. But the government had the recording and it found the opportunity to publicly link Pablo to the killing too
hard to resist. The transcript was leaked to the press.
There was a swift, outraged public response. Pablo was revealed to be, despite his denials, a killer, someone who was now ordering candidates killed just to sow discord. He lost whatever credibility he'd gained by his years of skillful public relations. So the leak from Barco's office had its desired effect. But it also had an undesired one. Pablo now knew that conversations on his cell phone were being overheard. His voice vanished from the airwaves. He would never again hold an unguarded conversation on a radio or cell phone.
This made life much more difficult for Colonel Martinez, who had developed a good working relationship with Centra Spike in Medellín. Over the first few months of 1990, the Search Bloc conducted raid after raid on the drug boss's suspected hideouts, but always arrived too late. The Centra Spike soldier attached to the base in Medellín was more impressed by Colonel Martinez's will than by his methods.
Clearly the colonel was different from most of those in the Colombian army and police forces. Other than the air force general who had wanted to bomb the finca where José Rodríguez Gacha had been staying, most of the local officers Centra Spike worked with had seemed lazy, incompetent, or corrupt—or perhaps all three. The tall, skinny colonel clearly intended to get the job done. According to some of his men, one of the first things he did at the headquarters in Medellín was line up his inner circle against a wall and tell them that if he discovered any one of them betraying their mission, "I will personally shoot you in the head." He locked down his men to prevent uncontrolled communication in and out of the compound, and perhaps most importantly, he showed genuine frustration and anger when one of his missions failed. The Americans were used to working with Colombian officers who would joke about failed missions, who took them no more seriously than getting the wrong order at a restaurant.
There were plenty of reasons why they repeatedly failed. On one occasion, approaching a suspect finca on a morning raid, the assault force lined up along a ridge and then simply walked toward the structure. A Centra Spike soldier accompanying them suggested that the force drop down on the ground and crawl.
"In the dirt?" asked a Colombian officer, insulted by the suggestion. "My guys don't crawl in the dirt and mud."
The occupants of the target house fled well before the raiding party arrived. The finca had all the hallmarks of an Escobar hideout, the giant-screen Sony TV, a well-appointed modern bathroom, a refrigerator stocked with steaks and soda, and lots of state-of-the-art radio equipment. The occupants had fled in such haste that they hadn't had time to completely burn documents, so they had urinated and defecated on them. This was enough to dissuade the national police from taking a look. When the Centra Spike man began fishing papers out of the mess, the colonel himself had objected.
"I can't believe you'd do that," he said. "That's human waste!"
"Where I come from we also low-crawl and get our uniforms dirty," the American said.
When the documents were gently cleaned and dried, they found handwritten notes from Pablo, sealed with his thumbprint. The notes promised financial security for the caretaker of the farmhouse. There were copies he had prepared for several other fincas, indicating that he kept a string of such safe houses stashed and ready in advance, so he always had someplace secure and comfortable to go. It was a useful insight into how Pablo recruited and nurtured assistance in the hills. While this detective work went on, the colonel's men settled in front of the television and began drinking Pablo's sodas and cooking his steaks. Two men who had stayed behind in the farmhouse, the finca's caretakers, were bound and gagged. Several of the colonel's men were beating them.
"What are your guys doing?" the Centra Spike man asked Martinez.
"We're interrogating them."
"The fuck you are, you're killing them."
"We are just encouraging them to talk," said Martinez.
"If you want them to talk, why don't you take the gags out of their mouths?"
"No, no," said Martinez, ushering the American away from the farmhouse. "Leave it alone. You shouldn't be here."
After that, the Americans found that the colonel tried to keep them a safe distance from the action. Not to protect them, they deduced, but to protect their eyes. Centra Spike heard plenty of rumors about the colonel's unsavory tactics—beatings, electroshock torture, killings—but if they were happening, it was always out of sight Centra Spike and the other Americans at the embassy were content so long as it stayed that way. Nobody wanted to be a party to human-rights abuses, but so long as the Americans didn't see them, they didn't feel obliged to report them. With all the disinformation floating around, how could the truth be known anyway? The colonel forcefully denied the accusations. But if he was playing rough, well then…wasn't Pablo? On March 20, 1990, two of his sicarios on a motorcycle threw a bomb into a crowd in the village of Tebaide, injuring seven people and killing a child. A car bomb detonated just outside Medellín on April 11, killing five police officers and agents. On April 25, two of Martinez's men were killed, seven injured, and two passersby killed when a car bomb was remotely detonated in Medellín. If the colonel's men occasionally crossed the line in response, who could fault them?
On one occasion, a Centra Spike soldier reported that two men seized in a raid had been thrown from helicopters on the flight back to Medellín. He had not seen it done but had heard several of Martinez's men joking about it. He confronted the colonel and was told, "We were concerned that they might have seen you."
When the Centra Spike man protested, Martinez waved him away. "Don't worry about it. It's not your concern."
When the soldier reported the incident to Jacoby, the major asked, "Did you actually see them thrown from the helicopters?"
"No."
"Good."
Centra Spike noted how quickly the colonel learned from his mistakes. He was candid about his unit's shortcomings and took the right steps to improve. His men did begin low-crawling, as well as fishing documents out of latrines. At first skeptical of American technology, Martinez gradually warmed up to it. When he had overheard Pablo's voice on a portable radio monitor being carried by one of the Centra Spike men on a raid, the colonel had asked that he be given the same equipment the next time out. He took suggestions, and asked for more. As a result, when rumors began to circulate that the colonel had taken money from the Cali cartel, rumors that some of the DEA guys took seriously, the embassy was not about to discard him. So long as there was no overwhelming evidence of it, such allegations could always be blamed on Pablo's sophisticated disinformation efforts. The colonel was their man. As far as the embassy was concerned, El Doctor had finally met his match.
Martinez may have been ruthless, but he was also relentless. Steered in part by intelligence from Centra Spike, the Search Bloc kept closing the ring around Pablo. In June 1990, they killed John Arías, one of Pablo's most trusted sicario leaders, and then in July they captured Hernan Henao, Pablo's brother-in-law and a trusted associate. On August 9 they killed his longtime partner in crime and play Gustavo Gaviria, his buddy from his first days of skipping school and stealing cars. These two killings were blows to Pablo both emotionally and professionally: Henao, "H.H." (Aahchey-Aahchey), had been the cartel's treasurer, its main money man, and Gustavo had been one of Pablo's most trusted confidants. The Search Bloc said he was killed in a shoot-out, which had become such a commonplace that up in the embassy vault it was greeted with winks. The expression "killed in a shoot-out with police" was regarded as a euphemism for summary execution. Pablo claimed that there had been no shoot-out, that his cousin had been captured, tortured, and then executed by the colonel's men.
Two days before Gustavo was killed César Gaviria had been sworn in as president of Colombia. He had somehow survived his candidacy. Gaviria was a low-key, pleasant man with youthful good looks and habits. He collected modern paintings, loved listening to The Beatles and Jethro Tull, played tennis avidly, and had two small children, Simon, eleven, and Maria, eight H
e had entered the presidential campaign almost two years earlier as manager for Galán. The two men had shared political outlooks and interests, but Galán had been the bold one, the one with charisma and dash. Gaviria's style was milder. He was less a fighter than someone who tried to broker deals and forge consensus. That he had courage was beyond contention, but his courage was not that of a man staking himself against the tide but of one resigned to ride it out, to do his part and see it through without complaint, just as every day he marked down the "assignments" he had to complete. Gaviria was so dutiful that he had campaigned expecting he would be killed, less out of ambition than a sense of duty, a sense that it was expected of him. He arrived at Colombia's highest office somewhat astonished to still be alive. He was convinced that the only explanation why he had not been killed was that, for some reason he did not understand, Pablo had decided not to kill him.
Pablo shifted tactics after Gaviria took office. Instead of bombing, he hit upon a more devious method of fighting back. The government of Colombia had long been the preserve of a relatively small group of wealthy, powerful Bogotá families. This oligarchy owned the major newspapers and TV stations, and the presidency and top ministries seemed to cycle among the families over the generations. Pablo had long portrayed his battle against the government as a class war, wherein he represented the common folk of Medellín and Antioquia. That summer, after his cousin's death, Pablo began applying his calculated plan to "go for the oligarchs and burn the houses of the rich." He did it not by setting fire to their houses but by stabbing their hearts. On August 30, he kidnapped journalist Diana Turbay, the daughter of former president Julio Turbay, along with four members of her news team.
Gaviria had been in office only three weeks, but already he had demonstrated that his approach to dealing with Pablo would include both the carrot and the stick. Colonel Martinez's Search Bloc was the stick, and it continued its bloody work: in October another of Pablo's cousins, Gustavo's brother Luis, was killed "in a shoot-out with the police." The new president also extradited three suspected drug dealers in the first two months of his administration (the twenty-fifth suspected trafficker extradited since Galán's murder in August 1989). But Gaviria also offered the carrot. In his acceptance speech, he had drawn a careful distinction between terrorism and drug trafficking. Drug trafficking was an international problem, he said, one that Colombia could not be expected to solve alone. But terrorism was a national problem; it was the national problem. The two issues were separate, and he would deal with them separately. His first priority would be to end the violence, even if that meant striking a deal with the likes of Pablo Escobar. Gaviria doubted at that point if the Colombian police and judicial system were capable of arresting, trying, and punishing Pablo anyway. The nation's best hopes were to keep the pressure on and to offer the drug boss a deal sweet enough to make him surrender. Just a week after Turbay was taken, Gaviria issued a decree offering Pablo and other indicted narcos immunity from extradition and reduced sentences if they would surrender and confess. The decree was seen purely as a reaction to the kidnapping, which it was not. It was the first step in a plan Gaviria had thought through carefully.
