by Mark Bowden
Santos met the following morning with Pinzon, who, it was immediately apparent, was not happy to see him. The Colombian lieutenant colonel appeared to regard Delta's arrival as an insult to his leadership and a threat to his career. When Harrell arrived later that day, things got really bad.
Javier Peña, a DEA agent who was a veteran in Colombia and who had dealt often with Pinzon, pulled Santos aside that first day. Peña was a fearless, cheerful busybody, a man who kept his finger in everything, a Mexican-American from Austin, Texas, who at one time had served as the only hispanic DEA agent in that city. "Man, was I busy," he says. A short man with glasses and a big mustache, Peña loved his undercover work and was a sponge for information. The more dangerous his job was, the more he seemed to enjoy it. He and Santos hit it off immediately, at least partly because they were the only two Americans at the Holguin base who spoke fluent Spanish.
"Santos, it's not working out, man, because as soon as you guys got here, you acted like you wanted to rule," he said. "Then you want things done your way, and Pinzon and this colonel [Harrell] are already butting heads."
Pinzon and Harrell were stuck with each other. Delta positioned two operators in Pablo's own observation tower up at La Catedral because of its panoramic view of the entire urban valley. One of them was Sergeant Major Joe Vega, a "captain" in Colombia, a broad-shouldered weight lifter with long, thick black hair. The Colombian police had moved in and were living in comfort, with the commander ensconced in Pablo's own luxurious suite. Vega had a satellite phone, a laptop computer to help him rapidly correlate Centra Spike's coordinates on the map, an 8mm video camera with several high-powered lenses to focus in on the target, and a microwave relay to transmit the image back to Harrell and Santos at the Holguin school. They waited for Pablo to make another phone call.
He didn't that night, but early the following evening Centra Spike picked up another phone call from Tres Esquinas. Up in the observation tower, Vega quickly found the coordinates on his map, focused his camera, and shot the image to Harrell, who tried to rouse Pinzon and get his men moving. The Colombian commander responded to the news off-handedly, as if it were just another bit of information to be added to the mix—dozens of leads were reported every day, he told the Delta commander. Despite Harrell's urgency, Pinzon pointedly made it clear that he gave this tip no more weight than any other.
When the embassy in Bogotá learned that Pinzon had not moved, calls were placed to the Presidential Palace, and Gaviria himself ordered the Search Bloc to get going. Angered that the Delta team had gone over his head, the Colombian lieutenant colonel took hours to assemble his men. It wasn't until early the next morning that he launched the "raid," sending about three hundred of his men creeping up the side of the hill, to Harrell's horror, in a caravan of pickup trucks and cars that could be seen and heard from miles away. Advice from the Delta operators to send a smaller, stealthier unit was ignored. It was like stalking a deer in a bulldozer. From his perch at La Catedral, talking by phone to Major Steve Jacoby back at the embassy, Vega noted the procession of headlights as this giant convoy began moving up the hill.
"Wait a minute," he told Jacoby. "Now there's another set of headlights moving down the hill on the other side of the mountain."
Pablo would not have even needed to be tipped off. Everyone on the mountain could see and hear the approach of this colossus. Pinzon's men spent about four hours searching the hill to no avail, then withdrew. They found the suspected finca to be typical of an Escobar hideout, luxurious furnishings far beyond the norm for that neighborhood, including a sparkling new bathroom with a deep tub (Pablo was finicky about his toilet). A records check showed he had used the place as a hideout during his first sojourn as a fugitive.
More calls were intercepted early the next morning, these from Pablo's men arranging to move him to a new hideout, discussing the need to collect identity documents and weapons. Pinzon answered the summons at the door of his quarters in his silk pajamas.
"How do you know he's there?" Pinzon asked.
Harrell was not at liberty to explain.
Again, it took pressure from Bogotá to force Pinzon to move, and again he sent the caravan up the hill. This time they spent the rest of the morning and most of the day searching door to door, and found nothing. Pinzon remained convinced that it was all fruitless and he complained to Peña, "These Delta guys are trying to get me fired in Bogotá."
By the end of the week, the search force was empty-handed and Pablo had clearly moved on. There was now little chance that he would be found quickly. Harrell brought back the horror story of Pinzon's attitude, effort, and tactics. Pinzon complained to his superiors about Delta. At the embassy, the Colombian colonel would henceforth be known simply as "Pajamas."
9
Busby had his own problems back in Bogotá. As expected, once the Colombian government's invitation for help had been broadcast at the Pentagon, it had prompted an overwhelming response. By the end of the first week the ambassador had people camped out on the floor in the embassy conference room. Every direction-finding, surveillance, and imagery team in the arsenal descended on Medellín. The air force sent RC-135s, C-130s adapted for sophisticated imagery, U-2s, and SR-71s. The navy sent P-3 spy planes. The CIA, which already had its own two-prop De Havilland over Colombia, now sent Schweizer, a remarkable machine that looked like a big glider and could stay silently aloft over a target for hours on end. It could provide highly detailed imagery over a target with FLIR, an infrared technology that could peer through clouds and darkness. Anything that had a potential capability was shipped south. It was like a sweepstakes: see who could demonstrate the most effectiveness first. Target-acquisition units were using their equipment to do surveillance. There were so many American spy planes over Medellín, at one point seventeen in the air together, that the air force had to assign an AWACs, an airborne warning-and-control center, to keep track of them. It took ten C-130s just to deliver the contractors and maintenance and support staffs for all this stuff.
Toft had spent years learning his way around Colombia, and his initial excitement over all this military help quickly soured. Data is only as good as the people who collect it. There were lots of false alarms. Some surveillance teams would pick up a phone call in which one caller referred to the other as "Doctor" and would assume that it was Pablo on the line, even though the informal honorific was commonplace in Colombia.
This eagerness, along with the sudden influx of hardware and manpower, also spooked Centra Spike. The unit relied on blending in quietly with the surroundings. Now it was hard just finding airspace for their little Beechcrafts. Major Jacoby prevailed on Busby to give everyone else a flight ceiling of 25,000 feet. The U-2 stayed up above 60,000 feet Centra Spike kept its planes at about 30,000 feet.
This sudden full-court press was meant to cause problems for Pablo, but instead it provoked a crisis in Bogotá. One night, during the same week Delta was trying to prod Pajamas Pinzon into action, one of the new arrivals, an RC-135, caught sight of something interesting and moved down below 1,000 feet for a closer look. The jet flew so low that the Colombian press was able to photograph it clearly at night.
The outcry forced Defense Minister Raphael Pardo into the hot seat before the same congressional committee grilling Mendoza—many in that body were calling for both his and Gaviria's immediate resignations. The Colombian press had proclaimed all the activity an American military "invasion" of Medellín. Pardo admitted that the Americans had been invited to help but argued that planes flying overhead did not violate the prohibition against foreign troops on Colombian soil. He volunteered nothing about Delta Force.
It was the journalistic equivalent of war. Radio Medellín started broadcasting the tail numbers of American planes, including one of the CIA planes, which was promptly flown out of Colombia.
CIA station chief Wagner was furious, Jacoby was frustrated, and President Gaviria, mindful that he had invited this help, was now complaining to the ambassador,
"This is nuts!"
By the end of the week Busby had ordered home everything except Centra Spike, the CIA, and Delta. The first look at Pinzon's effectiveness had made it clear that Pablo was not going to be caught, even with the most sophisticated targeting information, until Colombia could muster a mobile, elite strike force that would be trustworthy, determined, stealthy, and fast Clearly what they needed was something like a surrogate Delta Force.
Pajamas Pinzon would have to go. And whether it was quid pro quo or not, Harrell was shipped back to Bragg.
"Captain" Vega stayed camped out up at La Catedral, and "Colonel" Santos stayed on at the Holguin school, awaiting the arrival of the one man everyone felt was needed to make the effort come together: Colonel Hugo Martinez.
10
The colonel was delighted when he got the news, in Madrid, that Pablo had walked out of jail. No one knew better than he did what a charade that imprisonment was. After his two years on Pablo's heels, he viewed the infamous "surrender" as the evasive drug boss's cleverest escape.
For the colonel, it had been a defeat. His friends in the police command had teased him that he would not be promoted to general until he got Escobar, which at first had sounded like a joke. But as each succeeding year had passed without the promotion, the colonel had realized it was true. Martinez had been a colonel for six years while others of equal tenure and experience had already been promoted. His future, his life, was now inextricably mixed with Pablo's. With the son of a bitch in jail, there was no telling when, if ever, he could get on with his life. It wasn't that the police didn't appreciate his efforts. He had been rewarded with a post in Madrid, as military liaison to Spain.
Under ordinary circumstances this would have been a coveted assignment, an extended posting to safety, relative luxury, and the high culture of the mother country. The best part of it was that he and his wife, their daughter, and their two younger boys (the oldest, Hugo Jr., was a student at the police academy in Bogotá) would at last step out from the chilling shadow that had fallen over them when Martinez had been given the assignment in 1989.
But Pablo's reach proved as long as his memory. A bomb had been placed on the plane that flew the colonel's family to Spain in 1991, set to explode when they reached a certain altitude. The airline found out about it from a phone tip only after the plane was airborne. The pilots had held a very low altitude to the nearest airfield, landed, found the bomb, and removed it. In the spring of 1992, in Madrid, a car bomb was discovered on the street outside the Colombian embassy, right where Martinez passed each day on his way to work. The embassy was so sure that the bomb had been meant for the colonel that they asked him to stay away from the building.
So when word reached him that Pablo was once again at large and that his superiors wanted him to come back and resume the hunt, Martinez was grateful. So long as Pablo Escobar was alive, the colonel knew he and his family were in danger. The two men's destinies were connected. He made plans to fly back to Bogotá immediately.
Now they would finish this thing.
Four days after Pablo's "escape," Steve Murphy, Javier Peña, and several other DEA agents spent the day touring La Catedral. The mountaintop "prison" was now a hot tourist attraction for top-ranking American and Colombian officials. CIA chief Wagner would tour it days later with a video camera, accompanied by several members of his staff. It confirmed all of the worst suspicions and stories about Pablo's supposed imprisonment, but it also gave the agents a rare glimpse into the life and mind of the world's most famous fugitive.
Although the agents suspected the Colombian army of destroying or carrying off most of the documents, including floppy disks and the hard drives from Pablo's computers, there was much of interest left behind. First there was just the luxury of the place, which they had heard about but still found hard to believe. If there had ever been a doubt about who was in charge at the prison, it was put to rest by a small table with telephones and a metal box mounted on the wall just outside Pablo's "cell." It was the main circuit box for all the communications lines to the prison.
One of the rooms in Pablo's suite had been his office. On a shelf over his desk was a neat library of news articles, diligently clipped, pasted, and sorted in a row of file boxes. There was also Pablo's collection of fan mail. One was from a local beauty queen, who referred to Pablo as her boyfriend and lover. One pathetic letter was from a man pleading with Pablo not to kill any more members of his family, as he had already done away with nearly all of them. There was a letter from the wife of a prison guard, thanking him for her husband's recent promotion. Pablo had copies of all his indictments, going back to his youth in Medellín, and had framed on his office wall a collection of the mug shots taken at each of his arrests, showing the tousle-haired teen with a thinner face who was arrested for stealing cars in Medellín, and a fuller-faced, mustachioed shot from his first and only drug bust in 1976. The agents also found a handwritten draft of a letter from Pablo to President Gaviria, requesting armor-plated cars for his wife and children. Pablo had saved a complete transcript of the U.S. indictment of Ivan Urdinola, a heroin trafficker from the Cauca region, and kept files on his Cali cartel rivals, complete with photographs, addresses, descriptions of their vehicles, and license numbers. On the wall he had a photograph of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the famous Argentine Marxist revolutionary, alongside an illustration from Hustler magazine depicting Pablo and his associates cavorting in an orgy behind bars (throwing darts at a picture of President Bush on a TV screen) and a photograph of himself and a young Juan Pablo posing before the front gate of the White House. Among his collection of videotapes was, predictably, a complete set of the Godfather films, Chuck Norris's The Octagon, Steve McQueen's Bullitt, and Burt Reynolds in Rent-a-Cop. There were five Bibles in his personal library, and books by Graham Greene and Nadine Gordimer. It was not the book collection of an avid reader but of someone who bought in bulk. Among the collection were works by Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez and, curiously, a complete collection of the works of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. The closet in his bedroom was stacked with identical pairs of Nike sneakers and a neat pile of pressed blue jeans. Over his gigantic bed was an ornate, gold-framed portrait of the Virgin Mary painted on inlaid tile. Beside the bed were hundreds of bound copies of a book Escobar had had privately printed, in which were reproduced hundreds of newspaper cartoons about him.
There were photographs of Pablo, his family, and his fellow inmates from the lavish Christmas dinner in the prison's disco and bar, and pictures of him posing with some of Colombia's biggest soccer stars. One framed photo showed Pablo posing in full costume as Pancho Villa, clearly enjoying himself, and another showed him and Popeye dressed as Prohibition-era American gangsters, complete with tommy guns.
The DEA agents itemized all they found and took turns posing for snapshots, happy as high schoolers invading a rival gang's clubhouse. They posed sitting on Pablo's bed, taking turns wearing one of the thick fur caps that the drug boss's mother had given him for his birthday, and that he had worn in a photograph that had run on the cover of the weekly news magazine Semana.
These were all just scraps left behind by the Colombian investigators, but they added up to a fascinating portrait of a man who clearly relished his celebrity outlaw status, even though he was known to protest his complete innocence at every public opportunity. Here was a man who went to vicious bloody lengths in a vain effort to wipe out evidence of his criminal past, who repeatedly argued his innocence of drug exporting, yet who posed for photographs dressed as a famous out law and hung framed copies of his mug shots on his office wall. The effects left behind at La Catedral exposed the cheerful cynicism behind Pablo's public pose of wronged innocence. It suggested a man who viewed criminality as a normal, healthy outlet for his ambition, just as he remained devoted to his family while employing teenage whores and beauty queens to satisfy his wider sexual appetites. Pablo clearly saw government and law enforcement as nothing more than power r
ivals, earnest opponents in an ongoing chess match.
Drawing on this information and its own files, the CIA prepared a brief "personality assessment" of the infamous fugitive. The summary attempts, with thinly veiled contempt, to sketch the internal life of this complex new military target. Anyone familiar with Pablo would have found it amusingly obvious—"Escobar has difficulty containing his extreme aggressiveness" certainly rang true—but it concluded with a chilling suggestion for how he might be hired into the open:
Escobar does seem to have genuine paternal feelings for his children, and the young daughter Manuela is described as his favorite. His parents were once kidnapped by a rival group, and Escobar apparently spared no effort or expense rescuing them. Whether his concern for his parents or his children would overcome his stringent security consciousness is not clear.
A week after Pablo escaped, a Colombian court rejected an appeal by his lawyers to have his flight ruled a legitimate action taken in fear for his life. So there would be no putting things right. Pablo's comfortable deal had come completely undone.
Instead, Pablo was back on the run, only this time the search would be conducted with the full cooperation of the United States. Over the next six months, the secret American operation in Colombia would swell to nearly one hundred personnel, making the Bogotá embassy the largest CIA station in the world.
The men involved in this manhunt knew that it had only one likely end. Escobar knew it well himself. It was the one thing that everybody understood but no one said out loud. None of this effort was about arresting Pablo anymore. The Colombians had no further patience for trying to put him on trial or lock him up; he had shown how pointless that was. They couldn't extradite him and try him in the United States; Pablo's own bullets and bribes had made extradition unlawful. No, this time the hunt was for keeps.
