Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (27 page)
In 1989, Escobar targeted Cesar Gaviria, a young presidential candidate who was running for the post only because the former candidate, Luis Galan, had been assassinated. (His fatal error: running for office on promises of breaking the cartels.) After Galan’s death, the Colombian government cracked down on the Medellin cartel, touching off an urban war. The cartel set off a long series of pipe bombs in very public places—at the entrances to offices, banks, and shopping centers, terrorizing citizens to ratchet up pressure on the government to cease its pursuit of the cartel. Between March and August, at least fifteen officials were murdered, including another presidential candidate, Jose Antequera, in addition to a lawyer, a newspaper editor, a chief magistrate, a judge’s father, and the governor of Antioquia.
Bogota was a war zone. By August, more than four thousand Colombian judges had gone on strike, in fear for their lives. Escobar issued “communiques” in which he styled himself part of a humble citizen resistance whose rights had been violated by an oppressive police state, and whose families were the targets of “arbitrary raids.” He asked for “peace.”
Then he kept on killing.
When Cesar Gaviria took up Luis Galan’s cause, Escobar decided to kill him, too. This is how ruthless Escobar was: When he learned that Gaviria was ticketed on an Avianca Airlines flight, Escobar recruited one of his trusted
sicarios
, or assassins, a man named Carlos Alzate. This time Alzate thought he was assigned to a less lethal job—carrying a suitcase equipped with a recording device aboard the flight to record the conversation of the passenger sitting next to him. But he was wrong. When the poor stooge flipped the recorder’s switch, he detonated five kilos of dynamite, blowing himself and one hundred nine other people out of the sky. All this to assassinate one man, Gaviria, who as it turned out, was not aboard, precisely because he knew the cartel meant to kill him.
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That was Pablo Escobar: willing to murder more than a hundred innocents, including his own man, to crush one enemy.
PART OF OUR JOB AT DELTA was keeping tabs on the world’s bad guys, and we had been watching Escobar for years. We downloaded daily intel briefs from a dozen different agencies, concentrating on groups and individuals known to be involved in terrorism, hostage taking, and the proliferation of WMDs. Though Escobar wasn’t mentioned every day, he frequently had a starring role. He wasn’t a terrorist in the political sense, one who terrorized in the pursuit of some religious or political belief. Escobar had simpler tastes: Money and power. And he elevated narco-terrorism to a craft.
By the time I visited
La Catedral
in the summer of 1992, Escobar had either personally executed or ordered the deaths of more than a thousand people. The CIA and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had labored against the cocaine trafficking for years, and the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Morris D. Busby, had been pushing the government to take specific action against Escobar. But in Colombia, corruption choked reform like a fast-moving cancer and those not already in Escobar’s pocket were at each other’s throats.
Meanwhile, Escobar’s farcical imprisonment at
La Catedral
had become an embarrassment to Cesar Gaviria, who was elected president in spite of Escobar’s effort to kill him. From his mountain “retreat,” the drug lord still managed the shipment of millions of pounds of cocaine into the U.S. every month. By 1992, Gaviria had had enough. He ordered the Colombian army to go to
La Catedral
, take Escobar into custody, and move him to a real prison. But the soldiers, many on the take and the rest terrified of Escobar’s certain retaliation, let the drug lord escape.
Gaviria was livid. While Escobar was ensconced in
La Catedral
, the country enjoyed relative peace. Now its legislature was set to rewrite the constitution, and Colombia was a nation on the verge of historic change. Desperate, Gaviria sought out Busby.
The Colombian president knew we had captured Manuel Noriega and imprisoned him for drug trafficking. He also knew that in the United States Escobar was under indictment as Noriega had been. But the Colombian constitution forbade the use of foreign troops on its soil. Still, wasn’t there some way America could help?
UNLIKE MANY AMERICAN DIPLOMATS, Morris Busby understood the yin and yang of diplomacy and military force. I had worked with him in years past when I was operations officer in the Special Ops task force and he served as ambassador-at-large for combating terrorism. He was an experienced statesman with the warm personal style of a West Virginian, but also with the aggressive edge of a former naval officer. Complex and engaging, he loved country-boy things like bluegrass music, but you might also walk in at any moment and find him listening to Chopin.
While many diplomats considered the employment of military force the sign of absolute diplomatic failure, Busby recognized that sometimes, especially when working on behalf of an ally, it was simply another tool in the toolbox—even if it was a hammer. In this case, the hammer he selected was Delta.
During the two previous years, I attended the Army War College and served as operations officer for General William F. Garrison, the steel-jawed Texan who would turn out to be so crucial during the Somalia operation. Garrison had taken charge of the Joint Task Force, and in the early summer of 1992, I took over command of Delta Force, relieving Pete Schoomaker who headed to Texas to become assistant commander of 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood.
Pablo Escobar became my first major target. In July 1992, Bill Garrison called me at my office. “Have you seen the intel reports on Escobar’s escape from prison?”
I said I had.
“Ambassador Busby has gotten approval for Delta to help the Colombians hunt him down,” Garrison said.
Interesting
, I thought. I knew that Wayne Downing had talked around a similar operation in 1989, but the idea was shot down. Now, though, Busby’s request had survived the scrutiny of Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, and President George H.W. Bush—and had come back approved. Manuel Noriega, the last drug pushing despot who thought his
cajones
were bigger than Bush’s, was sitting in a federal penitentiary in Florida.
Maybe Escobar will be next
.
Garrison went on, and I pictured him on the other end of the line, tall and lanky, his cigar clenched in his teeth and bobbing up and down as he spoke. Garrison never lit his stogies, and I couldn’t remember ever having seen him without one.
“I want you to go down there. Select a few folks to take with you,” he said. “Keep it small. I’ll let you know as soon as we have the execute order.”
Garrison was a special ops veteran who had worked on Phoenix, a Vietnam program that retaliated against Viet Cong who killed village leaders when they did not support communism. Under Phoenix, Viet Cong who could not be induced to surrender were assassinated. Garrison was tough. Nothing ruffled him—ever.
Between Busby and Garrison
, I thought,
Pablo Escobar has met his match
.
The first man I selected for the mission was Lieutenant Colonel Gary Harrell, the big guy from East Tennessee who served in Eldon Bargewell’s prison assault element in Panama. Gary selected the rest of the team, choosing from the Delta squadron that happened to be stateside on a training rotation. Sergeant First Class Joe Vega, the Julio Iglesias of Delta Force, was among his first picks. A buff, good-looking Latino who spoke fluent Spanish, Vega was a skilled operator who charmed everyone he came in contact with. The Colombians would prove no exception.
Gary also tapped Sergeant First Class Tony Mafnas, a Saipan-born operator and lethal martial artist who stood only five-four and was one of the toughest men I’ve ever met. While prepping for a particularly dangerous mission I can’t mention here, Mafnas attended SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape) training at Fort Bragg. I had the opportunity to observe him during the interrogation phase, which is pretty brutal. The SERE instructors know they’re training high-risk personnel, so they slap you around, slam you against walls, grab you by the hair and hold your head under water, that kind of thing. As three interrogators took turns battering Mafnas, I watched through a two-way mirror. After awhile, Mafnas broke down and started crying.
The interrogators eased up and, one by one, filed out. Moments later, the SERE psychologist went in to talk to Mafnas, who sat in a chair, head in his hands, shoulders heaving.
The shrink leaned down and touched Mafnas’s shoulder. “Tony? How are you doing?”
Mafnas shot the shrink a quick sideways glance and his eyes were dry. “Go back to your office, doctor,” he said quietly. “I’ve got them right where I want them.”
Gary also chose for the mission Sergeant Major Jack Alvarez, another native linguist, and a veteran operator with whom Gary and I had both served for years. Known for his speed and agility, Alvarez was a former track star who had been a member of the winning team in European Counterterrorism Olympics. The man was just deadly.
I looked forward to the mission. First, I thought it was a prime opportunity to rid the world of a gory and unrestrained killer who got so rich that in 1989
Forbes
magazine listed him as the seventh wealthiest man in the world. I hoped we would capture Escobar quickly, but I knew the best scenario for everyone was to simply kill him. If we captured the drug lord and he was imprisoned, he would simply launch another war—a bombing and assassination campaign in which hundreds more would die. Meanwhile, the Colombian justice was so corrupt it was unlikely Escobar would even be convicted (should any judge live long enough to actually do that). If he served any time at all, innocent Colombians would continue dying until the government was forced to cut a deal.
By then I had come to believe that some men in the world were simply evil. They could not be bargained with. They could not be rehabilitated. As mass murderers who killed repeatedly without regard for human systems of justice, it was possible they could not even be defeated. I came to believe such men just needed killing.
Pablo Escobar was one of those men.
IN LATE JULY, I flew down to Bogota with Gary and the rest of the element, eight of us in all. We deplaned at El Dorado Airport into the almost liquid warmth of a humid evening, all wearing civilian clothes. A group of officials whisked us to the embassy, a gray four-story structure hunkered in downtown Bogota like a fortress.
Gary and I were to meet with Busby in the “vault,” a room normally located on an embassy’s top floor, fortified by a soundproof, bulletproof Lexan bubble. No bullets in, no secrets out. When we arrived, DEA agent Joe Toft and CIA station chief Bill Wagner were already there. Busby, a tall, smooth gentleman, made the introductions. As we all took seats, he and I caught up on old times. How were things at Delta, he wanted to know. I asked him about the counterterrorism fight at State. Then we got down to business.
Busby laid out the complexities surrounding Escobar, much as an analyst would: A brief history on how Escobar came to be at
La Catedral
. His history of violent and indiscriminate retaliation against officials who tried to rein in the cartel. And the intricate web of corruption permeating every level of Colombian government. He ended on a hopeful note: The sea change in Colombian politics and society possible under Cesar Gaviria’s presidency.
“Gaviria, unlike his predecessor, is truly committed to shutting down the drug trade in Colombia,” Busby said. “The credibility of his administration is at stake. It’s critical that you find Escobar. Do you have any limitations on what you can do?”
“General Joulwan wants to make sure this is a Colombian operation,” I said, referring to the new SouthCom commander. We had stopped in Panama on the way down and met with George Joulwan, a man with a reputation as an effective leader who used a lot of football metaphors because he thought of himself as a coach. During our meeting, Joulwan told me Delta’s role was to support the Colombian police and military with training and intelligence, along with some weapons and equipment.
He was crystal clear that the Colombians were to be on the front lines. Delta was to be invisible—a ghost.
Now, in the vault, Busby said he agreed with Joulwan: the Colombians had to be the public face of the hunt for Escobar. “But you guys are going to have to get up to Medellin and work with them, train them,” he said.
I told them we were prepared to do that, and to offer logistical and intel support. “We have pretty good SIGINT,” I said, meaning signals intelligence collected via electronic surveillance, communications intercepts, and telemetry. “What we’ll need is any kind of human intel we can get from DEA and CIA. Any reports they can provide would be very helpful.”
Busby glanced at Bill Wagner, the CIA station chief. “We’ll provide all we have, plus they can work in our space here,” Bill said. Busby seemed pleased.
We turned to the DEA agent, Joe Toft. Long and lean with a tanned leathery face, Toft was a veteran frontline agent, accustomed to the bloodbath that was the South American drug war. And yet, with all he’d seen, he considered Escobar the most notorious and lethal cocaine trafficker who had ever lived. Toft, I would learn, saw the drug lord’s “escape” not as a problem, but as an opportunity to finally hunt him down. Still, I was unsure how the DEA viewed Delta’s involvement.
“Yeah, we’ve got some sources,” he said. “We can get you some information.”
Toft was hard to read. I couldn’t tell whether he really meant to help us, or was just telling us what we wanted to hear. You could never tell about interagency turf wars.
I turned back to Busby. “We’ve got some assets up at SouthCom,” I said. “If we need to, we can send them down.”
Joulwan had a P-3 surveillance plane up in Panama that could fly down and perform a high-altitude aerial stakeout over Bogota, transmitting SIGINT and imagery.
“If you don’t have anything else,” I said to the ambassador, “we’ll get our guys briefed and start moving.”
