Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (28 page)

5

I SENT FOUR MEN NORTH TO MEDELLIN. Gary and Jack Alvarez went to the police headquarters. Tony Mafnas and Joe Vega went to establish a sniper/observer position at
La Catedral
prison, which overlooked all of the Medellin valley. They weren’t up there to shoot anyone, but with their laptop computer, satellite phone, and long-range scopes and lenses, they could receive SIGINT on Escobar’s location and zero in visually on any location in the valley below. On the grounds of his private prison, Escobar built rustic little individual cottages. The one where Mafnas and Vega set up was actually picturesque, with a little wooden railed balcony where they put up their observation gear. Compared to missions where we’d slept in rat-infested barrios and snake-riddled jungles, we joked that they were living high on the hog.

The next morning, I went with Ambassador Busby to meet
El Presidente
. Cesar Gaviria worked out of a kind of presidential palace, an elaborate office building in the heart of downtown Bogota. But his office was not at all opulent. Instead, it was simple and elegant, with a burnished conference table and some framed original landscapes on the walls. Busby made the introductions in Spanish, and my first impression of the Colombian president was that he was a man laboring under a heavy burden. His would-be murderer was on the loose again, now threatening not only his personal future, but that of the country he meant to lead.

We gathered around the conference table and I began to brief the president in my crappy Spanish, muddling along, mangling the syntax. Embarrassed, I said to Gaviria, “
Con su permiso, quiero hablar ingles
.”

“Certainly,” said Gaviria, who spoke perfect English.

Relieved, I went on to explain the composition of our element and how our people were positioned. Then I concluded. “
Senor Presidente
, the United States is offering a $2 million reward for Escobar. We are prepared to train your people, and support them with all the intelligence we can gather on Escobar’s whereabouts. We will stay as long as we have to.”

“Thank you very much, Colonel,” Gaviria said. “We need your support. I think you understand the importance of finding Escobar. This is in the best interests of both our countries.”

While I was meeting with Gaviria, Gary and Jack Alvarez met with two senior Colombian military officers, including Lieutenant Colonel Lino Pinzon who would be in charge of the “Search Bloc,” the military component tasked with hunting Escobar.

Gary and Pinzon immediately despised each other.

Pinzon, with his salt-and-pepper crew cut, was considered a bit of a Casanova and had a reputation as a careerist who saw other people as stepping stones to the next rank. He was exactly the kind of leader Gary couldn’t stand. At their first meeting, Gary sized Pinzon up as unserious about the mission—at best afraid of failure, at worst on the take. And it quickly became clear Pinzon resented Gary’s good-ol’boy, take-charge manner. Clearly, Pinzon wanted to be deferred to. And Gary wasn’t interested in deferring to a man he considered no better than a bureaucrat.

For credibility’s sake and to avoid offending our hosts, Gary introduced Jack Alvarez as “Colonel Santos.” Delta was working with a very aggressive ambassador who expected us to convince the Colombians to undertake a task that to them meant certain death. We could not force them to act, and so had to rely on persuasion, and on the Colombians’ confidence that we were a highly trained force. Jack Alvarez was one of the world’s elite warriors. But none of the Latin American countries had a professional NCO corps. If the Colombians thought Alvarez was an enlisted man, they would likely have dismissed his advice as that of an untrained grunt.

Back at the embassy, I got comms set up in the CIA station. With my radio operator and intel analyst, I could receive SIGINT reports from NSA, and human intel from Bill Wagner and Joe Toft. From there, I also had radio comms with Gary, SouthCom, and the guys up at the observer position. The next morning, I called SouthCom to update Joulwan on what we’d done to that point.

Joulwan’s operations officer got on the phone and immediately went on the offensive. “What are those guys doing up there at
La Catedral
?”

“Just observing,” I said.

“Are they armed?” the J-3 demanded.

“Yes, they’re armed.”

“Do they have rules of engagement? Are they allowed to engage targets?”

“No. It’s purely a defensive position.”

“Who else is up there with them?”

“There are a couple of Colombian soldiers up there for force protection.”

“Okay. Don’t do anything until we get back to you.”

Oh, good
, I thought as the line clicked dead in my ear.
Now I can go back to watching soaps and eating bon-bons
.

Three hours later the J-3 called back. “Your observers up at
La Catedral
? Just make sure they understand they’re in an observer role. They’re not up there to engage any cartel people unless it’s in self-defense.”

“We understand the rules, sir,” I said.

That annoyed the crap out of me. First, I felt like the folks at SouthCom didn’t trust Delta, that they were convinced we were down there freelancing, gunning for Escobar ourselves. Second, I felt Joulwan didn’t trust Morris Busby, thought he was too aggressive. I knew SouthCom was concerned about the legal and public relations issues associated with Americans getting involved in ground ops. The South American media—particularly those on Escobar’s payroll—could certainly be counted on to call the use of any U.S. firepower an American invasion of Colombia, whether we were there to liberate them from under Escobar’s boot heel or not.

Still, I thought SouthCom’s reluctance was very strange: usually it was the other way around, with the generals ready to launch, but frustrated by foot-dragging diplomats.

I brushed my irritation aside, and all of us began working the intel really hard. Escobar liked to use a cordless phone, not radios. From the embassy, SouthCom, and from the air, analysts monitored all cordless calls, listening for the drug lord’s voice. We relied very heavily on a couple of analysts who had listened to him again and again on tape, until they could recognize his voice instantly. And on the second day, Pablo Escobar made a phone call.

6

AN INTEL AIRCRAFT INTERCEPTED THE CALL and immediately transmitted coordinates to Mafnas, who trained cameras on the target and then fired imagery to Gary, who called Pinzon. It was a hot lead, Gary told the Colombian commander. He should order the Search Bloc to strike.

But Pinzon seemed bored by it all. “We get leads all the time,” he told Gary. This one would be another dry hole like the rest. Hours passed as Pinzon sat on his hands. When he finally ordered his men to move, it was only because Gaviria called and intervened. Even then, Pinzon’s response wasn’t so much a strike as a slow-motion farce that crawled loudly up the hill where the cordless call carrying Escobar’s voice had come from. A deaf drug lord could’ve heard them coming. And surprise: When the Search Bloc found Escobar’s hideout, Escobar was gone.

Gary was livid. He called me to vent his frustration. “I don’t think this guy has any intention of going after Escobar. I’m not sure whether he is scared or on the payroll.”

The next day, new phone calls generated a new fix and a new opportunity for a strike. Instantly, Gary asked Pinzon to start prepping for a raid. Pinzon initially agreed, but again showed no signs of action.

Again Gary called me. “This mission ain’t gonna go.”

“Why not?” I said.

“When it looked like Pinzon wasn’t moving again, I went to his house. He answered the door in his pajamas.”

From that day on, we hung Pinzon with a new nickname: “Pajamas.” And after that, there was more discussion about whether he was on the take. In the end, we gave him the benefit of the doubt and decided he was more likely a coward.

On the third day, we brought the P-3 down from SouthCom to do some pinpoint geo-locating. So the citizens of Medellin wouldn’t spot it, we directed the aircraft commander to orbit above ten thousand feet. But at that altitude, the geo-locating gear wasn’t returning precise coordinates, so Busby decided we should bring the bird lower. Somebody saw it and the next day, a Miami paper helpfully ran a headline that went something like “U.S. spy planes flying over Medellin.”

SouthCom went nuts. The J-3 called me, machine-gunning questions: “What were you thinking?” “What was the purpose of lowering the altitude?” and my personal favorite, “Who authorized you to direct that aircraft to fly so low?”

“Ambassador Busby,” I said, playing my trump card.

“Well, the P-3 is outta there. We’re ordering it back to Panama.”

“You’ll have to talk to the ambassador about that.”

At that moment, I was grateful Busby was the kind of man he was. Between Pinzon, the reluctant Search Bloc and SouthCom’s constant mothering, I already felt like a pinball, and the mission was only three days old.

Busby prevailed. We were able to keep the P-3 as long as it stayed high. During the first week, the SIGINT kept rolling in. Several times we tried to get the Colombians to launch assaults, but they wouldn’t. We couldn’t blame them entirely. Many had seen friends and family members die on Escobar’s orders.

About halfway through week two, the SIGINT dropped off completely. Human intel also dried up. Escobar either went underground or fled. We decided we’d better concentrate on turning the timid Search Bloc into a more formidable force.

7

BOTH GARY HARRELL AND LUIS PINZON rotated out of the operation. Gary was a squadron commander with other soldiers back at Fort Bragg so I let him return to his primary duties. Pinzon was replaced by Colonel Hugo Martinez, a Colombian colonel who originally founded the Search Bloc to hunt Escobar down after the drug lord in 1989 ordered the murder of Martinez’s friend, Waldemar Franklin, chief of the Antioquia police.
⁴
After a bloody war between the Search Bloc and the cartel that ended with Escobar’s farcical imprisonment in
La Catedral
, Martinez accepted a diplomatic appointment in Spain. Now, stoically, he said yes to an invitation to replace the useless Pinzon.

Among the Americans involved in the drug war to this point, Martinez had a reputation as a man with integrity and resolve. It was widely known that Escobar once offered Martinez $6 million to stand down the Search Bloc. Martinez turned it down.
⁵
When I met with him the second week we were there, I found him to be cool and aloof. But it was also clear he was prepared to pursue Escobar to the end even if it meant his own death. That was a likely possibility: In his earlier war with the Search Bloc, Escobar’s
sicarios
more than once came close to killing Martinez, and his son, Hugo, Jr.

With Busby’s support, we decided to start a vigorous training program for both the police and the military. I sent some trainers down to Tola Maida, a Colombian army camp in the lowlands south of Bogota, and I went down to join them. In contrast to Bogota’s cool, mountainous terrain and hilly city streets that reminded me of San Francisco, Tola Maida was steamy and tropical, like being back in Panama. The camp itself was a compound of simple stucco and wood-frame buildings laid out in rows tucked in among jungle foliage. Open
bohios
, or pavilions, dotted the camp. And while the American Navy paints its structures gray and the Marine Corp paints them gold, the Colombians painted everything in the tropical parrot colors of a Cheeva bus. Not the buildings, but pretty much everything else—the security bar on the camp entrance, the
bohio
posts, even the rocks.

The Colombian soldiers’ normal training routine called for lots of drills, but nothing realistic. We quickly learned they were not good marksmen. Ammo being expensive, they probably shot only about twenty rounds per year. Also, their idea of room clearing was to stand outside a building and empty their magazines through the windows. They had no concept of an organized assault, of covering each other, of shooting only the bad guys and letting the good guys live. And there was no such thing as a helicopter assault.

I called down more operators from Bragg. Using sixteen trainers, including aviators, we put about a hundred men through a three-week mini assault course that included marksmanship, CQB (close quarters combat), sniper/observer ops, explosives, communications, emergency medical treatment, and integrated assault. The Colombians soaked it up, increasing every day in skill and confidence. Three weeks later, we held an exercise, a live-fire night helo assault. Busby and Colonel Martinez came down to watch and went away impressed.

After that, we set up for the long haul, beefing up our surveillance capabilities and increasing our numbers in both Bogota and Medellin. The hunters were in place. Now we would go after the hound.

8

FOR THE REST OF 1992, I bounced back and forth between Bogota and Bragg, going south about every eight weeks. I kept about a dozen people in Colombia equally split between the Embassy, and the police and Army quarters in Medellin.

In the U.S., in early 1993, news reports began to trickle out about a strange cult that had barricaded itself in a compound in Waco, Texas. They called themselves the Branch Davidians, and were led by a nut named Vernon Howell, a high school drop-out who renamed himself David Koresh and convinced about a hundred men, women, and children that he was the Christ. Word was the Branch Davidians were some kind of doomsday cult and that Koresh taught his followers that they would all someday die in a violent clash with “unbelievers.” After significantly sized shipments of weapons and weapon-building components began arriving with regularity at the cult’s Waco compound, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms launched an investigation.

Because it was a domestic matter, Delta followed the case like everyone else—by watching the news. Details began to emerge: Koresh had joined the Branch Davidians, a small sect that began in the 1930s, in 1984. After a dispute with the cult’s leader, he was driven from the 78-acre Waco compound at gunpoint, but later returned to seize control of the cult in a shootout.