THE FUGITIVE: AN ACCOUNT OF THE SEARCH FOR THE HEAD OF THE MEDELLIN DRUG CARTEL

KILLING PABLO The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw. By Mark Bowden.
Illustrated. 296 pp. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press. $25.

In early 1993, Colombians were crouched in their homes, waiting for the
next bomb to go off. They had already lived through one terror campaign led
by the Medellin drug traffickers, who were fighting extradition to stand
trial in the United States. The bombs and bribes worked that time. Pablo
Escobar, head of the cartel, wound up in a cushy jail that he had built
near his hometown and staffed with friendly guards.

But the deal unraveled when he continued to ply his trade and launch hits
against competitors from his "jail." After he escaped during a botched
crackdown, the Colombian government took off the gloves and turned to Uncle
Sam for help in hunting him down. Escobar, true to his street-brawler
origins, fought back. After a grisly game of hide-and-seek, he was finally
killed in December 1993 while fleeing across the rooftop of his last safe
house.

This is the story Mark Bowden tells in "Killing Pablo," with the help of
important new sources and documents.

A master of narrative journalism, he employs the same techniques of
reconstructing scenes and dialogue that made his best-selling "Black Hawk
Down" gripping reading (both were originally published as series in The
Philadelphia Inquirer, where the author has been a reporter for 21 years).
The action-novel feel kicks in when a top-secret United States military
team arrives to eavesdrop on Escobar and pinpoint his location with
high-tech radio telemetry gear. The team helps the Colombians' newly
created Search Bloc police unit doggedly trail the fugitive despite daily
killings, threats and infiltration. Over a two-year period, Escobar was
responsible for countless bombings, assassinations of top officials and
murders of more than 270 policemen and civilians.

The tale of law-enforcement heroism under pressure has a dark side,
however. It has long been rumored that the knights in white hats
collaborated with henchmen who waged an equally bloody and indiscriminate
war, planting bombs and kidnapping and executing over a hundred of
Escobar's relatives and associates, some of them innocent people like the
family maid, tutor and building manager.

Bowden cites sources and documents amply establishing links between the
Search Bloc and the henchmen, known as Los Pepes -- former Escobar
associates financed by the rival Cali cartel -- as well as demonstrating
American officials' knowledge of those links.

Some of the Pepes' hit men allegedly hung out at the Search Bloc's base and
even accompanied Drug Enforcement Administration personnel on unauthorized
missions. Most troubling of all, the author says that the United States
knowingly supplied intelligence that Los Pepes used to conduct assassinations.

If this is true, there should be an investigation and those responsible
held accountable. But Bowden is lamentably vague about the allegations.
Although he demonstrates that American officials knew of the Colombians'
unsavory collaboration, he never proves that the United States officials
did then, and "on occasion" do now, "target foreign citizens for
assassination," as he asserts.

He has, he says, over a thousand pages of documents sent to and from the
American Embassy in Bogota, yet he does not reproduce any of them in full,
so they are difficult to assess.

And he does not tell us what his American sources say when confronted with
the documents.

We hear only a denial from the former American ambassador to Colombia,
Morris D. Busby, who disputes the strength of the evidence linking Los
Pepes and the Search Bloc. "If I had believed such a connection existed,"
he says, "it would have been a showstopper."

Bowden also appears to overreach when he raises the possibility that an
American soldier in the elite Delta Force actually fired the shot that
killed Escobar. This may be true, but the author provides no evidence for
the assertion, instead swathing it in innuendo.

Noting Delta's famed marksmanship, he says, "Legend has it that its
operators were in on the kill." He quotes a Delta Force member, looking
over the autopsy photos, saying, "Pretty good shootin', huh?" This is
colorful writing, but not convincing journalism.

Clarification of these matters is critically important, not just to set the
record straight but to inform present-day policy toward Colombia. Bowden
does not spend a lot of time discussing the moral of the story, but he does
relay the nagging worry of Joe Toft, the D.E.A. chief in Colombia at the
time, that destroying the Medellin cartel would merely end up strengthening
the Cali cartel and its government ties. This is in fact what happened,
though the Cali cartel was eventually dismantled. But now Carlos Castano,
who was a member of Los Pepes, is a rising player in the drug trade, with
growing political pretensions and army protection. He has built a force of
more than 8,000 drug-financed "self-defense" fighters, who commit frequent
massacres of civilians with the goals of cleansing the country of
guerrillas and winning control of the lucrative drug trade.

He may well become a more formidable threat than Escobar ever was.

What then are the lessons of these macabre games?

The Colombia conundrum baffles even experts, and Bowden visited the country
only twice and does not speak its language.

He does tell a great story, sheds new light and captures well the peril and
grind of police work. The reality is that law enforcement often relies on
defectors and rivals to penetrate the underworld and apprehend targets.

Using one gangster to fight another might be justifiable if some progress
could be seen a decade hence.

But Colombians have paid a terrible price in bloodshed, with a murder rate
that is the worst in the world -- 10 times that of the United States -- and
still no end in sight.

What is needed is some serious thinking about new solutions instead of the
usual dirty wars. Joe Toft appears to agree. "I don't know what the lesson
of the story is," he says. "I hope it's not that the end justifies the
means." Colombians need functioning institutions capable of protecting
them, a police and judiciary that aren't cowed by rapacious criminals who
buy political protection. The United States does its allies no service by
looking the other way while they pursue expedient but counterproductive
policies. It could contribute more by blowing the whistle early on, and
above all by curbing its insatiable appetite for drugs.