SIMPLE TALE OF HOW U.S. HELPED BRING DOWN A DRUG KING

Killing Pablo: The Hunt For The World's Greatest Outlaw

By Mark Bowden ,Atlantic Monthly Press, $25, 296 pages

The story of how U.S. Army intelligence experts and Delta Force
commandos helped Colombian police track down and kill Pablo Escobar,
head of the Medellin cocaine cartel, in December 1993 is rife with
implications for the United States as it embarks upon a $1.3-billion
effort, complete with Black Hawk helicopters and trainers, to
eradicate cocaine production in this South American country over the
next two years.

Mark Bowden, a veteran Philadelphia Inquirer reporter whose
bestselling book "Black Hawk Down" described the Delta Force's
ill-fated attack on a Somalian warlord in Mogadishu earlier in 1993,
is clearly aware of those implications. But he leaves them for us to
articulate.

Bowden simply tells his story, aided by interviews with top U.S. and
Colombian sources and access to classified documents, including
transcripts of telephone calls by Escobar that were monitored by an
American unit called Centra Spike in aircraft crammed with high-tech
surveillance gear.

It is a compelling, almost Shakespearean, tale: how a small-time
hoodlum from Medellin parlayed the cravings of U.S. drug users and
his own organizational genius into a criminal empire that almost
toppled Colombia's fragile democracy; how his incarceration in 1991
ended a year later when he walked away from a luxury prison he had
built for himself; how Colombia, desperate, allowed U.S. soldiers to
operate in its territory and let a death squad use the most brutal
methods to bring down Escobar.

At his peak, Bowden says, Escobar "built small, remote-controlled
submarines that could carry up to 2,000 kilos of cocaine from ...
Colombia to ... just off Puerto Rico, where divers would remove the
shipment and transport it to Miami in speedboats. He would send
fleets of planes north, each carrying 1,000 kilos .... Eventually he
was buying used Boeing 727s, stripping out the passenger seats and
loading as much as 10,000 kilos per flight. There was nothing to stop
him."

A multibillionaire with a private army, Escobar gave Colombian
authorities the option of plata o plomo-- a bribe or a bullet. He
bankrolled politicians of every party. His sicarios, or paid
assassins, killed presidential candidates, in one case by blowing an
Avianca jetliner out of the sky with 110 people aboard. They killed
judges, prosecutors and hundreds of police officers. They kidnapped
and killed enemies' parents, wives and children.

Escobar's weakness, Bowden says, was that he believed his own
propaganda about being a populist hero who provided Medellin's poor
with housing and soccer fields. He could easily have left the country
after his surrender in 1991 but instead stayed and fought, like
Macbeth, adding another chapter to Colombia's century-long history of
La Violencia. Bowden lucidly summarizes that history. If his story
has heroes, however flawed, they are Colombians such as Col. Hugo
Martinez, head of the special police unit that pursued Escobar, who
could be neither bought nor scared and who kept going when the
situation seemed hopeless. The Americans were technically adept but
prone to interagency squabbling, tolerant of human-rights abuses and
contemptuous of the host country.

A 1989 memo by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney defined anti-drug
activities as a "high-priority security mission," clearing the way
for the U.S. military to operate in Colombia. The jetliner bombing
that same year allowed the first Bush administration to redefine
Escobar as an international terrorist and covertly abet his
assassination. The death squad, Los Pepes, which wrecked Escobar's
organization by killing as many as six of his supporters a day, had
troubling links both to Martinez's police and to the rival Cali
cartel, whose clout in Colombia rose as Escobar's fell.

Escobar's death from the bullets of a police squad led by Martinez's
son did not halt cocaine's flow to the U.S., Bowden notes. He lets
Joe Toft, former chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
office in Bogota, have the last word: "I don't know what the lesson
of the story is. I hope it's not [just] that the end justifies the
means."