MAP's index for the series: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n000/a251.html

Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia

A TRAITOR WITHIN THE SEARCH BLOC

Chapter 17 of a continuing serial

Up in their Beechcraft spy plane over Medellin one day, the Centra Spike
operators were stunned by what they overheard.

They had just picked up a brief radio transmission from Pablo Escobar. They
plotted the coordinates, then sent the data to the Search Bloc headquarters.
There, the unit's commander, Col. Hugo Martinez, shared the information with
his top officers.

It was at this point that the Centra Spike men picked up a phone call from
the base. Someone was calling from the Search Bloc headquarters to warn
Escobar. Apparently there was a soplon, a traitor, within Martinez's
handpicked inner circle.

Escobar had been tipped off in plenty of time to escape. But the Centra
Spike operators had recorded the soplon's warning - "They're on their way,
they're coming for you!" - which had gone out to an Escobar associate called
Pinina.

Several days later, a Centra Spike technician visited Martinez at the base
and played the tape. The colonel didn't recognize the voice, but he assumed
it was one of the men on his command staff. So the colonel dismissed all but
his two or three most trusted officers, sending all the others to Bogota for
reassignment.

Eight days later, after briefing only his top commander, Maj. Hugo Aguilar,
about a pending raid, Martinez was again called by the man from Centra
Spike: Minutes after sending coordinates to the Search Bloc base, the unit
had picked up another telephone warning to Pinina.

"If it isn't you," the American said, "it has to be one of the men who are
right there with you."

Martinez was angry, and frightened. It had only been two minutes! He knew he
could trust Aguilar ... or could he? He summoned the major to his office and
confronted him. Aguilar swore he had made no such call, and was wounded to
be accused.

Martinez felt wounded, too. Aguilar said he had conveyed the colonel's plans
to three other top officers, but that was it. The information had not
traveled outside the Search Bloc's smaller new inner circle.

The colonel was spooked. If he couldn't carry on a conversation with his
most trusted officer without Escobar finding out about it minutes later,
what hope did he have of ever catching the man? Within 30 minutes, he was on
a helicopter to Bogota, where he turned in his resignation. He explained to
the generals that the situation was out of his control. The generals refused
his resignation, and ordered him back to Medellin to straighten things out.

When Martinez returned the following day, Aguilar met him at the helicopter
and said they had found the soplon. Just after Martinez had flown away from
the base, Aguilar had stormed out to confront the officers he had spoken
with. All three angrily denied the betrayal, but as they spoke they noticed
that a mechanic who worked at the base was standing close enough to
overhear. He had been standing at the same spot when they had spoken
earlier.

"That's got to be him," Aguilar said.

Before accusing the man, they set a trap. With the colonel back in his
office the next day, they ran through the same scenario. Aguilar emerged
from Martinez's office and consulted with his three officers, standing close
enough for the mechanic to overhear. Minutes later, Centra Spike recorded a
phone call from the base delivering the false information.

The mechanic was confronted, and confessed. Fearing for his life, he said he
had been recruited by a second lieutenant, one of the men Martinez had
banished from the base nine days earlier. He said he also had been paid to
kill Martinez. He had been given a pistol with a silencer and had actually
climbed a tree several nights before outside the window where the colonel
often sat reading. The mechanic said he was too far away to fire accurately
and, fearing an errant shot would prompt return fire, he had resolved to
spend a few days practicing with the pistol. He had planned to try again the
night before, but the colonel had not returned from Bogota.

The incident reinforced the pervasiveness of Escobar's influence, even
within the Search Bloc compound. The traitor lieutenant had been handpicked
for the Search Bloc. Like the other men at Holquin, he had no access to
telephones or radios, so he had recruited the worker.

Now more than ever, the colonel realized how dangerous his mission had
become, and how hopeless the entire effort sometimes seemed. Not long
afterward, the traitor lieutenant was killed, Martinez said, "fighting
against the guerrillas." Several of Martinez's men said they believed the
man was executed.

Even after this soplon had been sniffed out, there was still reason to
believe Escobar had sources inside the compound. In November 1992, two raids
on targets where Martinez was convinced Escobar had been hiding turned up
nothing. Yet during the same period, raids on some of the cartel's midlevel
management routinely got results. The experience confirmed Centra Spike's
accuracy, yet when it came to Escobar, the raids were always too late.

Over the Christmas holidays in 1992, Escobar made yet another surrender
offer, this time in a letter to two sympathetic Colombian senators. He would
turn himself in if the government agreed to house him and 60 members of the
"military and financial arms" of his organization at a police academy in
Medellin, to be supervised by members of the Colombian army, navy and air
force.

He also demanded that all members of the Search Bloc be fired. In the
letter, he accused Col. Martinez of routinely torturing those he arrested.
Escobar demanded an investigation of these "human rights abuses," and then
issued a threat:

"What would the government do if a 10,000-kilogram bomb were placed at the
Colombian prosecutor general's office?"

He promised a new wave of kidnappings, threatening members of the
"diplomatic community." He vowed to plant bombs at the government-owned
radio and television station, the national tax offices and the newspaper El
Tiempo.

Colombian President Cesar Gaviria responded in early January by calling the
demands "ridiculous," and he dismissed Escobar's charges of human rights
abuses as a public-relations ploy. Still, the warnings spread fear
throughout official Bogota. Fiscal General Gustavo de Greiff, Colombia's top
federal prosecutor, asked U.S. Ambassador Morris Busby to help relocate his
family to the United States for safety.

For all the misery Escobar had caused, Martinez could not help but admire
the way his enemy never seemed to lose his temper, especially when he was in
danger. In the recordings of Escobar talking to his associates, the drug
lord seemed to radiate calm. Martinez was impressed by his ability to manage
several problems at once, and by the care with which he planned his moves.

Escobar proved to be flexible and creative. During the months when Martinez
imposed a blackout on all cellular-phone use in Medellin, hoping to make it
more difficult for Escobar to communicate with his organization, the drug
boss just switched over to radio or communicated by messenger.

Escobar seemed able to anticipate how others would react, and plan
accordingly. He and his friends would speak in elaborate impromptu codes
that required remembering specific dates, places and events. Often Escobar's
fluency with these facts tripped up his associates, who couldn't keep up
with their boss' agile memory.

It was clear that Escobar believed he could stay one step ahead of the
colonel for as long as it took for the Gaviria administration, or perhaps
the next administration, to capitulate to his demands. Martinez was
stubborn, but after six months of futile searching, after the deaths of 65
police and scores of civilians, he was no closer to finding Escobar in
January 1993 than when he had started.

The colonel became devoted to his superstitions, bathing stones he carried
in goat's milk, watching for omens to supplement the steady stream of
intelligence he got from the Americans.

It was in this climate of frustration and fear that Los Pepes suddenly began
to produce results.