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

WITH ESCOBAR ELUDING CAPTURE, AMERICANS SUMMON DELTA FORCE

In the three years since their unit had arrived in Colombia, the men of
Centra Spike had come to recognize not just the voice of Pablo Escobar, but
his idiosyncrasies and unique personal style.

The secret electronic eavesdropping and tracking unit had heard the man's
voice on radio and cell phone many times during the first hunt, before
Escobar struck his 1991 deal with the Colombian government and moved into a
comfortable suite in the "prison" run by his bodyguards.

Now, in the summer of 1992, Escobar had walked out of prison and was once
again a fugitive. This time, the Colombian government had asked the United
States to take a more assertive role in hunting down the man whose
assassins and terrorists had killed thousands of Colombians, including
presidential candidates and supreme court justices.

Supervised by Maj. Steve Jacoby, Centra Spike's analysts felt they knew
Escobar as well as anyone, though none had ever seen or spoken to him.
Inside a steel-reinforced vault on the windowless fifth floor of the U.S.
Embassy in Bogota, they listened to hours and hours of Escobar's recorded
conversations.

Based on Escobar's discussions with his lieutenants, lawyers and family
members, it was clear that he was a man of a certain refinement. He had a
deep voice and spoke softly. He was articulate, and though he sometimes
slipped into the familiar Paisa street patois of Medellin, he normally used
very clean Spanish, free of vulgarity and with a vocabulary of some
sophistication, which he sometimes sprinkled with English expressions.

He was painstakingly polite, and he seemed determined to project unruffled
good humor at all times, even though it was quite clear that everyone who
spoke to Escobar was deathly afraid of him. Both the pattern and content of
these calls changed Centra Spike's understanding of the Medellin drug
cartel that Escobar had helped build. Particularly illuminating were the
calls Escobar made after the death in 1989 of Jose Rodriguez Gacha, one of
Escobar's top confederates. Jacoby's Centra Spike operators had helped the
Colombian army and police track down Gacha - who was gunned down with his
son and five bodyguards by Colombian government helicopters.

Instead of scrambling to fill the leadership void created by Gacha's death,
or allowing feuding among Gacha's underlings, Escobar worked coolly like a
chief executive officer who had lost a key associate. People called him to
make decisions, and he did so calmly, redistributing Gacha's interests and
responsibilities.

A few weeks later, they found out just how vicious Escobar could be. He
ordered his men to kidnap a Colombian army commander, then had them slowly
torture the man to death. Revulsed, one Centra Spike officer bought a $300
bottle of Remy Martin cognac and vowed not to open it until Escobar was dead.

Tipped off by the eavesdropping unit, Colombian security forces began
scoring big successes. They intercepted some of Escobar's drug shipments,
and some of the drug boss' key associates were arrested or killed. Escobar
himself was always alerted by corrupt Colombian police or army officers in
time to escape, but he began to suspect a spy. He had several members of
his security force tortured and executed in his presence in early 1990. In
one intercepted conversation, Centra Spike recorded the screams of victims
in the background as Escobar spoke lovingly to his wife.

Now, in July 1992, Jacoby and his unit were back in Bogota to resume the hunt.

He was waiting at the U.S. Embassy when top American officials returned
from an all-night session with Colombian President Cesar Gaviria at the
presidential palace. It was during this session that Gaviria, breaking
years of official reluctance to allow full-scale American involvement in
the government's war against drug traffickers, had asked the Americans to
do whatever they could to track down Escobar.

They conferred in the big steel vault upstairs in the embassy compound -
Ambassador Morris Busby; Jacoby; Joe Toft, country chief for the Drug
Enforcement Administration; and Bill Wagner, the CIA station chief in
Bogota. It was July 23, 1992, the day after Escobar walked out of jail.

Busby looked as if he hadn't slept.

"How long do you think it's going to take for you to find him?" he asked.

Maybe a day or two, Jacoby said. They all knew that if Escobar evaded them
for the first few days, the hunt would get significantly harder. The big
question was how quickly the Colombians could get up and get moving once
Escobar was pinpointed.

For all their determination, the National Police had proved repeatedly
inept in the first war against Escobar. Despite solid leads provided by
Centra Spike, he always got away. There was such fear of Escobar that the
Colombians always went out in force, hundreds of men on trucks and
helicopters. It was like stalking a deer with bulldozers.

Then there was the corruption issue. Among the hundreds of police involved
in these raids, there was always someone willing and able to tip off
Escobar for a fee.

"No matter how good our intelligence is, and how hard they try, they just
can't close the last thousand meters," Jacoby told the ambassador. "With
these guys, it just ain't gonna happen."

Busby considered the resources at his disposal. The CIA was good at
long-term intelligence gathering, not special ops. The DEA was good at
street work, recruiting snitches and building cases. The FBI in foreign
countries did mostly liaison work.

What Busby believed they needed were the manhunters of Delta Force, the
Army's elite and top-secret counterterrorism unit. Busby was familiar with
the unit from his years as the State Department's ambassador for
counterterrorism. Nobody could plan and perform a real-world operation
better than the men of Delta.

Colombian law forbade foreign troops on its soil, and it would really be
pushing President Gaviria's invitation, but the ambassador felt it was
possible on the Colombian end. Delta was stealthy enough that the Colombian
press would never find out they were there. But Busby knew there was strong
resistance within the Pentagon to entering the drug war, and he believed it
was unlikely that Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, would order
the move over such strong objection.

"What we need is Delta, but we could never get them," Busby said.

"Why not?" Jacoby asked.

Jacoby and others in the special-ops community knew that Gen. Wayne
Downing, chief of the Army's Special Operations Command, had been
interested in getting Delta involved during the first war against Escobar.

What had stopped Downing was the possibility of getting one of his men
killed. A dead American from Delta would provoke a crisis in Washington,
bringing down scrutiny he was not prepared to accept.

"What are our chances of going in and not getting anybody killed?" Downing
had asked one of his advisers.

"Almost zero," he was told. "None of these narcos is going to surrender
peacefully. If you go in, you either have to take them all or kill them all."

Downing had let it be known to Jacoby and others that if a situation
developed that was the right fit for Delta Force - something clean,
precise, and that could be done in a nonattributable manner - he was ready
to send them.

So when Busby said, "They'll never sign up," Jacoby countered by saying: "I
think you're wrong. If you ask, I think you'll get what you ask for."

"I guess there's no harm in asking," the ambassador said.

Jacoby gave the ambassador some advice.

"Don't say you want them to come in here and go after Pablo themselves," he
said. "That will never fly. Say you want them to offer training and advice."

They all agreed that Delta was the answer.

There was one other thing that was understood: This time nobody expected
Pablo Escobar to be taken alive. The Colombians had no stomach left for
putting him on trial or locking him up; Escobar had just shown how
pointless that was.

Even though Escobar had been indicted by American courts, Colombia would
not extradite him to the United States. Escobar's terror bombings and
assassinations had cowed the Colombian congress into outlawing extradition
for the drug traffickers.

No, this time the hunt was for keeps, the men in the vault concluded. No
one said it out loud, but they all knew: When the Colombians cornered
Escobar this time, they all believed they were going to kill him.