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 TOP-SECRET ELECTRONIC TRACKING UNIT REJOINS THE HUNT

By walking out of prison in July of 1992, Pablo Escobar had done his
enemies a favor.

He had gone from prisoner to prey. Morris D. Busby, the U.S. ambassador to
Colombia, knew this opportunity would not last long. If Escobar was not
apprehended quickly, before he had a chance to securely set himself up as a
fugitive, the search might drag on for months or years.

Escobar had spent a lifetime building criminal associations. His wealth and
his reputation for violence ensured loyalty where his popularity did not.
Ensconced in his home city of Medellin, he was king of the mountain. He
would be free to resume and refine the web of drug trafficking,
assassinations, terror bombings, bribery and intimidation that had made him
the world's most notorious outlaw.

Busby wanted Escobar now, while he was still on the run - and at a moment
when the Colombian government, after years of hesitation, had finally
issued the Americans an unequivocal invitation to do whatever it could to
track Escobar down. The ambassador had served as State Department
coordinator for counterterrorism, so he knew all the secret tools in the
U.S. arsenal. And he knew exactly what he wanted: He put out a call for
Maj. Steve Jacoby.

For the previous three years, Jacoby had secretly worked from a locked-down
section on the windowless fifth floor of the bunkerlike U.S. Embassy in
Bogota, where few people beyond the ambassador and the CIA station chief
knew exactly who he was or what he did. In fact, Steve Jacoby wasn't even
his real name. It was one of four identities he could assume at any moment,
each supported by passports and credit cards. Changing into each one was
like slipping on a new pair of shoes.

Jacoby ran a covert operation for one of the most classified units in the
U.S. Army, a highly specialized cadre of communications experts that had
gone by a variety of cover names over the years. It had been called Torn
Victory, Cemetery Wind, Capacity Gear and Robin Court. Lately, it was
"Centra Spike."

Until Escobar settled into his luxury prison suite outside Medellin in
1991, Jacoby and his handpicked operatives had spent much of their time
secretly tracking the drug lord, his cronies and his rivals.

Escobar's sweetheart deal with the Colombian government had been a
disappointing end to that chase and, with the elusive drug boss in prison,
their mission had been throttled back. Jacoby had used the slack time to
pull some of his men and equipment out of Colombia. Marriages and machines
were in need of repair.

Jacoby was a career soldier and a new kind of spy. With the end of the Cold
War, a profusion of small-scale, specialized American military operations
were being launched in exotic places by small units of unconventional
soldiers dispatched on short notice. America's newest enemies were not only
regional powers and dictators and their armies, but also terrorists, crime
bosses and drug traffickers.

Military commanders who once focused on enemy troop maneuvers and missile
throw weights now also needed more timely, localized and specific
information: How many doors and windows does the target building have? What
kind of weapons do the bodyguards carry? Where does the target eat dinner?
Where did he sleep last night, and the night before?

Centra Spike had evolved to provide the kind of precise, real-time
intelligence that big spy outfits like the CIA were not designed to
collect. Over time, the unit's primary specialty had become finding people.

Techniques for eavesdropping on radio and telephone conversations from the
air had been perfected during missions over El Salvador. There were other
military and spy units that could do it; what distinguished Centra Spike
was its accuracy. It was capable of pinpointing the origin of a call within
seconds.

The unit had advanced far beyond the primitive days of World War II, when
ground-based antennas could do little more than determine the general
vicinity of a radio signal. By the Vietnam War, army direction-finders had
perfected techniques for quickly locating a radio signal to within a
half-mile of its origin. By the '80s, when Jacoby joined a precursor of
Centra Spike, that capability had been reduced to a few hundred meters.

Instead of triangulating from three receivers on the ground, the unit did
it from one small airplane. Airborne equipment took readings from different
points along a plane's flight path. When a signal was intercepted, the
pilot would fly an arc around it. With on-board computers providing
instantaneous calculations, operators could begin triangulating off points
in that arc within seconds. If the plane had time to complete a half circle
around the signal, its origin could be narrowed to under 100 meters.

The system was ideal for tracking a man like Escobar, who moved from
hideout to hideout, communicating by cell phone and radio. While a radio or
phone signal could be encrypted, there was no way to disguise its origin.
And the system worked in any kind of weather or terrain.

The presence of such sophisticated military spying equipment targeted at
foreign citizens was legal. A National Security Decision Directive signed
by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 declared the flow of drugs across U.S.
borders a national security threat and authorized the use of American
military forces against foreign drug traffickers. A similar classified
directive signed by President George Bush in 1988 authorized the U.S.
military to arrest foreign nationals and bring them to the United States
for trial.

So Centra Spike was officially approved. It was also highly classified. The
unit's operators and equipment had been slipped into Bogota under the
direction of the previous CIA station chief, John Connolly. Colombian
officials were informed that the United States, at their invitation, was to
begin some fairly sophisticated electronic surveillance, but details about
methods or personnel were not provided.

The first problem was getting Centra Spike's aircraft into the country
without arousing suspicion.

Anyone looking for America's most sophisticated eavesdropping equipment
would be watching for something high-flying and fancy, with great bulbous
features and bristling with antennas. They probably wouldn't be looking for
two perfectly ordinary Beechcrafts, an older model 300 and a new model 350.

Inside and out, the Beechcrafts looked like standard twin-propeller,
six-passenger commercial planes. Such aircraft were common in Colombia, a
mountainous country with poor roads. But these Beechcrafts were $50 million
spy planes crammed with state-of-the-art electronic eavesdropping and
direction-finding equipment.

A close examination of either plane would have revealed a wing span about
six inches longer than the normal models - to accommodate the two main
eavesdropping antennas built inside. Five more antennas could be lowered
from the plane's belly in flight.

In the cockpit was more instrumentation than in a 747. Once the planes had
reached altitudes of 20,000 to 25,000 feet, operators switched on laptop
computers plugged into the planes' mainframe and power centers. Wearing
headsets, the operators could monitor four frequencies simultaneously.

The laptops displayed the planes' positions and the estimated positions of
signals being tracked. Because the planes flew so high, no one on the
ground could see or hear them. It was an extraordinary capability,
particularly useful because it was unknown to even the most sophisticated
telecommunications experts - the kind of people drug lords hired to advise
them on ways to avoid detection.

To help explain why the Beechcrafts were in Colombia, the CIA set up a
dummy corporation called Falcon Aviation. The company was said to be
conducting an aviation safety project, a survey of Colombia's VOR (Variable
Omnidirectional Radar) beacons. These are transmitters at all airports to
help pilots locate runways.

The project gave Centra Spike's pilots a plausible reason to fly just about
anywhere in the country in pursuit of Escobar and other drug traffickers.
There were only a few dozen VOR beacons in Colombia, so anyone familiar
with the country's aviation infrastructure would know that such work would
only take a few weeks. But no one ever questioned the mundane little
Beechcrafts.

This ability to track and tail Escobar had been at Busby's disposal for
nearly three years. Now, with Escobar back on the loose, Colombian
President Cesar Gaviria was giving the Americans carte blanche to use it.

Joe Toft, the gun-toting DEA chief in Bogota, understood just how different
the game had become. In a cable to Washington, Toft wrote that Escobar "has
placed himself in a very precarious position."

He offered a prediction: "Escobar's gall and bravado may lead to his
ultimate downfall."