← The Rest Is Classified
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For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the Declassified club@the restisclassified.com Victory over drugs is our cause, a just cause, and with your help, we are going to win.
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B
Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin drug cartel. The world's 14th richest man. He was in many ways a terrorist.
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A
This is an economic power concentrated in a few hands and in criminal minds. What they cannot obtain by blackmail, they get by murder. And I don't think he expressed any regret at all. He tries to portray himself as a man of the people. This kind of like, leftist revolutionary outlaw.
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B
Nearly everyone in Medellin supports the traffickers. Those who don't are either dead or targets. If you declare war, you've got to expect the state to respond.
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A
This is the moment where he goes too far. 13 bombs have gone off in Medellin since the weekend. By the end of 87, Bogota is essentially a war zone. US spending for international anti drug efforts is going to grow from less than $300 million in 1989 to more than 700 million by 1991.
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B
It is the certain knowledge that no one is really safe in Colombia from drug cartel assassins.
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A
It's a conflict where the goal wasn't even to stop the flow of cocaine. It was to bring down this. This narco terrorist.
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B
Everything has turned against him after this point. The whole thing he was building is collapsing. Let us give this a little bit more clarity. The situation arose because they went in their shooting and we were defending our lives, but our intention was to comply with the government until the end. It is possible that one or two persons were smuggled into the jail. I won't deny it. That happens in all jails all over the country and the world. And in reality, I am not to blame. The person to blame is the person who lets them in. So that if people entered La Catedral shooting and we had information that Americans were participating in this operation, we have to put our lives first. We have families. Well, welcome to the Rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.
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And I'm David McClarsky.
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B
And that was none other than Pablo Escobar talking to his lawyer, seeking legal counsel. That's not the way I talk to a lawyer, that's for sure. But that was him talking to his lawyer days after this dramatic escape that he was talking about in that intercept from La Catedral, which was this, I guess, prison. I was gonna say he was confined in but he wasn't confined in that prison because he went out to football matches, and as we heard, he was bringing people in.
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A
No prison can hold Pablo. It was more of a headquarters. I feel where we left the story.
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B
Last time was his compound, prison fortress, had been raided amid fears he was gonna be moved, and he escaped dramatically or by basically walking out.
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A
By walking.
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B
By walking out. And he's now back on the run, and the Colombians are after him, and they're going to turn to the US for help, aren't they, David? And I think some in the U.S. i think, at the time, were quite pleased, weren't they, that he'd actually escaped, because they kind of knew that this was not much of a prison. He was still running his drug operation, and they knew actually by escaping, it gave them their best chance maybe, to finish him off in a more permanent manner.
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A
That's a very, very careful way of putting it, Gordon. I mean, it is. It's one of the interesting pieces of this that you would think, on the face of it, a drug lord who is responsible for maybe 70 to 80% of the cocaine that is arriving in the United States at that time, you wouldn't exactly greet that sort of event with cheers, right? But you're spot on that nobody in Washington, and really Nobody in the U.S. embassy in Bogota had seen his pseudo imprisonment at La Catedral as any kind of permanent solution. And, in fact, I think the fear in Washington at this time is that it's a way station to him, essentially laundering himself back into respectability. All the while, he continues to run the Medellin cartel. So this is an opportunity for the United States, and it's exceptionally embarrassing for the Colombians, of course, but it is also an opportunity for the Colombians to go to Washington and ask for maybe a different kind of help or a sharper tool to use to go after Pablo. And so, right after Pablo escapes, the US Ambassador, who had been in Washington for consultations, flies back to Bogota, and there is a pow wow with the Colombian president. The ambassador, then I guess what you'd call the country team, right? You have the DEA country attache, you have the CIA station chief. And the Colombian president basically looks at the ambassador, a guy named William Busby, who, by the way, is sort of universally lauded in the memoirs as somebody who was extremely capable and extremely dedicated to the job of finding Pablo Escobar and bringing him to justice. So the Colombian president looks at the ambassador and basically says, help us get this guy as soon as possible. Now, from an American standpoint Pablo has three indictments against him in the US George H.W. bush Department of Justice has already determined that US military forces have the authority to arrest foreign nationals and bring them back to the US for trial. And we also have this whole kind of suite of intelligence and security assistance that's been earmarked for the war on drugs and for Colombia in particular. So a lot of the hurdles, resource legal that the US Might have experienced in years past if they had received a request like this from the Colombians are gone. So the US Is basically being asked, what can you do to help us right now? We spoke last time about this group, Centrist Spike, that had been really doing direction finding in an attempt to locate kingpins inside the cartel. And during Pablo's imprisonment, because most of the cartel kingpins are hanging out with him at La Catedral, the Centrist Spike sort of pace of operations, their operational tempo had really been. Had been scaled back. And the call comes pretty much right after Pablo escapes that they want Centris bike back. Major Steve Jacoby, who we met in the last episode, who'd been running that team, is back in Colombia literally the next day, the 23rd of July 1992. Now, what else might you need to find Pablo? You might also, if you're the Colombians, want some help actually hunting him down. And to do that, there's a provision in Colombian law that essentially makes it illegal, understandably so, for a foreign military to operate on Colombia soil. So you need a group that's not going to be visible. And it just so happens that the United States army has such a group, and it's called Delta Force, or sometimes just the unit, the unit. Now, Delta Force is an elite special operations group within the U.S. army. It's known formally as the First Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta. And it is a creature of a unit from the Vietnam War known as Project Delta, that did things like deep jungle insertions, recon snatch operations, where they would capture Viet Cong operatives. And the Delta Force that we're going to be talking about is born out of that Vietnam experience. But it's officially founded back in 1977, and it is administratively controlled by the Army. But really, in practice, it's a creature of jsoc, which is the Joint Special Operations Command, which we talked about in the bin Laden episodes. It's kind of the same overall command that dispatched Seal Team Six to kill bin Laden back in 2011.
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Could we get to the really important bit about it, though, which is that the inspiration for those not watching on.
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The video, Gordon Was like, literally about to jump out of his seat as I was talking there. And I know you know what's coming.
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Because it's founded by a guy called Charlie Beckwith, who is an American, although it's quite the kind of British name. Charlie Beckwith sounds like the kind of local grocers down the road who is an American. Yeah, he is an American.
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Yes. You keep saying this like it's not.
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Where does he get his inspiration from? It is from the sas, Britain's Special Forces. And what I love is that he gets this from being on an exchange program with the sas. Now, I've heard of school exchanges before, but he goes and does an exchange program with the SAS and takes part in the kind of Malayan counterinsurgency operations. And that's where he kind of works with them and gets the inspiration from. So, basically, thank you, sas, because that gives birth, that experience, to this, the unit or Delta much storied organization. So thank you, Brits.
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A
That's definitely one of the messages of this, this episode. Thank you. Charlie Beckman is a very interesting guy. He's founded the unit back in 1977. In his first briefing, just to give you a sense of kind of the vibes of this group. Okay. In Charlie Beckwith's first briefing to a group of potential Delta recruits, he's allegedly to have said that he could promise them only two things, a medal and a body bag. So this is not like a normal group of people, we should say. Right. And I mean, really, the idea of this unit is very similar to the sas, the Special Air Service. The idea is that it would be able to penetrate deep into enemy territory, blend in, collaborate with indigenous groups, sabotage enemy installations, disrupt operations as a whole sort of asymmetric warfare component to what Delta Force does and can train other units on, and if necessary, they can conduct assassination. So it's, in other words, a really unconventional military unit. Right. They train in everything from, like, hostage management to lock picking to marksmanship, to how you drive a diesel locomotive. So this is a group of people who have an interesting set of skills. And the late 1970s, you have this rash of airline hijackings, kidnappings, oftentimes by Palestinian or leftist terror groups. And Charlie Beckwith's whole proposal was, we don't have a unit who can deal with these very specialized situations. This unit is formed. It's filled with a lot of very interesting, quirky personalities. One of the memoirs from a guy named Jerry Boykin, who. Who's actually going to be the Delta commander that gets sent to Columbia. He remembers that there was a guy in the unit. These are not the guys who went to Columbia, by the way, but these are kind of some of the first recruits. Gives you a sense of the DNA. There was a guy in the unit who smeared dog biscuits with peanut butter and ate them. There was a guy who sharpened his knife all the time. There was another one who ranted constantly about how ugly his wife was. And there was another who woke up in the middle of the night apparently to argue with his rucksack. So these were people living on the edge, let's say slightly unhinged.
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Maybe that's a bit harsh. Maybe that's.
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No, I think that is harsh because it's interesting because I've gotten to know a couple of these guys and they're not unhinged.
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B
Can I just take that back before they come off to me?
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Gordon immediately recants. Gordon immediately recants.
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They're already great people, completely stable, very nice.
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They are truly incredible Americans. And the unit has been involved at this point in the story, Operation Eagle Claw, which is the attempt to rescue hostages in Iran, involved in the effort to overthrow Noriega, and Panama involved in the invasion of Granada. And they were in Somalia during the Black Hawk down incident where five Delta Force operators were killed. So this unit has seen a lot of action by the time we're in the late 80s and the US ambassador in Colombia Busby asked for Delta Force to come to Colombia to assist the Search Bloc and the Colombians in general in the hunt for Pablo. And I think that's a really forward leaning approach by the ambassador. And I think there are many ambassadors who would recoil at the idea of calling in a unit like this.
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Yeah, because lots of ambassadors, they don't want any trouble in their country. And you just think bringing in a bunch of Delta guys, it's a lot of trouble.
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Undercover, it's bringing in trouble.
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But I guess they've decided they're going to deal with it and these are the guys to deal with it. So they need them in.
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They do. And so it's an indication here of just how high of a priority Pablo Escobar has become in Washington, because the ambassador, after leaving this meeting with the Colombian president, goes back to the Department of State and requests that they put in the request for a Delta team to come down to Bogota. That request goes to the White house. President George H.W. bush consults with a couple names that will probably be familiar to our listeners because Colin Powell is then chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Dick Cheney is Then the Secretary of Defense, and they all collectively decide, we are going to give the Colombians what they need. So four days after Pablo Escobar has sauntered out of La Catedral, a team of Delta Force operators, eight of them dressed in civilian clothes and led by Jerry Boykin, are on the ground in Bogota. And, and we should say, Gordon, as a special treat for our club members, that on the team is a gentleman named Joe Vega, who we are going to be interviewing as part of this Pablo series and talking to about his experience in Colombia hunting for Pablo Escobar. So Joe Vega is there on this team, and he's described, just to kind of set him up a bit, he's described in Jerry Boykin's memoir as the Julio Iglesias of Delta Force. A buff, good looking Latino who spoke fluent Spanish, Vega was a skilled operator who charmed everyone he came in contact with. The Colombians would prove no exception. So if you need no further sort of incentive to. To join the club and listen to.
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B
That episode, just to hear the Julio Iglesias of Delta. I love that. Now we should talk a little bit about what their official mission is and what the reality is, because officially they're there to train, aren't they? And to provide support rather than to actually do the manhunt themselves. But it's fair to say that's always a little bit blurry. Is that a fair way of putting it, that the distinction between how closely you get involved with actually doing operations as opposed to training and supporting the Colombians to do it, I mean, it feels like it gets blurry. But that was probably always the way it was going to be, and it was understood that they were going to be more deeply involved than the official line.
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A couple factors to consider here. One is that given the operational tempo that the search block is going to take on in the weeks and months after Pablo escapes, the idea of doing all of the training separate from the actual work was never going to be feasible. So a lot of the training had to happen on the job. Right. And then the second piece is it was, I think, clear to the Delta operators immediately that if they did not go along on raids, the Colombians would just ignore them. Yeah, they're going to lose all credibility with their Colombian counterparts.
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But it also strikes me that these are the kind of people who don't like sitting back at base while the Colombians.
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Yeah, I think that's fair.
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It doesn't strike me.
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Yes, you know, I think that's also fair.
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They want to get in the action. I guess a crucial question which we'll come back to is, is there any sense that they are really trying to capture him?
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I don't think so.
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No, I don't think so. I think it's pretty clear from everything, partly because of what's happened before. The fact when he's got captured, he's end up in some kind of comfy compound prison. You know, it feels like everyone knows this is a manhunt with the aim of killing him. I mean, even if that's not explicitly said, it feels like that's implicit in everything that's going on.
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A
I think the Colombians, Hugo Martinez, his search block, understand that Pablo could not be captured alive. I think that in a slightly more delicate way, Jerry Boykin's memoir from the Delta side makes it clear that it would have been better if Pablo were to be killed, then captured. And I think that it's also important to note that the official mission is training and intelligence support. Right. So formally, there is no authorization to kill Pablo Escobar. I think that there is a bit of a clue as to the Delta mentality that's actually in Jerry Boykin's book where he's describing kind of the blueprint for the unit in general. And I think it's worth just reading a little bit from it. Charlie's blueprint called for us to build a unit that could be deployed in response to a terrorist crisis anywhere in the world. On a moment's notice, Delta would move in below the radar and work with local officials, military and police to get the bad guys. Then we would simply fade away, so that as far as anyone else knew, the resulting counterterrorism action had been a local operation. So the MO Is very much, we're going to do what's required so that you get the job done. We will take zero credit, and nobody else will know we're here.
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Let's maybe start having set that up. Let's look at how they're going to try and find him. And I guess again, here it's going to be about trying to mix informers, human intelligence, and the kind of intercepting of communications and that kind of geolocation together. That's the package they've been using all along and which is going to be the core of this again.
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A
That's right. So to get kind of the financial wheels going, the US posts a $2 million reward for information leading to Pablo's capture. And then Centra Spike, which is now back in the country along with Delta, gets back to work, and what's interesting is in the kind of first, maybe days, week of Pablo being on the loose, he's using a cell phone. I think maybe he, he suspects that surveillance has not been spooled up yet on him. So he's, he's talking on a cell phone in a wealthy suburb of Medellin. He's about four miles from the prison. What I find very fascinating about these intercepts, Gordon, is that Pablo wants to go back into the prison. So he, he wants to strike a deal to go back because he didn't want to be plucked out of that prison and taken to Bogota. He wants to go back to La Catedral. You know, he's saying, I've been fine with the deal. He seems surprised, like legitimately surprised that the Colombians were tweaked about him killing his capos in the, in the cartel. This is like an internal feud. Why would the Colombian state care? And he is viewing the assault on La Catedral as this kind of American backed hit. Right? So. So he's on the phone, he's talking center. Spike is trying to locate him. Four members from the Delta team, after arriving in Bogota, they travel up to Medellin. They have with them a portable GPS satellite positioning device, microwave visual imagery platforms, video cameras with powerful lenses for remote ground surveillance. They establish a kind of sniper slash observer position actually up at La Catedral because it has great views of the sort of entire valley that Medellin sits in. And these four operators link up with the search block at this kind of police academy, this kind of training center outside of town, which is going to become the kind of task force hq. Now, Joe Vega is there up at La Catedral. He has with him a satellite phone, a laptop computer to help him sort of correlate center spikes coordinates on the map. He's got a video camera with lenses to focus in on the target, and he's got this microwave relay to transmit images back to the academy. So the idea here is Centrist Spike could get a coordinate from the plane, they could send it to Joe Vega. Joe Vega could then figure out where the building is, take pictures of it, and, you know, figure out kind of what's going on around the premises. All that information can then go to the search block to potentially conduct a raid. Now, at this time, the CIA, Gordon, God bless him, is also supplying satellite imagery and the DEA agents are kind of going back and forth between Bogota and Medellin. And I do think it's interesting. And, you know, this is, I don't Know if this is a controversial position, but when you watch the show Narcos, you get the sense that the DEA is really deep, specifically in this hunt for Pablo. The rumors are that the DEA guys were not up there all that much.
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Oh, how surprising. The CIA man is going to claim it was all the CIA.
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I'm not claiming it was all the CIA at all. I'm just saying the direct connection between the work DEA and Pablo himself, I'm not quite seeing. I'm seeing Centra Spike and Delta and the search block with the CIA and the dea, frankly, in a bit of a background role. So Boykin, commanding the Delta team in Colombia, set up a sort of command center inside the CIA station in the embassy in Bogota. And they've got radio comms established with that police academy up in Medellin, the observer post at La Catedral, and they're waiting for Pablo to make phone calls. And literally the next day, Pablo does. He gets on the phone. Centra Spike picks up the call. Joe Vega pinpoints the coordinates on the map, focuses in his camera, and sends an image to the operators who are liaising with the search block. And the search block. Gordon kind of just sits there, right? And Jerry Boykin, in his memoir, says that the commander of the search block, and we should note, actually, this is an important point. So Hugo Martinez, who listeners will remember who had been the commander of search block.
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B
The brave commander.
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Yeah, the brave commander of the search block has been rotated off and given a kind of plum assignment sort of as a reward, where he's essentially the military liaison, the attache in Spain.
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B
Yeah, but he'll be back.
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He'll be back, but he is not here right now. The commander of the search block at this point is a guy named Pinzon, who gets all this information from Delta. And according to Jerry Boykin, he seems bored by this and says, we get these kind of leads all the time. And the Delta guys, to your point, Gordon, about they're not really the type to sort of sit around and just kind of hang, go to the ambassador of the country team. And then there's an intervention at the presidential palace. The Colombian president basically goes back and kind of pushes on Pinzon, the colonel, leading the search block, and says, what are you going to do with this? Now, as you can imagine, bureaucratically, that's very frustrating to this colonel. Right, because he's now had the Americans go over his head on a raid that he didn't seem particularly excited to conduct. But a raid is finally launched the next morning. But Pinzon sends 300 men, despite Delta's advice, to send a much smaller party. And Boykin says a deaf drug lord could have heard them coming. So by the time the raid reaches the estate where Pablo's hiding out, Pablo, unsurprisingly, is gone. But he had been there. One of the clues is that there's a new bathroom that had a really nice toilet. So that's sort of his calling card, right? Very picky about his toilets. And the next day, Pablo is again sort of back on, on his radio phone, making calls, and there's another opportunity for a raid. So again, we have this flow. It goes center Spike to Delta. Delta passes it to Pinzon in the search block, but again, Pinzon sits on it. And one of the Delta guys says that he had gone to Pinzon's house to try to kind of get things moving, and the colonel had answered the door in his pajamas. And from that day on, he got hung with the nickname Pajamas by the. By the Delta team, Pajamas Pinzon. And legitimately, I mean, Boykin, in his memoir, says he wondered if Pinzon was on Pablo's payroll. But they decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and decided that he was merely a coward. Now, the hunt for Pablo has attracted a lot of attention in Washington, as we mentioned, and there are loads of air platforms, Gordon, soaring over Medellin to collect SIGINT and IMINT imagery. So the Air Force has sent. Has sent U2s at SR71s. The Navy has sent P3 spy planes, the CIA. Gordon has got something in the air called a Schweitzer, which looks like a giant glider, and it can loiter over a target for hours, which, I mean, very novel, of course, in the early 90s, right? Sort of a preview of a lot of the drone stuff that's to come a decade down the line. And it can provide really detailed imagery, kind of float around for a long time, and can peer through the clouds. So there's so. So many American spy planes over Medellin. It's, like, clogged the airspace, which means, perhaps unsurprisingly, the.
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B
The Colombian people and journalists start to notice, don't they? I mean, it becomes so obvious that you've got all of these flights going over. One of the radio stations is broadcasting the tail numbers of the planes because of that, which is not good, because there's just so many, and. And foreign military aren't supposed to operate there. So it is starting to, you know, draw attention, isn't it? But, I mean, I think one of the interesting aspects of this is the extent to which different bits of the U.S. intelligence and national security system are basically competing to get in there and to show that their technology works and prove that it works. I mean, it's very American, if you don't mind me saying. And then, you know, they're kind of bureaucratic battles around it to say, hey, we can do this and we can do it better than them. And they're kind of at times almost racing to send messages back to Washington or competing or even stealing the other people's kind of intelligence. I think it is worth saying though, David, and I think we touched upon this at an earlier episode, that the Schweitzer and the CIA stuff is not the best stuff. Centrispike outperforms, doesn't it? The CIA tracking technology that's coming from the air, allegedly. No, I think that's pretty clear from all the histories, because I particularly like the CIA has got its glider, which also feels a bit low tech to me. I'm not quite sure. I just imagining a guy with a glider in a direction finder, kind of.
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A
I was picturing the. Yeah, the guy with like the wings. Like the wings that he sort of taped on who say I'm soaring over Medine with like, like.
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B
With like a microphone.
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A
With a microphone, yeah, exactly. One lens would be competition, I think the other lens would be. The more stuff you have operating over Medellin, the more likely you are to pick up one of the frequencies that Pablo is speaking on. It depends on your perspective. But it is true, Gordon, that there was a bit of a head to head competition, I think, between Centrist Bike and some of the CIA's tech. There was a program that the CIA was running at the time called Majestic Eagle, which I think is a good.
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B
Name, good code name. Shame about the results, Shame on the results.
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A
But it was. It was conducting direction finding over Medellin as well. And it seems like there's actually. There was actually a head to head competition between Center Spike and Majestic Eagle to figure out whose direction finding equipment was better. And it seems, according to the publicly available information, Gordon, although, you know, who knows what could be lurking in the classified that Center Spike could pinpoint the target to under 200 meters. But the Majestic Eagle tech of the CIA was actually more like 7km, which is a significant difference. But critically, Gordon, by the second week of Delta and Centrospike being back on the ground, after all of these collection platforms have been floating over Medellin, the SIGINT is starting to dry up. Pablo is on the phone a lot less. There isn't really any humint, and the hunt is going to get a lot more complicated.
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B
So I think there, as we wait to see how they are going to reacquire the trail of Pablo Escobar. Let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll see how they get onto his tale. Welcome back. And we're on the hunt for Pablo Escobar. And I guess it's clear that the search block led by pyjamas is not quite doing the business. And so it's time for our old friend Hugo Martinez Flacco, skinny, to be recalled back from Madrid. I mean, he's got this kind of very personal battle. It becomes with Escobar, doesn't it, that he's engaged in which he's going to lead through the final stages.
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A
It's fair to say that Hugo Martinez and Pablo are locked in some kind of, like, death dance together, because Pablo has certainly not forgotten about Hugo, even though Hugo had been sent to Spain. A bomb had been placed on the plane that actually flew the colonel's family to Spain back in 1991. It had been set to explode when it reached a certain altitude, but the airline got a phone tip about it after the plane was airborne, suggesting this might have been a message and not really intended to. To kill him. But the bomb had been found and removed. And then also in 1992, in Madrid, a car bomb was discovered on the street outside the Colombian Embassy, right, where Martinez passes each day on his way to work. So I think Martinez probably feels some sense of like, it's him or me. It's him or me, Right? Exactly. Pablo is going to try to kill me or I'm going to kill Pablo. Right. So Martinez is. Is brought back to replace Pajamas. And it's fair to say that the collaboration between the Americans and Delta Force and Hugo Martinez is going to be significantly better than the collaboration with Pajamas. Delta ramps up a really intense training program for the search block. And they run this at a camp in the lowlands south of Bogota. They run this for about 100 of the search blocks operators, the people who actually will go on the raids. And it's quickly clear that the Colombians, the search block, struggle with a lot of basic kind of tactics. One of the interesting things I found is ammunition is expensive. And so many of the kind of soldiers and police that make up these search block units were only shooting 20 or so training rounds per year. So they actually don't have a lot of practice in marksmanship and Delta brings 16 trainers down from Fort Bragg, and they run yet about 100 search block operators through a really intensive three week mini assault course, which culminates in a kind of live fire exercise where they're. They're simulating a raid conducted by helicopter. So the whole idea here is, how do we get you ready to do exactly the kind of raids that we hope will eventually capture Pablo Escobar? And for the rest of 1992, Gordon Delta keeps about a dozen people in the country. They're split between the embassy in Bogota and that search block headquarters up in Medellin. The Delta teams are rotating through. They sleep on cots and air mattresses, and they basically assist. The Search bloc is kind of forward observers and advisors. And they are going on raids, right? They're going on the raids. They might not be in the lead, but they are. They are on raids with the search block. And for six months, they really have no luck finding Pablo. He's using his phone much less. He's constantly shifting frequencies on the radio. Though in the fall Gordon of 1992, they. They do kill one of his sicarios. And by the end of the year, they've killed 12 more. And this again will be that theme of they're not capturing people at this point. They are killing cartel associates and leaders during these raids.
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B
But then Pablo is doing the same. He's now going after them, and his associates aren't there, and they are upping the game. So the violence is kind of intensifying, but in this very controlled way between these two groups who clearly know they're in this death struggle.
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A
Throughout the first six months of the hunt, Pablo and his guys kill 65 members of the search block. There's a special National Police chapel in Bogota where they do the funerals. And it apparently just reeks of death, right? There's. There's so many funerals. Then In January of 1993, a massive car bomb explodes in Bogota outside a bookstore. Kills 21, including a number of children.
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B
This is a big moment, isn't it? Because it's again, Pablo Escobar turning to something more like terrorism. I mean, I guess this is back to Pablo's negotiating tactic, isn't it? Which is I'm willing to escalate the violence to such a level of just killing civilians outside a bookstore to try and get you to stop this hunt and cut a deal with me. That's the calculation he's making. But in a sense this time, a, the public is turning against him because of this And B, I think patience has slightly run out. I think he hasn't worked out that something has changed, and now they are basically out to kill him rather than negotiate. So it's a different dynamic, but he's still trying to use that tactic.
- [33:56]
A
It feels, we should say, that it's probably the case, a little grim, but it's probably the case that the Colombian military police, the Search Bloc, can throw more bodies at the problem than Pablo and the cartel can. Right. So if they can just keep killing people, the Colombians conceivably could sort of win a war of attrition. But, you know, Pablo, I mean, he still has some cards to play, because it seems that he actually. I mean, he's recruited some people inside the search block. There's this case where in one instance, after Centra Spike hears Pablo on the phone, they send coordinates to Hugo Martinez and his staff. And then after doing that center, Spike picks up a call to a Pablo associate that's actually coming from the search block base, and it's alerting Pablo and his people that, quote, they are coming for you. So there is a. There is a snitch inside the search block. And so in. Martinez now has this big problem, which is, you know, not only am I out there fighting Pablo, but he's in here. I've got to fight him sort of inside the four walls of my headquarters. So Hugo Martinez dismisses a number of his men, reassigns them to Bogota, you know, in an attempt to sort of potentially just send the mole away. And then the same thing happens again. And the Search Block kind of inner circle at this point is pretty small. It's Martinez and maybe three guys who he really trusts who are kind of the collective leadership. And they realize that there's a guard who had been standing nearby during these conversations, like, away, but close enough. And then they run the same kind of play the next day, but this time they flush false information through the system. And it's what's known as a barium meal or a barium enema. So you put something in one end and then see what comes out the other, right? And lo and behold, the same information that had been passed within earshot of that guard makes it back to Pablo's associate. The guard had apparently been recruited by another one of Martinez's men who'd been sent back to Bogota, and they'd been told also to kill Martinez. So to think of this whole conflict as like a police action or something like that is really wrong. They're not fighting criminals. This is Like a war in Medellin.
- [36:16]
B
Against a kind of guerrilla group. It's much more like that. I mean, one of the things I found stunning is that, you know, Pablo still manages to stay just ahead of them. I mean, and he's learning, isn't he, about how to use his comms. Much better. But this is crazy fact that at one point, Search Block shuts off all the cell phone service in Medellin, which is an amazing thing to do. They're just going to switch off. I mean, I guess there weren't that many cell phones then. But the fact that they're able to do that to try and flush him out. But then he switches to radio, to couriers, and he just seems to be one step ahead of them, whether it's due to snitches, whether it's due to, you know, his understanding of the technology. So they seem to be always missing him. They're always just a bit too late to get him.
- [36:59]
A
And he's calm, Gordon. You know, in the intercepts, he's calm, he's collected. The raids are always too late. And we've got a log jam going, Gordon. And I think, you know, we're in the first months of 1993. He's been on the loose for. For six, seven months. And how do you break a log jam, Gordon? What would you do? What would you do? In this case, you're stuck. You're the Colombians, you're the Search block. You're Delta. This guy is elusive. He's got a lot of control in Medellin. He's recruited snitches on your payroll to try to kill you and to steal information.
- [37:34]
B
I mean, I'm thinking back to our bin Laden case, where what you do is you go up through the couriers, you work out who he trusts, you build a picture of his network and try and find him that way. Or you try and turn the population against him, maybe on the basis that he needs to be able to kind of swim amongst the population, you know, kind of hide there. What's interesting is the way. Because I know what happens, the way they do it is not the way I would necessarily have done it or the way it looks like it emerges, because it's. It's pretty. Pretty wild, isn't it, the way he's flushed out.
- [38:07]
A
So, fundamentally, up to this point, the Search Bloc is fundamentally playing by different rules than Pablo Escobar, right? The Search Bloc is not blowing up civilian airliners. The Search Bloc is not detonating pipe bombs on the streets of Medellin or Bogota. And so the Search Bloc is not targeting for torture and execution the families of cartel members and associates who might be one or two, you know, circles removed. There's different rules, and it's hard to beat somebody who's playing by a different set of rules. So what you kind of need is a good old fashioned death squad, Gordon, to break this log jam.
- [38:50]
B
We'll come back to this. But it is remarkably coincidental that just as the police and, you know, Delta and the others were a bit stuck in their hunt for Escobar, a new player enters the game, which is going to kind of take him on and play by very different rules. And it's called Los Pepe. That's the group. Yes, Los Pepe. And this I find actually one of the most intriguing and interesting bits of the story, if it wasn't wild enough already. I think this group is fascinating because they are just. I mean, they are basically a death squad, aren't they? I mean, is that a bit. Is that a bit harsh?
- [39:27]
A
Maybe it's extreme. I might be overselling it just a little bit. It is definitely a group that is going to play by Pablo's rules, not by the state's rules.
- [39:39]
B
And we should say in terms of how they present themselves, if we go back to La Catedral, Pablo had killed two senior members of other families, hadn't he, who were drug barons within his cartel. And ostensibly Los Pepe's are representatives of those families or linked to those families, is that right, who are out for revenge.
- [40:03]
A
Well, and it's even, I mean, in the name Los Pepes, it's an acronym for people persecuted by Pablo Escobar. So the public face of this group is sort of aggrieved former associates, families that have been victimized by Pablo in Medellin. And the actions, though, are very irregular, I would say. So in January, Pablo's mother's hacienda is burned to the ground. She's not there, but they go after Pablo's mom. There are car bombs outside apartment buildings where Pablo's immediate family lives. A bomb goes off at one of his estates, and it injures his mom and his aunt. One of his fincas, sort of cattle ranches, little farms in the country, is burned to the ground. All these sort of attacks and, you know, intimidations are claimed by Los Papes, the people persecuted by Pablo Escobar. And it's murky, I think, who exactly they are. They definitely do portray themselves as sort of former members of the cartel who are going after Pablo, now that he's on the run. But there are going to be a lot of theories that emerge about how involved. Let's say the Colombian state is in Los Pepe's. But in any case, whoever they are, the heat is really getting cranked up on Pablo. Because after that bookstore bombing in Bogota, the Colombian government now offers a six and a half million dollar reward for information leading to his Capture. Right. The US already has the $2 million reward out there, so there's some real money that's out there for people who might start to collaborate with the government. The Colombian Attorney General issues a general amnesty for trackers and criminals who take part in the hunt for Pablo. So a number of Pablo's former associates begin to talk and agree to cooperate with the government in exchange for amnesty. Pablo's brother and even our friend Popeye, who had been locked up at La Catedral with Pablo, they surrender and they are put into a conventional maximum security prison by February of 1993. Just to give you a sense of the tempo here, Los Pepe's are maybe killing six people each day. So they are working very hard. And throughout the spring, the carnage continues. Pablo's real estate guy is killed. His brother in law is killed. More sicarios are killed. Estates owned by Pablo's bankers are bankruptcy blown up. One of his lawyers is killed, another is tortured, another resigns, but then secretly continues work for Pablo. And that's discovered. And then he's shot 25 times. Police that are on his payroll are killed. So you get the sense that they're really going after the sort of military wing of the cartel, but also a lot of the people who were kind of on the periphery, I was going.
- [42:56]
B
To say they're going after the organization. They are going after the kind of the white collar bits of Pablo's group as well, you know, like the lawyers, like the kind of money launderers as well as his family. So you can see why this is really putting the, the pressure on Pablo in a different way, because suddenly, in a way, he'd offered silver and lead to people. Suddenly everyone else is thinking, if I stay with Pablo, you know, I'm going to get lead.
- [43:20]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [43:22]
B
That's the problem for them. And it's disintegrating his organization.
- [43:25]
A
Just to give you a sense of how dirty this gets, right? In one instance, Los Pepe's steal a prize stallion that had been owned by Pablo's brother. They kill the rider and the trainer, right? Who I think we'd all probably argue are not ponchos in the cartel, but they're killed and the horse is castrated. It's brutal. And it is all designed to convince Pablo that anybody that touches you, anybody that sticks with you in any capacity, be they your banker, your sicario, or the guys who train your horse, they're all fair game.
- [43:59]
B
Yeah. And so you can clearly see the aim is to isolate Pablo effectively, to reduce the circle around him. It is also obvious from this that whoever is doing it has very good information on who to go after. I mean, you know, you need very good intelligence in order to know who these people are. Now, of course, you could say, well, if it is the kind of other parts of the cartel, that's understandable. But I think the suggestion is it was a much closer relationship with Search Bloc and perhaps the United States, and that there was a flow of information which is passing through that now. Exactly. The nature of that relationship, I think, is really interesting because I think, you know, at one extreme, you could see Los Pepe's as virtually being an arm, a tool of the US and the Colombian government. At the other end there, a real thing that they're just using by maybe supplying intelligence to them. The more you look at it, the more you go, the relationship looks pretty close. Even if people who were there at the time wouldn't want to acknowledge it or talk about it.
- [44:58]
A
Absolutely. And I think, at minimum, what seems obvious is that there was a pipeline of information that was flowing from the US and the Colombians to Los Pepes. And whether the Americans knew that that was happening, suspected it, it's very unclear. It will never be answered. It seems obvious that elements of the Colombian government and probably the Search Bloc, were passing this information to Los Pepe. And I would wager that given the organization of the violence and the fact that at this point, it's still feasible that Pablo Escobar sort of returns to kind of run this cartel and or strikes a deal with the government, that the sort of muscle behind Los Pepe's, it strikes me as a little bit fanciful that it's just an element of the cartel. I would suggest that. And it's interesting that a number of Pablo's inner circle in this period, they're not killed. And these are the people who are under constant audio and sometimes video surveillance by the US and the Colombians. Right. Los Pepe's leave them alone. And there's a good reason to do that, which is these are the people who might lead you to Pablo, and you want them alive.
- [46:13]
B
Which again suggests a Level of. To use a word sometimes used in collusion between these. These groups and the state in terms of who to target and who not to target. So I think all of it points to that, you know, very close relationship. I think, you know, this is really putting pressure on Pablo, isn't it? I mean, it's. It's starting to take a toll on him.
- [46:34]
A
Yeah. I mean, by, you know, really. Spring of 1993, I think you'd say the cartel's in. In shambles. Pablo's estate, Hacienda Los Napolis, is a police headquarters. At this point, many former allies have abandoned him. A lot of people are dead. Pablo is moving from safe house to safe house in Medellin. And by the way, if you think he's in the jungle in this period, you're. You're wrong. I think Pablo is a little bit more of a. A city and ghetto guy. He's not a jungle guy. Right. He's trying to negotiate a deal with the government. He's got bodyguards with him, he's got the couriers, he's got cooks, he's got hookers with him who are usually, you know, then disturbingly quite young. But his entourage is definitely thinning out. He's making offers to surrender, does that in March, and delivers it through the.
- [47:22]
B
Catholic Church, the Colombian government. You know, I mean, you can see why it might be tempting to some of them to go. Maybe there's a way of just ending this war and dealing with it. So there's definitely a tension there, isn't there? Over. Over whether to end this with negotiation or whether to pursue it really to the end.
- [47:40]
A
And we should say he's not totally neutered. I mean, this is a period where you do have car bombs and pipe bombs going off.
- [47:44]
B
And, yeah, he's fighting back.
- [47:45]
A
He's fighting back, Right. And I think by the summer of 1993, we basically have three clocks running in the hunt for Pablo. The first one is that Delta Force and the search block are hunting him with the, I think, non official, but very clear intent that Pablo be killed when he's found. Right. So that's the first clock that's running is, can he be, you know, found by kind of the official good guys? Right. Two is that Pablo is trying to keep up the violence. So the Colombian population eventually sort of cries uncle and forces the government to cut a deal with him. And it's. It's pretty clear by the summer of 93 that the kind of always fractious and factionalized Colombian government has elements within it, including the Colombian attorney general, that actually want to deal with Escobar. Right. So there are people who want to cut a deal. Right. So Pablo wants to keep the violence going to give him a deal. And the third clock is that Los Papes is squeezing Pablo really hard, and in particular, in the spot that hurts him the most, most. And that is going to be his ultimate weakness, which is his family.
- [48:54]
B
So there, I think, David, with those three clocks running, with the pressure growing on Pablo, and I think with that crucial issue of his family, let's stop. And next time, we'll come to the dramatic conclusion of the hunt for Pablo Escobar and how he finally meets his end.
- [49:14]
A
And, Gordon, we'd be remiss if. If we didn't say, speaking of family, if you want to join our family and you want early access to these episodes, you want to join a family that'll keep you much safer and happier than Pablo escobar, go to therestisclassified.com and join the declassified club. We'll see you next time.
- [49:34]
B
See you next time.