-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.killingpablo.com/content/killingpablo/philly/1047327534.htm Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.killingpablo.com/content/killingpablo/philly/1047327534.htm"> Killing Pablo</A> ----- A deadly manhunt guided by the U.S. By Mark Bowden INQUIRER STAFF WRITER Pablo Escobar terrorized Colombia with a string of bombings and assassinations beginning in 1984. PHOTO GALLERIES EIGHT YEARS AGO, at the request of the Colombian government, U.S. military and spy forces helped fund and guide a massive manhunt that ended with the killing of Pablo Escobar, the richest cocaine trafficker in the world. While portraying the pursuit of Escobar as essentially a Colombian operation, the United States secretly spent millions of dollars and committed elite soldiers, law enforcement agents and the military's most sophisticated electronic eavesdropping unit to the chase. The full extent of the U.S. role has never before been made public. Details of the 15-month operation, which began during the administration of President George Bush and continued under President Clinton, are revealed in a serial beginning in The Inquirer today. A two-year Inquirer investigation has found that: The Army's top secret counterterrorism unit, Delta Force, along with a clandestine Army electronic surveillance team, tracked the movements of Escobar and his associates and helped plan raids by a special Colombian polic e unit called the Search Bloc. The former American ambassador to Colombia directed the U.S. effort with assistance from agents of the CIA, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and National Security Agency. Midway through the operation, the Search Bloc began collaborating with vigilantes, who assassinated Escobar's associates and relatives. U.S. soldiers and agents said they witnessed the cooperation. The United States continued to supply intelligence, training and planning to the Search Bloc even as the assassinations continued. In November 1993, Pentagon officials sought to end U.S. involvement in the manhunt. They were concerned that American forces in Colombia were going beyond their instructions and possibly violating a presidential directive prohibiting American involvement in assassinations of foreign citizens. The campaign to withdraw the U.S. personnel was stalled by a lobbying effort led by the American ambassador in Bogota. Five weeks later, Escobar was killed by Colombian police. Official accounts at the time said Escobar, 44, was killed Dec. 2, 1993, in a gun battle on a rooftop in the city of Medellin. Autopsy reports and photos reveal that he was shot point-blank in the ear. A senior Colombian National Police commander said Escobar was executed by a member of the Search Bloc after being wounded. The Colombian government had said its aim was to arrest Escobar, an indicted criminal. The mission to track down Escobar rid Colombia of a violent menace who threatened to topple the state. Escobar had terrorized his country beginning in 1984 - assassinating judges, police officers, journalists and politicians. Much of the violence was meant to coerce the Colombian government to ban extradition of drug traffickers to the United States. Escobar was believed to have ordered the killings of three of the five candidates for president of Colombia in 1989. But eliminating Escobar did nothing to stem the flow of cocaine to the United States, and may have inadvertently contributed to the formation of "super ca rtels" - alliances among guerrillas, growers, paramilitaries and traffickers that today threaten the government of Colombia. Those alliances are one target of the $1.3 billion in U.S. anti-narcotics aid to Colombia this year, which includes 300 American troops training Colombian security forces. American involvement in the hunt for Escobar began in 1989, when President Bush authorized a secret military effort to help Colombia track down leaders of the Medellin cocaine cartel. Its code name was Heavy Shadow. Centra Spike, a top-secret Army unit that specialized in tracking people by monitoring telephone and radio calls, was covertly sent to Colombia in August of that year. The sophisticated surveillance helped chase Escobar into hiding and a life on the run. He surrendered to Colombian authorities in 1991 after negotiating a deal that allowed him to live with his closest associates in a comfortable "prison" built for him in his hometown of Envigado, near Medellin. Escobar fled the prison on July 22, 1992, when Colombian authorities tried to move him to a real prison. After he disappeared, Colombian President Cesar Gaviria asked the United States to expand its assistance. Bush authorized the clandestine deployment of Delta Force and other U.S. personnel, and the multimillion-dollar effort continued during the Clinton administration until Escobar's death. Public statements by U.S. officials during the manhunt acknowledged that American forces had helped train the Colombian Search Bloc. But American involvement in the effort was far more extensive than that. Participants said that secret U.S. contributions totaled hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware, personnel and cash. At its height, with all these forces assembled under Ambassador Morris D. Busby and CIA station chief Bill Wagner, Bogota was the largest CIA station in the world. The hunt for Escobar took an ugly turn in February 1993, when a vigilante group calling itself Los Pepes (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, or People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar) embarked on a campaign of murder and bombings. The vigilantes burned Escobar's mansions and luxury cars and began methodically killing off lawyers, bankers, money-launderers, assassins and relatives who helped him maintain his cocaine empire. In so doing, the vigilantes made a key contribution - stripping away the infrastructure of Escobar's organization and leaving him isolated and afraid for his family. In communiques, Los Pepes said it was composed of relatives of people murdered or terrorized by Escobar. The vigilantes hung a sign around the neck of one victim that read: "For working with the narco-terrorist and baby-killer Pablo Escobar. For Colombia. Los Pepes." The Search Bloc's methods were no less brutal. So many of its targets were killed, rather than arrested, that American officials came to regard the phrase "Killed in a gun battle with the Colombian police" as a euphemism for summary execution. Busby, then the U.S. ambassador, and Colombian Gen. Hugo Martinez, the Search Bloc commander, both deny that the hunt for Escobar was tainted by cooperation with Los Pepes, who at their busiest were killing as many as five people a day. The group assassinated an estimated 300 people. No one was ever prosecuted for these murders. Martinez said in interviews that he and his men had no association with Los Pepes, whom he called a "nuisance." "They made more trouble for us than help," said Martinez, who survived numerous attempts on his life and on his family. He said he turned down a $6 million bribe from Escobar to abandon the chase. Busby said he had been told of evidence that the Search Bloc and Los Pepes were working together, but never found it convincing. He said that if he had believed the two groups were linked, "it would have been a show-stopper. We would have pulled everybody out of the country. I communicated that directly to the Colombian president." The evidence Busby had seen was detailed in a secret cable he wrote on Aug. 1, 1993. In it, the ambassador said that Colombia's top prosecutor had told him he had "very good" evidence of a connection. Busby also said that "our own reporting" suggested a link. Separate DEA cables from the embassy noted the connection between the Search Bloc and a leader of Los Pepes. Busby, in an interview, said he had not seen the DEA cables and that DEA agents and Delta Force operatives never informed him of the interactions they witnessed between members of the Search Bloc and Los Pepes. He said he still does not believe the Search Bloc and the vigilantes were connected. In a series of interviews, former Colombian President Gaviria, now general secretary of the Organization of American States, said he suspected ties between his police generals and Los Pepes. "I was very concerned there was a connection," Gaviria said. "I spoke out against Los Pepes very strongly from the beginning, but I feared there was a connection with the police. I think the police felt they were very close to getting Escobar, and maybe they went ahead because of that." Colombian Fiscal General Gustavo de Greiff, the equivalent of the U.S. attorney general, had more than suspicions. During the summer of 1993, he told U.S. officials in Bogota that he had strong evidence that Martinez and several top officers of the Search Bloc were working with Los Pepes. He said the evidence was sufficient to charge them with bribery, drug trafficking, torture, kidnapping and possibly murder. Busby relayed this information to Washington in his secret cable of Aug. 1, 1993. The ambassador expressed misgivings about the sources of de Greiff's information. Many of the allegations, he wrote, were made by "ex-Escobar assassins" trying to discredit the Search Bloc. Nevertheless, Busby said, he had urged de Greiff and the Colombian defense minister to immediately remove Martinez and the other officers, and had threatened to withdraw American support if they failed to do so. Busby said he wanted to "remove the taint from the anti-Escobar effort." Contrary advice was being offered by Joe Toft, the DEA chief in Bogota. In a cable written two days after Busby's, Toft said he had urged Colombian officials to keep Martinez in place. The message reads in part: "The BCO" - Bogota Country Office, meaning the U.S. Embassy - "continues to support Colonel Martinez and his subordinates." Martinez remained commander of the Search Bloc. Neither he nor any member of the unit was ever prosecuted, and U.S. support for the Escobar manhunt never wavered. Colombian Police Col. Oscar Naranjo, then intelligence chief of the National Police and now chief of analysis for the Ministry of Defense, said in an interview that Los Pepes had worked closely with the Search Bloc. "The Pepes were a desperate option after Pablo Escobar had generated so much violence in Medellin," Naranjo said. "Old partners of Escobar's got together to offer their services to the government. For the high-ranking officers of the police and government, their relationship with the Search Bloc was kept deliberately unclear, but people celebrated the actions of Los Pepes at all levels of the government. They and the Search Bloc acted on information gathered by the U.S. Embassy, and the Colombian army and police." Toft's Aug. 3, 1993, cable said: "At this point, according to de Greiff, police officials were probably already too deeply involved with Los Pepes to withdraw. The witnesses' testimony indicates that not only were some members of the Bloque and Los Pepes running joint operations, some of which resulted in kidnappings and possibly killings, but that the leadership of Los Pepes was calling the shots, rather than the police." There is other evidence of cooperation between the Search Bloc and Los Pepes. Fidel Castano, a colorful and ruthless Colombian paramilitary leader known as "Rambo" who at one time had helped Escobar ship cocaine and who was killed in 1994 fighting against Marxist guerrillas, acknowledged publicly to reporters before his death that he was a founding member of Los Pepes. He and his brothers turned against the drug boss after he murdered their associates, he said. In a dispatch to DEA headquarters on Feb. 22, 1993, DEA agent Javier Peña in Bogota identified Castano as "a cooperating individual who was once a trusted Pablo Escobar associate." Peña noted that Castano had valuable connections with the Colombian drug underworld. The cable went on to detail a recent Search Bloc raid on a suspected Escobar hideout that had been led by Castano. Castano's connection with the Search Bloc was noted in another DEA memo, written in September 1993 by agent Steve Murphy. A Colombian pilot and former drug trafficker, who asked to be identified only as Rubin, said he was associated with the death squad but stopped short of saying he was a member. Rubin said one leader of Los Pepes, a man he identified only as "Bernardo" or "Don Berna," had worked for two Medellin drug bosses who had been murdered by Escobar. Two DEA agents said they were familiar with Bernardo, who lived with other members of the group in a house just outside the gate to the Search Bloc headquarters in Medellin. They said they witnessed his regular association with Search Bloc commanders. Toft, who resigned as Bogota DEA chief months after Escobar was killed to protest growing links between drug dealers and the Colombian government, said the entire effort to track down Escobar was tainted by association with criminal elements. "On the day Escobar was killed, there were all these celebrations in Bogota," Toft said. "I went to the parties. Everybody was drinking champagne and slapping each other on the back, and the whole time I had this knot in my stomach. I was happy we had gotten Escobar, but at what price? It took away a lot of the joy." As the manhunt intensified in 1993, two high-level Pentagon officials began to express concerns about potential violations of Presidential Executive Order 12333, which originated during the Nixon administration after congressional hearings exposed excesses in the intelligence community. It has been updated under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The order states: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." It adds: "No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order." Concerns about potential violations of the order prompted Lt. Gen. Jack Sheehan of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to recommend the withdrawal all American military forces from Colombia in November 1993, just weeks before Escobar was killed. At the time, Sheehan was in charge of all U.S. military operations overseas. Sheehan said he made the recommendation after two CIA analysts briefed him at the Pentagon about suspected links between the Search Bloc, Los Pepes and American forces in Colombia. The analysts, according to Sheehan, noted that the tactics employed by Los Pepes were similar to those being taught to the Search Bloc by Delta Force; that intelligence gathered by U.S. forces was being shared with the death squads; and that Delta Force operatives were overstepping their deployment orders by accompanying Search Bloc members on raids. Sheehan's recommendation was supported by Brian Sheridan, deputy assistant secretary of defense for drug enforcement policy and support. When he learned of Sheehan's recommendation, Busby was angry. He said he "used my influence" in Washington to try to keep the troops in Colombia. According to Sheehan, the ambassador phoned the White House from Bogota and enlisted support from the National Security Council. "They all lined up against pulling our guys out," Sheehan said. "I thought this thing had gone way past the original deployment order, and I didn't like the way it looked at all. For Busby and the others, it was an ends-justifies-the-means kind of thing. I was opposed to it, as was anyone who takes seriously the importance of civilian control over the military." Busby said he believed the CIA analysts who made the report to Sheehan had been "misinformed" about the seriousness of the evidence linking the Search Bloc and Los Pepes. "We had made promises to President Gaviria that I felt we were obligated to keep," Busby said. "I was not about to abandon him at that late date. It was too important to him and us. I was also, frankly, angry that I had not been consulted." In the end, the Pentagon ordered the covert units in Colombia - Centra Spike and Delta Force - replaced by unclassifed special forces. The changeover had not been completed by the time Escobar was killed on Dec. 2, 1993. When Los Pepes had publicly surfaced earlier that year, Clinton had just assumed office. There is no indication that suspicions of American involvement with the vigilantes ever reached him. A senior Pentagon official said of the manhunt: "There's no question that things down there got ugly. Pablo Escobar was like a man standing on top of a mountain . . . consisting of every family member, business associate, friend and admirer he had built up over 40 years. And ultimately the only way to get at him was to take down the mountain, one person at a time, until Pablo had no place left to hide." A former American army officer who took part in the manhunt called the effect of Los Pepes "very significant." "They were stunning," he said. "There was no question in my mind that they were acting on information we gathered. It made it more and more difficult for him to hide. As more and more people were killed, he became terrified for his family. Ultimately, that was what enabled us to find him." Months after Escobar's death, former Bogota DEA chief Toft released surveillance tapes showing that cocaine traffickers in the Colombian city of Cali had helped finance the presidential campaign of Gaviria's successor, Ernesto Samper. Toft said he believed the hunt for Escobar actually helped create the alliances that today bedevil the country. Gaviria said that from his standpoint, "the battle against Pablo Escobar was never primarily about stopping drug smuggling. "He was a very serious problem because he was so violent," the former president said. "He was a threat to the state. The level of terrorism we had to live with was something awful." Busby, who is retired from the State Department and works as a consultant, described the long pursuit of Escobar as highly secret, but also satisfying. "Lots of things happened that no one is ever going to talk about," Busby said. "Nobody has ever really talked about this. I will say that in my long experience, I have never seen so many different American agencies, military and civilian, work together with such professionalism and efficiency. I'm really proud of that, and, let me tell you, at that point I would not have wanted to be Pablo Escobar." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Bowden's e-mail address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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