The president paced the room furiously as he spoke.
Busby was used to the president's temper. He admired Gaviria's courage, campaigning for president in defiance of Escobar's threats, but he did not find Gaviria a charismatic man. There was little about Gaviria that seemed presidential, Busby believed, even though he was almost classically handsome, with his dark hair and strong chin.
Both Busby and Wagner, the CIA man, saw Gaviria and the others in his administration as pleasant, well-educated, idealistic and hopelessly naive in their polite upper-middle-class ways. They hadn't stood a chance bargaining with a tough, streetwise gangster like Escobar. Even so, Busby believed that Gaviria, if frustrated and angry enough, was capable of turning cold and calculating. If they were going to get Escobar, they would need a president like that.
Busby knew this opportunity wouldn't last, and he was determined to make the most of it. It was the kind of task he was cut out for.
He was originally a military man, joining the Navy after graduating from college. Busby had served with a Navy Special Forces unit that predated the Seals, but he was often described as a "former Seal," a mistake he was always quick to correct but which nevertheless added to his mystique.
Busby did have close connections with American Special Forces, but they stemmed less from his military service than his years as ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism in the State Department, a job that involved coordinating American diplomatic and covert military action throughout the world.
He was a military man who had adopted diplomacy as a second career. That made him a new kind of diplomat.
As the Cold War world collapsed, America's enemies became drugs and thugs. Diplomats in previously unimportant parts of the world found themselves at the cutting edge of U.S. foreign relations. In certain hot-spot nations, ambassadors now functioned as field commanders, orchestrating law enforcement, military and diplomatic efforts, both covertly and in cooperation with host governments.
In that respect, Busby seemed made for the job in Colombia. To Colombians, he looked like Uncle Sam himself, minus the white goatee. He was tall, lean and tan, with graying sandy hair and the powerful arms and hands of a man who was a skilled carpenter and who loved to sail the waters of the Chesapeake Bay.
There was something about Busby that responded to the moral simplicity of confrontation. He was an American patriot, a true believer, and few circumstances in his career were more clear-cut than the challenge posed by Pablo Escobar, a man he considered a monster.
Now, as he listened to Gaviria, he knew the time for action had arrived.
There had always been restrictions on what American military forces were allowed to do in Colombia. But now, insulted and embarrassed, Gaviria said that as far as he was concerned, the door was wide open. Despite Colombian constitutional barriers and widespread public opposition to foreign troops on their soil, especially American troops, Gaviria said he would welcome any and all help they could give to find Escobar.
"This is critical, please," he told the ambassador. "Help us get this guy as soon as possible."
Morris D. Busby, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, was awakened by two phone calls early Wednesday, July 22, 1992, at a house in Chevy Chase, Md., where he and his wife were staying with friends.
The first call was to inform him that Colombian President Cesar Gaviria had finally decided to move the drug outlaw Pablo Escobar to a new prison, something Busby had been urging for more than a year. Shortly after that call came another, telling him that Escobar had somehow escaped through an entire brigade of the Colombian army.
The ambassador had spent too much time in Colombia to be surprised. He cut his vacation short and, within hours, flew back to Bogota.
Busby believed this bad turn of events for Colombia might be just the break he needed. Ever since he had been assigned to the embassy in Bogota the previous year, handpicked for the assignment in large part because it had become so dangerous, Busby had been eager to make an example of Escobar, but was frustrated by the drug boss' deal with the government.
The most notorious drug trafficker in the world had been perched on a spectacular Andes mountaintop, running his cocaine business surrounded and protected by the Colombian army. Current estimates were that 70 to 80 tons of cocaine were being shipped from Colombia to the United States every month, and Escobar controlled the bulk of it.
Inside his custom prison, Escobar lived like a sultan. There were parties with gourmet food and booze, beauty queens and whores. There were drugs, water beds and elaborate sound systems. Escobar ran his narcotics empire by phone. He ordered the murders of anyone who crossed him - including two of Escobar's onetime associates who were tortured and killed inside prison walls - according to one account, hung upside down and bled like steers.
At the presidential palace in Bogota the day of Escobar's escape, Busby found President Gaviria pacing in his office with fury. Gaviria had been up all night receiving one outrageous report after another: No assault had been made on the prison during daylight, despite Gaviria's orders. His vice minister of justice and his Bureau of Prisons chief had gone in themselves without authorization to talk with Escobar, and both had been taken hostage. And, finally, the worst of all scenarios had played out: Escobar had vanished.
It had taken more than two years, hundreds of lives, and hundreds of millions of dollars - much of it from U.S. covert funds - to hound the murderous drug billionaire into his surrender. Now, in one night, it had all come undone.
Waiting with Busby through the president's lamentations were Joe Toft, the flinty Drug Enforcement Administration office chief, and Bill Wagner, the "political secretary" who was in fact Bogota's CIA station chief.
"An entire brigade!" Gaviria shouted in amazement. "And the general allows two officials inside the prison to talk to him! For what? To notify him that he was going to be taken? What did he expect would happen? Such a stupid thing! I mean, such a stupid thing!"
Gaviria was fed up. For many long months, he had resisted the entreaties of the U.S. government. He had tried to control Escobar on his own. Now everything had changed. The time had come, he had decided, to call in the Americans.
The agreement that had landed Escobar in his prison suite at La Catedral the year before was a masterpiece of duplicity. A man with the blood of thousands on his hands was allowed to plead guilty to having introduced his cousin to a man who had arranged a single drug shipment overseas. Escobar was to serve a prison term and emerge a free man, all sins forgiven.
The length of the term was undetermined because prosecutors were allowed to add new charges if they obtained evidence of further crimes - not likely, for witnesses against Escobar typically were either bribed or murdered. In return, the government agreed not to extradite Escobar to the United States.
Everyone knew La Catedral was no prison. Escobar had paid to have it built on the site of one of his favorite resort hideaways near Medellin. His fellow prisoners were his cronies. He exercised a commanding influence over the local government of Envigado, where it was built, and Medellin, the booming northern city that was the base of his drug empire. In its eagerness to strike a deal with Escobar, Bogota had ceded virtually all authority for the "prison" to these locals.
La Catedral was legally a state within a state. The national police, who had lost hundreds of officers to Escobar's assassins, were forbidden to come within 12 miles of the prison. Concerned that American Special Forces or CIA agents might descend from helicopters, Escobar asked the provincial government to close the air space over the jail, which it did. Army guards fired on any aircraft that encroached.