This information was relayed to Col. Hugo Martinez at the Search Bloc headquarters outside Medellin. The colonel passed it on to his son Hugo, a member of a Colombian electronic surveillance unit recently dispatched to Medellin to assist in the hunt for Escobar.
Hugo asked his father to have Correa note the make and model number of the radio, and its frequency range. He also asked his father to get Correa to do what he could to encourage 15-year-old Juan Pablo Escobar to speak for longer periods with his father.
Provided with the frequency of Juan Pablo's radio, and with a rough idea of when father and son spoke, Hugo and his surveillance teams set about intercepting these calls.
At first they tried working with the CIA, which had its own eavesdropping team in Medellin. The Americans were not having much luck tracking Escobar, but Col. Martinez urged his son to work with them because he wanted to keep an eye on them. He didn't fully trust the American spy agency. The gringos jealously guarded their methods, and they would often fail to share everything they uncovered.
The younger Martinez had his own reasons for wanting to work with the American team. He thought he might learn from them, and he, too, wanted to find out everything the Americans were doing. "With me there, you know you will get everything," he told his father.
One of the first problems faced by the new unit was deciphering the coded lingo Juan Pablo and his father had constructed to confuse their pursuers. They used key words as a signal to switch frequencies, which they did quickly and often.
At first this tactic prevented the surveillance teams from getting even a general fix on Escobar's location, because every time father and son switched frequencies the signal would temporarily be lost. The direction-finding cars drove in randomly throughout the city, racing a few blocks in the direction of a signal and then pulling over to the curb when they lost it.
After a few days of this it became clear that the streets of Medellin, with so many walls, overhead wires, high-rises and other obstructions, were the worst kind of environment for direction-finding.
In the first few weeks, the Search Bloc followed the efforts of the younger Martinez and his teams with great interest. Once or twice they launched raids, breaking into the houses of startled Medelliners who had no connection to Pablo Escobar. Very quickly, enthusiasm for this new tool dried up. The new little vans and CIA equipment were just another disappointment.
Col. Martinez told them to keep at it, but in time everyone assumed the only reason the teams were still around was because Martinez's son was working with them. This was humiliating for the son, because he knew it was true. But it wasn't true in the way everyone suspected. Without a doubt, their rapid series of failures would have sent any other unit packing, their antennae and weird little boxes heaped with scorn.
But Hugo had his father's ear. They would sit together into the night, with Hugo selling his father on the amazing potential of the technology, how close they were to actually making it work. When it failed again and again he would explain to his father exactly why, his crew-cut head hunched between his shoulders as he sketched out his diagrams with arrows and filled the margins with math.
"It isn't something simple and straightforward," Hugo said. His father listened and asked questions, and, in time, was converted. The rest of the Search Bloc may have considered the technology a useless whim, a father's indulgence, but the colonel had become a believer.
It wasn't just that he loved his son and wanted him to succeed, although the colonel was smart and honest enough to know that was part of it. The equipment, he was convinced, had potential. If Hugo and his men could work out the bugs, this was the thing that would give him a decisive advantage over Escobar, the magic device that could pick him out of the city.
The best thing about it was that Escobar knew absolutely nothing about Hugo's team. By now he knew the American spooks could pinpoint him with some accuracy from the air. He had even taken to talking on his cell phone while in the backseat of a car, moving through city streets, just to throw them off. But he did not yet suspect that their technology might, at least in theory, enable a team like Hugo's to find him in his moving car and follow him home.
In time, the colonel became convinced that when they finally got Escobar, it would be with Hugo's equipment, while the fugitive was talking on the phone, unsuspecting. He believed this in part because of Hugo, but also because he needed to believe it. He needed to believe there would be a way out of this endless struggle. And it didn't hurt that the one showing the way was his son.
As the hunt wore on late into the summer of 1993, at least one member of the top brass at the Pentagon began to worry about how far the Americans in Colombia seemed willing to go to get Pablo Escobar.
As the operations chief at the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Jack Sheehan was director of all special operations overseas. Sheehan already suspected that Delta and Centra Spike were overstepping the strict limits of their deployment order, which confined them to the Search Bloc headquarters outside Medellin. There, they were restricted to training, intelligence-gathering and analysis.
Sheehan was not a big fan of special operators. He regarded the men in charge - Gens. Wayne Downing and William Garrison in the United States and Ambassador Morris Busby in Bogota - as exceptionally aggressive. He called such men "forward leaners," by which he meant that they sometimes tended to stray beyond the strict parameters of their missions. Sheehan had heard tales of Delta operators going out on raids with the Search Bloc, and he worried about a possible U.S. relationship, direct or indirect, with the vigilantes of Los Pepes.
Sheehan's chief concern was that information gathered and analyzed by Centra Spike and Delta might be used to guide assassination squads to their targets - Escobar's lawyers, bankers, associates and hired killers. If that were the case, such assistance could fall into the category of supplying "lethal information," something allowed only with authorization from the president and notification of Congress.
The Clinton administration was growing more cautious about clandestine U.S. military operations overseas, and by autumn that year seemed inclined to pull everything back. According to administration officials, President Clinton felt he had been blindsided when Gen. Garrison and his Delta special operators found themselves in a pitched firefight in Somalia, where 18 American soldiers were killed in October 1993.
The deployment order for sending the special operations units to Colombia in 1992 had been very clear. They were there only to provide training. If they were going out on missions for any purpose other than training, they were exceeding their authority.
In fact, Delta operators had been secretly going out on Search Bloc raids for months, assisting as forward observers and helping the Colombians use global positioning devices. Sheehan knew that if just one Delta soldier were wounded or killed during a Search Bloc raid, it would raise an unholy stink in Congress, which by law must be consulted before placing American troops in harm's way. The larger concern for him was civilian control of the military - a principle both he and his boss, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell, took very seriously.
The American involvement in Colombia had created a string of issues inside the Pentagon. When it was decided that Search Bloc helicopter pilots needed training flying at night with night-vision goggles, American pilots were sent to Medellin. The pace of the hunt was demanding, so any training would have to be given on-the-job. This provoked a fight over whether sending pilots along to conduct training violated the prohibition against sending American soldiers on raids.