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 (VHF Omnidirectional Range) 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."
In the three years since their unit had arrived in Colombia, the men of Centra Spike had come to recognize not just the voice of Pablo Escobar, but his idiosyncrasies and unique personal style.
The secret electronic eavesdropping and tracking unit had heard the man's voice on radio and cell phone many times during the first hunt, before Escobar struck his 1991 deal with the Colombian government and moved into a comfortable suite in the "prison" run by his bodyguards.
Now, in the summer of 1992, Escobar had walked out of prison and was once again a fugitive. This time, the Colombian government had asked the United States to take a more assertive role in hunting down the man whose assassins and terrorists had killed thousands of Colombians, including presidential candidates and supreme court justices.
Supervised by Maj. Steve Jacoby, Centra Spike's analysts felt they knew Escobar as well as anyone, though none had ever seen or spoken to him. Inside a steel-reinforced vault on the windowless fifth floor of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, they listened to hours and hours of Escobar's recorded conversations.
Based on Escobar's discussions with his lieutenants, lawyers and family members, it was clear that he was a man of a certain refinement. He had a deep voice and spoke softly. He was articulate, and though he sometimes slipped into the familiar Paisa street patois of Medellin, he normally used very clean Spanish, free of vulgarity and with a vocabulary of some sophistication, which he sometimes sprinkled with English expressions.
He was painstakingly polite, and he seemed determined to project unruffled good humor at all times, even though it was quite clear that everyone who spoke to Escobar was deathly afraid of him. Both the pattern and content of these calls changed Centra Spike's understanding of the Medellin drug cartel that Escobar had helped build. Particularly illuminating were the calls Escobar made after the death in 1989 of Jose Rodriguez Gacha, one of Escobar's top confederates. Jacoby's Centra Spike operators had helped the Colombian army and police track down Gacha - who was gunned down with his son and five bodyguards by Colombian government helicopters.
Instead of scrambling to fill the leadership void created by Gacha's death, or allowing feuding among Gacha's underlings, Escobar worked coolly like a chief executive officer who had lost a key associate. People called him to make decisions, and he did so calmly, redistributing Gacha's interests and responsibilities.
A few weeks later, they found out just how vicious Escobar could be. He ordered his men to kidnap a Colombian army commander, then had them slowly torture the man to death. Revulsed, one Centra Spike officer bought a $300 bottle of Remy Martin cognac and vowed not to open it until Escobar was dead.
Tipped off by the eavesdropping unit, Colombian security forces began scoring big successes. They intercepted some of Escobar's drug shipments, and some of the drug boss' key associates were arrested or killed. Escobar himself was always alerted by corrupt Colombian police or army officers in time to escape, but he began to suspect a spy. He had several members of his security force tortured and executed in his presence in early 1990. In one intercepted conversation, Centra Spike recorded the screams of victims in the background as Escobar spoke lovingly to his wife.
Now, in July 1992, Jacoby and his unit were back in Bogota to resume the hunt.
He was waiting at the U.S. Embassy when top American officials returned from an all-night session with Colombian President Cesar Gaviria at the presidential palace. It was during this session that Gaviria, breaking years of official reluctance to allow full-scale American involvement in the government's war against drug traffickers, had asked the Americans to do whatever they could to track down Escobar.
They conferred in the big steel vault upstairs in the embassy compound - Ambassador Morris Busby; Jacoby; Joe Toft, country chief for the Drug Enforcement Administration; and Bill Wagner, the CIA station chief in Bogota. It was July 23, 1992, the day after Escobar walked out of jail.
Busby looked as if he hadn't slept.
"How long do you think it's going to take for you to find him?" he asked.
Maybe a day or two, Jacoby said. They all knew that if Escobar evaded them for the first few days, the hunt would get significantly harder. The big question was how quickly the Colombians could get up and get moving once Escobar was pinpointed.