For all their determination, the National Police had proved repeatedly inept in the first war against Escobar. Despite solid leads provided by Centra Spike, he always got away. There was such fear of Escobar that the Colombians always went out in force, hundreds of men on trucks and helicopters. It was like stalking a deer with bulldozers.
Then there was the corruption issue. Among the hundreds of police involved in these raids, there was always someone willing and able to tip off Escobar for a fee.
"No matter how good our intelligence is, and how hard they try, they just can't close the last thousand meters," Jacoby told the ambassador. "With these guys, it just ain't gonna happen."
Busby considered the resources at his disposal. The CIA was good at long-term intelligence gathering, not special ops. The DEA was good at street work, recruiting snitches and building cases. The FBI in foreign countries did mostly liaison work.
What Busby believed they needed were the manhunters of Delta Force, the Army's elite and top-secret counterterrorism unit. Busby was familiar with the unit from his years as the State Department's ambassador for counterterrorism. Nobody could plan and perform a real-world operation better than the men of Delta.
Colombian law forbade foreign troops on its soil, and it would really be pushing President Gaviria's invitation, but the ambassador felt it was possible on the Colombian end. Delta was stealthy enough that the Colombian press would never find out they were there. But Busby knew there was strong resistance within the Pentagon to entering the drug war, and he believed it was unlikely that Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, would order the move over such strong objection.
"What we need is Delta, but we could never get them," Busby said.
"Why not?" Jacoby asked.
Jacoby and others in the special-ops community knew that Gen. Wayne Downing, chief of the Army's Special Operations Command, had been interested in getting Delta involved during the first war against Escobar.
What had stopped Downing was the possibility of getting one of his men killed. A dead American from Delta would provoke a crisis in Washington, bringing down scrutiny he was not prepared to accept.
"What are our chances of going in and not getting anybody killed?" Downing had asked one of his advisers.
"Almost zero," he was told. "None of these narcos is going to surrender peacefully. If you go in, you either have to take them all or kill them all."
Downing had let it be known to Jacoby and others that if a situation developed that was the right fit for Delta Force - something clean, precise, and that could be done in a nonattributable manner - he was ready to send them.
So when Busby said, "They'll never sign up," Jacoby countered by saying: "I think you're wrong. If you ask, I think you'll get what you ask for."
"I guess there's no harm in asking," the ambassador said.
Jacoby gave the ambassador some advice.
"Don't say you want them to come in here and go after Pablo themselves," he said. "That will never fly. Say you want them to offer training and advice."
They all agreed that Delta was the answer.
There was one other thing that was understood: This time nobody expected Pablo Escobar to be taken alive. The Colombians had no stomach left for putting him on trial or locking him up; Escobar had just shown how pointless that was.
Even though Escobar had been indicted by American courts, Colombia would not extradite him to the United States. Escobar's terror bombings and assassinations had cowed the Colombian congress into outlawing extradition for the drug traffickers.
No, this time the hunt was for keeps, the men in the vault concluded. No one said it out loud, but they all knew: When the Colombians cornered Escobar this time, they all believed they were going to kill him.
Hopes at the U.S. Embassy soared when a Delta Force team led by Col. Jerry Boykin arrived in Bogota late in the evening of Sunday, July 26, 1992.
Ambassador Morris Busby's request for Delta to assist in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, much to his surprise, had sailed through Washington. The State Department had approved it and passed it up to the White House, where President George Bush consulted with Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and then instructed Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to give the ambassador anything he needed. The word was that Bush, who had poured millions into a new effort to stanch the flow of drugs from South America, had taken a strong personal interest.
The order came through Gen. George Joulwan, commander of the U.S. Army Southern Command in Panama, and Maj. Gen. William F. Garrison, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C. Col. Boykin and his crew flew south that evening with authorization to get the job done. Their mission was code-named Heavy Shadow. They arrived on a U.S. Air Force jet painted to look like a standard commercial flight.
Eight very fit American men dressed in civilian clothes were met at El Dorado airport in Bogota by midlevel embassy officials and driven downtown in the dark, moving swiftly along roads that in daylight would have been choked with traffic.
The U.S. Embassy was just north of central Bogota, a gray, four-story, L-shaped structure with a windowless fifth floor atop one arm. It was set back behind high walls. In the vault on the closed fifth floor, Busby was waiting with CIA Station Chief Bill Wagner and Joe Toft, the top DEA man in Bogota.
Busby and Boykin were old friends, and after a few minutes of getting caught up, the ambassador began briefing the Delta colonel on the situation. It was, to say the least, confusing.
From the rondos of blame taking place in the government palaces to the furious caterwauling of the Colombian press, the July 22 prison escape of Pablo Escobar had set off a great storm in Bogota. There were hourly contradictory reports: Pablo had been captured; Pablo had been killed; Pablo had surrendered; Pablo was still hiding in the jail.
To an extent that no one had anticipated, the Escobar problem was a keystone that touched every fissure of Colombia's confusing power structure. When Escobar walked out of jail, the hopeful administration of President Cesar Gaviria had begun to splinter. Every day a new official investigation began. The Ministry of Justice accused the army of accepting bribes to allow Escobar's escape; one widely circulated (and false) report held that Escobar had paid huge sums to the soldiers around the prison, then walked out dressed as a woman.
President Gaviria had already fired all the guards and army officers associated with the disaster, as well as the air force general whose pilots had kept the assault force waiting for hours on the ground in Bogota after they were ordered to attack the prison.
The military began spreading rumors that Escobar had escaped through a secret underground tunnel. It seemed possible: On intercepted phone calls from the prison in the weeks before the escape, Escobar and his men had been overheard speaking about using "the tunnel."
Escobar had, in fact, left by more conventional means. The "tunnel" turned out to be the drug boss' term for the covered truck that was used to roll contraband - women, weapons, bodies, alcohol - up and down the mountain under the studiously uninterested noses of prison guards and army patrols. The truck helped Escobar maintain his extravagant lifestyle inside the comfortable "prison" that he had paid to have built and that was guarded by men he controlled.
The day after his disappearance, Escobar's lawyers had presented the government with a surrender offer. In his typical arrogant, formal style, the drug boss' demands were enumerated:
(1) That he would be able to return to prison;
(2) That his guards be rehired;
(3) That aerial surveillance of the prison be stopped;