The Rest Is Classified - 76. The Hunt for Pablo Escobar: From Narco to Global Terrorist (Ep 3)

Episode Date: August 24, 2025

By the late 1980s, Pablo Escobar’s grip on the cocaine trade was unmatched. But a new threat loomed: extradition to the United States. To Escobar, it was a fate worse than death. His answer was brutal - declare open war on the Colombian state. In this episode, Gordon and David trace the rise of the so-called “Extraditables,” a loose alliance of cartel bosses who vowed to stop extradition at any cost. Through car bombs, political assassinations, and the murder of anyone who stood in their way, Escobar sent a single message: you cannot take me alive. It’s the beginning of a bloody showdown that would push Colombia to the brink. ------------------- To sign up to The Declassified Club, go to⁠ ⁠www.therestisclassified.com⁠⁠. ------------------- Order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Email: [e-mail] Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@triclassified⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books, join the declassified club at the rest is classified.com. It won't take long to tell you neutrals ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar at it? Neutral. Refreshingly simple.

Victory over drugs is our cause, a just cause. And with your help, we are going to win. Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellan drug cartel. The world's 14th richest man. He was, in many ways, a terrorist. This is an economic power concentrated in a few hands and in criminal minds. What they cannot obtain by blackmail, they get by murder. And I don't think he's presently regret at all.

He tries to portray himself as a man of the people, this kind of like leftist revolutionary outlaw. Nearly everyone in Medellin supports the traffickers. Those who don't are either dead or targets. If you declare war, you've got to expect the state to respond. This is the moment where he goes too far. 13 bombs have gone off in since the weekend. By the end of 87, Bogota is essentially a war zone. U.S. spending for international anti-drug efforts is going to grow from less than $300 million in 1989

to more than $700 million by 1991. It is the certain knowledge that no one is really safe in Colombia from drug cartel assassins. It's a conflict where the goal wasn't even to stop, the flow of cocaine. It was to bring down this narco-terrorist. Everything has turned against him after this point. The whole thing he was building is collapsing. We are declaring total and absolute war on the government, on the individual and political oligarchy, on the journalists who have attacked and insulted

us, on the judges that have sold themselves to the government, on the extraditing magistrates, on all those who've persecuted and attacked us. We will not respect the families of those who've not respected our families. We will burn and destroy the industries, properties and mansions of the oligarchy. Well, welcome to the rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And that was Pablo Escobar, the subject of our series, writing as a member of a shadowy

group of cartel affiliates who will become known as the extraditables. Great name. I was thinking, is it like the expendables or the Incredibles? I think those were the kind of cartoon series. I don't think any of them were quite as violent or as mean as the extraditables. The expendables were pretty violent. Yeah, but not quite in the Escobar way. More noble than a bunch of narco-traffickers attempting to avoid extradition to the United States.

Yeah, trying to destroy the oligarchy and journalists, I notice. But they're declaring war on the state, and Pablo, subject of our story, is part of them. And the name is the clue about what they're bothered about. It's that they don't want to be extradited to the United States. And he, as we'd left it last time, has just returned from a brief. Sojourn in Panama and Nicaragua back home to Medellin in Colombia, where he is now engaged really in a growing battle with the Colombian state. It's 1985 in Colombia. Pablo is back in Medellin. He has a U.S. indictment hanging over his head, the prospect of extradition, as you so eloquently

read, also hanging over him. And what is fascinating to me about this period is that Pablo is officially a fugitive from Colombian and U.S. justice, but he's not really in hiding. In the last episode, we talked about his attempt to negotiate a deal with the government. Well, that never happened. He just decided to go home because his control over the cartel was slipping through his fingers. So he's gone home, and he's not really in hiding. He is openly moving about the city. He's throwing parties.

He's going to nightclubs and bullfights. And he has very effectively bought off the municipal government, police, and crucially, really the weakest link, I think, in Colombian law enforcement, the judiciary, right? Which he's so vociferously attacking in that quote that you read. So judges will play a big role in this story. Colombian judges are mostly in their 30s. They make about $230 a month, and the kind of legal system that Colombia has puts a lot of power in the judge's hands to sort of interpret the law. It's a Napoleonic legal system, right? And so the judges are crucial to Pablo's control, along with, of course, the police and the municipal government in Medellin.

It's really critical that Pablo digs his fingers into the Colombian judiciary. And what's wild is at this time, there's a great little section in Guy Gugliada and Jeff Lean's book, Kings of Cocaine, on how systematic Pablo's really undermining of the Colombian judiciary was is that at this point in time in 1985, there's actually a price, a set price for a judge to dismiss a narco-trafficking case. It's $50,000, which, of course, if you're a judge that makes $200,000. $130 a month, pretty good money, right? Maybe life-changing money. And it's so brazen that the cartels bagmen are actually hanging around the arraignment courts in Medellin with briefcases full of cash, right? And so we talked in our earlier episodes about this sort of underlying kind of approach that Pablo has to control, right? Plato, plomo, silver or lead. And so here we have a great example of just the silver working, right? And so he's sitting there in Medellin,

more or less the feudal lord of the city, with real control over the system of government and the courts. But as well as the silver, there's lead. And there's growing amounts of lead. And I think dynamite, angelic knight and other things as well, and not just lead. Well, that's right. So in July of 1985, the judge appointed to investigate the justice minister's murder. We talked about this in the last episode, Justice Minister Lara Bonilla, who was killed by cartel Sicario's. The judge appointed to investigate Laura's murder is himself murdered in Bogota. And in 1985, Pablo forms an organization, the one you read, called the extraditables, which vows this kind of fight to the death against the procedure of extradition. And it is extradition above all that Pablo

fears most. It's a poor superhero franchise, isn't it, the extraditables? Yeah, it's a, it's, it didn't quite make it into the Marvel cinematic universe, right? It was one of those comic books that got left on the, on the cutting room floor when the Russo brothers were, we're trying to figure out how to stitch it all together on the big screen. Pablo and the overall cartel leadership, I think, feel like the sort of day-to-day business of dealing with even local judiciary, like in Medell, that's probably pretty well locked up, right, with with the silver and lead approach. But extradition is a big hot-button national political issue. And in 1985, the Colombian government, despite all of Pablo's pressure, is actually starting to extradite narco-traffickers, right? So by September of 85, six defendants have been extradited, nine more are in custody. And there are 105, what we call them, requests for provisional arrests, right? Which is the U.S. requesting that the Colombians arrest somebody that are. active. So the US and Columbia are actually starting to put this treaty really into effect. And we should say the reason why extradition is so terrifying in a way to these people is, if you're in a Colombian jail, you can probably bribe, bust your way out some way.

If you're going to the US, you're basically never getting out. And so it's game over for them. So it is the one thing they are really, really scared about, which is why it's going to up their level of violence against this, you know, kind of possibility of extradition. You get these kind of wild letters. Lots of wild letters in this period. Wild letters. I mean, it's kind of an interesting thing. I mean, sending them to the judges, I guess, to try intimidate them. Yeah, there's another one here. We're not going to ask or beg or seek compassion because we do not need it. Vile wretch. All caps. Emphasis not added by this podcaster. That is the actual. That's the way it was printed. We're going to demand a favorable decision. We'll not accept.

stupid excuses of any kind. You know, the letter kind of goes on saying any decision against extradition would be rewarded or we swear before God and the life of our children that if you fail us or betray us, you will be a dead man. Three exclamation points at the end. Three exclamation points. So this is the stuff going to judges. They're faced with a pretty hard decision, aren't they? Well, I actually don't think it's not hard of a decision personally. It is shocking to me throughout the story, given the amount of lead that we'll be flying, that there are Colombian judges, lawyers, and political officials who are brave. They stand up to the cartel. Because four judges weighing the extradition issue are murdered in the middle of 1985. More than 30 have been killed in the year

plus since the justice minister's assassination, right? And so we're getting a lot of silver. We're also getting a lot of lead, and the issue is going to actually go in front of Colombia's Supreme Court. And so the pressure, it becomes a more complicated issue for Pablo and the cartel, because you're not dealing with a local Medellin judge. You're dealing with the nation's highest court. But this is the bit that's extraordinary about Pablo Escobar is that as an issue like that escalates up the Colombian government, at no point does he think, oh, that's getting a bit too high for me or a bit too risky or this level of violence is too dangerous. He just goes with it. You know, he takes it to the heart of government, as we'll see. You know, I mean, there's something

about that willingness to escalate, which is clearly what made him who he was, but also made him kind of ferociously dangerous and put a target on his back, I guess, because, you know, it's going up to the Supreme Court. So what does he do? He goes for the Supreme Court. Yeah, go for the Supreme Court. I mean, this is absolutely insane because in November of 1984, an urban guerrilla group called M19 storms the Palace of Justice in Bogota, the home of the Supreme Court. And they demand, among some other things, but primarily they demand, that the government renounce the 1979 extradition treaty with the United States. Now, in this standoff, the entire Colombian Supreme Court and its staff are held hostage, which prompts a government siege that leaves 40 of the M19 rebels, 50 Palace of Justice employees dead, including 11 of the 24 Supreme Court justices.

I mean, it makes January the 6th look like, you know, something else, isn't it? It's kind of on another level in terms of taking the battle to the art of government. And do we know that it's Pablo who did it? Because you said it was this M19 group. I mean, the fact that extradition is on the agenda makes it feel like it certainly is, even if it's not him actually doing it. So M19 is probably paid at least a million dollars by Pablo and the Medellin cartel to carry out the raid. But again, it's one of these murky situations where I wouldn't say there's a smoking gun. But it would not make a lot of sense in this context for M19 to be doing this on their own. Also, as part of this, there's a bunch of freewheeling arson in the Palace of Justice building

and a load of criminal case files are destroyed, including records of the criminal proceedings against Pablo. And there's been a bunch of debate, of course, of was that destruction intentional, was just sort of an accident of the raid, but in any case, a bunch of records are destroyed. And this siege, as you can imagine, not such a good thing from the Colombian government. And it starts, I think, to break the Colombian government's will to fight the cartel. And really, by 1986 or so, I think it's fair to say that Pablo and the Medellian cartel are actually on the verge of state capture. They've got the courts cowed. They've got hooks inside both of the major political parties in Congress, the police.

Most of the professional soccer league, as we mentioned last time, is under the control of the cartels. Even the bullfights, Gordon, have been compromised by the cartels. And strangely enough, I mean, you know, you think about, okay, going through. list of Colombian institutions, right? The guerrilla groups, which have been features of Colombian political life going back 50 years, are now sort of being captured by the cartels, as you can see by M19's collaboration with Pablo and the Medellin cartel to hit the Supreme Court. So you kind of tick out a list of big Colombian political institutions or to state institutions, civic institutions, and the cartels have really infected all of them. In the

aftermath of the hit on the Supreme Court. Columbia does away with jury trials. Citizens are too frightened to serve on juries. The Colombians try to hide the judge's identities. And the chaos in Columbia is getting so bad that in the spring of 1986, Ronald Reagan signs National Security Decision Directive 221, which makes drug trafficking a threat to national security. And we've been ticking through, I guess this kind of slow turn of the United States to start focusing on the drug war in Colombia and in particular to apply military and security force in Colombia to go against the Medellin cartel. And this decision in 1986 really starts to open a door to the possibility of military involvement in the war on drugs, right? Because as part of it,

the departments of defense and justice are directed to, quote, develop an implement any necessary modifications to applicable statutes, regulations, procedures, and guidelines to enable U.S. military forces to support counter-narcotics efforts. And later that year, this actually begins with the involvement of the U.S. Army in cooperation with the Bolivians. That shift in U.S. capabilities or willingness to use those capabilities in the war on drugs is really going to be a critical piece of what will become the hunt for Pablo Escobar. And really, I think Washington's urgency is increasing, right, to do something because at this point in the 1980s, the crack epidemic is really spiraling. Cocaine prices just keep on dropping. They've

gone from $35,000 per kilo in Miami to maybe $20,000 by 1985. So despite all of these seizures, despite all of the chaos, right, supply is absolutely booming. And the violence is continuing. There's a bit of back and forth, isn't there, about the extradition treaty, but fundamentally, Escobar is able to go about his work. I mean, there's like this very little restraint on him from either the government or the US at this point. Yeah, I think it's really kind of a showdown, right? I mean, by end of 1986, the Supreme Court actually ends up declaring the treaty invalid on a minor technicality, right? Largely due to the intimidation that they've experienced from Pablo and the cartel.

The treaty had apparently been signed by a delegate of the president back in 1979, not the president himself, right? And so Pablo, of course, celebrates this decision in Medell, big fireworks display to celebrate the annulling of the extradition treaty. But then, literally two days later, a newly elected president re-signs the treaty to make it formal. So you have this kind of back and forth, I think, between the cartel and the government that is still, by the end of 1986, not resolved in. Pablo's favor. But in any case, this mixture of kind of murder and bribery that the cartel has applied, it has lightened his legal difficulties because Pablo's name is removed from the indictment for the Justice Minister's murder. And the charges for killing those two DAS, the Colombian FBI, killing those two DAS agents back in 1976, are dropped. So you have a lightning

of the load, but the extradition treaty is still hanging over him. And then as you tip into the late 80s, Columbia really descends into near chaos as you have the cartels fighting the government, right, continuing this kind of attempt to squeeze and intimidate the state. And the cartels are also fighting each other in this period. The Medellin cartel and the county cartel are fighting each other. By the end of 87, Bogota is essentially a war zone. There are two DEA agents who were involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, Javier Pena and Steve Murphy, both of whom I believe are represented. in the series Narcos, and they write in their memoir that Bogota was at war. The streets were deserted at night. There were soldiers in riot gear with AK-47s and German Shepherds on leashes, standing

guard at every major hotel in the city. And the U.S. ambassador in this period warns that violence really does threaten to bring the state down. And the White House begins preparing a new policy to shore up the government in Bogota. Also in this period, the Colombian government and the president declares martial law. And this is all happening while Pablo is living, you know, in some measure of peace and comfort in Medellin. The lawyers who are working with Pablo in this period, because he's got a host of sort of, you know, lawyers who are on the take. And the lawyers who meet him, they're kind of terrified. There's some great anecdotes on this in Mark Bowden's book, Killing Pablo, which I'd highly recommend. You know, they say, oh, we're terrified of this guy,

but when you meet him, he's charming. You know, he's calm. he's usually stoned. He doesn't raise his voice, though. He never swears. He's very polite. He's rarely in bad moods. So you're terrified when you meet the guy, but then you're soon, you're sort of at ease, right? This guy's calm. He's collected. He's cool. It's a weird juxtaposition, isn't it? You know, and this is the theme all along is a man who on a personal level can be so calm and is capable of the most extraordinary violence. Because at this point, I think, is when you start to feel it shifting, I mean, if it didn't feel like something close to terrorism, it's starting to feel, more and more like that, isn't it, in this period, in the battles against the state and against the other cartels, because you start to get pipe bombs and car bombs going off around the city. And I mean, it's just extraordinary, just this idea that it's not just targeted killings of some judge or police officer who won't take the silver, but it's doing them around kind of bits of daily life, shopping malls and banks and on the streets. There's kind of pipe bombs and car bombs going off. I mean, normally not always designed to kill just to

intimidate, but it just feels like a civil war or that kind of, when you have a state collapse like you had in Iraq or somewhere else, rather than, you know, a very targeted kind of criminal enterprise. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, even Pablo's family is targeted, right? I mean, there's a bombing outside his apartment building in Medellin. His young daughter, Manuel, actually is left with ear damage and she's partially deaf for the rest of life because of this attack. And of course, by 1989, I think this is another turning point. That is when you're starting to get into this more, I guess, what feels more like a terrorist campaign. There's bombs going off all over the city. And there are really a spate of assassinations,

not just of government officials, but of journalists, lawyers, radio reporters. And through the spring and summer of 89, it's just like every couple days. Somebody is killed, right? Or a pipe bomb goes off in Bogota. And in this period, that that U.S. focus is continuing to shift from interdiction, right, cutting off goods, cocaine, getting into the U.S., to really attacking the roots of the cartels, right? So you've got more U.S. airborne and satellite surveillance over Columbia that's providing intel to Colombian forces on where the labs and the coca fields are. And Pablo, interestingly, I mean, he's trying to work this from the Colombian end. But in this period, Pablo was actually trying to do his own deal with Washington.

So he tries to retain Kissinger associates, Henry Kissinger's lobbying firm unsuccessfully. And then he does retain a lawyer who works at the same firm as Jeb Bush, hoping, that through their kind of mutual connections, he could persuade Jeb Bush to go talk to his father, then President George H.W. Bush, to sort of grease the wheels for Pablo. These efforts go nowhere. Now, by 1990, there is a presidential election coming in Colombia. And there is a very popular reformer named Luis Galan, who's a senator from the progressive wing of Colombia's ruling liberal party, who is a the absolute frontrunner and is expected to take more than 60% of the popular vote. And he's anti-cartels, he wants to go after them. Totally anti-narco, right? He is 100% committed to extradition. And in his campaign speeches, he regularly calls the cartels a threat to liberty and justice. So he is unambiguously opposed. And on the 18th of August 1989, Luis Galan dawns a bulletproof vest and speaks to a crowd of 10,000 who have gathered for a campaign rally.

So he gets on the stage, he's waving at the crowd. There are seven gunmen that have been dispersed out in the crowd who open fire and two bullets penetrate Luis Galan stomach just below the vest. And he's killed. Bogota goes on absolute lockdown. The sitting president declares a state of emergency. He suspends habeas corpus, which requires that after you're arrested a person needs to actually be brought before a judge or into court. And that state of emergency gives the president the power to reinstate the extradition treaty without congressional approval because it had been in this

limbo. So the president reinstates the extradition treaty without congressional approval. He does that immediately after this assassination. So he's, you know, he's taken out half the Supreme Court or someone has probably on his behalf. Now we've taken out a presidential candidate. But it's actually, to some extent, thing, which he does, which I think is actually the most extraordinary thing, which happens after that, and which feels like it is a turning point for Pablo, in which even he and even for Colombia, he's going to go too far, because it's something which really crosses the line into what we think of as terrorism, is that? Well, exactly. And three months later, in November of 1989, Avianca Flight 203

departs Bogota's El Dorado International Airport. It leaves at 730. A.m. Five minutes later, it's up at 13,000 feet. All's going smoothly. At 718, an explosion rips the plane in two, splitting the nose from the tail. There are three bystanders on the ground to look up to see debris hurtling toward them. They're killed instantly. In total, 110 people are killed, including two Americans who are on the flight. And what is wild is that Luis Galan's successor, as the Liberal Party candidate had been scheduled to be on the flight, but he cancels at the last minute.

The guy who's carrying the bomb is given a briefcase, isn't it? And he's told it's a recording device in order to record one interview or a conversation that's going on on the plane. And he's told, just turn it once the plane's in the air to start the recording device and he doesn't realize it's a bomb.

I mean, it's kind of, you know, you are blowing up a civilian airliner in order to take out one person. It's a suicide bombing. It's a suicide bombing. Yeah, using an unwitting person to do it. You know, I do find this particularly extraordinary. And it's that moment where you think this surely is too far, isn't it?

I guess it's an interesting question of whether these are mistakes. And obviously, you'd have to argue, given what is going to come, that these are mistakes. This is the moment. Yeah, it goes too far. This is the moment where he goes, he goes too far, because you have drifted. from more run-of-the-mill, I guess you could say, cartel violence, and also, frankly, violence in Colombia, to now attacking an airliner that has American citizens on it.

To me, this is the moment where Pablo crosses from cartel kingpin to international narco-terrorist, which then puts a bullseye on your head in Washington. The context is also interesting, isn't it? Because this is 1989, and you've just had Lockerbie at the end of 1988, haven't you? Which is the Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am flight. And so actually kind of terrorist attacks on airliners, who's behind it, is a big deal in Washington. And now again, you've had a bombing. And it's two Americans who are killed on this Avianca flight. But it's still somehow, in that context of the time, is bound to draw Washington. into seeing what's happening in Colombia and Escobar in a different way, which I think is what it does. So it does feel like that is just a step too far by him. Well, maybe there, Gordon, let's take a break. And when we come back, we will see exactly how Washington puts the bull's eye on Pablo Escobar's head.

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New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, Fisket or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Welcome back and has Pablo Escobar gone too far? I mean, it seems extraordinary given all the other things he's done, but blowing up that aircraft, the assassinations of presidential candidates, that's brought him into Washington's sights, hasn't it, David?

Yeah, killing half the Supreme Court just wasn't quite enough. It had to go further. I mean, it is one of the wilder aspects of the story of just how far to this point Pablo has gone before the United States starts to get really serious about bringing him to justice or attempting to kill him. And at this point, after the Avianca airliner bombing, the George H.W. Bush administration starts to look into what might be the legal justification for targeting Pablo. because this is not post-9-11, right? The legal framework that the American government is dealing with to go after a Columbia-based narco-trafficker, well, it's kind of thin, right? So since the mid-70s, the issue of targeting foreign citizens for death had been governed by executive order 1, 2, 3,33.

And the pertinent parts of that basically say that there is a prohibitioner, on assassination. So nobody employed by or acting on behalf of Washington can engage in or conspire to engage in assassination. And then there can be no indirect participation by any agency of the intelligence community in requesting anybody to kind of undertake activities forbidden by that order. So it's attempting to put some guardrails on a lot of the insanity that happened in the 50s and 60s in the U.S. intelligence community. Yeah. It comes out. after the commissions which reveal all the attempts to kill Castro and all the kind of crazy plots that the CIA had been up to. So they put this prohibition in, which kind of sounds like it

stops assassination. But then again, this is also a war, isn't it? You've got a war on drugs. This is a very interesting story about the overlap between the intelligence world and the military world. And the two are fused here. And that offers, I guess, a route for the United States to be able to go after people and to do certain things. So, I mean, literally weeks after the Avianca bombing, the White House releases an opinion by the Department of Justice, which concludes that it would not violate the Possecomitatis Act, which is essentially a prohibition on using the military to enforce laws in the U.S., right? DOJ wants to be sure it's clear that using the military in Colombia isn't going to violate that

law. and they come up with a judgment that basically says if the president uses clandestine or low visibility military force is the term use, that it would not constitute assassination. If the U.S. military forces were employed against the combatant forces of another nation, a guerrilla force or a terrorist or other organization whose actions pose a threat to the security of the United States. so you can see how, given the airliner bombing, Pablo fits square into that definition. Strikes me as a very well-lawyered statement. Oh, yeah. Appropriately papered, yes. Appropriately papered.

And it is interesting because it becomes, I mean, you see in lots of other contexts, we don't do assassination, but we do preemptive killing of people who pose a direct United States. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this goes right through to the bin Laden rage, where technically it was a capture or kill, but everyone knows what it is. So there's always this wiggle room, but you're right, it is the ability of the U.S. to designate Pablo as a threat to the United States and a terrorist that really gives them the leeway to do this. And again, he'd set that up by bombing airliners with U.S. citizens on board. Well, you can see in this DOJ ruling, I mean, some of the seeds of what will become the justification throughout the war on terror to kill, I mean, not just terrorists who are sitting in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Afghanistan who are not U.S. nationals, but even the killings of someone like Anwar Aalaki, who's a U.S. citizen and who's in Yemen, right? Like, we're not quite there yet, but in 1989, in the hunt for Pablo, I think some of these seeds are being, are being born. Now, Bush, President George H.W. Bush, essentially, is declared an actual war on drugs and put Colombia at its center. So just weeks after the murder of Luis Golan, that presidential candidate, President Bush has signed National Security Directive 18, which calls for more than $250 million worth of military law enforcement and intelligence assistance to fight the drug cartels in South America over the next five years. And a week after that, he's authorized $65 million in aid for Columbia alone. At that point, Colombia is probably the source of maybe 80% of the cocaine that's making into the U.S., so allocating some money specifically for that theater makes. He authorizes sending a small contingent of U.S. special forces to Colombia to train its police and military. So again, we're seeing this creep of more and more U.S. sort of military involvement in South America. And you have some senior U.S. officials are even starting to weigh steps of like how would we approve unilateral U.S. military action against the narcos without the approval of the Colombian government. So over the next five years, the U.S. is basically going to underwrite a covert war in Colombia. U.S. spending for international. anti-drug efforts is going to grow from less than $300 million in 1989 to more than $700

million by 1991. And that doesn't even reflect the black budget. So the secret kind of military and intelligence spend that'll be deployed as part of this effort. It does remind me a little bit about, you know, going back to the war on terror analogies, the war against al-Qaeda when it's in Pakistan. And that issue, that you're both funding the Pakistani government and working with them. And you know that there's elements the Pakistani state who have close relationships with al-Qaeda and might be protecting them? And do you, you know, act unilaterally? And I mean, in the modern world, you've got drone strikes and predator drones to take people out unilaterally, which is what the US ends up doing in Pakistan. But at that point, this is all going through

the Colombian government, which obviously has its advantages, but also, you know, has its challenges, I guess. But the US is basically going to bankroll special teams of Colombians to do this for them and to some extent with them. Well, and I mean, you need some element. of Colombian help to do this, right? And ideally, the Colombians would be taking the lead. But really, at this point in the late 80s, right, if you're Washington, you kind of look at your array of Colombian military and security and police institutions, and you've got to be thinking, boy, like, do we have actual partners here? It's to your, your Pakistan analogy. So what happens is that with some of this U.S. funding, the Colombians create special police units, which

are called the search block that are dedicated to hunting down Pablo and the other narco kingpins. Command of the group is considered so dangerous that it is supposed to rotate monthly, although, as we will see, that doesn't practically happen. And command is initially given to a man

who will be very important for this story. Colonel Hugo Martinez, who's known to all as flaco. Skinny. Is that what it means? Skinny is how it translates. He is a really, really interesting character, isn't he?

He's a stern man. He's apparently very tall, very skinny, very taciturn. He's quiet. He's kind of bookish. He's a long-time administrator, but very tough, very courageous. And I think he, more than anyone else, is going to embody the Colombian side of the hunt for Pablo Escobar. He is an example of those Colombians who are brave enough to not take the silver and risk taking the lead from Pablo and to go into what will prove to be a long war with Pablo. And I think he's a

very interesting figure in that. But also knows how to play the game, I think, as well. But yeah, this search block is going to become the kind of key instrument, isn't it, for the U.S. and for the Colombians to go after them? Well, and Pablo has thoughts on the search block, of course. And he responds to its creation by saying it won't last 15 days. Thankfully, he's very wrong in that. But the task in front of the search block is almost impossible. I think because effectively what they're doing, you know, you kind of think about it, okay, it's a group established from units of the national police, some other elite kind of police and security institutions they draw from it to form the search block. It's not the military, but you are effectively invading Medellin. It's not like you're policing or conducting security operations in Apache territory that you fully control. because Pablo and the cartel essentially own Medellin, right? Pablo owns enough of the police in that city that one of the rules,

the sort of founding rules of the search block, is that it cannot be staffed with native Antiochians. So from the region containing Medellin and around it. So the search block bring men from elsewhere in the country. They absorb some of these specialized units from the Colombian version of the FBI and a special branch of the judicial police. some in the search block work in uniform under what, I mean, essentially ends up becoming similar to a military command. Others are plaincloses civilians. And because they're being drawn from other parts of the country, they kind of start from scratch, right? They don't have local sources. They don't necessarily know the geography. They can't really collaborate with the police because they would fear that the police would report to Pablo. Yeah. And they stand out because they don't speak with that Paisa act. accent, right, that Pablo and the other, you know, cartel members from Medellin would have. So

they're kind of sitting docks, right? And in the first 15 days of the search block attempting to work in Medellin, 30 of Martinez's 200 men are killed, picked off by Pablo Sicario's often with the help of the police. 30 out of 200. Back to your point on courage, I mean, you have to have, you know, some guts to be, to be accepting a judge. job with the search block. And in fact, I mean, this is a sign of Hugo Martinez's character. I think it just hardens his resolve. So he gets 200 more men. They have to actually construct special funeral chapels in Medellin and in Bogota to handle the demand for funerals for members of the search block. And at the end of October of 1989, Martinez is supposed to be replaced, right?

Because he's only supposed to do this for a month. And even though he's done his duty and has been courageous, you would prefer another job. And in the classic case of you don't want to succeed at jobs that you don't want to do in the future, the department basically says, look, you've done such a good job, Hugo, why don't you just stay, right? So he stays on. That's not the conversation you want. No one else wants to run the search block. But he does it, doesn't he? He does. And of course, inevitably, Obama has discovered in the basement of the apartment building where Martinez and his family are living, and because the residents of the building are all high-ranking national police officers, it means that one of them, if not multiple, were probably on Pablo's payroll, and Martinez was

essentially betrayed from the inside. The families in the building take a vote, and they actually ask Colonel Martinez and his family to leave the building, right, because they're worried about everybody else's security. Soon after that, a retired police officer that Martinez has apparently known very well for years shows up. at his office and says, I come to you obligated, meaning that Pablo has gotten to him. And this guy offers $6 million. He offers Martinez $6 million to call off the hunt or, better yet,

keep it going, but do kind of a shoddy job. And don't do any damage to the cartel. And he also, this guy asks, as part of that $6 million, bribe if they could get a list of this. traders in Pablo's organization, meaning the sources that the search block has recruited. And I think it begs the question here, Gordon, would you have taken the $6 million? I don't think I'd have taken the $6 million. He says, trying to be honest. I think I'd have been agitating to leave that job. I think I would have tried to stay clean, but not do that job. What would you have done, David?

I think I might have done the shoddy job. I don't know. It's a terrible position to be in. I like to think I wouldn't have taken it, but boy, it's a rough position to be in if you're Colonel Martinez. Yeah, and Martinez says the guy, tell Pablo that you came but did not find me here and then leave this matter as if it had never occurred, he says. So it's quite interesting because he also, he's giving his old friend a way out as well. We're at a point in the story here where we're setting up, I think, some of the teams that are going to be going after Pablo. The search block is really the primary Colombian element. But, Gordon, there's an absolute alphabet soup of U.S. agencies and organizations that are starting to get more involved in Colombia because of all of that money and the political

will from the George H.W. Bush administration to get more involved in the war on drugs in Bogota. Yeah, you talk about the alphabet soup. There is that slight feeling of everyone wants in, in the U.S. on this and in Washington. You know, you can sense it's become a political priority. for the administration. There's a war on drugs. We're at a point at which the Cold War is coming to an end where some of the organizations, including the CIA, are kind of looking for new missions and new things to do, to justify themselves. The old things have gone. So you can see that it is an alphabet suit because everyone wants to get in and actually show their value to some extent in Washington in order to preserve themselves and preserve their budgets and to keep

going. I mean, that's part of what's going on. Absolutely it is. And I think, you know, to kind of lay some of them out, I mean, of course, we're going to have the CIA Gordon involved in this hunt. How could we not? Right. I mean, again, I feel just a warmth in the conversation. We'll see how well they do. Talk about them. But it is true that in Colombia in the late 1980s, I mean, the focus of the agency's collection to all of the sources that the station in Bogota would have recruited, they have not really been focused on the cartels. They've been focused on the Marxist insurgency in the hills, on politics in Bogota, and shoring up the democratic anti-communist government in Bogota. And counter-narcotics has only recently been defined as a CIA admission. I mean, the counter-narcotics center dates from 1989. So it's brand new. This has not been a real focus of the agency in Columbia up to this point. We should also note that from the standpoint of the agency sources, but I think just also the human intelligence piece of this more broadly, narcotics cartels are really hard intelligence targets

to recruit sources inside. So I think the Medellin cartel, we could think of it maybe a little bit like Al-Qaeda prior to 9-11, where they have a sanctuary in Medellin. They have safe haven there. They are an exceptionally brutal organization. So if you flip on the cartels, you, you can expect not to be jailed, right, or slapped on the wrist. You will be brutally tortured and your family will be tortured probably while you watch and then you'll all be killed, right? So the incentives for collaboration just from that standpoint are really, really limited. And this is different from al-Qaeda or a terrorist group target, is that the cartels are awash with money. So if you're trying to go and buy a source, you can't outbid though. You can't struggle

to outbib Pablo. Exactly. Exactly. The numbers around how much money the cartels are making in the late 1980s are of course very hard to sort of pin down. But like the cartel is probably making at least $70 million a day. So the high level guys that are going to have access to the plans and intentions of the cartel are obscenely wealthy and really hard to buy off. So it suggests that human intelligence is a particularly difficult target because you're not going to turn people ideologically that easily. You're not going to turn them with more money. So, I mean, is that why ultimately this becomes more of a technical intelligence mission rather than necessarily entirely a human intelligence mission? It's kind of interesting, isn't it?

Is it because it's such a hard target? I think that's exactly right. And we should mention that from the human side of things, as much as it pains this former CIA guy to include other agencies in the collection of human intelligence, we have, you know, the FBI has made some inroads working informants who are captured in the U.S. And then gets sent back to work inside the cartel of sources, but they're not a huge player. The DEA, agents of the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, are on the ground working with the Colombians. police trying to run and recruit sources inside the Medellin cartel. But I would say, I think you're spot on on the human side of things because, number one, in the histories of this fight against the Medellin cartel and in the memoirs written by the DEA agents who are involved, a lot of their

sources are killed. And at least as far as I can tell, I don't think anybody, be it CIA or DEA or FBI ever succeeded in recruiting for any period of time, a really well-placed source inside Pablo's organization. We should also point out that the relationships in particular between all these humid collectors and especially between the CIA and the DEA in this period are really, really awful. You shock me. You might be surprised. You might be surprised.

You might be surprising amongst U.S. intelligence agencies, never. Queue the bureaucratic infighting. I would say that from the CIA side, they probably viewed the DEA agents as sort of lesser versions of FBI special agents, which in those years would be saying something, right? So from the, from the CIA perspective, the D. They're not even Feebs. They're not even, they're not even febes. There's an absolute chasm between these two agencies. And there's some great lines from the DEA memoir. where they talk about going into the station, I can still remember the humiliation of going into their offices, meaning the CIA station at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotov. Whenever we walked in, they would activate a flashing blue light throughout their office space to let everyone know that there was an outsider in their midst,

which you would do in a station any time you have an uncleared person come in. There's like a red light that goes off that says there's an uncleared person. So the DEA people don't have TSSCI clearances, right? So they're uncleared people. They're coming in. But then I love the next slide is the best. We were then required to sit at a child-sized desk located just outside the office of the chief of station. He just imagined it's like given some like primary school desk to sit at and, you know, just see what you're given.

I mean, it feels like deliberately slightly humiliating, I think. Yeah, and it probably was. They're not enemies in the same sense that all of the Americans in Colombian government are with the Medellin cartel, but they're not exactly working closely together in this period. But actually, it's not the CIA, which is arguably the most important player in this, David. It pains me, Gordon. I know it pains you to say it, but I'm going to point that out because, as I said, I think it's the technical side, which actually is going to be some of the most important when it comes to intelligence gathering. And that comes from the U.S. military.

It does. And this is one of the more interesting and spooky units that will be part of this story. This group is going to fly into Colombia in late 1989 and early 1990, so pretty much right after. after the Avianca airliner bombing and this sort of influx of support from Washington. It is a small, highly secretive technical unit inside the army. Like all good spooky units by 1989, its name has changed quite often. It had been called ISA for intelligence support activity, been called the Secret Army of Northern Virginia. Which sounds like something from the Revolutionary War.

Which does, or potentially the Civil War. It's been called Torn Victory, Cemetery Wind, Capacity Gear, and Robin Court. And it is an organization, a group called Centra Spike, which is also a great name. Now, that is a good name. I mean, these guys are good, aren't they? They're good. And the focus of Centra Spike, which is going to be very useful in the Pablo Escobar situation, is their focus is finding people, Gordon.

How do you find people? And they have a particular technical specialty in this regard, which in 1989 was absolutely cutting edge. And it is radio location from the air. So how do I pinpoint the origin of a radio or cell phone call? And we should probably explain a bit about this because this is pre, you know, pre the kind of modern digital world. And particularly drug lords are always at the advanced edge of technology, aren't they? They're going to be at the advanced edge. They're early adopters. Yeah. This is a good example of where they are using that and where there is this kind of cat and mouse game. But I find it so interesting because actually some of the techniques that Central Spike are going to use are basically very similar to what you read about from the Second World War. And direction finding and the way in which the Nazis were looking for undercover British, you know, SOE and MI6 operatives in Europe who were using radio sets to kind of wireless telegraphy said messages back to Britain. And the Germans would have, in that case, vans driving around cities where they thought they might be.

And they would try and pick up a stronger signal and then try and triangulate based on the strength of the signal where it was most likely coming from. And that's essentially what they're still doing now in the late 80s, early 90s. But by 1989, Centra spike can pinpoint a radio or cell phone signal down to within a few hundred meters in many cases. And instead of triangulating from ground-based receivers, like you mentioned in the Second World War, where you've got vans, they're all on the ground. Centra Spike can do this from inside one small aircraft. And the aircraft accomplishes this by taking readings from different points along its flight path. So as soon as Centra Spike receives a target signal, the pilot can begin kind of flying an arc around it and using onboard computers to do a very precise and very quick calculation of where that signal might be. coming from, and they can typically do this within seconds. So Central Spike is a military unit.

There's a major in that unit named Steve Jacoby. He goes to Columbia. He's only, there's a handful of people in the embassy who are read into the program, and it's probably operating largely out of the station. He's got a very small team. They obviously don't want many people in Columbia, if at all, to know that they're there. These guys are not partying. They're not. They're not. going out in Bogota. They are playing themselves off as really boring admin or tech people at the embassy. The team by that point has some experience in both El Salvador and Nicaragua, primarily using this technology to target communist guerrilla groups, right? So it's now being turned, again, theme of this series, right? What had been used against communism is now being

turned against drug lords. And what I think is very interesting about this technology is that Once Centra Spike has acquired a signal, so long as the target left the battery in their phone, the Americans could actually turn the phone back on without triggering its lights or anything. So it admits kind of a low intensity signal, which would allow Centra Spike to establish the location of that phone. And then you could put the plane into position above to monitor the calls. And to accommodate all this, the CIA has, of course, set up a cutout corporation with the wonderful name of Falcon Aviation to be. the cover for the planes. I thought the CIA was also trying to do its own kind of radio detection efforts at this time, as well as this Centrasbite team. And isn't the reality that they were slightly competing? And isn't the reality that the CIA were kind of outgunned by Centresbyte.

You seem to have neglected to mention that. Oh, it just comes later in the story, Gordon. Oh, does it? It does. The CIA had their own platform, which I think was remarkably similar. allegedly Gordon. It was not quite as accurate. This is an absolute theme of the hunt for Pablo is the sort of competition and below the surface near hatred that many of these organizations had for one another. And it's absolutely a feature, not a bug, of the American effort to hunt down Pablo. But there I guess with Centrospike, this new technical capability established, you know, a team which have got the ability to fly over Colombia, to try and look for targets surreptitiously, to do it without being spotted, they hope?

A new tool, really, in the hunt for Escobar as it's escalating. Should we stop? And next time we'll see how that hunt unfolds and whether they can find their man. Well, that's right. But Gordon, we'd be remiss if we said that we hope listeners would direction find their way to the rest is classified. dot com where you can join the declassified club get early access to all of our series but especially this one find out exactly how centra spike and the americans nail pablo eskabar sign up we'll see you next time see you next time