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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Bowden, who wrote "Black Hawk Down," a bestselling account of the disastrous 1993 helicopter raid by U.S. Ranger troops in Mogadishu, Somalia, knows this specialized element of the military well, but that doesn't make him immune to the comic dimensions of this rally -- a "sweepstakes" is what he calls it. No sooner did Escobar escape than several players began licking their chops, from the local DEA chief, "who thrilled to the chase," to the U.S. ambassador, Morris Busby, a man with a record of Special Forces service and coordinating covert military actions. It wasn't just the challenge that revved Busby's engines, though; it was also the target. Escobar provided exactly the kind of villain the post-Cold War counterterrorist crowd craved: "Warriors believe in intractable evil. Certain forces cannot be compromised with; they must simply be defeated ... 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 clearcut than the challenge posed by this man he considered a monster, Pablo Escobar."
Escobar was, indeed, a monster, but that passage from "Killing Pablo" recalls a conversation in Don DeLillo's novel "Underworld," in which an American surveying the poisoned remains of a Soviet nuclear test site asks his Russian host, "Does anyone remember why we were doing all this?" "Yes," the Russian replies, "for contest. You won, we lost. You have to tell me how it feels. Big winner." In "Libra," his novel of the Kennedy assassination, DeLillo suggested that conspiracies exist not so much to achieve certain ends but to satisfy the appetite of certain men for conspiracy itself. Politics becomes a necessary pretext for what they really want: to play cloak-and-dagger.
One of the striking aspects of "Black Hawk Down" was Bowden's incorporation of the reports of Somali witnesses in his account of the disastrous Mogadishu raid. Likewise, in "Killing Pablo," he presents the Escobar manhunt from the Colombians' perspective as well as the Americans', and the two are strikingly different. The Colombians who stood up to the drug lords showed an almost unimaginable courage and integrity, resisting enormous bribes and threats against not only their own lives, but those of their wives, children, parents and friends. One of them, Hugo Martinez, the police official in charge of Search Bloc, the Colombian team dedicated to capturing Escobar, initially resisted the assignment: "Cocaine was not Colombia's problem, it was the norteamericanos' problem," is how Bowden characterizes his views. Generally, he writes, the Colombians felt that "the gringos were the only ones fixated on the drug trade."
For the Colombians, the hunt for Escobar was not a matter of drug law enforcement, but a battle in a civil war over who would run their nation. And they didn't especially trust their counselors. The first Americans brought in to train the Search Bloc found the Colombians had a prickly blend of pride and incompetence: During one raid, an officer refused an American's suggestion that they crawl toward the target house, retorting, "My guys don't crawl in the dirt and mud." The house's occupants quickly spotted the approaching, upright raiding party and fled well before it arrived. Eventually, though, the Search Bloc incorporated some American practices and learned to appreciate the technology brought in by outfits like Centra Spike, gizmos that enabled them to listen in on and locate the source of cellphone calls and radio transmissions -- communications essential to the drug lords' operations.
But "recapturing" Escobar (it soon became an unspoken assumption that, given his ability to manipulate the Colombian legal system, he should not be taken alive), and striking a blow for the rule of law in Colombia, came at a terrible price. One of the key factors in bringing Escobar down was an anonymous group of vigilantes calling themselves Los Pepes. Los Pepes' activities escalated from the planting of nonlethal bombs to the kidnapping and killing of key members of Escobar's operation, as well as menacing his family on a regular basis. In the end, the group would boast of having killed as many as 300 people, and while Bowden can find no hard evidence of the fact, it seems probable that, at the very least, Search Bloc cooperated with Los Pepes by supplying them with information and that, at the most, Los Pepes included some Search Bloc members in its ranks. That means that American personnel provided training, assistance and information to the death squad without presidential authorization or the notification of Congress, a violation of U.S. law.
Whether other Americans -- specifically the gung-ho Delta Force operators who had been officially confined to their base -- participated in the Escobar hunt even more directly remains unknown, but both Bowden and other observers think it's likely they did. (Certainly one Delta operator managed to get off base long enough to father a child by a Colombian woman.) What is clear is that hundreds of deaths and $30.8 billion later, there was just as much cocaine flowing into America as when Pablo Escobar had been a free man, 70 to 80 percent of it coming from Colombia. "All-in-all, there was more cocaine available for sale in the United States at cheaper prices [in 1993] than ever before in history." The DEA station chief in Bogotá told Bowden that he was "convinced that Cali [the other big drug cartel] was the big winner in all this," and that many of the Colombian policemen and other officials he worked with were "in bed" with both Cali and Los Pepes. Killing Escobar had made no more of a dent in the trade than arresting Noriega had.
What the drug war has done is given zealous U.S. attorneys like Dick Gregorie and seasoned Cold Warriors like Morris Busby the chance to go on believing they live in a world where "intractable evil" must be fought by brave and resolute men like themselves. It's an occasion to build state-of-the-art surveillance equipment and to deploy crackerjack special operative units. It's a kind of employment program for spooks and commandos who'd otherwise be at loose ends. In DeLillo's words, it's a "contest," a most welcome thing to the kind of man whose world doesn't make much sense, and isn't much fun, without one. Whether it's worth the price the rest of us are paying for it is up to us to decide.
