XIII. At Last the Fall
Examining captured weapons at the DIJIN
I must admit that being pulled out of the Search Bloc in Medellin was beneficial to my operation. After all, I was sent to Colombia to help the police and military affect weapons trafficking and not to hunt down Pablo Escobar. There were DEA agents dedicated to that. Although I was no longer physically stationed in Medellin, I was still very much involved in the search operation. I continued to trace the guns the Search Bloc recovered from the cartel. I continued to assess the car bombings in Medellin and traced the explosives caches the Search Bloc recovered. However, there were other issues outside of Medellin that required my serious attention.
Escobar had shifted his focus to intimidating the government and stepped-up his bombing campaign in Bogota. The guerrillas had launched a campaign of their own causing great consternation at the Presidential Palace and the U.S. Embassy. The two campaigns differed in size and scope. Escobar used 80-kilo car bombs to target innocent bystanders at shopping centers, markets, and other areas of town sure to guarantee a large body count. The FARC and ELN, on the other hand used pie bombs to target banks and other economic centers mostly in the predawn or the dead of night to avoid killing innocents. Escobar was interested in instilling fear to force the government to relent while the guerrillas were interested in furthering their ideology, as bankrupt as it had become with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and killing civilians was not in their best interest.
Things were heating up for Escobar. A shadowy group calling themselves ‘Los Pepes’, an acronym for ‘People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar’ emerged in spectacular fashion burning Escobar’s collection of antique cars. They sprang from Escobar’s former associates, who he had targeted for death. They waged a parallel hunt for Escobar, his sicarios, and his infrastructure and did so effectively. So effective were they that Escobar asked the U.S. for help to protect his family, who the Pepes made clear were fair game. Although the pressure being exerted by the Search Bloc on Escobar’s associates and sicarios had a lot to do with it, many of the cartel’s henchmen began to turn themselves in to avoid being captured by Los Pepes, Los Pepes were fond of torturing the sicarios they captured and them humiliating them by stringing them up with a somber warning to the other cartel associates.
I made a note in my work diary that I thought the end was near based on the successes the Search Bloc was realizing, chipping away at Escobar’s cadre of sicarios and henchmen with a little help from Los Pepes’ terror tactics. (I have no knowledge that the Pepes ever worked directly with the Search Bloc. I never saw it in the time I worked along with the Search Bloc in Medellin). Almost invariably, guns were taken from those killed, captured, or that surrendered giving me crucial insight into the Medellin cartel’s weapons supply sources. On March first, 1993, William Cardenas Calle, a principal sicario behind the car bombings in Bogota surrendered as did Jose Fernando Posada, Escobar’s chief financial officer. The next day, the Search Bloc dealt the Medellin cartel a major blow by killing Hernán Darío Henao, alias ‘H. H’. in barrio Laureles in Medellín. Henao was Escobar’s chief of security and his wife’s cousin. He ran Escobar’s lavish country home, Hacienda Napoles as well as his cocaine labs in the Magdalena Medio. There were numerous others taken down by the Search Bloc, far too many to mention. Each had a definite impact on the cartel’s operation. By June, even Pablos Ecobar’s brother, Robert fled to Chile to get away from the Search Bloc and Los Pepes.
Meanwhile, the bombings continued, and the Colombian intelligence services were focused on targeting the means used to carry out the attacks. I, as well as other U.S. entities with explosives backgrounds, did all we could to help. On March fourth, the police reported the recovery of four and a half tons of ANFO (ammonium nitrate and fuel oil) in Barranquilla. My notes suggest that it might have actually happened three weeks previously). Supposedly, Escobar had been planning to bomb the U.S. Embassy and it was ‘suspected’ that this material could potentially have been used to make a truck bomb like the one that brought down the DAS building in 1989. The next day, a fifty-kilo bomb was deactivated in front of the Telecom (tele-communications) building in Bogota that I believe was attributed to the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas.
On April 15th, Mexico City-based ATF Assistant Attaché, Ramon Bazan, who was in Bogota covering my office while I was otherwise engaged narrowly escaped becoming a victim of a two-hundred-pound car bomb that went off in front of the Centro 93 shopping center. Ramon had just left the shopping center when the bomb detonated. I had a similar close call as I mentioned previously when I drove by a Pizza Hut in extremely slow traffic thirty minutes before a car bomb went off killing several people. Such was the nature of Escobar’s bombing campaign. As if the bombings were not enough to keep everyone on edge, an incident in Managua, Nicaragua ratcheted-up the tension.
On May 23, 1993, an explosion in a sophisticated bunker built under an auto-repair shop in Managua’s east end sent an alarm throughout the Americas when it was discovered that it contained, among an arsenal of other weapons, a surface-to-air missile. The recovery of surface-to-air missiles in the hands of weapons traffickers sent an alarm to ALL the intelligence services operating in Colombia. This development posed a real threat that the Medellin cartel or the guerrillas could possibly acquire surface-to air missiles.
Since the end of the Nicaraguan and El Salvadoran civil wars in Central America, a steady stream of military rifles and ordnance were finding their way into the hands of Colombian guerrillas and to a lesser extent the Medellin cartel. I traced M16 rifles that were reported lost in Vietnam or sold to the Nicaraguan and El Salvadoran armies. (Note: The Soviets often use captured NATO weapons to hide their signature). I identified AK47 rifles linked to Russia, Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea. Through ATF’s industry contacts around the world and in the intelligence community, it was determined that the weapons were supplied to the combatants in the Central American civil wars by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Manuel Noriega in Panama. After the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, they too began to clandestinely supply weapons to the FMLN in El Salvador including SAM-7s.
In the fall of 1989, a Cessna 310 piloted by Nicaraguans that had apparently run out of fuel crashed outside of San Salvador carrying two dozen Soviet-made SA-7 surface-to-air missiles, a Red Eye surface-to-air missile, a 75mm recoilless rifle, and 82mm mortar ammunition. The lone survivor of the four-man crew committed suicide rather than be taken alive. A second airplane landed at an airstrip southeast of El Salvador after running out of fuel and was burned by her crew after her cargo, believed to have been similar in configuration as the wrecked aircraft, was off-loaded. In the months that followed in 1990, the FMLN downed two government helicopters. In the fall, the FMLN insurgents downed two El Salvadoran Cessna Sky Master forward air control aircraft and a Cessna A-37 Dragonfly jet. In January 1991, the FMLN added two more helicopters, one crewed by American military personnel.
After Violetta Chamorro defeated Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas in the 1990 presidential election in Nicaragua, the Sandinista army admitted to clandestinely trafficking surface-to-air missiles and other weapons to El Salvador and she wanted it stopped. Unfortunately, control of the Nicaraguan army remained with the Sandinistas, who considered its armaments to be their property and not the government’s. The State Department came to me with a request from President Chamorro’s newly appointed ambassador to Colombia. He wanted help in stemming the flow of Sandinista arms to Colombia. I met with the Ambassador who briefed me on the Sandinista army’s weapons trafficking operations. He asked me to help him track suspected Sandinista-sourced matériel recovered in Colombia. In return, he would apprise me of any new information his government developed. It turned out to be a mutually beneficial arrangement.
The Sandinistas joined a hodge-podge collection of international weapons traffickers operating out of Central America. Most were unsophisticated. If memory serves, there were two independent studies conducted by international think tanks estimating that there were between 2 and 3 million small arms in the hands of civilians in Nicaragua and El Salvador. During their tenure as the government of Nicaragua, the Sandinistas armed its’ population with small arms to prepare for an imagined attempt by the U.S. to depose them. Likewise, there were numerous small arms and ordnance left in the hands of former fighters on both sides of the El Salvadoran conflict. When the wars in both countries ended, there were smalls arms in the hands of farmers, bus drivers, fishermen, and the like. Gun traffickers took advantage of this surplus and a black market sprang up to relieve those wanting to cash in on it. At the time, an AK47 could be bought for as little as $25 and an M16 for $100. A Soviet F1 fragmentation grenade could be bought for $5.
The guns and ordnance were trafficked overland through Costa Rica into Panama where the weapons were funneled through the Darién province into Colombia’s Chocó department. The maritime routes were even more problematic. The weapons came by fishing boat or go-fast boats from the Bay of Bluefields in Nicaragua to San Andres island, a Colombian possession located a hundred or so miles off the Nicaraguan coast. They came down the Pacific coast in fishing boats and the Caribbean to the Gulf of Urabá, Coveñas, Barranquilla, and Santa Marta along Colombia’s north coast secreting the weapons in their fish or cargo holds. When a caché of weapons was found buried somewhere with no one to interview, the traffickers made it easy to determine the supply routes by overlooking simple things like leaving the guns wrapped in Costa Rican or Panamanian newspapers before they went into the ground.
With the explosion in Managua in May 1993, it became evident that weapons traffickers had gained access to a supply of surface-to air missiles. It was believed that it was only a matter of time before the surface-to-air missiles would filter into Colombia to either Escobar’s killers or the guerrillas. Both groups had demonstrated a desire to bring down government aircraft.
Escobar’s sicarios had already downed a commercial liner and had been found in possession of a spent Red Eye missile tube. The guerrillas often took unsuccessful pot shots at Colombian helicopters with anti-tank rockets.
I had been working closely with the DAS, the DIJIN, and military intelligence regarding weapons trafficking from Central America, identifying captured weapons, exchanging intelligence, debriefing informers and what not. When it came to guerrillas, I worked with Naval Intelligence headed by Naval Infantry Colonel Rodrigo Quiñones and the Colombian Army’s 20th Brigade (Intelligence) headed by Colonel Padilla. In May, Colonel Padilla informed me that he had information that the guerrillas were trying to acquire surface-to-air missiles on the heels of the incident in Managua. I told him that I would make identification materials available to him. In return, he provided me with copies of several manuals captured from the FARC and ELN relating to improvised explosives devices.
Coincidentally, as news was breaking about the secret bunker in Managua, Louis Velasco, a headquarters agent in ATF’s explosives branch and Dave Shatzer, a gifted explosives specialist arrived in Bogota to help me with the spike in the bombings. I gave them a detailed briefing on the attacks along with an overview on the strategies, techniques, and explosives materials being used by the Medellin cartel and the guerrillas. I provided them with police and military reports detailing the attacks along with pictures, diagrams, and the various Colombian assessments. I also provided them with my assessments and analysis.
Since my arrival in 1989, I had come across numerous variations of grenades, rifle grenades, mortars, and other military ordnance the police and military were seizing. Shatzer and his colleagues at ATF’s Explosives Technology Branch had been helping me identify the matériel via fax and over the telephone. I had collected a lot of data and with Shatzer’s help, I put together a Spanish language identification manual that I would use to further training. With the discovery of the SA-7 in the hands of weapons traffickers in Managua, I needed to include man-portable shoulder-fired weapons to the manual. Shatzer would help me with this.
In June I traveled to the North Coast to examine weapons captured by the national police from the ELN guerrillas and to conduct training in Barranquilla and Santa Marta. When I speak of conducting training, I actually do more than that. I take the opportunity to meet as many of the command officers and rank-and-file troops working in the field to debrief them regarding what they are seeing and what they may have heard. As a part of my lecture, I show the class how to fill the stampings on the firearms with chalk to get better photographs. I also show them how to lift the markings using a pencil to fill the stampings with lead and scotch tape to apply over the markings to transfer them to a sheet a paper noting where on the firearm it was located. I provided them with my phone and fax numbers at the embassy so that they can fax me the markings along with a report. As I have mentioned, this simple gesture helped me establish a real-time, country-wide intelligence network.
On July 6, the Panamanians seized a large cache of AK47 rifles in Colón on the Caribbean coast hidden in a steam roller. If memory serves, the steam roller was destined for Peru. A Panamanian customs inspector was killed when he used a blow torch to open the huge metal roller triggering an explosion. The Panamanian chief of firearms asked for my help. I am not certain, but I believe the guns might have been Sandinista weapons destined for the corrupt Peruvian National Intelligence Director, Vladimiro Montesinos. Montesinos would later be implicated in a deal to provide 10,000 AK47 rifle to the FARC. On July 14, I traveled to Panama to conduct training and collect intelligence in the manner I described.
On July 26th, I took Miami-based ATF Special Agent John Cooper to Barranquilla to interview Wilmis Sandoval, a suspected Colombian north coast gun trafficker. Cooper’s investigation exposed Sandoval’s modus operandi of secreting guns in washing machines and dryers in Miami and putting them in a shipping container to Barranquilla. Sandoval failed to keep his appointment and I returned on July 29th with Lieutenant Rocha of the DIJIN and interviewed Sandoval at the Fiscalia (prosecutor’s office). Sandoval all but admitted it but did provide enough for Cooper to make his case.
On August 11th, I met the Chief of Ballistics for the Ecuadorian lab at the Colombian National Police lab. I briefed him about the LAWS rockets used to attack the Colombian army’s air base at Rio Negro outside of Medellin and of rockets recovered from a FARC transporter along the border with Ecuador. I advised him that all were traced to the Ecuadoran army. He told me that my information corroborated his government’s suspicion that corrupt military personnel were pilfering weapons from the armory. (I would later obtain a flyer issued by the FARC in Ecuador enticing soldiers to sell their weapons to them.)
After attending a two-week safety and survival school at Glynnco, Georgia I returned to Colombia. On September 27th, Shatzer and Velasco returned to help conduct more explosives training and gather additional intelligence I had been accumulating. The next day, the guerrillas planted a 27-kilo car bomb in Pasto, near the border with Ecuador using two ignition systems that failed go off. By this time, I was beginning to develop a recognizable signature for the guerrillas’ bombing tactics. They differed from the cartel’s signature in that they used mining explosives while the cartel used ammonium nitrate dynamite. The guerrillas tended to use small devices while the cartel went large.
On Oct 5th through the 8th, I attended an Organization of American States (OAS) arms trafficking seminar. The seminar denounced small arms trafficking and prepared a joint statement obliging all member countries to enact gun control measures to affect the problem. Obviously, we did not agree to it and did not sign the agreement. The seminar did provide me with an opportunity to make new and meaningful contacts throughout the Americas. I offered to help them trace firearms and provide training my agency would follow up on in the future.
I was busy in October conducting training, delivering trace results and trafficking analysis to my Colombian counterparts, and meeting with my intel counterparts relating to an increase in ELN activity. On October 13th, I went to Ibaqué, Tolima in the Central Andes to conduct firearms and explosives identification classes for the DAS, the Army, and the prosecutor’s office (fiscalia). The army requested that I return to train a larger cadre of their armorers, line officers, and intelligence officers. On Oct 22nd to the 27th, I went to San Andres Island to gather intel on Nicaraguan gun traffickers and conduct training.
In early November, the ELN stepped up its bombings of bank ATMs around Bogota. In each incident, they planted small pipe bombs more intent on making a statement rather doing any real damage it seemed. All the attacks occurred in the predawn when no one was expected to be using them. I went on Home Leave around mid-November.
On December 2nd, I was in Houston at my brother’s house when the I saw the news about Pablo Escobar getting killed on a roof top in El Poblado, a suburb in Medellin. The Colombian headlines read, ‘Al fin cayo’ – At last he falls.
DEA agent Steve Murphy on the roof with Escobar’s corpse Pablo Escobar
