As 1992 began to wind down, so did my time at the Carlos Holguin police school at Medellin. The search for Escobar continued to drag on with no end in sight. In the meantime, the guerrillas had stepped up their activity, acquiring weapons and ordnance from Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Venezuela. The ELN took a page out of the Medellin cartel playbook and started bombing targets in Bogota. The intelligence services from the DAS, DIJIN, Army, and Marines requested my immediate assistance requiring me to travel between Medellin, Bogota, Barranquilla, Cartagena, and San Andres Island. In the fall, DEA agent Steve Murphy began rotating with me to work with the Search Bloc in Medellin.
Red Eye missile tube recovered in Medellin
On August 31st, the Colombian National Police recovered a Red Eye launch tube in the hands of the Medellin cartel along with a World War Two vintage German MG42 light machinegun. As I recall, the Red Eye missile could not be reloaded, and the military generally destroyed the tubes after removing the optics. It had no battery and the optics had been carefully removed suggesting to me that this had been the case with this tube. The U.S. military had taken the Red Eye out-of-service in favor of the more sophisticated, reloadable Stinger missiles and the device possibly was either part of a U.S. military sale to a friendly country or used for training purposes.
As I understand, the U.S. had supplied Red Eye missiles to the Contras in Nicaragua fighting against the Sandinistas. Several were used successfully to down Soviet helicopters. I am relatively confident that the Contras, an irregular military force probably did not adhere to the strict disposal procedures practiced by the U.S. military. However, if this tube had been one of those used by the Contras, it goes to reason that if they did not destroy the tube as per procedure, they probably would not have bothered with carefully removing the optics.
At the time, the U.S. military’s School of the Americas was in neighboring Panama before being relocated to Fort Benning in Georgia. The school is responsible for training soldiers and policemen from friendly countries in Latin America and the Caribbean Basin. It was possible that the tube was not destroyed after being spent in accordance with strict military procedure and may have been pilfered by a U.S. soldier stationed in Panama.
Believe it or not such things happen. When I was stationed in El Paso, Texas the Mexican police recovered several spent rocket tubes left in a crate that had been sold to a junk dealer in Juarez across the border. In another incident, a student took a spent Red Eye tube to his school in the greater Houston area for ‘show and tell’. Then, when I served as ATF’s country attaché in Mexico, the Federal Police asked for my help investigating a retired U.S. soldier moving to Mexico who had brought a spent AT4 anti-tank tube with him in his household goods. The tubes are just that. They look mean but have no teeth. All the technology is in the missile and the optics. They make great souvenirs but are supposed to be destroyed as per military procedure.
A car bomb was detonated in Medellin on September 1st, killing nine requiring my expertise during the post blast investigation. The bomb detonated not far from where I was sleeping at the Carlos Holguin police school. It was loud and somehow, it didn’t wake me. It’s funny how I missed that. Yet, I had no trouble hearing the gentle knocking on my door made by a corporal sent to get me. I identified part of the components recovered from the blast seat as servos from an airplane model. I went with the police agents investigating the bombing to the only hobby shop we could find that sold flying airplane models. The servos were a match. I was not invited to participate in the interviews that followed so I can’t comment how that went.
I spent several days in Manizales training investigators with the national police’s Judicial Intelligence and Investigative Section, the SIJIN after making that white-knuckle drive through guerrilla territory I mentioned previously. I returned to Bogota to conduct a school at the War College and work with the colonel directing operations for Army intelligence at the 20th Brigade. I had been working with the colonel regarding a Michigan-based gun trafficker sending Mini-14 rifles to Colombia and tracking supply lines for 60mm mortars from Venezuela (with the assistance of a Venezuelan secret agent working for the DISIP). The guerrillas had also returned to using anti-tank rockets and he had a tail assembly of one that was used to attack one of their outposts in the Eastern Colombia. As I have mentioned, the tail assembly of mortars and rockets often survive the explosion and are traceable. We had no doubt it came from Venezuela but needed the proof a trace would give us.
I spent the rest of September traveling to Barranquilla on the North Coast to work with the Administrative Department of Security (DAS) and the national police’s Judicial Intelligence and Investigative Directorate, the DIJIN. There had been an influx of AKM rifles being intercepted all along the North Coast and in San Andres Island. We also were working jointly on a case involving a Barranquilla businessman using a shipping company to bring guns and ammunition he was acquiring in Miami using straw purchasers.
October saw me shuffling back and forth working with the Search Bloc in Medellin, conducting training at the War College, and working with Army intelligence in Bogota. I set up an explosive training work shop for December before I took leave in mid-November, returning at the end of the month to conduct training with the DAS in Bogota.
On December 3rd, ten policemen and four civilians were killed by a car bomb in Medellin. I had to write a detailed explanation to headquarters before I could return to Medellin. Like I said, headquarters had started to require this of me more-and-more as the year came to a close, seriously affecting my response time.
On December 4th, while I was busy penning my latest masterpiece, the FARC raided the airbase at Rio Negro in Medellin destroying a Blackhawk helicopter. According to the Colombian Army, the guerrillas used ‘U.S.-made M72 LAWS rockets’ during the attack. However, they placed an improvised explosive device (IED) under the helicopter to make sure they destroyed it completely. (Note: Despite what you might have seen on ‘Blackhawk Down’, disposable rockets like the U.S. M72 are not all that accurate and can go wild.)
Up to that point, I had not seen genuine U.S.-made M72 rockets in the hands of the guerrillas or the cartel. At the time, the FARC were using primarily Swedish-made rockets that had been erroneously identified as the familiar M72 rockets often seen in war movies. They look similar but are light green in color while the U.S. original is olive drab. Many countries copy our ordnance to cash in on the legitimate arms market the U.S dominates. Besides the Swedish-made knock-off, I also encountered West German-made Armburst rockets, East German-made RPG-18 rockets, and a Swedish AT4, but no genuine M72 rockets.
Knowing that I couldn’t expect headquarters to authorize travel to Medellin without an assessment memo, I was going to have to wait to hear from the 20th Brigade before I could get access to the trace information and hoped they’d get it right. As luck would have it, a good friend of mine, a captain with the U.S.’ Seventh Group Special Forces working as an advisor for the Colombian Urban Special Forces was going to Rio Negro with the unit that night. I met him at a bar in the Zona Rosa after work and briefed him what to look for over a drink.
We met at the same bar later that week where he handed me the information. Unlike most of the M72-like rockets I had seen to that point, the nomenclature and lot numbers confirmed that they were the genuine article.
Three days later, the national police intercepted a stake truck carrying nine M72 LAWS rockets in the department (state) of Nariño near the border with Ecuador. The rockets were secreted in the truck in a void behind the headlights. It was being driven by an old man, who had his grandsons with him.
I flew to Pasto, the capital of Nariño at the request of the General Montenegro, the head of the DIJIN to inspect the rockets. That was the third scariest landing I made since coming to Colombia. The scariest was in Bucaramanga, in the Department of Santander in northeast Colombia where the airstrip sat on a mountain top that was just long enough for the airplane to land. The flight into Pasto required that we descend through a heavy cloudbank between several mountains. It was a little unnerving seeing the peaks rising through the cloudbank as we descended into it. Pasto is located on the side of a volcano that had been spewing smoke and ash periodically over the previous month or so. It would erupt several days after my visit.
One thing about the FARC and the ELN – when they get their hands on a new toy, they put it into service immediately. I took the identification information I got from that Seventh Group captain with me just in case the rockets recovered by the police were the same as the ones used in the Rio Negro raid. As it turned out, they were identical. The old man driving the truck claimed he had no idea that the rockets were hidden in the vehicle. He claimed to have been hired by a man to take the truck to a relative in Medellin. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard similar stories working the border in West Texas for seven years.
As I headed back to Bogota, the National Liberation Army (ELN) had bombed three hotels: the Fontana, Travel Lodge, and Royale in Bogota. I proceeded to dive into the post blast investigation learning that the timers used by the guerrillas were identical in configuration to those by the Medellin cartel bombers. This signified to me two possibilities: 1) the guerrillas were working with the cartel; or, they had the same teacher. The Medellin cartel used ammonium nitrate dynamite religiously. The dynamite was manufactured in Ecuador for use in mining and road construction. It shatters rather than cuts like nitro glycerin-base dynamite. The FARC used gels and slurries, another type of mining explosive the Colombians called ‘salchichas’ because they came packaged like sausages.
In my time in Colombia, I had come across bombing manuals put together by the ETA, the Basque terrorist organization, and manuals penned by the Cubans. I knew the Medellin cartel bombers were using techniques developed in the Middle East, taught to them by an ex-Israeli military officer, whose security company had been retained by the defunct Rodriguez Gacha, ‘El Mexicano’ formerly of the Medellin cartel. El Mexicano had developed a .308 caliber headache delivered by a door gunner on a national police helicopter. At the time, there were rumors that several former Irish Republican Army (IRA) explosives experts were looking for work in Colombia (a side effect of peace in Northern Ireland). The rumors must have had some merit. In August 2001, three Irishmen were arrested at the Bogota airport and accused of being with the IRA and providing explosives training to the FARC.
My principal associate at the Explosives Technology Branch called me with the results of the trace on the rockets used in the Rio Negro raid. They had been sold in a U.S. military sale to Ecuador. It was evident that the guerrillas and possibly the Medellin cartel were accessing the rockets through a corrupt Ecuadoran military contact. Later, I would fly to Quito to try and stem the supply line by speaking with a representative with the Ecuadoran Army. I was provided with a FARC circular soliciting guns, grenades, and rockets from the soldiers patrolling the border with Colombia.
On December 7th, the Medellin cartel detonated a car bomb at an apartment complex where several Colombian judges lived, injuring thirty-nine people. I needed to return to Medellin to follow up on the bombing and to brief Colonel Martínez, the commander of the Search Bloc regarding several significant trace results and the recently identified supply line of M72 rockets from Ecuador. My efforts to see the colonel had been hampered by the assessment memos I had to submit before I was authorized to go to Medellin.
On December 10th, Escobar’s sicarios set up a road block on the road between Medellin and the Rio Negro Airport killing three people and kidnapping fifty others. That didn’t help my situation with headquarters as one of my chores while at the police school was to ferry equipment for our military communications personnel between the school and the airport – the very road where the cartel set up the road bloc.
In the meantime, I assisted a team of experts from Explosives Technology Branch that came to Bogota to help the Colombians study the explosives signatures being used by the cartel and guerrilla bombings. I worked with the DAS on the hotel bombings waiting to hear from headquarters. My trip to Medellin became moot because of the Christmas holidays. Everything shuts down during Easter and Christmas in Latin America.
On December 29th, the cartel detonated another car bomb wounding two national policemen and fifty civilians. The next day, the national police captured John Jairo Posada, alias ‘El Titi’, one of Escobar’s most trusted men. He had been identified by the DIJIN as the man behind the car bombings in Medellin that killed sixty-nine national policemen and nine civilians. I couldn’t wait for headquarters to approve my travel to Medellin, so I went to identify the guns he had on him when he was captured.
On January 4th, 1993, I returned to face the music writing an extensive memo explaining why I disregarded my orders and went to Medellin without previous authorization. The situation had become problematic. As I have often said, ‘You can’t score standing on the sideline’. They seemed to understand and off I went, back to Medellin on January 7th.
On January 11th, the Colombian marines seized six boxes of explosives aboard a Panamanian fishing boat off the Pacific coast of Buenaventura in the department of Valle de Cauca. Around the same time, they intercepted a ‘go-fast’ boat with two Russian-made PKM light machineguns. I returned to Bogota to meet with the head of naval intelligence to discuss these significant seizures and arrange to get the identification information.
On January 13th, I went to the Nicaraguan Embassy to get their help to confirm that the PKM machineguns belonged to the Sandinista army. I discovered that while the Sandinistas no longer ran the government of Nicaragua, they were still in charge of the military and would not cooperate in tracing the guns. I was told in confidence by the Nicaraguan staff that the Sandinistas themselves were probably behind trafficking the guns to their communist brothers in Colombia.
The next day I traveled to Barranquilla to conduct training and work with the DAS on the North Coast gun trafficking situation. Pablo Escobar announced that he was going to start a new bombing campaign in retaliation for the Search Bloc’s brutal pursuit of his associates. The Elite Corps believed in ‘an eye for an eye’ when it came to Pablo’s gunmen. On January 21st, he made his threat good detonating two car bombs outside of the national police headquarters on the North Highway injuring twenty-three people.
On January 29th, Jorge Nelson Sepulveda Torres, a major gunrunner for Escobar was captured in possession of several firearms. The subsequent trace revealed that the U.S. handguns were legally exported to a Panamanian gun dealer. During a trip I made to Panama in July 1990, I noticed that the country had a score of gun stores, far more than the population could support given gun ownership restrictions and frankly, the cost-prohibitive price of the guns. I had an analyst in Panama do a search of the ownership of the gun stores. As I suspected, many were owned by businessmen living in Colombia. I passed that information back to the State Department section approving export licenses of U.S. firearms ending that supply line.
I was in Panama to recover vital gun records kept at a bank by two Cuban-American gun dealers, whose guns were used to assassinate three Colombian presidential candidates. It had been six months or so after Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invasion to depose Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Panama City was still in shambles. The bank manager took me to the where they kept their records. The room was in total disarray. When I turned to the bank manager for an explanation, she giggled and simply said, ‘soldiers’.
On January 30th, a car bomb was detonated in downtown Medellin killing twenty-five people and injuring seventy. The next day, a shadowy band of paramilitaries calling themselves ‘Los Pepes’ (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar) bombed Pablo’s mother’s house. I needed to return to Medellin. However, the stepped-up guerrilla activity kept me from responding.
On February 5th, the national police seized sixty Yugoslav rifles and an U.S. commercial model M-1 carbine on San Andres Island and the DIJIN asked for my assistance. They had a ‘witness’ they wanted me to talk to on the island. On the same day, the Nicaraguan ambassador summoned me to his office to discuss a possible Sandinista connection. While all this was happening, the Pepes stepped-up their campaign targeting Escobar and his associates.
I traveled to Barranquilla on February 9th to meet with my counterparts regarding the Nicaraguan trafficking situation before going to San Andres on the 11th. The ‘witness’, an artisanal fisherman was so frightened that he barely acknowledged what he had initially told police. It was clear that he had been threatened.
In the first two weeks of February, the Pepes had killed thirty Medellin sicarios. Pablo alleged that the Search Bloc was working with the Pepes and he threatened to kill Americans in response. As a result, the Ambassador issued a dusk-to-dawn curfew and had all the non-law enforcement personnel at the Embassy escorted to and from work. As a side note, Embassy personnel get the same danger pay as law enforcement working in Colombia.
On February 16th, after I returned to Bogota, I began drafting yet another assessment explaining why it was necessary for me to return to Medellin. The Nicaraguan- San Andres supply line was drawing a lot of interest form my U.S. intelligence counterparts and that more than the assessment memo to headquarters kept me from deploying to Medellin. At the same time, the DAS contacted me with information they had developed involving a Canadian gun dealer diverting Chinese ammunition and firearms to Colombia. I also met with the colonel in charge of naval intelligence relating to a cache of rifles recovered from the ELN guerrillas.
Then, on February 17th, Carlos Alzate, ‘El Arete’, a ranking sicario in Escobar’s paramilitary wing surrendered to the Attorney General’s office in Medellin for a reduced sentence. I called headquarters to check on the last memo I sent them requesting travel to Medellin, hoping to get approval so I could examine the guns Arete may have surrendered. I was expressly told not to go until approval was granted. I had already played the ‘ask for forgiveness’ card and knew that it wouldn’t work a second time, so I stayed in the capital that weekend. Instead, Peña and Murphy joined me in Bogota where we got together for a drink with the DIJIN agents working with the Search Bloc, who had returned to Bogota for R and R.
Speed boat on San Andres Island
The following week, the national police seized a case of specialized rifle grenades on San Andres Island. ATF Explosives Technology Branch later identified them as anti-diver grenades. The police were seizing more and more ordnance including mortar rounds being smuggled to San Andres aboard high-speed boats and they wanted me to return to the island. Despite the lure of the island paradise, I wanted desperately to return to Medellin.
There had been rumors circulating after Arete’s arrest that Escobar was considering another surrender deal. The Search Bloc evidently knew about the rumors and stepped up their activities as did the Pepes. So, on February 21st, Pablo sent a nasty letter threatening the head of the Search Bloc, Colonel Hugo Martinez.
Speaking of letters, I finally got a response to the one I sent headquarters on Wednesday, February 24th. The Chief of Firearms asked me to call him. He personally denied any further travel to Medellin citing concern for my safety. I pressed him for an explanation and all he would say is that the Director had a ‘bad feeling’ about my getting killed.
That Sunday, February 28th – ATF raided the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. I understood now why headquarters had tried to hobble my activities in Medellin.
