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Killing Pablo

By Mark Bowden

   Morris D. Busby, the U. S. ambassador to Colombia, was awakened by two phone calls early Wednesday, July 22, 1992, at a house in Chevy Chase, Md. , where he and his wife were staying with friends.

   The first call was to inform him that Colombian President Cesar Gaviria had finally decided to move the drug outlaw Pablo Escobar to a new prison, something Busby had been urging for more than a year. Shortly after that call came another, telling him that Escobar had somehow escaped through an entire brigade of the Colombian army.

   The ambassador had spent too much time in Colombia to be surprised. He cut his vacation short and, within hours, flew back to Bogota.

   Busby believed this bad turn of events for Colombia might be just the break he needed. Ever since he had been assigned to the embassy in Bogota the previous year, handpicked for the assignment in large part because it had become so dangerous, Busby had been eager to make an example of Escobar, but was frustrated by the drug boss' deal with the government.

   The most notorious drug trafficker in the world had been perched on a spectacular Andes mountaintop, running his cocaine business surrounded and protected by the Colombian army. Current estimates were that 70 to 80 tons of cocaine were being shipped from Colombia to the United States every month, and Escobar controlled the bulk of it.

   Inside his custom prison, Escobar lived like a sultan. There were parties with gourmet food and booze, beauty queens and whores.

   At the presidential palace in Bogota the day of Escobar's escape, Busby found President Gaviria pacing in his office with fury. Gaviria had been up all night receiving one outrageous report after another: No assault had been made on the prison during daylight, despite Gaviria's orders. His vice minister of justice and his Bureau of Prisons chief had gone in themselves without authorization to talk with Escobar, and both had been taken hostage. And, finally, the worst of all scenarios had played out: Escobar had vanished.

   It had taken more than two years, hundreds of lives, and hundreds of millions of dollars - much of it from U. S. covert funds - to hound the murderous drug billionaire into his surrender. Now, in one night, it had all come undone.

   Waiting with Busby through the president's lamentations were Joe Toft, the flinty Drug Enforcement Administration office chief, and Bill Wagner, the "political secretary" who was in fact Bogota's CIA station chief.

   "An entire brigade!" Gaviria shouted in amazement. "And the general allows two officials inside the prison to talk to him! For what? To notify him that he was going to be taken? What did he expect would happen? Such a stupid thing! I mean, such a stupid thing!"