Ambassador Morris Busby and CIA station chief Bill Wagner were not about to discard the colonel. As far as the embassy was concerned, Hugo Martinez was exactly the kind of man to go up against Escobar. The drug boss had finally met his match.
Four days after Pablo Escobar's escape from prison in July of 1992, a team of American DEA agents took a leisurely tour of La Catedral, the site of Escobar's luxury prison suite.
The mountaintop 'prison' was now a hot tourist attraction for top-ranking American and Colombian officials. CIA station chief Bill Wagner would tour it days later with a video camera, accompanied by several members of his staff. The visits confirmed all the worst suspicions about Escobar's supposed imprisonment, but it also gave the Americans a rare glimpse into the life and mind of the world's most famous fugitive.
Although the agents suspected the Colombian army of destroying or carrying off most of the documents left behind, including floppy discs and the hard drives from Escobar's computers, much of interest still remained.
First, there was the sheer opulence of the place. The 'cells' were lavishly furnished suites with living rooms, bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens and balconies that offered a stunning vista of Medellin, the surrounding valley and hills.
Just outside Escobar's suite was a small table with telephones and a metal box mounted on the wall that was the main circuit box for all the communications lines to the prison - leaving little doubt who was in charge. Down a flight of steps from Escobar's balcony was an elaborate dollhouse, large enough for his 7-year-old daughter to play inside.
The tour revealed that Escobar had been raising and using messenger pigeons to thwart electronic surveillance. They found little metal leg-bands for the pigeons neatly labeled: 'Pablo Escobar/Maximum Security Prison/Envigado'.
There was also evidence of Escobar's fears. Any flat ground on the hillside complex had wires suspended overhead, attached to tall posts around the perimeter to prevent helicopters from landing. One of Escobar's biggest concerns was that airborne American commandos or paid assassins would come for him in the night.
There were secret hiding places built into the walls of the prison suites, and trick doors to afford quick, silent avenues of escape. The gymnasium and kitchen were below, just inside the fence. The living quarters and cabanas were up an incline so steep that the DEA agents were breathing heavily when they reached the top.
Beyond the cabanas, the Colombian police had found a sizable arsenal of automatic weapons and ammunition. Escobar and his men had been prepared to hold off a sustained military assault.
On a shelf over Escobar's desk was a neat library of news clippings, diligently clipped, pasted and sorted in file boxes. His correspondence included fan mail from all over the world, requests for money, notes of thanks for favors bestowed, letters of sympathy after his arrest and imprisonment. One was from a local beauty queen, who referred to Escobar as her lover.
There was a handwritten draft of a letter from Escobar to President Cesar Gaviria, requesting armor-plated cars for his wife and children. One pathetic letter was from a man pleading with Escobar not to kill any more members of his family, as he had already done away with nearly all of them. There was a letter from the wife of a prison guard, thanking him for her husband's recent promotion.
Escobar had kept copies of all his indictments, and had framed a collection of the mug shots taken at each arrest. One showed the lean, tousle-haired young man arrested for stealing cars in Medellin in 1974; another was the fuller-faced, mustachioed shot from his first and only drug bust in 1976.
Escobar kept files on his Cali cartel rivals, complete with photographs, addresses, descriptions of their vehicles and license numbers. He had a framed picture of Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary. Alongside was an illustration from Hustler magazine, depicting Escobar and his associates cavorting in an orgy behind bars (throwing darts at a picture of President George Bush on a TV screen), and a photograph of himself and his son Juan Pablo posing before the front gate of the White House.
Among his collection of videotapes was, predictably, a complete set of The Godfather films, Chuck Norris' Octagon, Steve McQueen's Bullitt and Burt Reynolds' Rent-a-Cop. There were five Bibles, and collections of prize- winning books. These were not the shelves of an avid reader, but of a self-improver who purchased books in bulk intending to begin a course of reading.
The closet in the bedroom was stacked with identical pairs of Nike sneakers and a neat pile of pressed blue jeans. Over Escobar's huge bed was a golden, ornate portrait of the Virgin Mary painted on inlaid tile. There were photographs of Escobar, his family and his fellow inmates at what appeared to be a lavish Christmas dinner in the prison's disco and bar, and pictures of Escobar posing with Colombian soccer stars.
In the prison bedrooms were wide-screen TVs, electronic game players, stereos, VCRs, laser disc players, laser discs and videotapes (some of them pornographic, including homemade sex movies starring inmates and girlfriends). One framed photo showed Escobar costumed as Pancho Villa; another showed him and a bodyguard dressed as Prohibition-era American gangsters, complete with tommy guns.
The DEA agents itemized all they found and posed for snapshots, happy as high schoolers invading a rival gang's clubhouse. They posed sitting on Pablo's bed, taking turns wearing a thick fur cap that the drug boss had worn in a famous photograph reproduced on the cover of the Colombian weekly newsmagazine Semana.
It was all just scraps left behind by the Colombian investigators, but it still added up to a fascinating portrait of a man who clearly relished his celebrity outlaw status, even though he was known to protest his innocence at every public opportunity.
Escobar was a man of stark contradictions. He was a determined hedonist who recruited teenage beauty queens for sex on water beds under the florid portrait of the Virgin Mary, yet was so devoted to his family that his pursuers considered his most vulnerable spot to be the safety of his wife, Maria Victoria, and children, Juan Pablo and Manuela.
Escobar signed all his correspondence with his thumbprint, and he stamped one on the framed photo of him and his son at the White House. It was a form of graffiti, Pablo Escobar's thumbprint on the front door of the home of the President of the United States.
At the end of July, drawing on this information and its own files, the CIA prepared a brief 'personality assessment' of the infamous fugitive. It attempts, with thinly veiled contempt, to sketch the internal life of this complex new military target, and concludes with chilling prescience about the tactics that would ultimately lure Escobar to his death:
'Despite Escobar's authoritarianism, extreme self-centeredness and grandiosity . . . he is not a madman . . . he is in touch with the realities around him. In fact, Escobar is resilient and can generally adjust well to changes in the environment. . . .
