German equipment, which was housed in three gray vans. The vans would park on the hills just outside Bogota and raise their antennae - to the uninitiated they looked like electric company repair vehicles. The three vans would go out on trial runs to triangulate a target signal, placing it within a prescribed area.
Hugo would then cruise through the streets with another officer in an unmarked car, monitoring the directional signal with the screen and headphones. In theory, Hugo's team would pinpoint the signal to the correct building, even the correct floor and apartment.
It never worked. After some wrangling the police bought upgrades that did improve the system slightly, but it fell considerably short of being able to pick one building or floor from another. Hugo and his unit could find the right two-block area, but picking the right house was beyond them.
Progress in direction-finding was further stymied because his team's simple eavesdropping capability was in demand. When President Cesar Gaviria learned that the National Police were able to park outside a building and listen in on conversations inside, Hugo's team was assigned to eavesdrop on guerrilla leaders in Bogota for peace negotiations.
The unit was able to supply government negotiators with inside information about the guerrillas' negotiating strategies, and alert them to new proposals before they were made. As a result, the team developed a reputation for surveillance wizardry that overstated the actual case.
They were not really getting better at radio direction-finding. For that purpose the equipment was still useless. But, Hugo said, they didn't let on. Each small victory brought them a better assignment.
In 1991 and 1992, they were used against guerrillas in the southern part of the country. It was only after these missions that Hugo's commander was able to convince police authorities that they really needed more work on their direction-finding skills. They were allowed to return to Bogota not long after Escobar's escape, where they resumed their tests on city streets.
As hard as they tried, Hugo knew that his little gray boxes were not yet working well enough to help him find a man like Pablo Escobar.
Lt. Hugo Martinez and his team of electronic surveillance experts started getting better with their funny little boxes. They combined the various components, American, French and German, and developed techniques through trial and error.
Even though they still could not trace a signal reliably, their eavesdropping capability alone was exciting. It deprived criminals of privacy. Martinez had listened to so many intercepted conversations by now that he felt he could sense when someone was about to begin discussing something illicit.
Snooping was addictive. The more he worked with the direction-finding kits, the more attuned he became to subtle nuances in the images they displayed and the sounds they emitted in his headphones. It was like learning a new language.
He was not yet thinking about using it against Pablo Escobar. He assumed Escobar was too difficult a target. The kind of criminals he was after were unsophisticated people who never suspected that someone might be listening to their phone or radio conversations.
Going up against Escobar with this equipment would be foolhardy, precisely because it could steer them so close to him without being able to pinpoint exactly where he was. The risk was that the equipment would bring members of his team just near enough for Escobar to have them kidnapped or killed.
Seizing the son of Col. Hugo Martinez, the commander of the Search Bloc that had been hounding him for so long, would be a major coup for Escobar. The elder Martinez repeatedly warned his son to be careful, and would pass along the personal threats he received.
In the first few months after Escobar's escape, Col. Martinez had banned all cell-phone use in Medellin and closed down all repeater stations for transmitting signals. People had to use standard phone lines - or point-to- point radio communications, which required a clear line of sight between transmitter and receiver.
The idea was to isolate Escobar. He was too smart to use normal phone lines, but if he tried to communicate through the uncluttered airwaves he would be much easier to find. The drug lord responded by using messengers.
It was only in the spring of 1993, as he grew increasingly concerned about the vigilantes of Los Pepes and getting his family out of Colombia, that Escobar resumed regular radio communication. He found places that provided a view of the top of the apartment building where his family was living under heavy guard, speaking most often to his son, Juan Pablo.
This was the weak link that the colonel wanted to probe. The special police technical team had just been transferred to Medellin. And joining them, despite Col. Martinez's forceful objections, was his son Hugo.
Hugo Martinez and his partners found apartments in the city. The CIA provided them with six new direction- finding kits, designed to be operated from three small Mercedes vans. Three teams were created, each assigned to a van.
Their arrival stirred hopes in the Search Bloc. A CIA direction-finding crew had been working in Medellin since the previous November, with poor results. Now the inflated reputation Hugo's unit had earned preceded it, and the new men said nothing to deflate it. They had also arrived in time to take advantage of important new information.
Medellin's chief prosecutor, Fernando Correa, who met frequently with Escobar's family, had noticed a few interesting things. The family was virtually imprisoned in Altos del Campestre, its apartment building in Medellin, and lived in terror of Los Pepes. Increasingly the family members' energies were spent looking for passage to some other country. They were despondent.
Pablo Escobar's wife, Maria Victoria, wrote in a letter to her husband that year:
I miss you so very much I feel weak. Sometimes I feel an immense loneliness takes over my heart. Why does life have to separate us like this? My heart is aching. How are you? How do you feel? I don't want to leave you my love. I need you so much, I want to cry with you . . . I don't want to pressure you. Nor do I want to make you commit mistakes, but if our leaving is not possible, I would feel more secure with you. We'll close ourselves in, suspend the mail, whatever we have to. This is getting too tense.
Juan Pablo, a hulking 15-year-old who stood 6 feet tall and weighed more than 200 pounds, acted as the man of the house, at least in Correa's presence, and appeared to be making all the decisions for his family. He spent hours with binoculars observing the neighborhood from his perch, keeping a nervous eye out for those who appeared to be keeping an eye on them.
