also because he needed to believe it. He needed to believe there would be a way out of this endless struggle. And it didn't hurt that the one showing the way was his son.
As the hunt wore on late into the summer of 1993, at least one member of the top brass at the Pentagon began to worry about how far the Americans in Colombia seemed willing to go to get Pablo Escobar.
As the operations chief at the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Jack Sheehan was director of all special operations overseas. Sheehan already suspected that Delta and Centra Spike were overstepping the strict limits of their deployment order, which confined them to the Search Bloc headquarters outside Medellin. There, they were restricted to training, intelligence-gathering and analysis.
Sheehan was not a big fan of special operators. He regarded the men in charge - Gens. Wayne Downing and William Garrison in the United States and Ambassador Morris Busby in Bogota - as exceptionally aggressive. He called such men 'forward leaners,' by which he meant that they sometimes tended to stray beyond the strict parameters of their missions. Sheehan had heard tales of Delta operators going out on raids with the Search Bloc, and he worried about a possible U.S. relationship, direct or indirect, with the vigilantes of Los Pepes.
Sheehan's chief concern was that information gathered and analyzed by Centra Spike and Delta might be used to guide assassination squads to their targets - Escobar's lawyers, bankers, associates and hired killers. If that were the case, such assistance could fall into the category of supplying 'lethal information,' something allowed only with authorization from the president and notification of Congress.
The Clinton administration was growing more cautious about clandestine U.S. military operations overseas, and by autumn that year seemed inclined to pull everything back. According to administration officials, President Clinton felt he had been blindsided when Gen. Garrison and his Delta special operators found themselves in a pitched firefight in Somalia, where 18 American soldiers were killed in October 1993.
The deployment order for sending the special operations units to Colombia in 1992 had been very clear. They were there only to provide training. If they were going out on missions for any purpose other than training, they were exceeding their authority.
In fact, Delta operators had been secretly going out on Search Bloc raids for months, assisting as forward observers and helping the Colombians use global positioning devices. Sheehan knew that if just one Delta soldier were wounded or killed during a Search Bloc raid, it would raise an unholy stink in Congress, which by law must be consulted before placing American troops in harm's way. The larger concern for him was civilian control of the military - a principle both he and his boss, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell, took very seriously.
The American involvement in Colombia had created a string of issues inside the Pentagon. When it was decided that Search Bloc helicopter pilots needed training flying at night with night-vision goggles, American pilots were sent to Medellin. The pace of the hunt was demanding, so any training would have to be given on-the-job. This provoked a fight over whether sending pilots along to conduct training violated the prohibition against sending American soldiers on raids.
The pilots got permission to go.
This opened the door slightly for Gen. Garrison. He sought to send Centra Spike's skilled operators, with their portable direction-finding equipment, out with an American pilot on the Search Bloc helicopters.
Steering a raid to a specific spot required smooth coordination between the technician and the pilot, something the Americans had perfected. Here Garrison saw an opportunity to get official permission to send Delta operators out on raids. He argued that with an American pilot and technician accompanying the Search Bloc, then Delta needed to go along, too, to provide protection.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the request in the summer of 1993, but the Defense Department would not concur without approval from the White House. Defense officials were waiting at the White House for a meeting with Clinton's staff when a colonel on the Joint Chiefs' staff called to say they had decided to withdraw the request.
There were those working for the Joint Chiefs who, like Gen. Sheehan, weren't especially keen on sending Delta out on raids in Colombia, so they weren't about to take such a fight to the President. And as the mission evolved, Sheehan began to object more strongly.
In the late summer of 1993, Sheehan took his concerns to Powell. The chairman, who would be leaving the job in late September, asked him to look into it further. Sheehan also discussed his concerns with Brian Sheridan, the principal deputy secretary of defense for special operations. Sheridan began asking pointed questions about possible connections between the American effort in Colombia and Los Pepes.
In November, two CIA analysts met with Sheehan and other top brass at the Pentagon to report that Los Pepes were, in fact, Col. Hugo Martinez's Search Bloc. The analysts claimed that the vigilantes had been paid for and trained and, in part, led by Delta Force, and were receiving intelligence from the CIA and Centra Spike. 'These guys have gone renegade, and we're behind it,' one analyst told Sheehan.
Others at the meeting sharply contradicted the report.
'Bull----,' one of them said, explaining that Ambassador Busby had been monitoring the situation and was convinced the Search Bloc was not involved with Los Pepes.
Gen. Sheehan believed the CIA report. He said he was taking the matter to the new Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. John Shalikashvili, and would ask that all American special forces engaged in the hunt for Escobar be pulled out of Colombia. Sheridan backed Sheehan. He expressed concern that revelations, or even suspicions, of an American military link to Colombian death squads would harm Clinton.
It was late on a Friday afternoon in mid-November, and the only hope supporters of the mission against Escobar had of stalling the immediate withdrawal of American forces was to find someone on the Defense Department staff to oppose Gen. Sheehan. Before the night was over, a position paper had been produced that rebutted the CIA analysts' claims. That effectively countered Sheehan and Sheridan by forcing the question to a higher level at the Department of Defense.
Busby and his staff in Bogota had weighed in on the position paper, denying the CIA analysts' findings, which was enough for the Defense Department to decide to delay pulling out Delta and Centra Spike until further information was gathered.
As it happened, that mid-November delay was all that was needed. At the very moment the issue was heating up inside the Beltway, matters were finally coming to a head inside Colombia.
The special Colombian police squad sent to Medellin with its curious little portable direction-finding kits was having no luck finding Pablo Escobar. The Search Bloc was continuing to provide security for the men, but the unit itself was considered a joke. Things got so bad that Col. Hugo Martinez, the Search Bloc commander, finally sent the unit's leaders back to Bogota.
