always quick to correct but which nevertheless added to his mystique.
Busby did have close connections with American Special Forces, but they stemmed less from his military service than his years as ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism in the State Department, a job that involved coordinating American diplomatic and covert military action throughout the world.
He was a military man who had adopted diplomacy as a second career. That made him a new kind of diplomat.
As the Cold War world collapsed, America's enemies became drugs and thugs. Diplomats in previously unimportant parts of the world found themselves at the cutting edge of U.S. foreign relations. In certain hot-spot nations, ambassadors now functioned as field commanders, orchestrating law enforcement, military and diplomatic efforts, both covertly and in cooperation with host governments.
In that respect, Busby seemed made for the job in Colombia. To Colombians, he looked like Uncle Sam himself, minus the white goatee. He was tall, lean and tan, with graying sandy hair and the powerful arms and hands of a man who was a skilled carpenter and who loved to sail the waters of the Chesapeake Bay.
There was something about Busby that responded to the moral simplicity of confrontation. He was an American patriot, a true believer, and few circumstances in his career were more clear-cut than the challenge posed by Pablo Escobar, a man he considered a monster.
Now, as he listened to Gaviria, he knew the time for action had arrived.
There had always been restrictions on what American military forces were allowed to do in Colombia. But now, insulted and embarrassed, Gaviria said that as far as he was concerned, the door was wide open. Despite Colombian constitutional barriers and widespread public opposition to foreign troops on their soil, especially American troops, Gaviria said he would welcome any and all help they could give to find Escobar.
'This is critical, please,' he told the ambassador. 'Help us get this guy as soon as possible.'
EIGHT YEARS AGO, at the request of the Colombian government, U.S. military and spy forces helped fund and guide a massive manhunt that ended with the killing of Pablo Escobar, the richest cocaine trafficker in the world.
While portraying the pursuit of Escobar as essentially a Colombian operation, the United States secretly spent millions of dollars and committed elite soldiers, law enforcement agents and the military's most sophisticated electronic eavesdropping unit to the chase.
The full extent of the U.S. role has never before been made public. Details of the 15-month operation, which began during the administration of President George Bush and continued under President Clinton, are revealed in a serial beginning in The Inquirer today.
A two-year Inquirer investigation has found that:
The Army's top secret counterterrorism unit, Delta Force, along with a clandestine Army electronic surveillance team, tracked the movements of Escobar and his associates and helped plan raids by a special Colombian police unit called the Search Bloc. The former American ambassador to Colombia directed the U.S. effort with assistance from agents of the CIA, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and National Security Agency.
Midway through the operation, the Search Bloc began collaborating with vigilantes, who assassinated Escobar's associates and relatives. U.S. soldiers and agents said they witnessed the cooperation. The United States continued to supply intelligence, training and planning to the Search Bloc even as the assassinations continued.
In November 1993, Pentagon officials sought to end U.S. involvement in the manhunt. They were concerned that American forces in Colombia were going beyond their instructions and possibly violating a presidential directive prohibiting American involvement in assassinations of foreign citizens. The campaign to withdraw the U.S. personnel was stalled by a lobbying effort led by the American ambassador in Bogota. Five weeks later, Escobar was killed by Colombian police.
Official accounts at the time said Escobar, 44, was killed Dec. 2, 1993, in a gun battle on a rooftop in the city of Medellin. Autopsy reports and photos reveal that he was shot point-blank in the ear. A senior Colombian National Police commander said Escobar was executed by a member of the Search Bloc after being wounded. The Colombian government had said its aim was to arrest Escobar, an indicted criminal.
The mission to track down Escobar rid Colombia of a violent menace who threatened to topple the state. Escobar had terrorized his country beginning in 1984 - assassinating judges, police officers, journalists and politicians. Much of the violence was meant to coerce the Colombian government to ban extradition of drug traffickers to the United States. Escobar was believed to have ordered the killings of three of the five candidates for president of Colombia in 1989.
But eliminating Escobar did nothing to stem the flow of cocaine to the United States, and may have inadvertently contributed to the formation of 'super cartels' - alliances among guerrillas, growers, paramilitaries and traffickers that today threaten the government of Colombia. Those alliances are one target of the $1.3 billion in U.S. anti-narcotics aid to Colombia this year, which includes 300 American troops training Colombian security forces.
American involvement in the hunt for Escobar began in 1989, when President Bush authorized a secret military effort to help Colombia track down leaders of the Medellin cocaine cartel. Its code name was Heavy Shadow.
Centra Spike, a top-secret Army unit that specialized in tracking people by monitoring telephone and radio calls, was covertly sent to Colombia in August of that year.
The sophisticated surveillance helped chase Escobar into hiding and a life on the run. He surrendered to Colombian authorities in 1991 after negotiating a deal that allowed him to live with his closest associates in a comfortable 'prison' built for him in his hometown of Envigado, near Medellin.
Escobar fled the prison on July 22, 1992, when Colombian authorities tried to move him to a real prison. After he disappeared, Colombian President Cesar Gaviria asked the United States to expand its assistance. Bush authorized the clandestine deployment of Delta Force and other U.S. personnel, and the multimillion-dollar effort continued during the Clinton administration until Escobar's death.
Public statements by U.S. officials during the manhunt acknowledged that American forces had helped train the Colombian Search Bloc. But American involvement in the effort was far more extensive than that.
Participants said that secret U.S. contributions totaled hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware, personnel
