Pablo Escobar was arguably the richest and most violent criminal in history. Forbes Magazine in 1989 listed him as the seventh-richest man in the world.
A small-time gangster and car thief from Medellin, the second-largest city in Colombia, Escobar violently consolidated the cocaine industry there in the late 1970s. Elected as an alternate to Colombia's Congress in 1983, Escobar enjoyed widespread popularity among the poor in Colombia, especially in his home state of Antioquia.
He turned his violent methods against the state in 1984, when Colombia began cracking down on the cocaine exporters and extraditing them to the United States for trial.
His campaign of murder, kidnapping, bombing and bribery from then until his death in 1993 forced a constitutional crisis in Colombia. He cowed the government into banning extradition, and his murder campaign against judges and prosecutors so intimidated the nation that it abandoned trial by jury and began appointing anonymous, 'faceless' judges to prosecute crimes.
At the height of his power in the late 1980s, Escobar and his Medellin drug cartel controlled as much as 80 percent of the multibillion-dollar export of Colombian cocaine to the United States.
Escobar was blamed for assassinating three of the five candidates for Colombian president in 1989, and for instigating a takeover of the Palace of Justice in Bogota in 1986. More than 90 people died in the subsequent siege, including 11 Supreme Court justices.
When one of Escobar's bombs brought down an Avianca Airliner in Colombia in November 1989, killing 107 people, he became one of the most feared terrorists in the world.
Men working for Escobar were caught that same year trying to buy Stinger antiaircraft missiles in Miami.
A heavy pot-smoker, Escobar cultivated a relaxed, informal style with his friends and associates, but he was so vicious to his enemies that he was feared by everyone. In his battle with Colombian police, he placed a bounty on the head of officers in Medellin, paying higher rewards for killing those of greater rank. By the time of his death at age 44, Dec. 2, 1993, Escobar was considered responsible for thousands of deaths in Colombia, yet he was mourned publicly by large crowds in his home city.
By walking out of prison in July of 1992, Pablo Escobar had done his enemies a favor.
He had gone from prisoner to prey. Morris D. Busby, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, knew this opportunity would not last long. If Escobar was not apprehended quickly, before he had a chance to securely set himself up as a fugitive, the search might drag on for months or years.
Escobar had spent a lifetime building criminal associations. His wealth and his reputation for violence ensured loyalty where his popularity did not. Ensconced in his home city of Medellin, he was king of the mountain. He would be free to resume and refine the web of drug trafficking, assassinations, terror bombings, bribery and intimidation that had made him the world's most notorious outlaw.
Busby wanted Escobar now, while he was still on the run - and at a moment when the Colombian government, after years of hesitation, had finally issued the Americans an unequivocal invitation to do whatever it could to track Escobar down. The ambassador had served as State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, so he knew all the secret tools in the U.S. arsenal. And he knew exactly what he wanted: He put out a call for Maj. Steve Jacoby.
For the previous three years, Jacoby had secretly worked from a locked-down section on the windowless fifth floor of the bunkerlike U.S. Embassy in Bogota, where few people beyond the ambassador and the CIA station chief knew exactly who he was or what he did. In fact, Steve Jacoby wasn't even his real name. It was one of four identities he could assume at any moment, each supported by passports and credit cards. Changing into each one was like slipping on a new pair of shoes.
Jacoby ran a covert operation for one of the most classified units in the U.S. Army, a highly specialized cadre of communications experts that had gone by a variety of cover names over the years. It had been called Torn Victory, Cemetery Wind, Capacity Gear and Robin Court. Lately, it was 'Centra Spike.'
Until Escobar settled into his luxury prison suite outside Medellin in 1991, Jacoby and his handpicked operatives had spent much of their time secretly tracking the drug lord, his cronies and his rivals.
Escobar's sweetheart deal with the Colombian government had been a disappointing end to that chase and, with the elusive drug boss in prison, their mission had been throttled back. Jacoby had used the slack time to pull some of his men and equipment out of Colombia. Marriages and machines were in need of repair.
Jacoby was a career soldier and a new kind of spy. With the end of the Cold War, a profusion of small- scale, specialized American military operations were being launched in exotic places by small units of unconventional soldiers dispatched on short notice. America's newest enemies were not only regional powers and dictators and their armies, but also terrorists, crime bosses and drug traffickers.
Military commanders who once focused on enemy troop maneuvers and missile throw weights now also needed more timely, localized and specific information: How many doors and windows does the target building have? What kind of weapons do the bodyguards carry? Where does the target eat dinner? Where did he sleep last night, and the night before?
Centra Spike had evolved to provide the kind of precise, real-time intelligence that big spy outfits like the CIA were not designed to collect. Over time, the unit's primary specialty had become finding people.
Techniques for eavesdropping on radio and telephone conversations from the air had been perfected during missions over El Salvador. There were other military and spy units that could do it; what distinguished Centra Spike was its accuracy. It was capable of pinpointing the origin of a call within seconds.
The unit had advanced far beyond the primitive days of World War II, when ground-based antennas could do little more than determine the general vicinity of a radio signal. By the Vietnam War, army direction-finders had perfected techniques for quickly locating a radio signal to within a half-mile of its origin. By the '80s, when Jacoby joined a precursor of Centra Spike, that capability had been reduced to a few hundred meters.
Instead of triangulating from three receivers on the ground, the unit did it from one small airplane. Airborne equipment took readings from different points along a plane's flight path. When a signal was intercepted, the pilot would fly an arc around it. With on-board computers providing instantaneous calculations, operators could begin triangulating off points in that arc within seconds. If the plane had time to complete a half circle around the signal, its origin could be narrowed to under 100 meters.
The system was ideal for tracking a man like Escobar, who moved from hideout to hideout, communicating
