Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (15 page)

6

KINGPINS AND MANIACS

The night that North Vietnamese SAM missiles slammed into the B-52s over Hanoi—something that was not supposed to happen—had permanently cured fighter pilot Rex Rivolo of any faith in official military wisdom and promises. A few months later he climbed out of his F-4 Phantom fighter for the last time. After 531 combat missions he was done with war, or so he thought. Heading back to graduate school, he eventually earned a doctorate in physics. The next few years were the happiest in his life, teaching astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania while probing the far reaches of the universe as a fellow at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute. “That was a good time,” he reminisced fondly one bright winter morning in 2013 as we sat in his northern Virginia office. “All the beautiful space-telescope pictures, that all came out of the Institute.” Earlier, as we talked about his time in combat, he pointed to a framed photograph on the wall of a smiling twenty-two-year-old Rivolo standing on the wing of a Phantom. “Can you imagine giving
that
to
this
?” he laughed, indicating the sleek expensive fighter and to the carefree youth in the picture.

By the late 1980s, Rivolo, always enthusiastic about a new project, had conceived an ambitious plan to create the first detailed map of the entire Milky Way, including the vast molecular clouds, billions of miles long, that form the basic building blocks of star systems. Such a map, he thought, could guide astronauts in future space voyages. “We have no idea what’s really out there, we are at a stage akin to where geographers of our planet were in the fifteenth century,” he said at the time. Simultaneously, he had been exploring the world of graphic art, building up a collection that would grow to over fifteen thousand pieces, including the six signed Miró prints, along with a Picasso and a Braque, that he proudly showed me on the walls of the passage outside his office. Still in love with flying, he joined the New York Air National Guard and flew air-sea rescue helicopters on weekends—“with fighter jets, you need to practice all the time if you want to stay alive”—once making a forced landing on the lawn of Andy Warhol’s Montauk estate and being greeted by the artist himself, “a gracious host.”

Rivolo’s plan for mapping the galaxy involved no less than 5 million observations collected by radio telescopes around the world that would then be analyzed using specially designed computer programs. As with all Rivolo’s projects, his approach mandated a rigorous insistence on
hard data
, without which, he would pungently emphasize in his thick Bronx accent, theories and conclusions are
no fucking use.
To that end, he had acquired an expertise in statistics during his years in academia, along with a strong appreciation of how they could yield deeply buried truths otherwise invisible to the untutored eye. Such accumulation and manipulation of data were at the heart of a system he developed in the late 1980s to detect imminent failures in aircraft engines, which he hoped to turn into a profitable business venture. Leaving the stars behind, he launched a business to market it, “which promptly failed. I’m not a businessman.”

So, in 1992, he returned to the world of defense, taking a job as an analyst with the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Pentagon’s in-house think tank housed in an aesthetically unprepossessing complex of buildings in Alexandria, Virginia, a few miles south of the Pentagon. Fortunately for Rivolo, he landed in the Operational Evaluation Division directed by Tom Christie, the mathematician encountered in earlier chapters as the collaborator of the visionary tactician John Boyd and later a thorn in the side of the military for his unsparing test reports. Rivolo, as it turned out, would provoke equally choleric reactions, not least in his dogged pursuit of the V-22 Osprey, an aircraft under development by the marines that could tilt its rotors to fly like either a helicopter or a conventional plane. Early on, he concluded that the V-22 was dangerously unstable in certain conditions, telling a marine general to his face that the true measure of its performance would be the number of “dead marines per flight hour.” (As of 2014, thirty-six people had died in multiple Osprey crashes.)

Meanwhile, though the cold war had ended, America had embarked on another war, the war on drugs. Initially declared by Richard Nixon in 1971 in recognition of the political advantages of being seen as tough on crime, this war had been re-declared by President George H. W. Bush in 1989. Nixon had invoked the specter of heroin as a crime-fomenting menace to society; Bush fought cocaine for the same reason. Money was duly showered on every relevant department of government, including the Pentagon, where an Office of Drug Control Policy headed by a deputy assistant secretary was created to supervise the military’s role in the fight. In 1993 the Clinton administration awarded the post to Brian Sheridan, a tough and capable ex–CIA official. Sheridan, according to those who worked with him, was not impressed with what he found. Although Congress had bestowed a billion dollars a year on his office, no one in the government—not even the Drug Enforcement Agency, which could not tell him how many acres of coca plants it took to produce one kilo of cocaine—appeared to understand much about the actual mechanics of the cocaine trade or how to deal with it. More important, no one in the burgeoning drug enforcement bureaucracies seemed to know what the ultimate goal of all this effort might be and still less how to achieve it. Seeking an objective, intelligent analysis, Sheridan turned to the Institute for Defense Analysis and was duly presented with Rivolo and a more politically attentive former air force colonel named Barry Crane.

This was not the first time that IDA had been called in to survey the drug problem. In 1971, while the Nixon administration was promoting heroin addiction as the major cause of crime in America, a White House official had commissioned the institute to study the issue. Unlike law enforcement departments whose budgets were directly impacted by drug policy, IDA had no bureaucratic stake in the matter. So, taking a cool, objective look at the data, the analysts concluded that there was in fact no evidence whatsoever for the claim, accepted unquestioningly by policy makers for half a century, that addiction was a major cause of crime or that addicts were inexorably enslaved to their habit. Since this contradicted the basic premises of all government drug policies then and since, the analysts’ report remained classified.

Undeterred by reality, Nixon and his officials pondered means to strike at the drug traffickers who allegedly posed what today would be called an existential threat to American society. The ultimate solution appeared simple and obvious. Cloaked in euphemism as “clandestine overseas law enforcement” with an annual budget of $100 million was a scheme to eliminate the high-value targets (though that phrase had yet to be conceived) of the heroin business. As drug enforcement officials stated confidently in a 1972 meeting, “… with 150 key assassinations, the entire heroin refining operation can be thrown into chaos.” E. Howard Hunt, later infamous as a key member of the Watergate “plumber” unit, even traveled to Miami to consult with the Cuban exile leader Manual Artimes about supplying killers for drug enforcement work in Latin America. However, Watergate, Nixon’s exit in disgrace, and consequent investigations into the darker activities of U.S. intelligence brought trafficker-targeting fantasies to a halt for the time being. Though the congressional enquiries did not uncover the trafficker-targeting schemes, revelations about other plots generated the presidential edict barring assassinations, a ban that, as we saw in the previous chapter, administrations were soon doing their best to undermine.

In the 1980s, cocaine replaced heroin as the officially prescribed menace, especially when ingested in the form of crack by poor people. Predictably, the furor had a nurturing effect on law enforcement as Congress showered money on existing bureaucracies and even created new ones. Coincidentally or not, this was a time when the growing decrepitude of the Soviet Union indicated that the cold war was drawing to a close and that therefore the national security apparatus, including the military and the CIA, should look for other justifications for their budgets. By December 1989, President George H. W. Bush was able to invade a foreign country, Panama, and seize and imprison its leader on the grounds of an antidrug operation. In such an atmosphere, it was hardly surprising that Nixon-era ideas about assassinating major traffickers swung back into fashion in Washington.

In Colombia, the main source of supply for the American cocaine market, the business had been consolidated during the 1980s into a limited number of “cartels,” of which the two richest and most powerful were based in the cities of Cali and Medellín. Among these major traffickers, Pablo Escobar, the dominant figure of the Medellín cartel, was to become an object of obsessive interest to American law enforcement as he successfully evaded U.S.-assisted manhunts before negotiating an agreement with the Colombian government in 1991, under which he took up residence in a “prison” that he had built himself in the hills above his home city. A year later, fearing that the government was going to welsh on the deal and turn him over to the Americans, Escobar walked out of the prison and went into hiding.

The subsequent search for the fugitive drug lord marked a turning point. The cold war was over; Saddam Hussein had been defeated; credible threats were scarce; and the threat of budget cuts was in the air. Now the U.S. military, along with the CIA, deployed the full panoply of the surveillance technology that was developed to confront the Soviet foe against a single human target. The air force sent an assortment of reconnaissance planes, including SR-71s that were capable of flying at three times the speed of sound. The navy sent its own spy planes; the CIA dispatched a helicopter drone. At one point there were seventeen of these surveillance aircraft simultaneously in the air over Medellín, although, as it turned out, none of them were any help in tracking down Escobar. The decisive role in destroying his network of power and support was instead played by his deadly rivals from Cali, who combined well-funded intelligence with bloodthirsty ruthlessness. “We used Cali to get Medellín,” a former American ambassador to Colombia confirmed to me years later. His once all-powerful network of intelligence and bodyguards destroyed, Escobar was eventually located by homing in on his radio and gunned down as he fled across a rooftop on December 2, 1993. Though the matter is open to debate, a former senior U.S. drug enforcement official assured me unequivocally that a sniper from the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Delta Force had fired the killing shot.

Hunting down the leader of the Medellín cartel, albeit with the aid of his business rivals, had been something of an ad hoc affair, but it was nevertheless a showcase for an ambitious bid by the DEA to raise its status in the Washington police and intelligence pantheon. Unveiled the year before Escobar’s death under the leadership of Robert Bonner, an ambitious prosecutor appointed administrator of the agency by Bush in 1990, the “kingpin strategy” focused on eliminating the leadership of the major cocaine cartels, along with their key henchmen, either by death or capture. For a DEA case to qualify for support from headquarters, a clear connection had to be made to one of the targeted kingpins. For the agency leadership, the scheme had the merit of shifting power from traditionally influential regional field offices to headquarters, which would control the money for all kingpin operations. Furthermore, the new strategy relied heavily on the use of electronic intercepts, expensive to operate and thereby further enhancing the power of headquarters at the expense of the regions.

Implicit in the concept was an assumption that the United States faced a hierarchically structured threat that could be defeated by removing key components, echoing the core airpower doctrine of “critical nodes” discussed in earlier chapters. In a revealing address to a 1992 meeting of DEA veterans held to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the strategy’s inauguration, Bonner spoke of the corporate enemy they had confronted: “… major [drug trafficking organizations] by any measure are large organizations. They operate by definition transnationally. They are vertically integrated in terms of production and distribution. They usually have, by the way, fairly smart albeit quite ruthless people at the top and they have a command and control structure. And they also have people with expertise that run certain essential functions of the organization such as logistics, sales and distribution, finances and enforcement.” In essence, this was the same worldview propelling Colonel Warden’s “five-rings” strategy for attacking Iraq or Air Vice-Marshall Ritchie’s belief that Germany could be defeated by removing the Nazi kingpin. It would also, of course, inspire the targeted-killing strategy pursued by the United States against terrorists and insurgents in the drone wars following 9/11.

For the DEA under Bonner, a canny politician, the strategy was a matter of survival in the face of threats from two larger carnivores stalking the Washington bureaucratic jungle. Between 1981 and 1992, as Bonner related to me in the glass aerie of a giant Los Angeles law firm, the young agency had been effectively under the control of the FBI, with its senior officers drawn from the Bureau. No less threateningly, the CIA had been anxious not to lose out on the bounty of the drug war and in 1989 had created its own special unit, the Crime and Narcotics Center, which was soon running its own version of the kingpin strategy, the “linear strategy.” Barry Crane, an air force colonel who later worked closely with Rivolo at IDA, recalls attending strategy meetings as the air force representative at CIA headquarters as early as 1989. The new unit pursued identical targets, at least initially, and took equal credit inside the government for successes against the cartels. Many of the officers assigned to the new entity, such as José Rodríguez, subsequently infamous for his role in the CIA torture program, came from the agency’s Latin America Division, known for its rough-and-ready ways in the “dirty wars” of the 1980s. “DEA and CIA were butting heads,” recalled Bonner when we met. “There was real tension.” Bonner negotiated peace with the infinitely more powerful agency, “so now we had a very important ally. CIA could use DEA and vice versa,” by which he meant the senior agency could use the DEA’s domestic legal powers to good advantage.