HUNTING THE KING OF COCAINE
drug The lord. mission: The Kill assassins: the world’s A crack richest team of former special forces mercenaries. The endgame: A chopper crash that changed the life of a Scots gun for hire
LYING 8,000ft up on a Colombian mountainside in blood-stained combat gear, Peter McAleese knew he was in mortal danger. He was in excruciating pain from eight broken ribs and severe internal bruising, yet his multiple injuries were not the most immediate threat to his life.
Nor was the fact he had already spent two nights out in the open jungle in near-freezing temperatures with only the barest emergency rations to survive on.
Nearby lay the wreckage of a helicopter that was meant to fly the SAS veteran and his crack team of mercenaries on an audacious mission to assassinate one of the world’s most powerful and dangerous men: Pablo Escobar.
The name rightly struck fear into the hearts of all Colombians as the ruthless drug lord responsible for thousands of murders and 80 per cent of the world’s cocaine trade.
At his peak in the Eighties, Escobar was the wealthiest criminal in history – worth around £40billion – and believed himself to be untouchable. He once blew up an airliner killing dozens of civilian passengers to silence an opponent (who turned out not to be on board) and wreaked terrible vengeance on anyone who threatened his all-powerful Medellin cartel.
Having failed in their attempt on the life of this most infamous narco-terrorist when their chopper clipped some treetops en route to his lair and crashed, McAleese was now battling for his very survival alone in Medellin country.
As his less badly injured comrades headed down to fetch help, he knew that cruel vengeance would inevitably come his way if Escobar’s men found him first.
‘I was very aware we were in Pablo Escobar’s area. The nightmare scenario – what happens if Escobar’s men get me? But the main thing is the pain,’ he recalls.
For two nights and days, he lay with his weapon at the ready fearing the worst: ‘The Catholic prayers came out. I said, “Give me the strength to die with an element of honour”. I thought about my family, about how I put soldiering in front of my family. I thought about the mistakes I had made in life. I lay there thinking, “How the f*** did I get myself here?”’
Just how McAleese, who was raised in the shadow of Glasgow’s Barlinnie Prison, did come to be at the centre of an outrageous plan to bring down Colombia’s worst gangster – and lived to tell the tale – is the subject of a gripping BBC documentary, Killing Escobar.
BEYOND the doomed mission, the 90-minute film – first broadcast on BBC Scotland and now available on iPlayer – offers not just a fascinating glimpse into the secretive world of the mercenary soldier, but also examines the complex characters of the key men involved.
Speaking to the Scottish Daily Mail, McAleese talks candidly about the events of 1989 and how a ferocious fighting instinct, sharpened by a violent father and an upbringing on the tough Riddrie housing scheme, both drove and damaged his life.
Having worked as a mercenary in civil wars in Rhodesia and Angola, he had no qualms taking on the Colombia contract, despite knowing who the target was.
‘It never crossed my mind for one moment that we would fail; that was the confidence we had in ourselves,’ he said. ‘We were used to fighting odds of up to ten to one in Africa, against people who were as wellarmed as we were and had some form of training.
‘So, to take on 80 of Pablo’s guys was not a problem to us. We had the element of surprise, we had a gunship, we had two helicopters laid on for evacuation.
‘We were in there to fight guys carrying an Uzi sub-machine gun and a spare magazine tucked into their belt. We were carrying enough ammunition between us to wipe out a battalion.
‘In the documentary we have people on camera say they would have died for Pablo Escobar and, I’m telling you, they would have died.
‘This was not something thrown together by guys off the street. We’d rehearsed and trained for 11 weeks. We had been through every eventuality.’
McAleese was 46 and running a pub in Hereford when he was tempted back for ‘one last job’ by friend and fellow mercenary Dave Tomkins.
He had been contacted by a client in
Colombia for whom money was no object – according to Killing Escobar, the mercenaries were on $5,000 (£3,600) a month, plus expenses.
‘When Dave said who the target was, I was very excited,’ said McAleese, now 78 and living in quiet retirement in Birmingham. ‘For me it was the adventure – the money came second. That’s just the way I was made.’
They flew to meet the ‘client’, who turned out to be Escobar’s arch rivals, the Cali drug cartel. It was clear, McAleese says, that the hit on Escobar had the tacit approval of the Colombian and US governments.
For McAleese, who used his extensive military contacts to assemble and lead the team, it was simply a job. ‘I had no morals about killing him,’ he admits. ‘I’ve never looked upon it as murder. I looked upon it as a target.’
He dismisses the notion he was being used as a pawn in a power struggle between drug lords: ‘OK, I tried to kill a drugs baron and some of the finance came from other barons.
‘But the Colombian army was involved as well, giving intelligence, and they couldn’t get anyone to do it and that’s why we were called in. They were prepared to sit back and if we came unstuck it was no loss to them.’
In the film, former United States Drug Enforcement Agency operative Javier Pena says: ‘When we heard about this plan, of course we wanted him dead. So any effort to kill Pablo
Escobar was welcomed. We wanted it to happen.’
The plan, strikingly simple, could have come from a Frederick Forsyth novel.
A reconstruction in the film describes how they planned to fly over the Andes in a helicopter painted in Colombian police colours (Escobar had all the authorities in his pay so did not see them as a threat).
They would then land in his luxury fortified ranch, Hacienda Nápoles – complete with its own bullfighting ring and zoo – where the team would fight their way through the vast compound until they found and killed their man.
In a final grisly twist, they were to take Escobar’s head to his rivals to claim a $1million cash bonus.
Tomkins made a series of remarkable home videos documenting the mission and the film features riveting footage of the mercenaries waving giant bundles of cash, posing with weaponry and setting off rockets like fireworks.
THEY lived with the daily fear of being rumbled. At one point, McAleese relocated the operation to a new base deep inland after one particularly drunken evening in a local bar led him to fear their cover might be blown. Then one crew member asked to leave after telling McAleese his ‘bottle’ had gone.
He went home to Australia where he sold his story to a TV station about a British mercenary force on the loose in Colombia.
It nearly sparked an international incident, with then UK Foreign Secretary John Major publicly denying knowledge and condemning the presence of any such force, if true. ‘What John Major said... he’s a politician and he’s got to say what a politician would say,’ said McAleese. Luckily the target had not been named, as only Tomkins and McAleese knew his identity, so they decided to press on.
When a British newspaper also caught wind of the operation, a reporter flew out to meet McAleese and Tomkins, who struck a deal to give him the exclusive story if he agreed to sit on what he knew until after the attack.
Finally, at the start of June 1989, they got the green light. The men were briefed on the target before climbing aboard the ill-fated helicopter. McAleese recalls: ‘Taking off to do the job was an exciting high. A calmness came over me. I thought, “Have I given these men a fair deal? Have we done enough training? Is there anything we’ve missed?” I said to myself, “I think we’ve covered most things”. Then the mountain got in the way...’
Flying low to avoid detection, the helicopter pilot became lost in sudden cloud and crashed into a peak before bouncing through the trees upside down. ‘I had taken my seatbelt off and told Dave to adopt the crash position because I just didn’t like it,’ says McAleese.
‘That’s what saved me, because the propeller blade came through the cab and cut the pilot fatally.’
Having trained so meticulously, their plans were derailed before they fired a shot in anger. With McAleese too badly hurt to take with them, the walking wounded set off on an eight-hour trek down the mountain to find help. With Escobar’s men alerted and despatched to find survivors, it was a race to rescue their comrade.
FOR McAleese, the terrifying wait afforded ample time for soul-searching. His mind drifted back to his troubled upbringing and his family.
In the film, he says: ‘I was trained to kill by the Army but the fighting instinct came from Glasgow. I lay there for two or three days – I can’t remember – and you think, “Could I have been a better father? Could I have been a better husband?”
‘I was lying there trying to make a deal with God, saying, “If you get me out of this one, I will try and be a better person.”’
When he finally heard voices, he picked up his rifle and pushed it into the belly of the first person to come through the trees ready to open fire. Thankfully for him, it was a friendly face.
Two locals strapped him to a thick branch and lowered him slowly down the mountainside to safety. Through the pain, he was overcome with mixed emotions – relief at being rescued but regret at their plan ending in disaster: ‘Oh yeah, you put so much into it but the fact is the mission failed.’
It would take another four years for justice to catch up with Escobar, who was shot dead by Colombian police while on the run.
For McAleese, though, the Escobar escapade would prove a formative experience. He never returned to frontline combat, but instead embraced his Catholic faith.
Most importantly, the divorced father-of-three now enjoys a solid relationship with his children. It took a brush with one of the world’s worst gangsters, but has he finally found peace? ‘Yes. My biggest problem was coming to terms with a person called Peter McAleese.’