Pubdate: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 Source: 60 Minutes II Copyright: 1999 Burrelle's Information Services CBS News Transcripts Contact: http://209.3.209.3/prd1/now/feedback?p_whonetwork Note: Video from this is currently available at: http://www.cbs.com/flat/story_187452.html AMERICA'S SECRET WAR United States Trains Commandos To Fight In The War On Drugs In Colombia DAN RATHER, co-host: The United States is on the verge of a dramatic escalation in a war that you probably know nothing about. The proposal is to spend at least another $ 1 billion to fight an army of old-line Marxist guerrillas in Colombia who now have gone into the drug trade. The president of Colombia is in Washington this week to push for the whole amount. This may sound like the start of a new war, but it's actually only the latest battle in a secret war America has been fighting in Colombia for most of the '90s, a war that was started to take out Colombia's drug lords and a war fought by secret warriors trained by the United States. (Footage of commandos; helicopter; Major Gil Macklin and commandos; Rather exiting plane) RATHER: (Voiceover) They're called Copes commandos, a small US-trained strike force of deadly warriors. Since 1992, they have been fighting America's secret war on drugs in the jungles of Colombia. And one of the men who trained them in the art of killing is former US Marine Major Gil Macklin. We met up with him in Colombia recently to meet America's secret allies and to learn details of a mission about which he has never spoken publicly before. When we say Copes, in brief, what are we talking about? Maj. MACKLIN: The Copes are the--the direct action forces of the Colombian National Police. They're like the Delta Force. Their skills are honed on a regular basis to go at a moment's notice, to do anything at any time. (Footage of commandos; vintage footage of Pablo Escobar and others on motorcycles; Escobar and others on boat; Escobar and others on beach; assassination of presidential candidate; aftermath of bombed plane; footage of Ambassador Morris Busby) RATHER: (Voiceover) But to understand the significance of the Copes today, we have to go back to the early '90s, to when the United States started backing PAGE 2 CBS News Transcripts, September 22, 1999, Wednesday them for one mission and one mission alone: to take down the Colombian drug lords, wipe out the cartels. And chief among their targets was this man, Pablo Escobar. It was widely reported that he was killed in 1993, but details of how he was killed have never been revealed. Escobar was a larger-than-life character, colorful, ruthless and seemingly unstoppable. Eighty percent of the cocaine consumed in America came from him. His assassins murdered anyone who got in his way, even taking out a presidential candidate at a nationally televised rally. But when he reportedly ordered the bombing of this Avianca passenger plane with five Americans on board, Escobar's reign of terror suddenly hit home. Morris Busby was the US ambassador to Colombia. Now that bombing was an Escobar bombing to do what? Ambassador MORRIS BUSBY (Colombia): As near as we were ever able to piece together, it was a bombing to kill one particular individual on the airplane. RATHER: That Escobar wanted taken out? Amb. BUSBY: Yes. And so they killed everybody else on the airplane. RATHER: But who would kill 120-some-odd people to get one person? Amb. BUSBY: A monster. (Vintage footage of George Bush exiting plane; footage of Busby; US Embassy; vintage footage of Macklin and commandos; Jesuit mission; commandos) RATHER: (Voiceover) President Bush was so outraged, he ordered the beginning of a secret war to take Escobar down. And Ambassador Busby was the man he chose to do it. A former Navy SEAL, Morris Busby, like Major Macklin, has never spoken publicly about his role in the secret war. It all began when he turned the US Embassy into a war command and dispatched Macklin, among others, to start forming the small army that is now known as the Copes commandos. Macklin and a team of Marine trainers set up shop at this ancient Jesuit mission at the foot of the Andes. Their job was to find a few good men, young, uncorrupted and prepared to die for their country. Maj. MACKLIN: At the tip of the spear were these young farm boys from the valleys, the hills, the mountains and jungles of Colombia who came from nothing. (Footage of commandos training) RATHER: (Voiceover) Once he assembled enough men, Macklin gave them a crash course in the dark arts of killing--day and night, the kind of training only Special Forces do, exercises like this one: shooting live ammunition inches from each other's heads. Maj. MACKLIN: See this guy here? He's very dead. (Footage of commandos training) RATHER: (Voiceover) Macklin taught them his philosophy, kill or be killed, and he taught them how to fight, to take down the drug lords by surprise, to take them at a time and a place when they would least expect it. PAGE 3 CBS News Transcripts, September 22, 1999, Wednesday Maj. MACKLIN: (Voiceover) These men kill without compunction and die without complaint. There is--there is one solution, and their solution is to accomplish the mission and come out in one piece. RATHER: Marines are trained to kill people and break things. Is that what you trained these Copes commandos to do? Maj. MACKLIN: Yes. (Footage of commandos; ambulance; fires; General Rosso Jose Serrano and commandos) RATHER: (Voiceover) It's a chilling idea: Americans training killers with ski masks. But that's exactly what Gil Macklin set out to do. And back in 1992, with Colombia being terrorized by the drug lords, the stakes were never higher. Macklin trained them, and this Colombian police commander was chosen to take them into battle. At a time when thousands of cops were on cartel payrolls, General Rosso Jose Serrano was considered to be incorruptible. And for him and his 120 commandos, all of them devout Catholics, the mission against the drug lords was a moral crusade. General ROSSO JOSE SERRANO: (Through Translator) We know that God is going to protect us and help us. We with faith have been able to move mountains. (Footage of Serrano and commandos; Air Force airplane) RATHER: (Voiceover) They may have relied on their faith that God was watching over them, but they also believed in something else: high-tech weaponry that Ambassador Busby delivered courtesy of the most powerful war machine on Earth. Amb. BUSBY: We spared nothing in trying to use all of the intelligence we could find on a worldwide basis to pass to the Colombians to try and find him. RATHER: And your assets? DEA, CIA, FBI, Special Forces, Delta Forces? Amb. BUSBY: All of the above. RATHER: Has there been any other occasion which you know of in which the United States said right from the top, 'This is what we're going to do, and we're going to commit whatever assets are necessary to do it, and we're going to have the determination and the staying power that it takes to get it done'? Amb. BUSBY: I can't think of anything that--that we went into that we stayed with the way we stayed with this. We never wavered. (Vintage footage of commandos; dead soldiers; helicopter; gunners on helicopter) RATHER: (Voiceover) In the summer and fall of 1992, the mission began and they moved systematically. To get to Escobar, the Copes had to first eliminate each and every one of his lieutenants. These are the pictures of what they left behind, dead and injured soldiers of the drug cartels. The search for Escobar, spanning a period of a year and a half, was one of the most intense manhunts ever mounted. PAGE 4 CBS News Transcripts, September 22, 1999, Wednesday Amb. BUSBY: Well, the strategy that was followed was strip away his lieutenants, strip away all of his money, go after his infrastructure, take down everything that protects him. And that was done on a very systematic and organized basis. RATHER: Now we're not talking about one or two or three raids here, are we? Or are we? Maj. MACKLIN: No. We're talking about a whole series of raids that were conducted to take out the--the central nervous system of the cartels. RATHER: We're talking about tens of raids, dozens of raids, hundreds of raids? Maj. MACKLIN: Hundreds. RATHER: And what were they up against? Maj. MACKLIN: The best that money could buy. Escobar reportedly hired some of the best mercenaries in the world--British, Israeli, Russian. RATHER: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Working for Pablo Escobar were some of the best special operations people who were British and Israeli? Maj. MACKLIN: Exactly. (Vintage footage of commandos in vehicles) RATHER: (Voiceover) But the Copes gradually eliminated those surrounding Escobar, nearly 100 lieutenants in his private army. Maj. MACKLIN: (Voiceover) In the dead of night, they'd come like darkness, and they'd bust through a door or a window or go through the roof. And they'd capture these arrogant, narcissistic animals, the drug lords, and they'd bring them to justice. And that's what they did. (Vintage footage of funeral) RATHER: (Voiceover) The Copes took heavy casualties themselves, many of them killed by Escobar's hit men. Maj. MACKLIN: (Voiceover) The price they paid in flesh and blood is tremendous; it's enormous. If we lose two cops who get killed in the US Capitol, like we did last summer, Washington ground to a halt. They lose two cops before breakfast every morning. (Vintage footage of commandos; footage of Rather and Busby at scene of showdown) RATHER: (Voiceover) It took two years from the time they began training for American intelligence to finally corner Escobar. We went with Ambassador Busby back to the scene of the final showdown. PAGE 5 CBS News Transcripts, September 22, 1999, Wednesday Amb. BUSBY: In the final moments, what happened was that Pablo Escobar was talking on a phone to his son, and he was standing at one of these windows and the police van rolled up the street here; they--they were monitoring the conversation. And he said to his son, 'There's something wrong. I have to go.' (Footage of roof of building; vintage footage of Escobar's body; footage of commandos throwing Macklin into pond) RATHER: (Voiceover) Escobar tried to escape up the stairs. He got as far as the roof. That's where the commandos gunned him down. For Gil Macklin and his Copes commandos, it will always be remembered as their finest hour. But it was a triumph that could only be shared in private. Of the 120 Copes he trained, half of them died in action. As Macklin sees it, they died fighting America's war. Maj. MACKLIN: Copes! RATHER: But the American public didn't know about this. Maj. MACKLIN: No. RATHER: Have any second thoughts about that? Secret operation overseas, training young men to break and enter and kill and... Maj. MACKLIN: None whatsoever. Not now. I just wish we'd done more. RATHER: I think most Americans think we always lose in the drug wars. In fact, the record shows that if we don't always lose, we lose nearly all the time. Amb. BUSBY: But that's not true. That's not true. We scored a great success here. RATHER: But it's hard to talk about success when today more drugs are coming into America from Colombia than ever before. The sad truth about the drug war is that getting rid of one enemy seems only to bring on another even more menacing one. After Pablo Escobar came the drug lords of the Cali cartel. And the man who led the Copes commandos, General Serrano, became a national hero when he wiped them out. But by the time we met up with him last month, he was facing yet another enemy. (Footage of Rather and Serrano in vehicle with security vehicles; guerrillas) RATHER: (Voiceover) When we travel with the general through Colombia today, this is how he moves, escorted by an army of security. He is a living symbol of the war against the drug trade in his own country and a lot of people would like to see him dead, especially his new enemies. They are armed guerrillas. Led by old-style Marxists, the guerrillas began moving into the drug trade after the urban cartels were taken out. And today drug money has transformed that guerrilla army as it pursues its age-old war against the government of Colombia, according to US drug czar General Barry McCaffrey. General BARRY McCAFFREY (Drug Czar): These insurgent forces are fueled by massive amounts of money that produce shiny new uniforms, planes, helicopters and more automatic weapons in their battalions than in the Colombian army. PAGE 6 CBS News Transcripts, September 22, 1999, Wednesday Representative DAN BURTON (Republican, Indiana): A blind person could have seen there's a problem. (Footage of Dan Burton at House of Representatives; McCaffrey; guerrillas) RATHER: (Voiceover) For two years now, Republican congressmen like Dan Burton have been accusing McCaffrey and the Clinton administration of ignoring the mounting threat posed by Colombia's narcoguerrillas. Last month the drug czar joined this chorus, saying that he, too, is alarmed and now wants the US to intervene with $ 1 billion to counter this new and growing enemy in America's war on drugs. What's the single most important thing for Americans to know? Gen. McCAFFREY: The Colombians are involved in a situation of incredible violence. The situation's veering out of control, and we need to step in and stand with the forces of democracy in Colombia. (Footage of Capitol; guerrillas; commandos) RATHER: (Voiceover) The $ 1 billion McCaffrey wants would inevitably put the United States into the position of taking on a full-scale guerrilla army, and that's an escalation many in Washington don't want. Whether we choose to ante up or not, the Copes commandos have already started to move in on key guerrilla positions. For them, the war on drugs never ends. (Announcements) - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake