To Velásquez, the DAS scandal was not altogether surprising, as he had received information before the Tasmania scandal broke indicating that the DAS was monitoring him. But seeing the scale of the surveillance still caused him indignation. María Victoria was not surprised either, as she had been saying since the moment Uribe called Velásquez to ask about Tasmania, on September 11, 2007, that she was afraid of what might happen. But she also doubted that Calderón’s reports would do much to change the situation: “It’s as if you were in quicksand, and somebody threw a broom at you to get you out,” when what you needed was something much larger and stronger to fix the problem. What was really needed, she said, was for the justice system to work.
CALDERÓN KEPT PUBLISHING information about what he had found out about the DAS, in part because he was concerned that prosecutors were not following the evidence. After the CTI completed a fairly thorough initial report of the documentation it had found in DAS offices, the prosecutors seemed to be primarily focused on the actions of the G-3, and were ignoring the later behavior of the GONI—including the surveillance of Velásquez and the other justices. Uribe claimed that he was restructuring the DAS, but the government kept minimizing the scandal. Muñoz claimed that there were no recordings of illegal surveillance—essentially stating that Semana had no evidence—and at one point stated that Attorney General Mario Iguarán had informed him that there was no evidence against President Uribe or any other official within the administration (Iguarán later said he had been silent on the matter). Other officials would talk about problems in the DAS many years earlier, blame the surveillance on a few bad apples, and deny any involvement by senior administration officials.
In May 2009, La FM radio published some audio recordings of phone calls by opposition politicians and journalists that, the radio station said, the DAS had illegally tapped. Around that time, other outlets reported that Lagos, the counterintelligence chief, had told the attorney general’s office that President Uribe’s chief of staff, Bernardo Moreno, and close Uribe adviser José Obdulio Gaviria both knew of the DAS’s wiretapping of the Supreme Court justices. The inspector general’s office also started a disciplinary investigation against several officials within the presidency, including Moreno, though it could not investigate Gaviria because he did not officially have a position within the government.
The Uribe administration replied by announcing a reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for the surveillance, while at the same time expressing its surprise at the decision by the inspector general’s office to open an investigation. Meanwhile, Gaviria denied any knowledge of surveillance and blamed the entire DAS scandal on a plot against the government, telling a reporter from El Tiempo that there seemed to be “a cell of the most coarse, even criminal, opposition… infiltrated within the DAS, because the damage that it has done to Colombian institutions is enormous.”
IN AUGUST 2009, Calderón published yet another bombshell story: the DAS was still conducting illegal surveillance. In some cases, DAS sources had told him, they had used hidden mobile surveillance equipment to spy on the members of Congress who were considering the bill allowing for Uribe’s third-term reelection. But one of their main “objectives” remained Iván Velásquez. Calderón had obtained recordings of dozens of Velásquez’s phone calls from a former DAS official whom Calderón had met through Job. Calderón took them to Velásquez’s house, and they sat down together to listen to them: Velásquez confirmed they were recent. Several of them were calls with his family; in others, he talked with his security detail about his movements; in still others, he talked with colleagues about ongoing investigations. This time, Calderón ended up publishing a few of the recordings, including one in which Velásquez could be heard talking to Jim Faulkner, the US embassy’s justice attaché. The United States, now under the leadership of President Barack Obama, had been very silent about the DAS scandal so far, and Calderón wondered whether this would force it to speak out more.
One of Calderón’s sources explained that after the scandal first broke, the people involved in wiretapping had stopped their activities for a while, “until the storm passed.” But once they saw that the criminal investigations were focusing only on the old surveillance, they started their work up again. “Adjustments were made and the difference is that now it’s done better and more discreetly,” the source said. One of the ways they made their activity more discreet was by working through “external networks,” which Calderón described as former DAS agents who had left the agency, but who would still carry out “special jobs” for it.
According to a US cable that was later made public, on August 31, the day Calderón published the story about the DAS’s continued spying, the US ambassador to Colombia, Bill Brownfield, convened a meeting of all US government agencies that had any contact with the DAS. At the meeting, Brownfield reported, the agencies agreed that the scandals had made continuing engagement with the DAS “a political liability” for the US government. They each stated that, to the best of their knowledge, their counterparts had not “wittingly participated in any of the DAS’s misdeeds, and no assets, equipment, or resources provided by them to DAS were used to commit these acts.” Since the scandal had broken, however, embassy agencies had “reduced or eliminated” their contact with the DAS. Soon afterward, embassy officials met with the Colombian vice president, Francisco Santos, who denied any DAS involvement in the new surveillance Semana had reported. But, in a sign, perhaps, of Washington’s alarm over the extensive surveillance that Calderón was disclosing, embassy officials also met with Calderón himself. Calderón gave them detailed accounts that—as Ambassador Brownfield reported in another cable—“undercut” Santos’s claims.
On September 11, the US State Department issued an unusually strong warning to the Colombian government. In a press release announcing the department’s certification that Colombia was meeting the human rights conditions attached to military aid, State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly called the allegations about DAS spying—which, he stressed, the media and nongovernmental organizations said were ongoing—“troubling and unacceptable.” The recent revelations that the spying continued required that the attorney general’s office “conduct a rigorous, thorough and independent investigation in order to determine the extent of these abuses and to hold all perpetrators accountable,” said Kelly. A few days later, the New York Times published a lengthy article about the DAS scandal, including the latest recordings, along with a quotation from Ramiro Bejarano, who said that President Uribe was “seriously weakening Colombia’s democracy.”
The day after the Times article came out, Uribe gave a statement to the media in which he said, for the first time, that he thought the DAS should be shuttered. DAS chief Muñoz followed up soon afterward, announcing that the government would submit a bill to Congress giving the president the power to dismantle the intelligence agency.
In Calderón’s view, the announcement was a way for the government to put an end to the scandal, but it was a poor way of handling the situation. Yes, the DAS needed to be closed down, but in the process, which took two years, a lot of valuable information—records that could have been relevant to the criminal investigations, and even assets—got lost or harder to track down. The agency’s 6,000 employees were spread out throughout multiple other government agencies, and it became very difficult to find witnesses to what had happened.
Also, officials continued to try to minimize the scope of the scandal. Soon after Calderón published the August 31 story, officials began to claim that the recordings of Velásquez’s calls had not been conducted by the DAS, but rather, by members of the police—even though Calderón knew it was the DAS. During a September 15 meeting with the US embassy, Vice President Santos echoed José Obdulio Gaviria, claiming that a “very dark” anti-Uribe “force,” perhaps made up of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, the FARC, drug traffickers, or the internal opposition, was behind the attacks on the DAS. Calderón later learned th
at an associate of Job’s who had once worked in the DAS had paid members of the police and army to allow him to use their systems to listen in on and record Velásquez’s calls, as a way to cast doubt on the DAS’s involvement.
One piece of good news, Calderón reported, was that the attorney general’s office had replaced the prosecutors who had first handled the DAS investigation. The first set of prosecutors had focused only on early surveillance; the new ones would be free to look into what happened later. They seemed serious, but they faced tremendous obstacles. The delay in investigating more recent instances of surveillance meant some evidence might have been lost, and it would be harder to reconstruct what had happened.
And still, efforts to confuse and thwart both the investigators and the public continued. All of a sudden, reports were cropping up left and right about alleged surveillance by different government agencies and by private companies. Increasingly, too, investigators who were looking into the DAS scandal were receiving threats. As investigators got closer to the most senior people responsible for the surveillance, Calderón reported, “the dirty war is increasing. And the serious thing is that if this continues, it’s very unlikely that we will find out what really happened, and who was behind the chuzadas [as the illegal wiretapping was known].”
THE NIGHT OF October 31, 2009, several DAS agents were gathered at a Halloween party in a country house in Chía, on the outskirts of Bogotá. They were relaxed and having a good time, drinking the strong Colombian aguardiente and playing music. Even though Uribe had announced that the DAS was going to be shut down, they were fairly confident that that wouldn’t happen—after all, the agency had weathered many other scandals over the preceding five decades, and it was still going. But the partying came to an abrupt stop a few hours in, when shots rang out. Hernando Caballero, one of the agents, had gone into the kitchen, and he had now come out with a gun and was shooting at his colleagues. By the time he had emptied his gun, two agents were dead and four others were wounded. Caballero then threw himself into the fireplace, where he burned his face, before some of the agents restrained him and tied him to a tree.
The official version of events was that Caballero had become extremely drunk, lost control, and begun shooting into the crowd. To Calderón, the story seemed much more sinister. Some of the victims had been members of the GONI subgroups that had been responsible for much of the illegal surveillance Calderón had reported. Others, including Caballero, were members of the counterintelligence department—but Calderón knew that they had collected information about the GONI members. Prosecutors had never taken their testimony, even though Calderón believed they were key witnesses. After the shootings, Calderón later reported, the first people to arrive on the scene were intelligence agents from the DAS. These agents insisted on conducting the initial crime scene investigation even though this was not their function, and they blocked judicial investigators from entering. One judicial investigator told Calderón that by the time he finally got in, it was clear that someone had tampered with the scene. After his arrest, Caballero—who had, according to Calderón, received a series of unusual promotions in the months before the shooting—admitted his guilt, which allowed prosecutors to close the case without investigating it. Unlike with many other cases, in this case Calderón found it very difficult to access case files, and Caballero refused to give interviews.
In November, Calderón learned of another suspicious death: a DAS agent who had worked in the agency’s IT department, and who had been a good source for Calderón, had been shot in the head. The official explanation was that he had committed suicide after having a fight with his girlfriend. Calderón was sure that if prosecutors had interviewed him, he would have said what he knew. That was no longer an option.
In January 2010, a former DAS agent, Alexander Menjura, was teaching his teenage daughter how to play chess on the second floor of his house when the doorbell rang. It was around noon, and his wife had taken his two younger children to routine doctor’s appointments. The children were on a school break. He was slow to answer, and as he reached the top of the staircase, he felt an enormous “boom” shake the house. He and his daughter were okay, but he ran down the stairs to find shattered glass everywhere.
At first, Menjura assumed the explosion had been caused by a gas leak, but when the firefighters and police came, they corrected him: someone had thrown a grenade at his house. Did he have any enemies, the police asked? Menjura could only think of one: the DAS.
Menjura had been a DAS agent for sixteen years, serving as chief of its counter-narcotics and then its money-laundering divisions. But he had left the agency in 2007, in the midst of a dispute with colleagues, and had been practicing law since then. Menjura had been upset about the circumstances surrounding his exit, and when a friend of his had introduced him to Calderón, he had been open about his grievances. He and Calderón had met regularly for a few months, and he had shared information about the issues he knew well—though he had not been a major source for the DAS surveillance stories. At one point, he learned from a friend, some other DAS agents had seen him with Calderón, and they had taken photos of them together. Ever since then, he had felt they had been persecuting him. His wife, who also worked at the DAS, had been transferred to a lower-ranking position. His brother, who had been working in the IT section of the DAS in Bogotá, had resigned after he was suddenly ordered to transfer to the remote region of La Guajira. His family’s US visas were canceled out of the blue—he presumed because the DAS had sent bad information about him to the US embassy. Still, Menjura had never expected a physical attack: “Ricardo had many sources—good ones,” said Menjura. “I think I was among the least important ones.” Calderón confirmed that. But Menjura got the message. The day after the grenade attack, he and his family left Colombia for good.
Before the Halloween massacre, Calderón said, several DAS agents knowledgeable about the agency’s illegal activities had been starting to come forward with what they knew, out of fear that they would be dismissed or unfairly transferred. But the murders put a stop to that. “After they killed two of the ones who were going to talk, who was going to dare to say anything about what was happening? The message was very clear,” one DAS agent told Calderón. In fact, the killings fit into a broader pattern of threats against not only DAS agents but their family members as well, if they attempted to approach prosecutors. “Unjustified transfers and massive firings without explanation have become other types of warnings,” wrote Calderón.
DAS AGENTS WERE not the only ones feeling the heat. The threats against Calderón had continued: from the start of the DAS scandal in early 2009 through 2010 he received six notices announcing his own death, three funeral wreaths, and multiple threatening phone calls. Most went to his office, though one of the notices arrived at his home. Calderón was worried about the impact on Mónica, as well as on his father. His mother had passed away just a few months before the DAS scandal broke, and his father, who had served in the police in the 1970s, and then as a low-level DAS agent handling immigration (not intelligence) matters, before retiring in 1995, had generally stayed away from Calderón’s work—Calderón tried not to talk to him about it, and neither he nor his father subscribed to his own magazine. But Calderón was not able to shield him from the threats: one of the funeral wreaths went directly to his father’s house. It was especially worrisome because his father had already suffered a heart attack in 2006, probably due to stress, when Calderón had first reported on the paramilitaries’ infiltration of the DAS under Jorge Noguera.
Calderón’s wife, Mónica, had for years wanted him to quit his job and leave the country with her, though she also understood that he could not do that: being a journalist, being in the mix of everything in Colombia, was at the heart of who Calderón was. Still, the year or so since the DAS scandal had broken had been the most difficult yet for both of them. Calderón was working around the clock, so she rarely saw him. She didn’t see or hear the threats, but she knew he must
be in danger. And the work was taking a toll on his health: he barely slept, both because of the stress and because he was running out to appointments with his sources at all hours of the night. Calderón had never been very good about eating—his go-tos were coffee and cigarettes—but now he barely touched food. By 2010, he weighed around eighty pounds, about half of his normal weight, and he was suffering from painful bouts of gastritis, which repeatedly landed him in the hospital.
At least, Calderón felt, there was not much that his enemies could do to ruin him financially: he did not even own an apartment. He had a BMW from 1973 that was his first car, and a bulletproof truck that he got in an auction. Nor was there any legitimate way to discredit him: he didn’t have affairs, didn’t party, and other than his incessant smoking, didn’t have any vices. All they could do was threaten him, and that—he thought—was just part of the job.
MEANWHILE, Velásquez was also under extreme stress. Even though the truth was starting to come out about the Tasmania story and the DAS’s surveillance of him, it felt like every time they took a step forward, they were then forced to take two steps back. One day, as Velásquez was in his car getting ready to go to work, he suddenly felt ill. He got back out and called María Victoria, and they rushed to the hospital. The doctors told him that the stress had caused an episode of tachycardia—rapid heart rate. In their words, he was like “a pressure cooker,” Velásquez recalled.
CHAPTER 18
THE END OF AN ERA
PRESIDENT ÁLVARO URIBE SAT ATTENTIVELY on the White House stage, next to the prime ministers for Australia and the United Kingdom, John Howard and Tony Blair, respectively, as US president George W. Bush spoke. “Today the United States honors all Colombians by honoring the man they have chosen to lead them,” said Bush. “By refusing to allow the land he loves to be destroyed by an enemy within, by proving that terror can be opposed and defeated, President Uribe has reawakened the hopes of his countrymen and shown a model of leadership to a watching world.” In recognition of Uribe’s courage, Bush said, he was awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor awarded by the United States.
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