by Phil Klay
“All my life, and all my father’s life,” I say, “the government has sent us out into mountains and jungles of Colombia, to the regions where the government has no power. These places have always been the same—before the guerrilla and the narcos and the paramilitaries, there were bandits, there was the Violence, there was chaos. So we carve out order in the chaos. Sometimes I think it is like a man with a machete hacking a path through the jungle. Everybody who follows behind us, it’s their job to think about justice, about whether the state is cruel and callous, or good and benevolent. It’s my job to carve the path.”
“Then,” Mason says, “you are yes?”
“To call it a peace is too much, far too much,” I say. “I’m a soldier. I’ve seen guerrillas turn to paramilitaries turn to drug gangs turn to politicians. I’ve seen massacres over the scraps left behind after our victories. I know the law of unintended consequences. So we need to maintain presence and . . .” I consider whether this is the time to bring up the point of the evening, and decide I might as well. “There’s Operation Agamemnon. Already, it’s not going well, and this will complicate matters. I don’t want to say it, but I’m afraid the job will become too much for the police to handle on their own.”
“Ha!” Mason says, seeing the point I’m making. “Switching Agamemnon to the army . . . Well, I think of Agamemnon as law enforcement, not war. Yes?”
“Sadly,” I say, “there’s not much of a difference here.”
Operation Agamemnon is a police-led strike at the Clan Úsuga, alias the Gulf Clan, alias the Urabeños, a criminal group with an estimated two thousand members. It’s the largest campaign against a criminal group in Colombia’s history, with an order of magnitude more resources than we ever threw against Escobar. Also, given the FARC peace treaty and the peace talks ongoing with our other major group of communist guerrillas, the ELN, it’s the most important thing going on in Colombia. But it’s police led, which is a problem, and not just because the police lack our skills and are more prone to corruption and infiltration.
Having the Americans on board right now for a shift to making Agamemnon an army operation would put us, philosophically, in the same place. The modern Colombian army depends on millions of dollars of U.S. aid for the maintenance of our air power—a necessary capability in a country filled with jungles and mountains—and so despite the international news declaring an end to “the longest insurgency in history,” it is critical that all parties involved understand that “war,” loosely understood, continues in Colombia. War, and “war,” requires continuing support.
Mason turns to my daughter. “What do you think, Val?” Her name sounds dead on his tongue.
“That’s my father’s business,” she says. “I’m in my second year at university, studying law. We talk about the deal, but . . . I don’t know enough yet to earn an opinion. I think someone should really know what they’re talking about before they open their mouth.”
“You’d make a terrible American,” Mason says, laughing.
“It sounds strange,” Valencia says, “knowing that my father is an operations officer in the special forces, you’d think I would know all kinds of things about what’s going on . . .”
“We don’t talk about work,” I say, “inside these walls. This is a home. Our kind of work has no place in a home.”
Mason looks chastened. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s good. Every rule should be broken sometimes, especially for guests. Valencia, do you have any questions?”
She thinks for a moment, and Sofia eyes our daughter with her head cocked. Is she nervous? In truth, the rule is more for Sofia’s benefit than Vale’s.
Finally, Vale says, “What do you tell your daughters about what you do? Do they know about it?”
“Oh.” Mason looks at me warily, and I nod to him, slightly. He leans forward. “At first, nothing.”
Valencia nods.
“But kids learn things, I don’t know how. When they were old enough we had to have the war talk. The war talk, and the sex talk. Not very fun, those talks.”
I have had neither of those talks with Valencia.
“What was it like for you?” he said.
Valencia looks nervously at my wife, then at me. “The only scary time was when I was really young. Five or six, I think.” Without wanting to, I raise an eyebrow, and Valencia quickly adds, “Nothing happened. But . . . there was a time when my mother was very nervous.”
There’s a moment of silence. My wife looks sad, and then says, “Saravena,” the name of an oil town where I’d been tasked with building bridges to a community that hated us.
“That was a difficult place,” I say. “It still is.”
Valencia doesn’t say anything more, because she is a respectful child. I think about making a comment on those days, about being a father and fighting a war, but instead I wave my hand dismissively. Valencia’s face is opaque. I had always thought we shielded her perfectly, and the degree of achievement and obedience we see in her is proof that we raised her well and protected her from anything truly damaging, but of course children notice more than you think. Perhaps she knows better than I how Saravena changed me. I was too busy living through it.
“Good,” Sofia says, clapping her hands. “No more of that. And much more of the limoncello.”
* * *
• • •
After dinner, Mason and I have cigars in the garden of our apartment complex, leaving the women upstairs. I watch him put one of my lanceros to his lips and take a puff. He holds it awkwardly, and lets too much saliva touch the quickly dampening edges. Odd, for a military man, not to know his way around a cigar.
“Your wife wants the peace deal to deliver justice,” he says.
“Yes.”
“How about you?”
“I think justice is a lot to ask for.”
He laughs at that. “Somebody told me you were on the Raúl Reyes mission.”
I nod. Reyes had been the number three man in the FARC. Also, he’d been a clown and a killer, with rodent facial hair and endless crimes from cocaine trafficking to murder. Formally sentenced for eighteen kidnappings, for the murders of thirteen policemen, eighteen soldiers, the thirty-six youths killed in the bombing of Club El Nogal. And he had the obnoxious habit of dressing his murders up in the most trite clichés about the people, and the revolution, and socialism, and justice.
“Did that feel like justice?” Mason asks.
I wonder what he’s driving at. The Reyes mission was done in collaboration with the Americans, the type of collaboration we’d like to employ in the Agamemnon mission.
“It was”—I’m not sure how to describe it—“an impressive display.”
Basically I’d sat on a base, bored, while the planes flew overhead toward his camp just across the Ecuadorian border, first a group of Cessna A-37 Dragonflys, light attack aircraft carrying 500-pound Mark-82 gravity bombs with a Paveway guidance system strapped on the nose, behind them our Super Tucanos, flying at much lower altitude, carrying conventional gravity bombs, and behind them an AC-47 gunship. The Dragonflys dropped their smart bombs, killing Reyes and those around him. The Super Tucanos dropped their bombs, flattening the surrounding jungle, killing insurgents while simultaneously providing plausible deniability that we were using American technology. Then the AC-47 strafed the area, shot survivors. And it was only then, after all that firepower, that we came in on our U.S.-provided Black Hawks. There weren’t many guerrilleros left. We walked through bodies torn by shrapnel. One corpse lay peacefully, as if for a wake, the only sign of damage, pools of blood where eyes should be. And we found a huge amount of intelligence, probably the biggest haul on the FARC ever. And, of course, Raúl Reyes’s corpse. Mostly intact.
Hearing that story, you might be tempted to think it was a bomb that killed Reyes. You might focus on the technology, the guidance syste
m given to us by the CIA, or the plane, a light attack aircraft specially designed during the Vietnam War for counterinsurgency. Or perhaps you’d think about the pilot, or the commander who oversaw the operation. But that wasn’t what killed him at all. Or, at least, it wasn’t the important thing.
“You know what it felt like,” I tell him. “It felt like doing the laundry, or taking out the trash. Like something that needed to be done.”
Mason takes another awkward pull on his cigar. The only other American soldiers who don’t know how to smoke are the Mormons, who have an excuse.
Nonchalantly, not trying to offend him, I turn in profile to show him how to treat a lancero, holding the cigar just to the mouth, drawing in the smoke gently, bringing down the cigar with the smoke held in the mouth, feeling the tobacco hit, savoring the richness, slowly letting it out, then rotating the cigar, exaggerating the movement, and repeating the process. I don’t think he notices.
“Take Agamemnon,” I say. “Currently it’s the police who are leading the fight against the Urabeños. It’s logical. They’re a drug gang. Let the police handle them. And so they’re trying. And when they catch Urabeños, they arrest them and bring them to trial. Would you say that counts as justice?”
“Sure,” he says.
“But if the army takes over Agamemnon, well . . .”
“You’ll stop putting Urabeños in jail and start putting them in body bags.”
“Exactly.” I smile. I suspect this is what makes him nervous about the whole thing. Might as well confront it. “Is that justice? Who knows? But last week the Úsaga dragged a sixty-year-old man from his truck, they shot him in the middle of the road, waited for the police to come. Then they killed four police, they killed one army captain . . .” I let out a sigh. “So I don’t think now is a time to worry about justice. There are things that need to be done, one way or another.”
He says nothing. I know he gets my point, but he won’t agree to it, even for politeness’s sake. Which is frustrating. What we want is not simply a new front in a war, but access to that thing the Americans, and only the Americans, can provide. The same thing that killed Raúl Reyes, and which the Americans have been using to hunt people in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Philippines and Somalia and Niger and Colombia and Ecuador and who knows where else. And it is something we deserve access to. After all, it started here, in Colombia, thirty years ago.
This was during the war against Pablo Escobar, who had been the herald of a new type of criminal. A drug lord of such scale and wealth that he was able to wage an asymmetric war against the foundations of the state itself, focusing as much on murdering police officers, judges, and politicians as on holding territory. When ISIS started murdering every state worker in Iraq they could find, including garbagemen, as part of their war, they were acting as Escobar’s children. Break down all order, all civilization, so the cockroaches can breed in the ruins.
In response, we formed a special unit, the Search Bloc, about whom much has been written. Behind the scenes, men like my father worked with the Americans to create an integrated network of differing agencies designed to tighten the loop of finding targets, fixing them in place, finishing them, exploiting and analyzing the intelligence collected, and then disseminating that intelligence to the agencies and commands able to act on it most rapidly. It created a model in which the operations of special forces, military intelligence, police intelligence, signals and human and image intelligence services were reorganized and integrated to reduce stovepiping, maximize information sharing, and tighten the circle of analysis and execution into a seamless, never-ending cycle.
That system is something often ignored in discussions of military capabilities, because it is not a particular unit, or weapons system, or technology, or style of training, but something more amorphous, a system that ties all of those elements together and multiplies their lethality and speed. This is no exaggeration. The Americans would use the same system in the Balkans, and then would pump steroids into it in Iraq. The outcome: a special operations command that was executing 12 raids a month in 2004 turned into an industrial-scale killing machine that was conducting 250 raids a month only two years later.
An American officer once described it to me this way: “When civilians think about war, they tend to think about the mechanism of death. The heroic Navy SEAL firing a tight cluster of bullets into a bad guy’s head. The creepy, mechanical drone delivering a bomb. But those are just the flathead and Phillips-head screwdriver at the end of a targeting system. And it’s the system that’s the real killer.”
The Americans took the system back to Colombia ten years ago, and after a lucky NSA intercept of a phone call with Hugo Chávez, used it to help us kill Raúl Reyes. And Negro Acacio. And Martín Caballero. And many others. Of course, we can run the system, in a limited sense, on our own. In fact, we teach the system to other military allies around Latin America. But access to U.S. assets turns it into a monster.
“I’ll be honest with you,” Mason finally says. “Most of MILGROUP is on board with the shift. But personally, I think it’s a big fucking deal when you switch from targeting a bunch of guerrillas who are explicitly at war with you to targeting drug dealers. Mixing war and policing is dangerous. Plus, high-value targeting is famously useless against criminal gangs.”
That’s too stupid to take seriously. “And against terrorists, supposedly,” I say. “But Al Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, the Haqqani network . . . it seems a mix of war and policing is all Americans do these days.”
He laughs at that, and says, “Why do you think we can’t seem to end any of these wars?”
I’m not making any progress, and I should probably leave it there. Enough to learn that the rest of MILGROUP is in support. But I can’t help pushing.
“Can I trust you with something?” I say.
“Of course.”
“I mentioned to you we’ve been getting intelligence from a group operating in Norte de Santander with ties to the Venezuelan military.”
“Yeah . . . the . . .”
“The Mil Jesúses.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“What I didn’t mention was who they were passing intelligence through.”
Now he’s looking at me curiously.
“Me,” I say. “I’m their connection. Or, rather, they reached out to me.”
“Huh,” he says. “Why? I mean . . . why you?”
The short answer is that it’s my daughter’s fault. Because she’s got a professor who wants to take students to work for a foundation in Norte de Santander. Because I started reaching out to contacts in the area who might know something. And because within a few days a lawyer in Bogotá who, after my father’s disgrace, had worked briefly for my family, was calling me on their behalf. Not that I’m going to tell him that.
“Who knows?” I say. “Probably because they wanted a direct line to Colonel Carlosama. And he wasn’t going to be in touch with them.”
“Huh,” he says again. He’s not showing much surprise, but I expected that. The Jesúses don’t have much discipline around operational security, especially when it comes to avoiding signals intelligence, and so I’m quite sure the Americans already know about me. It’s one of the reasons I’m willing to share this little secret with Mason, who probably thinks I’m being recklessly trusting.
“Yes, it’s unusual,” I say. “And because of that . . . it puts my career in a delicate place.”
I let him take that in. He puffs on the cigar awkwardly, and makes a face.
“Friends like that can be a problem,” he says, his expression guarded.
“I know. But we wouldn’t have had the El Alemán raid without them.”
“The one in Norte de Santander?”
That was where we first met, when Mason came to Colombia.
“What am I going to do?”
He doe
sn’t answer. I decide to push him again.
“Are you going to judge me for these . . . friends?” I ask, smiling. “I suppose you only accept human intelligence from angels.”
“Not so much.”
I smile. “Don’t tell anyone about this, by the way. I tell you in confidence.”
He nods, warily. Of course I know he’ll share what I’m telling him. But he’ll feel guilty about it.
“They don’t trust the National Police, they will only work with us. Of course, we pass the intelligence on to the Junglas, but you know how easily bureaucratic roadblocks can happen.”
Mason shrugs. “Sure.”
“And their information about Venezuela is”—I decide to be deliberately vague—“interesting. Anyway, it’s just one of many developments that will put us in good standing when we take over Agamemnon.”
Mason nods, awkwardly fiddling with the lancero in his hands. I decide I’ve pushed this line far enough for tonight. Enough to put the worm in his brain. “We can talk more some other day. Enough work for tonight.”
Mason holds the cigar up to his face, lets it down, and says, “I’m sorry, I’m trying but . . . I never will understand cigars.”
I laugh. “I can see that.”
“I am wasting good tobacco here. To me, all cigars taste like lung cancer.”
I pluck the cigar from his fingers.
“Next time, you come to our place,” Mason says. “You can meet my daughters.”
I smile. “I would like that very much.”
He claps me on the shoulder. Very American, this Mason. I think he wants to be friends. In the military, in our military, we don’t have friends. One year here, two years there, is not enough time to develop friendship, true friendship, that lasts beyond the camaraderie of men who have served together. It is one of the many hardships of the army. The loneliness. The fact that we don’t even have the love or respect of our people. Until Uribe, we did not even give the army the tools we needed to accomplish the tasks asked of us, brutal tasks, tasks in jungles and mountains, in towns where the people report your movements to the guerrilla, in the forgotten parts of the country where coca grows everywhere and friends of the state wither and die.