One morning about two years ago, Mark Bowden awoke to find two large cardboard boxes on his doorstep, filled with nearly 3,000 documents, copies of the cable traffic between the United States embassy in Bogotβ and Washington over a three-year period relating to an undercover operation to kill the Colombian drug baron, Pablo Escobar.
Bowden, investigative reporter for the past 21 years at the Philadelphia Enquirer, had become interested in the US involvement a year before, when he saw a "grotesque picture of a dead fat man, bloody with a bunch of men posing around with guns. It looked like a big game hunt, which was what it was". The photograph (right) was pinned on the office wall of a member of the US's crack undercover military arm.
Like the rest of the world, he'd heard of Escobar but, again like the rest of the world, he had no idea that the US military had been involved in his death in 1993. Like a dog who scents a hare, Bowden was off.
He was then in the final stages of writing Black Hawk Down, a moment-by-moment account of the ill-fated intervention by Delta Force - the US equivalent of the SAS - in Mogadishu in 1993, a foreign-policy fiasco that resulted in 18 US dead and the total withdrawal of the US peacekeeping force from Somalia (Black Hawk was the name of the helicopters used). The cable traffic that was deposited so conveniently on his doorstep came from "a friend", though whether from the military or the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) or the FBI he wouldn't say. Bowden protects his sources.
"The key," he explains, "has been to find people who are no longer in the army, who were involved at the time." The cables proved to be a treasure trove, largely emanating from the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) personnel but also from the ambassador.
In addition to confirming US military involvement, they also provided a much-needed chronology of events. But Bowden didn't fully appreciate their significance until much later - when he had a clearer idea of what had actually happened.
Although no one in the military would talk to him officially, his experience in Black Hawk Down proved decisive. "A friend of a friend" put him in touch with "the former Delta Force operative who ran the American operation in Colombia", who was prepared to accompany him on his first trip to Colombia. "He was someone who thought this was an important story, wanted it to be told. And by virtue of the fact I was with him, the Colombians who might have stone-walled me, thought he must be OK, this guy's with him." The willingness of people down the line to open doors for Bowden - from former military personnel to the DEA and the FBI - not to mention the Colombians - is an indication both of his reputation as an old-style investigative reporter and his nice-guy, gentle-giant personality, seemingly free of ego and "side". His second book (this is his fourth) was an investigation into the world of US pro football and it remains his favourite. If he'd had a choice, he would have preferred to have made it as a footballer but he "just wasn't good enough". Writing came an acceptable second.
"Even though I studied English literature, the books I was reading were non-fiction books - Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese - the New Journalism. I didn't have a clue how to do something like that, so when I had a chance to work for a newspaper I took it. I actually took a cut in pay, until then I was a cashier at the supermarket. And I was lucky enough it worked out and I got to do exactly what I wanted." Black Hawk Down is currently being made into a film by Ridley Scott. Writing the first screenplay became an exercise in cutting, something you have to do for a film, something you cannot do in a book, explains Bowden.
"When you're writing about something like this, about real events, in a real country, about issues of tremendous importance, there are so many people who are real experts on these subjects, it's hard to be taken seriously as a journalist if you dummy down or simplify the story. You really have to show that you've done the work, that you know the context, that you know the history, that you demonstrate with the detail how thorough you have been in your research. It's only then that people take you seriously."
The cast list in Killing Pablo is enormous, from politicians and police to individual victims and hitmen. Bowden sets the stage with the history of Colombia's politics and the burgeoning of the post-war "narco trade" that became the arena for Escobar's reign of terror in the 1980s and early 1990s.
And terror it was. Escobar (born in 1948) started life as a small-time thug, and was by then one of the richest and most dangerous men in the world. If he couldn't buy his enemies with cash, he bought others who would kill them. Those he bought included politicians, lawyers, police.
By the end of the 1980s, Escobar held the whole of Colombia to ransom.
The US became involved in the hope - vain, as it turned out - that killing Escobar would kill the cocaine trade. (Ninety per cent of the world's cocaine comes from Colombia.) In 1991, Escobar escaped from the "prison" that he had built himself in the hills outside Medell∅n - in effect a nice, safe base from which to run his cocaine business, away from rival gangs, where the guards were in his employ and where his every whim was catered for. Fearing he was about to be put in a real prison, he went on the run. Only the North Americans had the technology to find him in the mountainous jungle that was his stomping ground, an area that stretched in a 100 mile-circle from Colombia's second city, Medell∅n, and included the great urban sprawl of Medell∅n itself.
Yet nobody at the top, including US President Bill Clinton, had any idea what was going on. Although the US involvement was the starting point for Bowden's investigation, he became increasingly fascinated by the courage of individual Colombians, given the very real danger they and their families faced from Escobar's bombs and hitmen.
A key figure in the hunt for Escobar from the start was one Col Martinez, who headed the Colombian police Search Bloc unit. By chance, his son Hugo, only a police cadet, became involved in surveillance and was seconded to his father's unit in the latter stages of the operation.
Through his Delta Force mentor, Bowden met Hugo Martinez and through him, his father, now retired. Although willing to talk, Hugo was unwilling to be named in the book - he was still a serving police officer - but agreed that if his father was willing to be identified, then it would be OK for him too.
"So I interviewed Col Martinez and at the end of the interview I asked him this question and I don't speak Spanish so I waited on the edge of my seat for this very long-winded answer for the verdict. And the verdict was that, yes, you can do it, because he felt that the people who were closely allied with Escobar had known for years who he was and who his son was."
The continuing secrecy about what really happened in the hunt for Escobar revolves around the role of a group of vigilantes known as Los Pepes - relatives of those killed, terrorised and tortured by Escobar - who decided to play Escobar at his own game. Whereas both the Colombians and the Americans had to abide by basic humanitarian rules, Los Pepes played as dirty as they wanted, killing anybody - if they felt it would undermine Escobar's belief in his own invincibility: relatives, women, children, even his lawyers and their families.
In Killing Pablo, Bowden argues that Los Pepes were not only allowed to carry out their acts of vengeance with impunity but were indeed set up and fed information by both the Colombians and the US.
"I think the book makes a very strong case that the United States was not just tangentially involved with these death squads but I think actually created them," he says.
It was naturally denied, but that was no surprise. Pressure was put on him to omit this conclusion. He declined.
"Anyone in the military has to take an oath not to reveal anything without permission. If they do, they can be prosecuted. But I can't be.
"In my country, there are no restrictions on what I can try to find out. Whatever I find out is fair game. I try to exercise good judgment. I went to people who were in a better position to know and showed them the manuscript before it ran and said 'Am I putting anybody's life in jeopardy?' I don't want to be responsible for anyone being hauled out and shot in another country. I think as journalists in a democratic society, we need to know how our government projects its power in the world - how we function. It's one of those areas where my role comes into conflict with the government but it's an appropriate tension." As far as the attitude to the alleged involvement with Los Pepes, Bowden says attitudes differ.
"Candid people within the United States military will say either that this was an outrage, this was clearly against the law and went beyond their authorisation and they should be prosecuted for this. Or they say isn't it refreshing that for once we had the balls to take the gloves off and deal with the situation as it existed. Do what had to be done." One of those he talked to was retired general, Colin Powell, now a foreign policy adviser to President George W.Bush.
Which side had be been on? "Publicly, he would be on one side and privately on the other. And that's the way it has to be. Publicly, you're not going to find someone in a position of authority and power to say it's important for us to ignore the rule of law on occasions. Ultimately, power rests upon violence. Countries are powerful ultimately because they're more capable of violence than other countries and so the United States, or in this case the government of Colombia, if it was to defeat Escobar, had to be more violent than he was. He kept upping the ante more and more and more and so the answer was to match him - and better him - at his own game. I think it's reprehensible, but it worked."
Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden is published by Atlantic Books (£16.99 in UK)