AT 11 A.M. ON FEBRUARY 18, 2009, Ricardo Calderón was walking down the street to Hacienda Santa Bárbara, a high-end red-brick shopping mall in Bogotá, when his DAS sources pulled up next to him and dragged him into their car. He had assumed that—as on other occasions—the DAS agents would ask him to climb into the trunk of their car in the basement parking lot, and drive him to an unidentified location to talk. They had good reasons to be paranoid, so he didn’t mind following their instructions whenever they met. But this time, they punched him in the brow and knocked him out. When the guard outside his building woke him up the next morning on the front lawn of his apartment building, Calderón could not remember anything that had happened over the past twenty or so hours. He went to the emergency room for stitches on his head wound, and a blood test revealed that he had been administered a drug similar to scopolamine, or “Devil’s Breath,” which left him able to function but with no awareness or recollection of what he was doing.
Around noon, Calderón pulled up to Semana’s offices to tell his editor what had happened. He was taken aback to find the same agents waiting for him by the building’s entrance. He took them into his office to talk, and they immediately apologized: “We’re so sorry, but you have to understand,” Calderón recalls them saying. The agents had been talking with him for so many months, without Calderón writing any articles, that they had become afraid that he was working for the counterintelligence branch of the DAS. Meanwhile, the word had been getting around within the agency that Calderón was writing something big about them. A counterintelligence agent had spotted Calderón talking to one of his sources, and had alerted the DAS’s counterintelligence director, Jorge Lagos. As a result, Calderón’s sources said, counterintelligence agents had begun destroying incriminating material and were now conducting a witch hunt within the agency, trying to find out who else might be talking to the media. Calderón’s sources were nervous. They didn’t understand why he hadn’t done anything yet with all the information they had been giving him, so they had decided to dope and interrogate him. “Last night we realized that you were loyal, but we had to be sure that you hadn’t been sent by Lagos,” they explained. Calderón accepted their apology and said he understood. But the incident changed things: he had kept the lid on his latest investigation for a long time and would have liked to continue investigating. But what if his other sources also grew suspicious? What else might they do to him?
Calderón’s wife, Mónica, was having dinner with her mother, who was visiting them, when she saw him walk into their apartment with a huge bruise on his head. He tried to avoid being seen, but she rushed to him, alarmed. What had happened? she wanted to know. Calderón always tried to keep the threats he received from Mónica, as he didn’t want to upset her. The only one she had ever directly encountered was a message on their phone’s answering machine in 2004, warning Calderón to be quiet or suffer the consequences. The threat, Calderón had believed, was in response to an article he had written about how police officers, apparently working on behalf of paramilitaries, had kidnapped and tortured a young woman they believed had stolen money from the paramilitaries. After that incident, which shook Mónica deeply, the couple had moved, and had gotten rid of their answering machine.
This time, Calderón told Mónica he had slipped and hurt his head by accident. Mónica kept looking him over, to see if he had any other injuries, but she couldn’t find any. She didn’t believe him, but she also didn’t want to upset her mother, so she accepted his explanation and let him go to sleep. Mónica had always known Calderón did dangerous work, and she had never fully understood why he was so passionate about it—she would not choose to do that work herself. But she also knew that it was central to who he was. So the best way for her to deal with it, and not live in a constant state of anxiety, was simply to trust him and try not to know too much about what he was doing.
CALDERÓN HAD STARTED this latest investigation as a result of his monitoring of Job’s activities. He had recognized former members of the DAS who were showing up to meet with the paramilitary, and who were clearly passing information on to him. Curious to find out more, Calderón had reached out to some of his DAS sources from the days when he was covering the scandal over paramilitary infiltration of the DAS under its director at the time, Jorge Noguera. Calderón had never revealed their names, so they trusted him. Knowing of Job’s efforts to smear the court, Calderón had asked them whether the DAS was spying on political figures—or even the Supreme Court. They confirmed that it was. And so began, especially starting in October 2008, yet another round of surreptitious meetings in which they gave him information. In addition to the basement of Hacienda Santa Bárbara, Calderón would meet them at gas stations, and at various restaurants in the middle of the night, usually on weekends. Initially, they only told him what they were seeing, and explained the structure of the DAS—which operated in cells—and the role of different actors. But Calderón kept pressing them for more.
He also reached out to other people at the DAS, some of whom started to talk. There were DAS agents who didn’t agree with what was happening inside the agency, and they wanted Calderón to expose it. Others agreed to talk to him because Calderón figured out that they were angry about the treatment they were getting from their supervisors, or frustrated in some way, and Calderón was able to play on those feelings to get them to open up. With a couple of others, Calderón was able to get them to talk out of fear, because they started to realize that things were getting out of control, and that they could end up in jail for following illegal orders.
By December, Calderón was receiving large quantities of audio recordings and intelligence reports that documented some of the agency’s activities. He had already obtained a vast amount of information, but there was more coming, and he wanted to get as much as possible before he essentially shut down his access to the documents by going public.
But at this point, he concluded, continuing his investigation without publishing anything was just not feasible without taking on an unacceptable amount of risk.
ON FEBRUARY 23, 2009, Semana ran the first of what would turn into a months-long series of stories, leading with an explosive statement: “The DAS is out of control. It illegally records the calls of judges, journalists, and politicians, and has put itself at the service of drug traffickers, paramilitaries, and guerrillas.” This scandal was worse, Calderón wrote, than the one the DAS had faced in 2005, after Noguera’s departure and Rafael García’s allegations. Based on statements by over thirty witnesses and participants in the events, as well as a vast number of documents and audio recordings, Calderón described an intelligence agency that, instead of focusing on true threats to national security, had poured much of its resources into spying on people perceived as enemies of the Uribe administration. These included opposition politicians, such as Gustavo Petro, as well as journalists, such as Semana director Alejandro Santos, and prominent columnists Daniel Coronell and Ramiro Bejarano, who had criticized the government (Bejarano also happened to be the attorney for the Supreme Court president, César Julio Valencia, in the defamation suit brought by Uribe). It also included the Supreme Court itself, and, most importantly, Iván Velásquez.
“Any person or entity that might represent a threat to the government has to be monitored by the DAS. And along those lines, more than a year ago the activities of the [Supreme] Court and some of its members began to be considered and treated as a legitimate ‘target,’” Calderón quoted one detective from the Intelligence Directorate of the DAS as saying. Four other DAS officials had corroborated the claim that the DAS was spying on the court. Calderón had reviewed some of the intelligence reports about the court, including one about Velásquez: “Velásquez has been the subject of ‘one-on-one tracking’ since the Tasmania incident in October 2007,” he wrote. “They don’t leave Velásquez alone even for a minute, as is evident from the DAS report.” The DAS had listened in on more than 2,000 of Velásquez’s calls and monitored dozens of his meetings. DAS reports included detailed logs of Velásquez’s movements—from the classes he taught at universities to the interviews he conducted with potential witnesses and lunch with his family on weekends. “The risk to judicial investigations is obvious,” wrote Calderón. In fact, one of Calderón’s DAS sources said, “when the confrontation between the court and the presidency became more acute, about a year and a half ago, the order was to find out as much as possible about all of the justices, by whatever means necessary, from human sources to technical tools. When the confrontation began to slow down, monitoring began to focus only on those that were higher priorities, like Velásquez.”
In addition to illegally wiretapping phone calls, the DAS was scooping up emails of their targets—Calderón discovered this by accident, when in early February 2009 a DAS official had called him, alarmed, a few hours after Calderón had an email exchange with fellow journalist Félix de Bedout about some of what he was learning about the DAS. Without thinking, the DAS official said something about the friendship between the two journalists. Calderón asked how the official knew about that, and the official said that Jorge Lagos, the counterintelligence director, had told him. But, Calderón pointed out, the DAS would have had no way of knowing about his contact with De Bedout unless it was monitoring their emails, as Calderón and De Bedout had only recently started to be in touch online. Calderón wasn’t able to get a straight answer from the official, but it was clear to him that the DAS was somehow getting access to his or De Bedout’s email messages. More broadly, with regard to the media, one of Calderón’s sources said that “the priority is to know the information about the ones who worry the government, either because they are too critical, or because, unlike others, the government cannot control them at will.”
The DAS conducted its illegal wiretapping through various means. A few years before, the United States had helped Colombia establish what was known as the “Sistema Esperanza” (Hope System), an official wiretapping system formally under the control of the attorney general’s office, to strengthen its ability to conduct criminal investigations. The system was operated from several different salas, or chambers, including two—the “wine chamber” and the “silver chamber”—within DAS headquarters. In theory, phone calls could only be intercepted through the Esperanza system if there was a judicial warrant for the surveillance. However, Calderón explained, DAS officials had gotten around the warrant requirement by simply getting judicial warrants for phone numbers of criminal suspects, but then—once the order got to the DAS rooms—changing the phone number to that of the target the DAS officials wanted to monitor. Alternatively, Calderón reported, DAS officials had at times manufactured fake warrants, or had tricked prosecutors into issuing warrants based on false information. In addition to the Esperanza system, the DAS had mobile surveillance equipment that it had purchased from the United States. It could use this technology to tap hundreds of phone lines without warrants, and even to track cellphone locations from secret DAS offices.
The story also described several incidents in which DAS information had ended up in the hands of prominent paramilitaries, drug traffickers, and even—in one case—ELN guerrillas, presumably because of corruption within the agency. At times, Calderón wrote, drug traffickers had even been able to get the DAS to carry out wiretapping on their behalf, using its mobile equipment.
In January 2009, Calderón wrote, a small group of DAS officials had been given the order to destroy most of the records of the illegal spying. The word had been spreading internally about Calderón’s investigation, and the government had decided to name a new DAS director, Felipe Muñoz, to replace María del Pilar Hurtado. Muñoz was going to take over on January 22, and midlevel officials were nervous about whether their illegal activities would be exposed, especially once Semana published. Eventually, investigators from the attorney general’s office would uncover video footage from the DAS’s security cameras that corroborated Calderón’s report: it showed an unusual amount of activity on those dates, with numerous DAS officials exiting the building with what appear to be boxes and briefcases of materials, and even entire desktop computers. Five hours of video from the day Muñoz took over were also missing—supposedly because the cameras stopped working during that period.
In the days after the story broke, Calderón felt like Semana was, more than ever, alone. On the radio, on TV, and in the newspapers, commentators were arguing that Calderón’s story was false, that it couldn’t be trusted, because it was based on anonymous sources, and that there was nothing there. The new DAS director, Muñoz, was also claiming that Semana had the facts wrong, and some of the other media outlets seemed to buy Muñoz’s line.
Calderón did find one source of support: the national police chief, General Óscar Naranjo, checked in on him, and he made a point of walking with Calderón around the “Parque de la 93,” a small, tidy park surrounded by cafés a block from Semana’s offices, on a regular basis. Naranjo admired Calderón’s courage and humility, and had been impressed by his depth of knowledge about organized crime in the country—on that issue, he said, Calderón “might be the best informed person in Colombia.” He couldn’t give Calderón armed guards without undermining the journalist’s ability to do his work, but by walking with him publicly, he could offer some measure of protection.
Nonetheless, a couple of weeks after breaking the story, Calderón and his wife fled to London, with help from the British embassy. One of Calderón’s contacts had warned him that there was an order out to kill him, so Calderón planned to stay outside of Colombia for three months. Mónica recalled that it was extremely difficult for him to leave, not only because he was attached to Colombia, but also because of his phobia of airplanes (apparently caused by a bad flight when he was a child). The entire flight out of the country was a nightmare. But it was good to have a few days of peace in a place where they could walk freely down the street.
Less than two weeks later, however, they were back in Colombia. Administration officials were on the offensive, attacking Semana and claiming that the story about the DAS was part of a political plot against the government. Since Calderón had worked alone, there was nobody else at Semana who had access to sources and could reply; he could either stay away and let the government kill the story, or he could return and defend it. He chose the latter. Some of his contacts in law enforcement and the intelligence community were also able to at least temporarily halt the plan to have him killed. “After that, we got the funeral announcements and wreaths, but that was a public threat, it was more comforting,” Calderón later recalled with a smirk. He kept meeting with his sources, though it became extremely difficult because now he was under surveillance himself: “It was very evident.… I would go out for coffee at a bookstore and the guys would be back there holding the books upside down while they watched what we did.”
Still, he was able to keep collecting information, often by slipping away in the middle of the night for meetings with sources, and over the following months he published several stories that shed more light on what had happened in the DAS. An investigation by the attorney general’s office—including a fairly thorough initial report by the CTI on the files they had found in the DAS—also yielded further details, and the new information started to change the coverage of the story by other news outlets, giving more credibility to Semana’s reporting.
The picture that emerged was that, as early as 2004, when Noguera was directing the DAS, the agency had established a group of around sixteen agents called the G-3, led by José Miguel Narváez, who was then the deputy director of the DAS. The G-3 was focused on conducting what Calderón later described as a “dirty war” against human rights groups and members of the labor movement. Narváez had for years held various prominent positions in the Ministry of Defense, in the military, and in military and intelligence training schools, and he was said to have been a teacher of General Rito Alejo del Río, whom former president Andrés Pastrana had cashiered over alleged links to paramilitary groups. Narváez was said to have been close to Pedro Juan Moreno, Uribe’s right-hand man in Antioquia, and there were rumors that, early in Uribe’s presidency, Moreno had pushed Uribe to set up a new central intelligence agency, with Narváez as its possible head.
The G-3 was the branch of the DAS that—as Calderón had reported during the 2006 scandal enveloping the agency after the former IT chief for the DAS, Rafael García, began making his statements about Noguera—had put together lists of trade unionists and activists and passed those along to paramilitaries. Some of the people listed, including a well-known university professor, Alfredo Correa de Andreis, were later assassinated by paramilitaries under the orders of Jorge 40 (Rodrigo Tovar Pupo), the senior commander of the AUC’s Northern Block. But the new documents revealed that the G-3 had also pursued prominent journalists, including Daniel Coronell, the Semana columnist and Noticias Uno director who later exposed the Yidis Medina scandal; opposition politicians, such as Gustavo Petro; and members of human rights groups. The documentation about Alirio Uribe, the head of a Bogotá-based organization, the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective, that litigated human rights cases, included detailed information about his movements and those of his entire family, photos and analyses of his financial transactions, and numerous transcripts of his phone calls.
Another DAS target during that period was Claudia Julieta Duque, a journalist who was then investigating the 1999 assassination of beloved comedian and journalist Jaime Garzón. Some of the DAS files that emerged after Calderón’s 2009 story contained detailed notes as well as photos of Duque, and even photos of her small daughter; there was also an instruction manual in the files about how to threaten someone, using Duque as an example. In fact, in November 2004, Duque had received a call that followed the precise formula sketched out in the manual: “Señora, are you the mother of María Alejandra?” they asked her. When she said yes, they went on to say, “Well, I have to tell you that you gave us no other choice. You were told in every possible way and you did not want to listen. Now neither bulletproof trucks nor silly little letters will help you. We’re now going to have to go after what you most love. This is what happens to you for being a bitch and getting involved in things that are none of your business.” Duque also recalled that the caller said, “Your daughter is going to suffer. We’re going to burn her alive, we’ll sprinkle her fingers throughout the house.” Within weeks, Duque and her daughter fled Colombia. Duque had been working closely with the Lawyers’ Collective. A senior official at that organization, Soraya Gutiérrez, also reported threats against her daughter at the time: she received a doll with [drops of] blood on it, and a note saying, “You have a lovely daughter. Don’t sacrifice her.”
The G-3 was dissolved after 2005, when Noguera resigned, and Narváez was removed from the DAS in the midst of a public fight between the two, in which they traded accusations of paramilitary links. But the illegal spying did not end there: soon afterward, now under the leadership of a new DAS director, the DAS established a new group, the GONI (Grupo de Observación Nacional e Internacional) or National and International Observation Group. According to Calderón, the GONI had many of the same members as the G-3, and it operated under the leadership of Fernando Ovalle, who had previously been coordinating the G-3. In theory, the GONI was divided into subgroups—Falcón, Fénix, and Cóndor—that were supposed to focus on external threats, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and the supposed Islamic terrorists in Colombia. There was a practical reason for selecting these themes, Calderón later explained: the GONI’s interest in getting US assistance, including access to surveillance equipment. In fact, Calderón said, the GONI did get extensive US support, including mobile surveillance equipment that it used for illegal spying. Calderón reported, for example, that if Senator Gustavo Petro was traveling to Cali, the GONI, which was in theory monitoring a foreign consulate there, would use its mobile surveillance equipment in Cali to spy on Petro. During this time, the GONI surveilled not only opposition politicians but also members of the Colombian Constitutional Court, when in 2005 it was considering a constitutional amendment to allow presidents to serve for two consecutive terms—thus allowing for Uribe’s reelection.
Around the same time, the DAS was also restructured a bit, elevating the intelligence and counterintelligence departments to the level of “directorates,” supposedly with the goal of making the intelligence-collection process more efficient and transparent. But this status meant that the chiefs of these departments—Fernando Tabares and Jorge Lagos, respectively—now formally had direct communication with the president.
By 2007, according to the information Calderón had collected, the GONI had turned its attention to a new set of targets: Iván Velásquez and other members of the Supreme Court. Initially, the DAS’s interest in the court seemed to have been triggered by an interview that Yesid Ramírez, who was then the president of the court, gave to Semana in 2006. In the interview, Ramírez—who had previously had a good relationship with President Uribe—sharply criticized the president for having backed the Constitutional Court in a conflict between the two courts over whether the Constitutional Court could review Supreme Court rulings for violations of fundamental rights. It had been widely believed that Uribe would back the Supreme Court on the issue, and so his decision to do otherwise—coming soon after the Constitutional Court approved an amendment allowing him to run for office a second time—had incensed Ramírez. In the interview, he insinuated that Uribe’s decision to back the Constitutional Court was a way to repay the court for having approved the amendment. Uribe reportedly called Ramírez to complain about his statements, and it was said that Ramírez hung up on the president. Soon afterward, DAS documents showed, the agency began monitoring Ramírez’s movements, examining his financial transactions, and digging into his background. DAS surveillance reports from early 2008 also showed that one of the agency’s plans was to look into connections between Ramírez and Ascencio Reyes, the businessman who—according to stories leaked to the press by the presidency—had paid for several justices to take a trip to Neiva.
But it was clear to Calderón that the DAS’s surveillance of the court extended well beyond the Neiva trip, and that it was politically motivated. In fact, the surveillance had ramped up significantly in early 2007, after the court indicted Senator Álvaro Araújo, expanding to include many other justices, and focusing in particular on Velásquez.
Calderón started talking to Velásquez much more often, corroborating information and piecing together how different sectors of the government were going after him. “I remember being in his house and talking to [Supreme Court Justices] César Julio Valencia and María del Rosario González and telling them that this was serious,” Calderón recalled. “Because Iván had enemies everywhere.”
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 that 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.