THROUGHOUT SEPTEMBER, we gathered intel and launched five more strikes, all designed to capture elements of Aidid’s infrastructure. Taking out a despot is a chess game. A dictator seizes control with a wave of violence and holds it with the threat of more. But iron fists leak. Exploit those leaks, mission by mission, systematically leveraging mistakes. Learn, profile, move closer, and even the most feared and cloistered man can be knocked down like rotten fruit.
Take Colombia, for example. Under the leadership of Hugo Martinez and with American intel support, the Search Bloc was systematically tearing the Medellin cartel apart. The body count was horrific: Pablo Escobar was fighting back savagely, ordering bombings and assassinations. Through the first six months of the hunt, more than sixty-five police officers were killed. But the Colombian government was winning the war of attrition, picking off major players in Escobar’s power structure. Escobar’s men began to turn on him, offering to provide information in return for concessions from the government, and the drug lord himself had gone to ground. Teams of Delta operators rotated through Medellin, assisting the Search Bloc as forward observers and advisors while being very careful not to get into the shooting end of the operations. Doing so earned them the Search Bloc’s respect.
Then, a vigilante group calling themselves Los Pepes (an acronym for People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar) burst onto the scene in January 1993. The day after Escobar ordered a massive bookstore bombing that massacred innocent people in the streets of Bogota, his mother’s hacienda burned to the ground. Then a pair of car bombs exploded outside Medellin apartment buildings where Escobar’s family was staying. Soon after, the drug lord’s mother and aunt were wounded in another bombing. While the Search Bloc confined its assaults to Escobar’s known cartel associates, Los Pepes had no such manners: They went after the drug lord’s family, his lawyers, his accountants, and his friends—and vowed in writing to do so every time Escobar injured innocent people.
Delta, Busby, and U.S. intelligence agencies suspected that the families of Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada—the murdered men whose blood I thought I’d seen at La Catedral—were part of the force behind Los Pepes. Whoever it was, one thing was certain: Where Escobar had long had the advantage of fighting a government enemy that played by legal rules, now he was fighting a second enemy, and this one played by his rules: the rules of terror. Garrison and I agreed that if any evidence surfaced that the Colombian elements we were working with were involved, Delta was out of there.
And so, the noose was tightening around Escobar in Colombia. In Mogadishu, I was confident we’d get Aidid, too. It was only a matter of time.
Sunday, October 3, was my mother’s birthday and I woke up wondering how I was going to manage to call her from this east African hellhole. By then we had already captured Osman Atto, Aidid’s chief financial advisor, and he and I had our little meeting in the Conex where I told him he’d “underestimated our God.”
After that, we published a list of targets: wanted men. These were Somalis we knew were either tied to Aidid, or whom we felt could provide us with useful intel. The idea was to stir the pot, to get Aidid’s men wary and moving—or perhaps worried and ready to turn.
It worked. The CIA station chief came down to the airfield from UN headquarters to tell me a very worried Somali had come to visit American agents there.
“My name shouldn’t have been on that list,” the Somali complained to CIA. If the Americans would take his name off the list, he said, he would reveal the location of a secret meeting of many of Aidid’s top lieutenants.
As the station chief briefed me, I listened, intent and skeptical. Top lieutenants? We’d heard that before and busted down courtyard gates only to frighten women and children. So far, the quality of intelligence in Mogadishu had succeeded as much in alienating the people we were trying to help as it had in getting us closer to Aidid.
Still, I listened. “Aidid’s lieutenants are meeting to discuss strategy,” the CIA liaison told me. “Today. In Bakara Market.”
The place we least wanted to go. Located in the heart of downtown Mogadishu, Bakara Market was like a sprawling, open-air farmer’s market, rummage sale, and arms dealership all rolled into one. It was, and is, the largest and busiest market in Mogadishu. In better times, Bakara had been alive with men dickering over bags and barrels of maize, sorghum, and rice, with scampering children, and wives getting out of the house for a friendly visit or a snatch of gossip, their hijabs vibrant against their dark skin. Now, food was scarce, and trade had turned darker, with stalls and vendors selling everything from illicit drugs and foreign passports to RPGs and anti-aircraft guns. And it could all be had cheap—and no questions asked—with money changers deciding on the spot the going exchange rate of the Somali shilling against the dollar.
Aidid controlled Bakara, and vendors paid protection money to his thugs. People would do anything to prop up one end of the war between the clans. Some tribe members fought with guns; others fought with money and information. Businessmen not only profited from trading contraband, but used their gains to finance rival militias.
In Bakara, armed militia openly patrolled the streets on foot and in technicals. Women and children were armed and loyal to the Habr Gidr clan. The American policy was not to even drive through Bakara. Now we were talking about hitting Aidid there.
So the question was, is the CIA’s informant reliable?
Danny McKnight sat across the battered table from me. “What do you think?” I asked him.
“Bakara?” he said. “I’d want to be sure.”
“The informant has a good motive for turning,” Garrison said. “He’s trying to save his own ass.”
“If he’s telling the truth, there’ll be a lot of targets at that meeting,” I offered. “Might be too good to pass up.”
Garrison sat back in his chair and considered the rafters. “All right,” he said after a long pause. “If he’ll I.D. the precise location of the meet, we’ll hit it.”