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BIRDS CHIRP
OMINOUS MUSIC
GRUNTS
MAN: The pain I had was excruciating.
MOANS
Every time I'd breathe, there was pain.
GUNFIRE
MOANS
I was very aware that we were in Pablo Escobar's area.
The nightmare scenario.
PANTS
What happens if Escobar's men get me?
But the main thing was the pain.
GRUNTS
GUNFIRE
GASPS
GUNFIRE
What was I going to do? Think about your morale.
Father, son, Holy Spirit. I swear, no more.
The Catholic prayers came out.
I said, give me the strength to die with an element of honour.
SIGHS
I lay there thinking,
how the fuck did I get myself here?
LOUD BANG
GUNFIRE
REPORTER: This was the work of the Medellin drug cartel.
REPORTER SPEAKS IN SPANISH
REPORT CONTINUES
FEMALE REPORTER SPEAKS IN SPANISH
REPORTER SPEAKS IN SPANISH
REPORTER: A bomb has exploded in the capital of Colombia in Bogota,
killing 35 people and injuring around 200.
SIREN WAILS
The explosion devastated the headquarters of the country's security police.
The main suspects are Colombia's drug cartels,
but the most prominent cartel bosses have escaped.
One Pablo Escobar, just minutes, the police say,
before they raided his hiding place.
On Sunday, Presidential elections take place.
GUNFIRE
Three candidates have been assassinated already.
The cause: the unending drugs war.
Central to the conflict is Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellin Cartel
and Colombia's most feared criminal.
Cocaine dealing transformed him to one of the world's richest men.
DRAMATIC MUSIC
MAN: When you look at Pablo Escobar and the size and scope of his organisation,
he is the largest cocaine manufacturer and distributor ever
in the history of the world.
Responsible for as much as 80% of the cocaine in the world.
Think of that, 80%.
Initially, there was an alliance between the two cartels, Medellin and Cali.
COLOMBIAN NEWS REPORT
MAN: Cali cartel controlled cocaine distribution to New York.
Pablo Escobar controlled the Miami area.
Then Cali started trying to get into Miami,
Pablo was trying to get into the New York markets.
SIREN WAILS
The war started and it was so vicious
that the Cali cartel tried to bomb Pablo Escobar's building.
They placed a car bomb at the base of that apartment
where Pablo Escobar's family was based.
Bomb detonated, everybody was fine
but the retribution that Pablo Escobar took on the cartel was vicious.
MAN SPEAKS SPANISH
SIREN WAILS
CARS HOOT
UPBEAT STREET MUSIC PLAYS
MAN: I was invited to a meeting with the Cali cartel.
Gilberto Rodriguez told me in two minutes
the reason we are here is we have a terrible enemy, Pablo Escobar,
and either we get rid of him or he gets rid of all our family.
What they wanted from me
was to put them in contact with some of the ex-SAS forces
that were retired in England to which I had access.
MAN: 1989, I received a telephone call from Jorge Salcedo Cabrera.
I said, what is it?
He said, we want you to work for some businessmen in Cali.
The mission was to eliminate Pablo Escobar from the Cali cartel's lives.
Kill Pablo Escobar.
And I knew just the person for that role.
You don't get asked to assassinate Pablo Escobar
unless you have the right experience.
GUNFIRE
SHOUTS
GUNFIRE CONTINUES
SHOUTS
ADVENTUROUS MUSIC
I went to Angola because I wanted to get into action.
REPORTER: Angola divided and at war with itself
has collapsed.
EXPLOSION
GUNFIRE
For us, the Cubans or the Russians have no right to kill Angolans.
We have to get aid from anyone who will help us to defend ourselves.
REPORTER: There have been about 200 British mercenaries
involved in the war
who are paid to fight against the MPLA,
the movement which won the civil war and which now runs Angola.
We interviewed Peter McAleese,
commander of all the FNLA mercenaries in Northern Angola.
What I want is for the public to hear the other side of the operation,
see the good side and the bad side, and to let them judge for themselves.
MC ALEESE: I was young, I was fit, I was aggressive.
Although I disliked communism, it was never a personal thing.
They supplied most of the enemy at that time.
The communist plan for Africa was to go across the central belt
and then start proceeding North and South.
The West backed the FNLA and the Eastern Bloc backed the MPLA.
I wouldn't have wished it on my worst enemy.
It was a nightmare.
The place was in a state of breakdown.
And there was a lot of money in arms, changing hands.
Why shouldn't we fight communism?
Whether it be for money or for a cause we believe in.
I first met Dave Tomkins in Angola.
He had never been a regular soldier
but what I did notice about him, he was extremely brave.
TOMKINS: I've had a whole host of jobs in the security
business, defence equipment.
I was the guy who would get you anything, anywhere:
bombs, missiles, artillery rounds,
in the millions and millions of dollars' worth
to Iran, Iraq, PLO, you name it, I shipped it.
MC ALEESE: He liked to sport a large medallion he had round his neck.
A bit suave, a bit debonair.
He was always well coiffured, you know.
TOMKINS: My first impressions of Peter were
I was impressed with him.
I was impressed with the way he handled himself, moved.
He wasn't flash.
We just gelled as soon as we met.
MC ALEESE: Dave said, are you interested in a job in Colombia?
And I accepted. I could not resist the challenge.
UPBEAT MUSIC
TOMKINS: Peter and I flew from London to Cali.
We were met by Jorge Salcedo.
MC ALEESE: We called him George.
He also had a code name he liked to use called Ricardo.
- How are you? - Very well.
- Nice to see you. - Let me introduce you to Peter McAleese.
Pleasure is mine.
Come by me.
MC ALEESE: I could tell that Jorge was definitely somebody within the system
because he walked us straight through customs,
immigration, and there was no hold-up whatsoever.
I felt that the mission had been sanctioned at the highest level.
CABRERA: At that time, I knew everybody.
I had no problems getting them through customs,
it was immediate.
And that power came from the Cali cartel.
CARS HOOT
TOMKINS: I had a video camera and videoed everything.
They took us to the outskirts of Cali,
to a private sports centre that was owned by the cartel.
- How was your flight? -Top of the range, thank you.
TOMKINS: And in a rest area there by the pool having lunch
was the four Cali cartel leaders
and that is where I had my negotiation.
We represent a group of highly skilled soldiers, the best in the world.
I charge per month, per person,
plus bonuses, plus expenses, plus all found, everything.
Money was not an object for them, they had billions.
Peter is our main trainer; he was with the SAS.
And then it just went a bit quiet
and it became a bit more intense.
Like it had been orchestrated.
One of them leaned over
and he said to me:
Can you kill Pablo Escobar?
TENSE MUSIC
MC ALEESE: The morals of killing Escobar,
I didn't have any conscience about it.
How can you have morals
when the American government has a million dollars on his head?
The Colombian government has quite a bit on his head.
COLOMBIAN NEWS REPORT
The guy was a threat to the government, the way of life in Colombia.
Although he was kind to a lot of people in Medellin,
but the fact is he upset the balance of power within Colombia
and he had to go.
Think about the heartaches that he caused by some of the people that he killed.
COLOMBIAN NEWS REPORT
MURPHY: He put a bomb on a commercial airliner
because he thought there was going to be a presidential candidate on that plane
and he wasn't even on there.
So 110 people died
because Pablo wanted to impose his will on somebody else.
MC ALEESE: You can't moralise with that.
I have never looked upon it as murder, I've looked upon it as a target.
I've looked upon it as
you could say that's a cop-out, it's not, it is genuinely how I feel.
Thou shalt not kill, you are in the wrong business
because that is what it's about.
The actual act of killing someone,
when you are a professional soldier and you are on a mission,
is partly what you have chosen to do in your life.
I was a bit nervous the first time I killed anybody.
I was in the SAS, I was posted out to Aden in 1967.
That area is now called Southern Yemen.
We were in a camp called Haberlain
and it was constantly being motared and shot at by dissident rebels.
Our task was to get out and try and get rid of these men.
We moved up to this area where we thought was a group of shepherds there.
As I looked at them, something clicked in my mind
and told me, these guys are not shepherds.
It was pretty dark.
I spoke to one, he stood up GUNFIRE
and he shot Dave Healy who was the troop sergeant
and I turned round and I just blootered him.
I fired a round into his stomach.
He stood up and he straightened up
and I put another five into his chest and he slid down a wall.
SLOW INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC
I felt really like I'd proved myself as a soldier.
I felt proud that I hadn't failed in battle.
In the eyes of some, it may be morally wrong
but then again, that was the profession that I chose.
BIRDS CHIRP
OMINOUS MUSIC
The first night it was cold
and I found a can of beans in my escape bag.
GROANS
I found some hexamine blocks which the British army used for cooking
and when the can inflates again, you know the food is cooked.
It was beautiful. LAUGHS
It was a fear that Escobar could send people to kill me.
On the hill there, lying on my own, I had some vivid dreams,
and this dream was Angola.
SHUDDERS
There was a guy bent over a bush
and somebody had shot him in the back of the head.
His brains had come out, he was still holding the bush.
PANTS
Managing to hang on.
PEOPLE SPEAK THROUGH RADIO
The Cali cartel was very confident that they could kill Escobar
when he had one of his usual parties in his ranch.
The details were to be carried by the British.
TOMKINS: We will target Hacienda Napoles,
we'll wait for him to come there and you will have to tell us when he is.
You will have to put your spies into action, police and military.
They said, good idea.
MC ALEESE: I wanted to do a flight recce, the reason being,
I wanted to know what the ground looked like
because that is where we were going to strike.
HELICOPTER WHIRRS
PEÑA: Hacienda Napoles was Pablo Escobar's pride and joy.
He loved that finca, it was about ten thousand acres,
it had a zoo where he had all the exotic animals of the world there.
I remember the elephants, the giraffes, the famous hippos.
A museum where he had Al Capone's car in.
He'd bought all kinds of things relevant to gangsters.
PEÑA: He built an airstrip
where his drug trafficker friends would come in to negotiate.
He had sicarios guarding that finca.
MC ALEESE: When we were in the air,
I looked down at Hacienda Napoles
and I realised that it was a lot easier than I had actually thought in the beginning
because I could see the ground.
CAMERA CLICKS
It was tailor-made for a complete assault team.
I had to think about med evac.
Should anybody be shot, how do we get them out?
There was three airfields that I was thinking about,
how we could med evac there.
We knew where the guards were.
We could see the guards on the gate and in various places.
The main thing I was concentrating on was the shape of the houses,
how the houses were laid out
and how the stables were laid out and the best place to attack it from,
and above all, I look for an area where the assault team would land.
It was pleasing to the eye of a military person
and I said, this one is a goer.
I felt excitement at the challenge,
excitement at doing something that nobody else could achieve.
Everything in my military career
had led me to believe that this was my day.
TOMKINS: We needed a number of men, preferably special force types
who were capable and mentally prepared to take on this mission.
MC ALEESE: How many men are we going to use? We decided on 12.
We can only go for the top guys.
Billy, it's Peter.
Lots of experience, combat proven, who had the big balls to do this.
It's Dave, Dave Tomkins.
MC ALEESE: The selection process I had for the men was based on
the fact that some of them had served with me before,
others were recommended by other people.
I knew I could count on you.
And to be fair, none of them said no, they just said, we'll come.
Alex Lennox, how are you?
In the beginning, Dave Tomkins called me.
Very well my friend, been a long time.
Alex had been parachute regiment, 32 Battalion, South African army.
I've got a good job opportunity for you.
I was excited.
Good money, very good money.
I said, where is it.
Colombia.
I'm in.
Basically come through Panama, not straight to Colombia, you know the drill.
ADVENTUROUS MUSIC
TOMKINS: He looks like a Peruvian mountain goat doesn't he?
They came in via circuitous routes, Germany, Argentina.
CHATTER
It was security protocol.
CHATTER
MC ALEESE: We with George, met them at the airport,
and George again secured them through the passport and immigration.
That's it, Jock, you look super. Straight out of Miami Vice.
CHATTER
Everybody's here!
MC ALEESE: By this time, George had acquired an apartment.
Very spacious, very palatial.
Everybody came there and we settled them in.
Brilliant, fabulous, well-furnished.
There was only one way into it, that was by elevator.
It had armed security, they supplied us weapons.
So we all had weapons
in case we got a surprise visit from anybody.
CHATTER
Today is a nice day, the sun is shining in Cali.
LAUGHTER
Here is a missionary to donate a few dollars to the poor.
That could be me cos I'm fucked.
I think that's 750 but just double check that.
What, mate? I can get the motorcycle.
My ship's come in.
UPBEAT MUSIC
LENNOX: We were on 5000 dollars a month, plus expenses, plus food.
But that was just a retainer.
I was on 1000 pounds a day.
MC ALEESE: The next morning, I got the guys together, gave them a quick brief.
At this stage, we still hadn't told them the target was Pablo Escobar.
We didn't feel they needed to know at that time
and I emphasised, do not do any drinking whilst you are here.
SHOUTS AND CHATTER
LATIN MUSIC
LENNOX: The most beautiful women in Latin America are in Cali.
I mean, it's just unbelievable,
that we've got 12 of us and they're beginning to seduce us.
It really was everybody loves Cali, we love Cali and we did.
LAUGHTER
TOMKINS: Guys spent a week or so running around the clubs and social life
doing what guys do, making a nuisance of themselves.
MC ALEESE: I went for a walk through Cali
and I passed by a pub that was fairly open.
SHOUTS
I went, what the fuck.
SHOUTS
Two of my team were there, they were drunk.
Anywhere else it would've been funny a situation,
but we could not afford to bring attention to ourselves.
I sent them back to the flat.
SLURRED SPEECH
The next day, we stopped a week's wages off them.
A thousand dollars off you and you.
I said also, you will do exactly as I tell you.
So I went to the chemist and I got some stuff called Antabuse
and if you drink alcohol with it, you start vomiting.
So I made them take Antabuse tablets.
LATIN MUSIC
CABRERA: Cali is a small city, not used to seeing a lot of foreigners.
Their presence was getting noticeable in the city.
So, I decided it was time to leave town.
DRAMATIC MUSIC
We were 8000 ft up. It was cold, a shivering cold.
I was thinking about survival because I could have died.
And it gives you time to mull over certain mistakes that you have made.
I was soul searching.
PANTS
I thought about a number of things.
My marriage wasn't going too well.
Everything went through my head, you know my childhood, mother, father.
I wished I had been a better husband and a better father.
I was hurting a lot and I felt my head was going to burst open.
I was trained to kill by the army
but the fighting instinct came from no mean city, Glasgow.
SLOW PIANO
I was brought up in Riddrie, right next to Barlinnie prison.
My upbringing in Glasgow, it was hard and tough
but when you lived where I lived, with the people I lived with,
it's natural.
I never saw my father, I just heard about him.
My dad was an extremely hard person, he was feared by a lot of people.
WOMAN: He was quite a tough man, quite a hardy old man.
He'd get himself into some scrapes
and I remember as a child seeing him,
a whole gang attacked him, he had about 46 stitches in his head.
MC ALEESE: He was also absent.
And I remember my mother said to me, your dad's home,
and I remember distinctly he had a uniform on.
I walked up to him and I said, hey mister, are you my daddy?
Because I had never seen him.
If you look up here at the top right-hand window of Barlinnie prison,
my father used to be incarcerated there
and he'd put little things in the window,
different colours to tell my mother, you know,
either he loved her, he was depressed, he was happy, things were going well.
BREWER: Mammy would be upset at times because
my father didn't know how to sorta be with him.
That's the only way I can put it.
He never ever told any of us he loved us, you know.
MC ALEESE: I seen my dad fighting on a few occasions.
He got himself involved in a fight.
I was very young at the time
and my father had been dethroned as the local hard man
by a guy called John Dones.
And old Miles, who was my grandfather,
said, we are not having this, the family has been toppled.
So he put my father on a training regime for the comeback fight.
They exchanged blows and it was fairly heated.
They were both really going for it.
It looked like something, you know, out a movie.
My father took a couple of smacks, but he bested John Dones
and eventually dropped him.
GRUNTS
My father used to beat me.
He just hit me once
and all I saw was a load of stars.
He broke my nose.
It made me think
that I could never let anybody beat me.
I prefer to leave it alone if you could, you know.
BREWER: I think Peter wanted him to say to him,
I am really proud of you.
But I don't think my father could say that.
I don't think he was able to say that.
MC ALEESE: It made me a fighter.
I found myself becoming more and more aggressive
because I was moving up the food chain of the hard men.
I was trying to find something that I could channel my aggression into.
I had to get out of Glasgow because Glasgow wasn't good for me.
SLOW PIANO ENDS
BIRDS CHIRP
MEMBER: The skinny one.
Very nice, I love them shorts mate.
There is Don chewing a fucking orange.
My God you are ugly close up.
He wants somebody to push him.
TOMKINS: We needed a place to train and we needed weapons.
We can't go around shooting in the streets
and eventually they moved us to a place called Pennsylvania.
WHISTLE
That was a beautiful ranch that the Cali cartel had.
MEMBER: There is Dave doing his exercise.
After a hard day I am having to relax.
Oh, we felt relaxed because you know that there was money behind you.
A hundred acres of mountain-top retreat.
It had Chinese gardens, full scale bowling alley,
swimming pool, sauna, weight room,
stables, horses, quad bikes, guard dog perimeters,
guarded by the security guards at the front gate,
a cook - Martha, servants.
It had an antenna for the television, bigger than my house.
They could get a tv channel anywhere,
you wanted to watch EastEnders
MC ALEESE: It was out of this world, it was truly palatial.
The most important thing about being up there,
there were no pubs.
The drinkers suddenly realised it wasn't on anymore
and the guys started taking it seriously and we started to train.
Up!
Come on boys, come on.
LENNOX: We needed to be fit. An unfit soldier is a dangerous one.
We had plenty of that, but not enough fitness,
so that really challenged the guys.
Five, four, three, two. Come on go, go, go!
We'd do basic para PT and fitness.
Ten push-ups, go, down.
TOMKINS: We used to run around the running track
every morning at 6 o'clock.
Bloody thing.
MC ALEESE: We were told there were weapons arriving and to be ready for them.
The weapons were obtained in the United States.
They were smuggled into the country.
We are getting excited, we were psyched up,
waiting on them.
TOMKINS: And then it was smuggled up on the back of a farmer's pickup truck
that folded up and had a false bottom, and all the weapons were in there.
That's when the guys were like kids let loose in a sweets shop.
Ah fucking hell, here we go.
MC ALEESE: There were Interdynamics,
which is a small submachine gun.
- TOMKINS: We had M16s, AR15s. - MC ALEESE: Anti-tank rockets.
TOMKINS: SPAS-12 shotguns, machine pistols, Uzis,
Zulu grenades, 66mm anti-tank LAW rockets,
60 kilos of C4 explosives, anti-personnel mines,
whatever we wanted.
CHATTER
It was like fucking Christmas.
The whole thing has come together.
Everything that we needed to assault,
weapons-wise, was there.
Go!
GRUNTS
TOMKINS: Now the weapons had arrived, it had become real,
and the training went into full swing.
CLICKS
I could see the mentality of the men switching.
They were starting to come together, identifying with team leaders,
the team leaders identified with me.
CLAPS
They suddenly realised
they were going to close with the enemy and kill them.
Everything seemed to be slipping into place,
that you get with a unit that has just started up
and everybody became part of the unit that we had.
OMINOUS MUSIC
BIRDS CHIRP
MC ALEESE: The second day, I just lay there, shivering cold
PANTS
and I was going through things: have I got food, the water is taken care of,
and I was planning in my mind if help didn't come,
how I could help myself because I had escape money on me.
And I formulated a plan
and I felt it would take me something like 8 days to get better.
But did I have enough food to sustain me for eight days?
Did I have enough warmth, did I have enough medical kit
to keep myself going to try and kill the pain?
I didn't.
PANTS
SLOW PIANO
The day I left the British army, I just went to one side and I started crying.
It was the worst thing I ever did in my life.
I drifted from job to job, I just wasn't fitting in
and I just felt lost.
And my aggression became worse.
My idea of a good Friday night,
you go on the pubs, get pissed and have a good fight.
It got to the stage in my life where I felt that
disputes could be solved by violence.
Irene was a girl I got involved with.
It developed into arguments
and one day I hit her, a slap in the back of the head.
And before I knew where I was, to use Glasgow terminology,
I was getting huckled off by the police.
I was charged with assault
and I got myself locked up in Gloucester prison.
I don't blame that lassie for what happened, I blame myself.
I am extremely sorry.
If I could meet the judge who sent me to prison,
I'd walk up and shake his fucking hand.
AFRICAN GROUP SINGS
I was doing a lot of reflection, where was I going to go from here?
SHOTS
What experience I had from the special forces,
I wanted to use it and test myself even further than I had gone.
There were plenty of places to go if you were seeking combat.
GUNFIRE
I was a mercenary in Angola,
GUNFIRE
I was a mercenary in the Rhodesian army,
I was a mercenary in the South African army.
PLANE FLIES LOW
In Rhodesia, every time we went out,
we had some form of contact with the enemy.
MUFFLED SPEECH
There was a thing called the black book,
my name was in it, it said 'a good hard, soldier'.
That's how I considered myself.
BIRDS CHIRP
The discipline that we are talking about is that we are going to fight back.
That's the difference. Understood?
Honestly, guys, nobody can touch us.
Together as a team we can take on four times our number,
I assure you we can do it.
Everybody here has got trigger time under their belt
which is more than what the army's got.
Keep it up, keep it together,
realise that they cannot fucking do us, and I mean it.
I am not creating this in my mind,
if we can't convince ourself that this is the case, we'd be as well go home.
This is home.
Just had lunch, Roy and myself. I had a tomato, Roy had a carrot.
LAUGHTER
It's terrible here, I'm doing it for the job.
MC ALEESE: Terry Tangney came to see me
and he says, my bottle has gone.
I'm shit scared, whatever it is that you are doing,
I just want to go home, mate.
They had no idea who the target was.
We didn't tell them it was Pablo in case, well for security reasons.
I'm out, I'm sorry mate.
MC ALEESE: I said to myself,
if his bottle has gone and we let him go, who is going to do it next?
I'll tell the boys that you have problems at home with the wife
and you have to go.
The guys turn round and said, he's a fucking liar, his bottle has gone.
Thanks, mate.
no worries
LENNOX: The truth was he wasn't up to it.
He wanted to get out and he was a security risk,
that's what he was,
and he should have never been let home until it had finished.
TOMKINS: So, gentlemen.
You're probably wondering what you are doing here,
who the target is.
Some of you might have guessed it right.
We called them together and said, right,
you are speculating on who the target is or what we are here for.
Don't speculate anymore, this is the target, his name is
Pablo Escobar.
The head of the Medellin drug cartel.
Great, how are we going to do him?
LAUGHS
ADVENTUROUS MUSIC
At the last meeting I had with the cartel bosses,
Chepe Longdonyo, who was one of the four,
came to me and he said, David, bring me back Escobar's head
and I'll give you a million dollars for it. I said, yeah, alright.
I said to David, I'll cut his head off once he is dead,
give you it and you can get the money, I'll take 100 grand.
And it would have been proof he was dead if I had brought him his head.
MC ALEESE: I had a look at the situation and I said,
I think it's time to do another flight over the route, into the target area.
CAMERA CLICKS
SPEAKS IN SPANISH
80 men on the premises.
We assumed there were 40 on duty and 40 resting.
SPEAKS IN SPANISH
MC ALEESE: The ammunition they were carrying was 60 rounds per man
and it was submachine guns, which didn't have the range of what we had.
SPEAKS IN SPANISH
MC ALEESE: Every one of the enemy there should be 3 men for,
so we made up those numbers, we made it up in ammunition.
The capacity of the Ordinates was enough to fucking kill 2000, 3000 guys.
GUNFIRE
Tactical wise, we had the advantage.
They were on to a loser, not us, because we had the fire power.
CAMERA CLICKS
EL ÑANGAS SPEAKS IN SPANISH
MC ALEESE: What I particularly liked was taking something from an idea,
turning it into a plan and implementing that plan.
The aim is to close with the enemy and kill them.
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
New evidence has emerged that British mercenaries are training gunmen
for the drug cartels in Colombia.
One mercenary has produced a videotape
which he says shows former British and Australian soldiers
at a secret Colombian training camp.
This man, Terry Tangney, sold NBC the pictures.
MC ALEESE: Terry got back to Australia.
The first thing he did was sell a story on what was happening in Colombia.
He jeopardised the mission,
he jeopardised the men who were his comrades there,
there but fortunately enough didn't mention Pablo Escobar
because at that time he didn't know.
I don't know what British mercenary activity there is in Colombia.
I have seen the rumours too.
If there is any, then I deplore it.
Why would the CIA or FBI or anything want to stop it
when he was a target for the United States anyway?
PEÑA: When we heard about this plan, of course we wanted him dead,
so any effort to kill Pablo Escobar was of course welcomed,
we wanted it to happen.
- You got it Dave? - Pardon?
- You got it? - Yup.
TOMKINS: I think they adopted a suck it and see policy.
They are disposable.
If they achieve it, fine, it's achieved an objective that suits us all,
if they don't achieve it, we've lost nothing.
CABRERA: It was a need that they should maintain secret in the area.
So one of the solutions was to move the whole group to the middle of the jungle.
OMINOUS MUSIC
PANTS
MC ALEESE: I woke up.
Still no sign of any rescue.
The pain at this stage, it hadn't subsided,
but I was learning to live with it a bit more.
I had some of the beans that I had left.
I just prepared myself to lie and wait until some form of help came.
The other reason I did that was to try and get my body to repair itself,
have an element of repair should I have to try and walk out.
COUGHS
It was a fear that
GROANS
Escobar's guys could come and get me.
I was very aware of what could happen to me.
I had decided if they came, I was going to take them with me.
WESTERN MUSIC
CHATTER
TOMKINS: They moved us to a place they called La Guagua.
God knows what that means, 'the jaguar' or something.
LENNOX: The trip was quite amazing trip.
We went by a Dakota aircraft; it really was phenomenal.
MUSIC CONTINUES
Give us a smile son
LAUGHTER
I'd bring it home for you Billy, if I could.
But I'm not allowed, police won't let me.
MAN: The Colombian or British police?
The British police. The Colombian police won't mind.
MAN: This is the place.
LENNOX: Finally, they took us to the training area.
It was obviously a cartel stopping ground, moving cocaine,
stuff like that.
MC ALEESE: The jungle accommodation was just a long hut.
It held us all.
CHATTER
We set up camp and settled in there
to begin another phase of training.
There's Dave with the M60. There goes Alex.
TOMKINS: It was in the middle of nowhere.
He has finally got it.
It wasn't Guerrilla territory that we knew of.
No beds, no bedding.
MC ALEESE: It was on a side of a river, so there was no trouble bathing
and keeping yourself clean.
What a sight! LAUGHTER
And we just got on with the routine there.
The helicopters, one was parked behind us,
two were over the other side of the river.
I am about to change the colour of this United States of America chopper
that's made its way here.
It has landed all on its own.
We are going to re-spray it nice Colombian police green.
TOMKINS: Historically, Pablo gave orders to his guys
never fire on the military or the police.
We had a tactical advantage,
approach the house low level and their spotters would have said
it's police and military because we have got military colours
and we are in police logo, policia nacional all over our helicopter.
We go into the grounds without being fired upon,
before somebody realises, fuck me, it's not the army.
The shit would hit the fan then.
GUNSHOTS
MC ALEESE: Six o'clock in the morning, get up, it was still dark,
we did tactical training.
There was nobody around for many, many miles.
GUNSHOT
We could fire weapons,
fire rockets,
LOUD BANG
drop bombs.
There was nobody to hear it.
LOUD BANG
CHEERS
MC ALEESE: In the jungle,
you had to do some serious training.
Just in case something went wrong on the actual mission
and we had to make our own way back.
They were getting fitter,
every day they were training together, so you were getting that team spirit.
The eight-million-dollar man.
LENNOX: It takes a team to do the job
and the team gelled very well for the operation.
HELICOPTER WHIRRS
MC ALEESE: We were out there practising on a riverbed that we had,
which was roughly the same size as the target.
The men had yellow patches
sowed on to the top of their balaclavas
so as I could identify our own guys from the enemy.
LENNOX: We were given a very competent Colombian pilot
who flew for the cartel on numerous operations.
MC ALEESE: One was called Pablo and the other one was called Tiger
and Tiger had an awful lot of police experience.
TOMKINS: Tiger, he was a bit of a daredevil.
He would zoom round through the riverbanks
and clip the treetops.
He seemed to want to get as close to them as possible.
We just covered everything from A to Z.
GUNFIRE
The morale was sky high.
GUNFIRE
What I was trying to do in my mind
was give those men the best chance they had
of leaving that target alive.
As we're going around, the fire group will land at one end
while this one is still laying fire to cover this.
MUFFLED SPEECH
MC ALEESE: We'd get together, we sat down at the table,
what we call a Chinese parliament.
The men had an awful lot of input in that they were dealing with their lives.
This team will then land under the cover of these guys,
there is no chance of being shot at, it will be closed.
MC ALEESE: Everybody felt they contributed.
We put the final plan together, the ground, the situation, the mission,
the execution, the admin and log
and that was it, after that, it's go.
When you talk about a mission,
you don't make it long winded, you just say ground, situation, mission.
Our mission is to kill Pablo Escobar.
The operation will be carried out in three phases:
one,
the flight from the jungle to the target.
GUNFIRE
Imagine all of a sudden helicopters come over,
start machine-gunning the place.
EXPLOSION
TOMKINS: By the time I've dropped 40 kilos of explosives around the place,
they'd have been shell shocked.
SHOUTS AND GUNFIRE
One helicopter's got the assault group in,
which are going to land first.
It would have been 12 guys on the ground,
Peter Mc up there with his Gympie and his gun ship.
So we had some aircover.
We would fan out.
One group is the cover group.
SHOUTS
Phase two, the rest of them would start clearing the premises,
working our way.
Action on the target.
GUNFIRE
GROANS
You engage the target
and you put enough rounds to put him down.
Ba ba bam.
GROANS
The assault team's aim was to get into the house.
Women and children were off the menu.
SHOUTS
We had the area colour coded.
White was the front, black was the back
and we'd numbered it one, two, three, section.
Clear!
We knew which part of the house he resided in, which was in black one.
Clear!
TOMKINS: Once the house clearance team were in section one,
we'd direct our fire to section two, ahead of them.
So we are clearing the way for them to move through the house
to find Escobar.
Phase three, withdraw to target.
MAN SPEAKS THROUGH RADIO
And we are taking Pablo's body to the helicopter.
Right, we have hacked his head off, so we only have a bit of him to carry,
we were overcrowded on the choppers.
And eventually they would have flown us back to Cali,
and hopefully we would all have lived forever, a day and gone home.
HELICOPTER WHIRRS
MUFFLED VOICE ON RADIO
- Do you want me to make it jump? - Not at me!
LAUGHTER
MC ALEESE: Everything was ready to go, the men were ready
and it seemed to turn into a waiting game.
And then a spanner landed in the works.
A Sunday Times reporter by the name of James Adams
had picked up on the actual mission and was threatening to print a story on it.
TOMKINS: He was an ex-spook or a spook at the time.
He had accessed flight information
and the fact that he got it
shows that he wasn't just your average journalist.
MC ALEESE: He contacted someone who knew Dave
and we agreed to meet him in Panama.
We have got a story, a very good story
and now I want you to contribute your side.
At the time, I was the defence correspondent of the London Sunday Times.
- You don't have a story. - There is a story.
I was told by somebody in the US intelligence community
that there were a group of mercenaries
planning to kill Pablo Escobar
and they were led by this Brit called Dave Tomkins
and that was kind of it.
So the rest of it, from my perspective, was all about bluff.
And we are ready to publish it.
TOMKINS: And I said, well, if you print that,
you will jeopardise some lives that are here now.
What are you doing?
Mind your own business.
ADAMS: Then the question was,
well how are we going to deal with this?
And Dave clearly wanted the operation to go ahead, fair enough.
I didn't care whether he killed Pablo Escobar or not.
So, there was a bargain to be struck
between what he wanted and what I wanted.
If you don't print until we tell you to,
we will give you exclusive rights to the whole story.
MC ALEESE: What we said, let us do the operation
and he could have the story at the end of it.
The exclusive, we can work with.
And then I said to him, I have a good idea.
I will put you at the heart of the battle.
He declined.
I told the cartel that we had a security breach
that could embarrass us.
They said, get him here and we will kill him.
LAUGHS
I said, no that can't happen.
I knew nothing about that at all
and I think Dave is a wonderful human being.
LAUGHS
GUNFIRE
MC ALEESE: We had telephoned the Cali cartel.
We said to them, we had better get a move on with this operation,
otherwise it's not going to come off,
due to the world press getting on to what is actually happening here.
If Pablo knows we're coming, we have got a problem.
OMINOUS MUSIC
MAN SPEAKS THROUGH RADIO
SPEAKS IN SPANISH
TOMKINS: The radio burst into life,
the message that came out of it in Spanish,
Pablo is there now, round the swimming pool, having a meeting,
go now.
He's there, go, go.
Billy, Phoenix is a go, Phoenix is a go.
When we had him in position, we said let's go for it.
ADVENTUROUS MUSIC
TOMKINS: They were all there, got their kit,
check mine, I'm out, okay, go helicopters, helicopters.
HELICOPTERS WHIRR
MC ALEESE: I was so psyched up. People talk about fear.
Fear was out of the question because we had conquered it.
We'd been training for 11 weeks
to go and get this guy and do the business on him.
ADVENTUROUS MUSIC CONTINUES
TOMKINS: The flight was nothing special.
I smoked a couple of cigarettes,
making sure I didn't set light to the bombs.
MC ALEESE: We were flying low, about 200 ft.
The reason for this,
the radar operators belonging to the military
were on the payroll of the person that we were about to take out.
TOMKINS: I am concerned for my safety.
I just want to do what we trained to do,
get it over with, get the money and go home.
LENNOX: On the helicopter, Pete Donnelly looked at me,
shaked his head as if to say, this is not good.
The first time in my life, in that helicopter,
I prayed to a God I never believed in, never spoke to.
I said these things: if you are real, protect us.
MC ALEESE: As we were flying towards the target,
I noticed that there was heavy cloud over the Andes.
I thought, maybe the pilots know what they are doing,
they will lift above the cloud and go over.
LENNOX: I saw each helicopter quite regularly
but there was a time when we had to split.
We were heading on for refuelling.
It seems a bit choppy, mate.
I could see that we were in some problems.
I couldn't see anything so I know the pilot couldn't either,
cos we were in a cloud.
MC ALEESE: I didn't feel right about it.
I turned to Dave and the men in the back. I said, get in the crash position.
It was instinct.
Get in the crash position.
Fuck!
As I turned myself back, we hit the trees
SHOUTS
and the helicopter turned over.
The blade came through the cab of the helicopter
and we started bouncing though the trees, upside down.
SHOUTS
TOMKINS: I'm frightened out of my skin
and I want to go home.
CRASH
CRASHING STOPS
BIRDS CHIRP
GASPS
MC ALEESE: The pain I had was excruciating.
GROANS
Every time I breathed there was pain.
TOMKINS: I am sitting there
waiting to get out of the cloud
and I wake up, like, from a dream
and I am huddled in the corner of the helicopter which is on its side
and nobody is in there, bar me, as far as I am concerned.
I know I am smothered in claret, my head hurts like a bastard
and I wanted to put my hand up
and all I pictured in my mind
was my hand was going to go in this fucking hole into my brain.
So I didn't touch it.
And then it clicked; the bombs.
I don't know what damage it has done to the timers.
When it goes up, it took half the mountain with it.
And I found the satchel of charges,
cut all the fuses off of them so they couldn't blow.
One of them, the time pencil had broken actually, so I was very lucky.
SIGHS
And I fought my way through,
breaking branches, anything to get out of that helicopter.
I suppose it was sheer survival panic
and I thought, fucking right, that's me out.
SHOUTS
- Peter, are you alright? - Yeah.
Then I see Peter and the other two staggering out of the woods
and Peter was hurt.
MC ALEESE: Dave, Dave, Dave, I'll take the morphine.
I said to Dave, pass me down a drip.
I can't move.
I just drank the drip, squeezed it in my mouth.
Find him something warm.
TOMKINS: There was no pilot.
Where's Tiger?
So I got back in the aircraft
Look at me, Tiger. TIGER GASPS
and I called his name, Tiger, and he mumbled
'mi pierna', which means 'my leg'.
He had been hit with what I assume was the helicopter blade.
TIGER SCREAMS
Now I run down his legs and they were still on.
I'll get you some morphine, mate.
I had tried to get a drip in his arm and his veins were flat,
I couldn't find a vein.
I went to this arm
and it was filleted from the shoulder to his wrist
as though a butcher had opened it up to the bone
and there was no blood.
He was mortally wounded.
Here you are, mate.
Mike, over.
MAN SPEAKS SPANISH THROUGH RADIO
We have crashed, we have crashed. Pilot's dead, need immediate evac.
We found out that they'd crashed, so that became an abort.
SCREAMS
TOMKINS: Peter was in a bad way, his hands were smashed,
his ribs were smashed, his legs fucked, and he couldn't do much.
In fact I took some photographs of him, he's collapsed on the deck.
Flaco had wounds and bits from trees I suppose, and glass,
Mario was fine,
I had my busted head
which turned out to be a tiny little wound but just decided to bleed a lot.
There's nowhere to land.
When the helicopter located us,
it hovered about 60/80 ft above us.
There's just rough rugged trees and bushes everywhere, nowhere to land.
Come on. SCREAMS
Alright, alright.
MC ALEESE: Dave and I decided for them to go down,
try and get help and bring some of them back to me,
to get me out,
because I was smashed up fairly badly.
GROANS I am going to get help, alright.
I'll be as quick as I can.
TOMKINS: Wrapped him up and we got all the medical packs, bandages
and we packed it round him so he would be able to stay warm,
it was cold up there.
GROANS
MC ALEESE: And when they left, I suddenly realised
I had broken a rule of combat survival,
one man should have stayed with me,
but I just, it never dawned on me at the time, I just said I'll be okay.
LENNOX: What are we going to do?
First thing was the concern of Dave, helicopter, Peter,
and then the modus operandi is survival
in the area of Pablo Escobar.
CHEERS ON TELEVISION
EL ÑANGAS SPEAKS IN SPANISH
TOMKINS: You're trying to push your way through,
it's thousands of years of overgrown stuff.
Mario and Flaco pointed out to me that there was a stream
flowing from the top of the mountain.
So they went off to try and find a way down below.
And it was getting dark at five o'clock, six o'clock in Colombia, pitch black.
MC ALEESE: I had no sense of time; my watch had come off.
I was judging the day by the amount of light.
I crawled about, I searched for food
GROANS
and I lay there, shivering cold.
TOMKINS: I was frozen to the bone and I could imagine Peter up there,
8000 feet up, dead body, can't move very well.
He's a friend, a very, very good friend,
and I care for him like I care for my son.
PANTS
I was never going to leave him, you know,
we would have moved heaven and earth to get him down that mountain,
dead or alive.
GRUNTS
EL ÑANGAS SPEAKS IN SPANISH
TOMKINS: That morning, after I spent the night on the mountain, away from Peter,
I heard people coming up.
SHOUTS
Everything in that Triunfo area is controlled by Escobar anyway.
SPEAKS IN SPANISH
MC ALEESE: If Pablo caught me,
I would have had a terrible, long, drawn-out painful death.
EL ÑANGAS SPEAKS IN SPANISH
TOMKINS: I'd heard people. Thinking it's our guys, I called out
SHOUTS IN SPANISH
Senor, senor!
SPEAKS IN SPANISH
Eventually we had reached the bottom.
GASPS
GROANS
It was day three, I woke up.
At this stage, the pain was so bad, I started sort of hallucinating,
you know, and seeing things,
looking at some of the people I had associated with in life.
In the early days of my youth
and through to the middle part of my life,
I did carry an awful anger within me.
There was a bit of guilt.
I felt a lot of the anger may have come from my father.
SIGHS
I'm sorry, dad.
I have an awful lot of regrets
and none of them are in the soldiering side of my life.
SLOW PIANO
I regret in the fact that I had a woman who was a good wife,
she was very supportive of me,
she followed me along through thick and thin
and I took her loyalty to the wire.
PANTS
I'm sorry.
I wasn't a good father, but I do love my kids.
I'm sorry.
Due to the way I was, my character, my violence, my aggression,
I failed at these things.
A dirty low down scum bag of a man, eh.
I swear, God I swear.
And being a Catholic
I promise.
I promise, God, no more.
I tried to make a deal with God. LAUGHS
and I said to myself, God, get me out of this
and I will always be a good boy afterwards.
GASPS
SHALLOW BREATHS
GUNSHOT
BIRDS CHIRP
I heard a gunshot but it was in the far distance
and then I heard voices.
PANTS
And the voices started coming closer
and I said, I have got to prepare myself for the inevitable.
And I sat there with my weapon and I said, let them get on top of me
and I'll take as many as I can with me.
At the same time, I would be killing myself.
As they came closer and closer, I could eventually see movement.
One man came so I shoved the machine gun at his stomach.
SPEAKS IN SPANISH
SIGH OF RELIEF
He went amigo, amigo, colonel Ricardo,
which was one of the code words that we had.
I then knew I was in the hands of friendly forces
SPEAKS IN SPANISH
and he says, we're going to take you down.
I was still in a state of bad repair.
I said, how long will it take? He said, eight hours.
They chopped down a long thin tree.
It was nothing to them, they just seemed to do it naturally,
loaded down a re-entrant, tied a rope round my shoulders
and they slid me down this tree.
SLOW PIANO
And we moved along,
and they did that all the time down waterfalls, re-entrants.
I was in immense pain.
We kept on and on and on.
How far is it? Four hours.
And the pain was just
I felt it was killing me.
There was a mental pain there, and it was,
right, you have done this wrong at this given time,
you can't put any of it right, you can only put it right
if you keep yourself alive, get yourself out of here
and get back to the UK.
There was a dark side to my character,
but I found that an awful lot of the anger, it started subsiding.
Everything seemed to come to me.
There was a clarity that I have never known before.
I think it was starting to bring me to terms with an element of reality.
I felt a sense of peacefulness
and I got to the bottom where I had to stand up and walk.
Every step I took, it was pain like I have never known in my life,
but I knew that at least I had been rescued
and I had a chance of staying alive, so it perked up morale.
HELICOPTER WHIRRS
I flew into Cali.
I walked into the bathroom, in the mirror,
every part of my body was covered in bruises.
I had four broken ribs in the front, four in the back
and there was quite a bit of internal bruising
but not enough to kill me.
I lay in bed and thanked my higher power that what happened to me,
I should have been dead,
and I was still alive.
TOMKINS: Everybody is there to look after the guy next to you.
Peter was the team leader, you know,
he was an important and integral part of that operation.
He is fearless, he is brave, he is loyal
and people have a great deal of respect for Peter.
He is the ultimate special force soldier.
MC ALEESE: There was a disappointment, we'd failed.
You know you can look at it, a mountain got in the way,
but the fact is we hadn't achieved the mission
and I knew even within my heart and soul
if we had got over that mountain,
there would have been no Pablo Escobar.
SLOW GUITAR
Physical state now is I am in constant pain.
I have got diabetes, I have arthritis in every joint in my body
but mentally, spiritually, I feel fantastic.
I stopped drinking about seven years ago and then when I stopped drinking,
I found there was an awful lot of space in my mind.
I feel that being a churchgoer filled that space.
The aggression seemed to subside, it got less, and it got less.
My brother Peter is a good man.
He has got a kind, warm and generous heart.
He could be aggressive,
but I think he was hurt by the way things were.
I am proud of his achievements of how he's managing his life,
even today with the problems he has had.
If anybody else has anything different to say about him
that's their opinion,
but I know him as my brother and I know him as the man.
MC ALEESE: I love being loved,
and when I say that, I don't mean in a female sense,
I just mean my friends, my relatives and above all my children.
If I hadn't been through all those things in life,
the fights, the shortcomings that I had,
crashes in helicopters, break up of marriages.
If I hadn't have had them, I couldn't have been where I am today.
It's just like everything had burned out, there was nothing left
except to live a good spiritual life.
What I can say is I learned a lot on the side of the Andes.
It was the beginning of me growing up
and eventually, I came to terms with a guy called Peter McAleese.