HE GROANS
The pain I had was excruciating.
HE MOANS IN PAIN
Every time I breathed, it was pain.
GUNFIRE
I was very aware we were in Pablo Escobar's area.
The nightmare scenario.
What happens if Escobar's men get me?
But the main thing was the pain.
What was I going to do?
Think about your morale.
The Catholic prayers come out.
I said, "Give me the strength...
"..to die with an element of honour."
I lay there thinking...
.."How the fuck did I get myself here?"
GUNFIRE
REPORTER: This was the work of the Medellin drug cartel.
REPORTER SPEAKS IN SPANISH
A bomb has exploded in the capital of Colombia, Bogota,
killing 35 people and injuring around 200.
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 into one of the world's richest men.
When you look at Pablo Escobar
and the size and scope of his organisation,
he's 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.
REPORTER: Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela,
Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela...
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.
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.
The bomb detonated.
Everybody was fine, but the retribution
that Pablo Escobar took on the cartel was vicious.
STREET MUSIC IN DISTANCE
I was invited to a meeting with the Cali Cartel.
Gilberto Rodriguez told me, in two minutes,
"The reason you're 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.
1989, I received a telephone call from Jorge Salcedo Cabrera.
And 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've got the right experience.
GUNFIRE, SHOUTING
I went to Angola because I wanted to get into action.
REPORTER: Angola, divided and at war with itself, has collapsed.
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.
There have been a total of about 200 British mercenaries
involved in the war, who were 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 the public to hear the other side of the operation,
see the good side and see the bad side,
and to let them judge for themselves.
I was young, I was fit, I was aggressive.
Although I disliked communism, it was never a personal thing to me.
It was just they supplied most of the enemy at that time.
The communists' 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 and arms changing hands.
Why shouldn't we fight against communism,
whether it be for money or for a cause we believe in?
I first met Dave Tomkins in Angola.
He'd never been a regular soldier.
But what I did notice about him - he was extremely brave.
I've had a whole host of jobs in the security business -
defence equipment -
and 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, the PLO.
You name it, I shipped it.
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?
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.
Dave said, "Are you interested in a job in Colombia?"
And I accepted. I could not resist the challenge.
Peter and I flew from London to Cali.
We were met by Jorge Salcedo.
We called him George.
He also had a code name that he liked to use called Ricardo.
How are you? Very well. Good to see you again. Nice to see you.
Let me introduce you - Peter McAleese.
Pleasure is mine.
I could tell that Jorge
was definitely somebody within the system,
because he walked us straight through customs, immigration,
and there was no holdup whatsoever.
I felt that the mission had been sanctioned at the highest level.
At that time, I knew everybody.
I had no problems in getting them through customs. It was immediate.
And that power came from the Cali Cartel.
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 very much.
..and in a rest area there by the pool, having lunch,
was the four Cali Cartel leaders.
And that's 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, and he was with the SAS.
And then it just went a bit quiet and it became a bit more intense.
It was almost like it'd been orchestrated.
And one of them leaned over...
..and he said to me...
Can you kill Pablo Escobar?
The morals of killing Escobar -
I didn't have any conscience about it.
How can you have morals
when the American government has got $1 million on his head,
the Colombian government's got quite a bit on his head?
REPORTER: Cien millones de pesos...
Pablo Escobar Gaviria, El Padrino...
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.
REPORTER SPEAKS IN SPANISH
He put a bomb on a commercial airliner...
..because he thought there was going to be a presidential candidate
on that plane.
And the presidential candidate wasn't even on there.
So 110 people died
because Pablo wanted to impose his will on somebody else.
You can't really moralise with someone like that.
I've never looked upon it as murder.
I've looked upon it as a target, I've looked upon it as...
You know, you can say, "Well, that's a copout."
It's not a copout. It's genuinely how I feel.
"Thou shalt not kill"? You're in the wrong business.
Because that's what it's about.
The actual act of killing someone,
when you're a professional soldier and you're on a mission,
is part of 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 Harbour Lane,
and it was constantly being mortared and shot at by dissident rebels.
Our task was to go out and try and get rid of these men.
We moved up to this area
where we thought there 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...
GUNSHOT ..and he shot Dave Healy,
who was the troop sergeant.
And I immediately turned around 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.
I felt, really, that 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 I chose.
The first night, it was cold.
And I found a can of beans in my escape bag.
And I found some hexamine blocks,
which the British Army used for cooking.
And when the can inflates again, you know the food's cooked.
It was beautiful. HE LAUGHS
There 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.
There was a guy bent over a bush,
and somebody had shot him in the back of the head
and his brains had come out.
And he was just... He was still holding the bush.
Man's inhumanity to man.
RADIO CHATTER
The Cali Cartel was very confident that they could kill Escobar...
..when he had one of his usual parties in his ranch.
So, the details were to be carried by the British.
"We will target Hacienda Napoles. We'll wait for him to come there,
"and you'll have to tell us when he is.
"You'll have to put your spies into action -
"the police and the military." And they said, "Good idea."
I wanted to do a flight recce,
the reason being I wanted to know what the ground looked like
because that was where we were going to strike.
Hacienda Napoles was Pablo Escobar's pride and joy. He loved that finca.
It was about 10,000 acres.
He had a zoo where he had all the exotic animals of the world
in there. I remember the elephants, the giraffes, the famous hippos.
A museum where he had Al Capone's car in.
And he bought all kinds of things relevant to gangsters.
He built an airstrip where his drug trafficker friends
would come in to negotiate.
He had sicarios guarding that finca.
When we were in the air, I looked down at Hacienda Napoles,
and then I realised that it was a lot easier than I had
actually thought in the beginning, because I could see the ground.
It was tailor-made for a complete assault team.
I had to think about medevac -
should anybody be shot, how do we get them out?
There was three little airfields there that I was thinking about
how we could medevac from 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 looked for an area where the assault team would land.
It was pleasing to the eye of a military person.
And I said, "This one's 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.
We needed a number of men, preferably special force types,
who were capable and mentally prepared to take on this mission.
"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,
and who had the big balls to do this.
It's Dave, Dave Tomkins.
The selection process I had for the men was based on the fact
that some of them had served with me before.
Ned...
Others were recommended by other people.
Yeah? 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.
Well, listen, I've got a very good job opportunity for you.
I was excited.
Good money. Very good money.
I said, "Where is this?"
Colombia.
"I'm in."
Basically, come through Panama. Do not come straight to Colombia.
You know the drill.
He looks like a Peruvian mountain goat, doesn't he?
They came in via circuitous routes - Germany, Argentina.
INDISTINCT DIALOGUE
It was security protocol.
Delivered personally, Dave.
We, with George, met them at the airport.
And George, again, secured them all through the passport
and immigration.
That's it, Jock. You look super!
Certainly straight out of Miami Vice...
INDISTINCT DIALOGUE, LAUGHTER
By this time, George had acquired an apartment -
very spacious, very palatial.
And everybody came there and we settled them in.
Brilliant. Fabulous. Well furnished.
There was only one way into it, and 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.
Today is a nice day. The sun is shining in Cali.
LAUGHTER
Here is a missionary who's donated a few dollars to the poor.
And that could be me because I'm fucked.
LAUGHTER
750.
D? This is a motorbike, mate.
You happy? Yeah, I've got a motorbike now.
My ship's come in! LAUGHTER
We were on $5,000 a month, plus expenses, plus food.
But that was just a retainer.
I was on £1,000 a day.
The next morning, I got the guys together, gave them a quick brief.
At this stage, we still hadn't told them
that 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're here."
SHOUTING AND LAUGHTER
The most beautiful women in Latin America are in Cali.
It's just... I mean, it's just unbelievable.
And we've got 12 of us.
It was beginning to seduce us. It was, "Oh, everybody loves Cali!
"We love Cali!" And we did.
LAUGHTER
Guys spent a week or so running around the clubs
and social life and doing what guys do,
making a nuisance of themselves.
I went for a walk through Cali
and I passed by a pub that was fairly open.
I went, "What the fuck?"
Ho!
Two of my team were there.
They were drunk.
What you doing?
Get up.
Anywhere else, it would have been a funny situation,
but we could not afford to bring attention to ourselves.
So I sent them back to the flat.
This is the riff-raff's bedroom.
The next day, we stopped a week's wages off them.
$1,000 off you, $1,000 off you.
I said, "Also,
"you'll 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.
Cali's a small city, not used to seeing a lot of foreigners.
And their presence was getting very noticeable in the city.
So I decided it's time to leave town.
We were 8,000 feet up.
It was cold.
Shivering cold.
I was thinking about survival
because I could have died.
And it gives you time to mull over certain mistakes that you've made.
I was soul-searching.
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 just wished I'd been a better husband
and a better father to my kids.
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.
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.
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, you know, there was...a whole
gang attacked him and he had about 46 stitches in his head.
He was always 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'd never seen him.
And if you look up here...
..on 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, he either loved her, he was depressed,
he was fairly happy, things were going well.
Mammy would be upset, you know, at times
because my father didn't know how to sort of be with him.
That's the only way I can put it.
He never, ever told any of us he loved us anyway, you know?
I'd seen my dad fighting on quite 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
with a guy called John Dornes.
And old Miles, who was my grandfather, said,
"We're not having this," you know?
"The family's 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 really, both really going for it.
It looked like something, you know, out of a movie.
My father took a couple of smacks, but he bested John Dornes,
and eventually dropped him.
And 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'd prefer to leave it alone if you could, you know?
I think Peter wanted him to say to him, you know,
"I'm really proud of you."
But I don't think my father could say that.
I don't think he was able to say that.
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.
The skinny one.
Very nice. I love them shorts, mate.
There is Don, chewing a fucking orange, look.
My God, you're ugly close up.
He wants somebody to push him.
We needed a place to train and we needed weapons.
Obviously, we can't go round 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.
There's Dave and his daily exercise.
After a hard day of having to relax...
Oh, we felt relaxed because you know that there's money behind you.
100 acres of mountaintop retreat.
It had Chinese gardens, a full-scale bowling alley,
swimming pools, sauna, weight room,
stables, horses,
quad bikes...
GROWLING
..guard dog perimeters,
guarded by his security guards at the front gate...
Evidence!
..a cook - Martha,
servants,
it had an antenna for the television bigger than my house, you know?
They could get a TV channel anywhere.
You want to watch EastEnders?
It was out of this world. It was truly palatial.
The most important thing about being up there - there were no pubs.
You know, the drinkers suddenly realised it wasn't on any more, and
the guys started taking it serious then, and we started to train.
Go! Come on, boys!
Go on!
We needed to be fit. An unfit soldier's a dangerous soldier.
And we had plenty of that, but not enough fitness.
So that really challenged the guys.
Up! Go, go, go!
We'd do basic para PT, natural fitness.
Ten push-ups there. Go, ten.
And we used to run around a running track every morning at six o'clock.
Bloody thing.
We were told there was weapons arriving
and to be ready for them.
The weapons were obtained in the United States.
They were smuggled into the country.
And we're getting all excited.
We're psyched up to fuck, waiting on these things coming.
And then it was smuggled up in the back of a farmer's pick-up
truck that folded up and had a false bottom in the bottom
and all the weapons were in there.
That's when the guys were like kids let loose in a sweet shop.
Aha, fucking hell, here we go!
There was a couple of Interdynamics, which is a small submachine gun.
We had M-16s, AR-15s...
Anti-tank rockets...
SPAS-12 shotguns, machine pistols, Uzis...
29 there.
Zulu grenades,
66mm anti-tank LAWs rockets...
..60 kilos of C4 explosives, anti-personnel mines,
whatever we wanted.
It was like fucking Christmas.
The whole thing has come together.
Everything that we needed to assault, weapons-wise, was there.
Go!
Now the weapons have arrived, it's become real, hasn't it?
And the training went into full swing.
I could see the mentality of the men switching.
They were starting to come together.
They were identifying with their team leaders.
The team leaders identified with me.
They suddenly realised that they were going to close with
the enemy and kill them.
Everything just seemed to be slipping into place,
that you get with a unit that's just started up.
And everybody became a part of the little unit that we had.
The second day, I just lay there
shivering cold.
And I was going through things - "Right, have I got food?
"The water's taken care of."
And I was planning in my mind
if help didn't come
how I could help myself
because I'd escape money on me.
And I formulated a plan and I felt it would take me
something like eight 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.
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 in 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 her 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'm extremely sorry.
If I could meet the judge...
..who sent me to prison,
I'd walk up and shake his fucking hand.
SINGING
I was doing a lot of reflection. Where was I going to go from here?
What experience I had from the special forces, I wanted to
use it and test myself even further than I'd gone.
Fortunately, there were plenty of places to go
if you were seeking combat.
I was a mercenary in Angola.
GUNSHOTS
I was a mercenary in the Rhodesian army.
I was a mercenary in the South African Army.
EXPLOSIONS
In Rhodesia,
every time we went out, we'd some form of contact with the enemy.
There was a thing called a black book.
My name was in it.
It said, "A good, hard soldier."
And that's how I consider myself.
And the discipline that we're talking about, cos we're going
to fight back, that is the fucking difference.
Do you understand that?
Honestly, guys, there is nobody can touch us.
Together, as a team, we can fucking take on four times our number.
I assure you, we can do it.
Now, everybody in here's got a bit of trigger time
under their belt, which is more than the army's got.
Keep it together, keep it together
and realise that they cannot fucking do us, and I mean it.
I am not creating this in my own mind.
If we can't convince ourselves that this is the case,
we'd be as well going home.
This is home.
Just had brunch, Roy and myself. I had a tomato. Roy had a carrot.
Er, it's terrible here and I'm doing it for the children.
Terry Tangney came to see me,
and he says, "My bottle's gone."
I'm shit-scared. Whatever it is that you're doing, I'm fucking...
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.
I said to myself,
"If his bottle's gone and we let him go, who's going to do it next?"
I'll tell the boys that you have problems at home with the wife
and you have to go home.
And the guys turned round and says, "He's a fucking liar.
"His bottle's gone."
Thanks, mate. No worries.
The truth was he wasn't up to it, and he wanted to get out.
And he was a security risk, that's what he was.
And he should never have been let home until it finished.
So, gentlemen, you're probably wondering what you're doing here,
who the target is.
Some of you might have guessed it right, some of you wrong.
In the end, we called them together and said, "Right,
"you're speculating on who the target is and what we're here for.
"Don't speculate any more. This is the target.
"His name is..."
Pablo Escobar.
The head of the Medellin drug cartel.
Great.
How are we going to do him?
At the last meeting I had with the cartel bosses, Chepe Londono,
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, all right."
I said to Dave, "I'll cut his head off once he's dead,
"give you it in a basket, and you can get the million dollars.
"I'll take 100 grand."
And it would have been proof that he
was dead if I'd brought him his head, wouldn't it?
I had a look at the situation, and I said to myself,
"I think it's time to do another flight over the route
"into the target area."
There were 80 men on the premises.
We assumed there were 40 on duty and 40 resting.
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.
Every one of the enemy, there should be three men, four,
so we made up that number - we made it up in ammunition.
The capacity of this ordnance was enough to fucking kill...
..2,000, 3,000 guys.
GUNFIRE
Tactical-wise, we had the advantage.
They were onto a loser, not us, because we had the firepower.
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...
Terry immediately 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,
but fortunately enough, he didn't mention Pablo Escobar,
because, at that time, he didn't know.
I don't know what British mercenary activity there may be in Colombia,
though I've seen the rumours like everybody else.
If there is any, then I thoroughly deplore it.
Why would the CIA or FBI or anything want to stop it
when he was a target for the United States anyway?
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.
Have you got it, Dave? Pardon? Have you got it? Yeah.
I think they adopted a suck it and see policy.
"They're 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."
It was a need that they should maintain secrecy in the area,
so one of the solutions was to move the whole group
to the middle of the jungle.
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.
And I had some of the beans that I had left.
I...just prepared myself...
..to lie in 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.
HE EXCLAIMS
There was a fear that...
HE CRIES IN PAIN
..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.
They moved us to a place they called La Guagua.
God knows what that means. The Jaguar, or something.
The trip was quite an amazing trip.
We went via Dakota aircraft.
It really was phenomenal.
Give us a smile, sir.
LAUGHTER
I'd bring it home for you, Billy, if I could.
But I'm not allowed.
The police won't let me.
The Colombian police or the British police?
No, the British police. The Colombian police won't mind!
This is the beach.
Finally, they took us to the training area.
It was obviously a cartel stopping ground,
moving cocaine, stuff like that.
The jungle accommodation was just a long hut...
..and it held us all.
We set up camp and settled in there to begin another phase of training.
Here's Dave with the M60.
There goes Alex.
It was just in the middle of nowhere.
There it is. He's finally got it.
It wasn't guerrilla territory that we knew of.
It had no beds, no bedding.
It was on the side of a river,
which meant 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'm about to change the colour of this
United States American chopper that has made its way here.
It had landed all on its own
and we are going to respray it nice Colombian police green.
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 will have said,
"It's police and military," because we've got the military colours
and we're 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.
GUNFIRE
Six o'clock in the morning, we get up, it was still dark,
we did tactical training.
There was nobody around for many, many miles.
GUNFIRE
We could fire weapons...
LOUD EXPLOSION
..fire rockets...
..drop bombs, and there was nobody to hear it.
CHEERING
When we were in the jungle,
we had to do some serious, serious training,
just in case something went wrong on the actual mission
and they had to make their own way back.
They were getting fitter. Every day, they were training together,
so we were getting that team spirit.
The $8 million men!
It takes a team to do the job
and the team gelled very, very well for the operation.
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 sewn onto the top of their balaclavas
so that I could identify our own guys from the enemy.
We were given a very competent Colombian pilot
who flew for the cartel on numerous operations.
One was called Pablo and the other one was called Tiger,
and Tiger had an awful lot of police experience.
Tiger, he was a bit of a daredevil.
He would zoom around through the river banks
and clip the tree tops.
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.
Boys, I would prefer to keep one on the ground all the time...
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,
so there's no chance of hopefully anybody shooting
because it'll be quite close...
Everybody felt they'd contributed. We had put the final plan together.
The ground, the situation, the mission, the execution,
the admin and the 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
All of a sudden, helicopters come over,
start machine-gunning their place.
By the time I dropped 40 kilos of explosive around the place,
they would have been shellshocked.
EXPLOSION AND GUNFIRE
One helicopter has got the assault group in,
which are going to land first.
There would have been 12 guys on the ground,
Peter Mac up there with his Gimpy in the gunship
so we had some air cover.
They would fan out.
One group is the cover group.
Fire in the hole!
EXPLOSION
Stage two, the rest would start clearing the premises,
working their way through.
GUNFIRE
Action on the target.
You engage the target and you put enough rounds to put them down.
B-b-b-bang!
The assault team's aim was to get into the house.
Women and children were off the menu.
We had the area colour-coded.
White was the front. Black was the back.
And we numbered it one, two, three sections.
We knew which part of the house he resided in,
which was in Black 1.
Clear!
Once the house clearance team were in section one,
we'd direct our fire to section two, ahead of them.
So we're clearing the way for them
to move through the house to find Escobar.
GUNSHOT
Phase three was the ultimate target.
OVER RADIO: Target is down, target is down.
We were taking Pablo's body to the helicopter.
Right, if we'd hacked his head off so we've only got a bit of him
to carry, because we were a bit overcrowded on the choppers!
And eventually they'd have flown us back to Cali
and hopefully we'd all live forever and a day and gone home.
Hey! Do you want me to make it jump? Not at me!
LAUGHTER
Everything was ready to go.
The men were ready to go, 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.
He was an ex-spook or a spook at the time.
He'd accessed flight information, and the mere fact that he'd
got it shows that he wasn't just your average journalist.
He contacted someone who knew Dave and we agreed to meet him in Panama.
We've 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're ready to publish it.
And I said, "Well, if you print that you will jeopardise some lives
"that are here now. What are you doing now?" I said...
Mind your own fucking business.
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.
What we said, "Let us do the operation."
And he could have the story at the end of it.
The exclusive, I think we can work with this.
And then I said to him, "I have a good idea."
I will put you on the helicopter
and fly you into the heart of the battle.
He declined.
I told the cartel that we had a security breach
that could embarrass us.
They said, "Right, get him over here and we'll kill him."
HE CHUCKLES
And I said, "No, that can't happen."
I knew nothing about that at all,
and I think Dave is a wonderful human being.
HE LAUGHS
GUNFIRE
We video-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 onto what is actually happening here.
"If Pablo knows we're coming, we've got a problem."
INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER
Os escucho fuerte y claro.
The radio burst into life.
The message came out of it in Spanish -
"Pablo is there now, round the swimming pool having a meeting.
"Go now."
He's there! Go, go!
Phoenixes are go. Phoenixes are go.
When we had him in position, we said, "Let's go for it."
They were all there. Got their kit. Boom, boom, boom. Checked mine.
I'm out, OK, good. Helicopters, helicopters.
I was so psyched up. People talk about fear.
Fear was out of the question because we'd conquered it.
We'd been training for 11 weeks to go and get this guy
and do the business on him.
The flight was nothing special.
I smoked a couple of cigarettes,
making sure I didn't set light to the bombs.
We were flying low, about 200 feet, and there was a reason for this.
The radar operators belonging to the military were on the payroll
of the person that we were about to take out.
I'm concerned for my safety.
I just want to do what we're trained to do, get it over with,
get the money and go home.
On the helicopter, Pete Donnelly looked at me,
shakes his head, as if to say, "This is not good, Alex."
For 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're real, protect us."
As we were flying towards the target,
I noticed there was heavy cloud over the top of the Andes.
I said to myself, "Maybe the pilots know what they're doing here.
"They'll lift above the cloud and go over."
I saw each helicopter quite regularly,
but there was a time when we had to split.
We were heading on for the refuelling.
It seems a bit choppy, mate.
I could see that we were in some problems
that I couldn't see anything, so I know the pilot couldn't see
anything either, because we were in a cloud.
I didn't feel right about it.
I turned round to Dave and the men in the back and I said,
"Dave, get yourself in the crash position."
I just... It was instinct.
Get in the crash position! Get in the crash position!
I turned myself back. We hit the trees.
THEY SCREAM
And the helicopter turned over.
A blade came through the cab of the helicopter.
We started bouncing through the trees upside down.
I'm frightened out of my skin and I want to go home.
CRASHING
HE GROANS AND COUGHS
HE SOBS
The pain I had was excruciating.
HE GROANS
Every time I breathed there was pain.
I'm sitting there, waiting to get out of the cloud,
and I wake up, like from a dream.
And I'm huddled in the corner of the helicopter, which is on its side.
And nobody is in there bar me, as far as I'm concerned.
I know I'm smothered in claret and 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's done to the timers.
When it goes up it would have took half the mountain with it.
I found the satchel charges, cut all the fuses off
of them so they couldn't go.
One of them, the time pencil had broken, actually,
so I was very lucky.
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."
Don't worry, we're close.
Peter, are you all right?
Then I see Peter and the other two staggering out of the woods.
And Peter was hurt.
Tranquilo. Relax. Dave, Dave, Dave.
I've taken morphine, and the veins, the veins are cramped.
I said to Dave, "Pass me down a drip. I can't move."
I just drank the drip, squeezed it into my mouth and drank it.
Lads, find him something warm.
But there was no pilot.
Where's Tiger?
I got back in the aircraft...
Look at me. Look at me, Tiger.
..and I called his name, Tiger,
and he mumbled, "Mi pierna."
Which means "my leg".
He had been hit by what I assume was the helicopter blade.
I run down his legs and they were still on.
I'll get you some morphine, mate, I'll get you some morphine.
I 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.
You're all right, mate.
RADIO CHATTER
We have crashed, we have crashed.
Pilot dead. Need immediate evac.
We found out that they had crashed.
So that became an abort.
SCREAMING Fuck...
Good lad. Good lad.
Peter was in a bad way.
His hand was smashed, his ribs were smashed, his legs were fucked,
and he couldn't do much.
In fact, I took some photographs of him sort of 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
that had just decided to bleed a lot.
They won't be able to land.
When the helicopter located us,
it hovered about 60-80 feet above us
but this is rough, rugged,
trees and bushes everywhere, nowhere to land.
Come on.
All right, all right.
Dave and I decided for them to go down, try and get help,
and bring someone back to me
to get me out,
because I was smashed up fairly badly.
Gotcha. Gotcha.
I'm going to get help, son, all right?
OK, I'll be as quick as I can.
We wrapped him up, we got all the medical packs, bandages,
and we packed it round him so that he was able to stay warm,
cos it was cold up there.
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 says, "I'll be OK."
Let's decide, 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.
CHEERING FROM TV
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 -
five o'clock, six o'clock in Colombia, it was pitch-black.
I had no sense of time, my watch had broken.
I was judging the day by the amount of light.
I crawled about, I searched for food.
HE GROANS IN PAIN
And I lay there shivering and cold.
I was frozen to the bone, and I could imagine Peter up
there, fucking 8,000 foot up, dead body, can't move very well.
He's a friend, a very, very good friend.
And I cared for him like I'd care for my son.
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.
HE GROANS IN PAIN
That morning, after I'd spent the night on the mountain
away from Peter, I'd heard people coming up.
Everything in that Triunfo area is controlled by Escobar anyway.
If Pablo would have caught me, I would have had a terrible...
..long, drawn-out, painful death.
I heard people.
Thinking it's our guys, I called out...
HE CALLS IN SPANISH
Senor. Senor.
Eventually we reached the bottom.
HE SCREAMS IN PAIN
It's 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 who 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.
HE BREATHES HEAVILY
Sorry, Dad.
I'm sorry, Dad.
I have an awful lot of regrets...
..and none of them...
..are in the soldiering side of my life.
I regret it 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.
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, lowdown scumbag 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.
And I said to myself, "God...
"..get me out of this...
"..and I will always be a good boy afterwards."
RAGGED BREATHING
GUNSHOT
I heard a gunshot, but it was in the far distance.
And then I heard voices.
And the voices started coming closer.
And I said, "I've got to prepare myself for the inevitable."
And I sat there with my weapon, I said, "I'll 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 and closer,
I could eventually see movement.
One man came so I shoved the machine-gun into his stomach.
Tranquilo, amigo. Colonel Ricardo.
He went, "Amigo, amigo. Colonel Ricardo."
Which was one of the code words that we had.
I then knew that I was in the hands of friendly forces.
HE SPEAKS SPANISH
And he says, "We're going to take you down."
And 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.
Lowered it down a re-entrant,
tied a rope round my shoulders,
and they slid me down this tree.
And we moved along, and they did that all the time
down waterfalls, re-entrants.
I was in immense pain.
And 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've 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 started subsiding.
Everything seemed to come to me.
There was a clarity that I've 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.
And every step I took,
it was just pain like I've never known in my life.
But I knew at least I had been rescued
and I had a chance of staying alive, so it perked up morale.
HELICOPTER
I flew into Cali.
I walked into the bathroom and 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.
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's fearless, he's brave, he's loyal,
and people have a great deal of respect for Peter.
He is the ultimate special force soldier.
There was a disappointment. We had failed.
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.
My 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 and it got less.
My brother Peter is a good man.
He's got a kind, warm and generous heart.
Could be aggressive, but I think
he was hurt with the way things were.
I'm proud of his achievements,
of how he's managing his life even today
because of the problems that he's had.
If anybody else has got anything different to say about him,
that's their opinion.
But I know him
as my brother and I know him as the man.
I love being loved.
And when I say that I don't mean in a female sense,
I just mean with my friends, my relatives
and, above all, my children.
If I hadn't have 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.