Bowden: A piece of that is true, he didn’t like Steele, but I don’t think that is a fair characterization of Paul Howe. Paul had an interesting reason for helping me. Paul was a key Delta Force operator in the middle of that fight and because the Army’s restriction of even admitting that Delta Force existed, he felt that the impression that was left after the battle was the Rangers had survived that battle because they were so well trained and they managed to do this themselves. His feeling was that the Rangers never would have survived if not for the Delta Force guys who were there with them. He said if the Army believes that the Rangers were capable of handling this episode by themselves, they are going to be put into situations where they are going to get killed. It was really important for people to understand that the reason they survived that ordeal was that they had these very veteran professional soldiers who led them out, essentially.
IACSP: In the ‘Guests of the Ayatollah’
IACSP: You also wrote about special
I got into the story of Pablo Escobar when I was working on ‘Black Hawk Down.’ A special ops commander in Mogadishu had a picture on the wall in his office of a bloody dead fat man on a roof top with a bunch of guys posing around it. It is not the sort
you portrayed the huge military failure and botched rescue of the American hostages in Iran. What were the lessons learned there and did you see echoes of this mission in the later successful killing of bin Laden, which you covered in a later book, ‘The Finish’?
of thing you see in
Bowden: In the case of Iran they had
said, that, my friend, is
toppled it together. They trained up the soldiers and didn’t have specialty equipment, helicopters and pilots capable of flying these difficult nighttime missions over the desert, so I think it revealed the need to integrate the different branches of the service in special ops. By the time we were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, we had the Joint Special Operations Command, made up of specialists from all the branches. They had specially designed weaponry, vehicles, helicopters and they were a far more sophisticated operation. During the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, those groups got more experience than any other time in history, so by the time of the bin Laden raid, you’re looking at state-of-the-art special operations capability. And the difference between what you saw in 1980 compared to what you saw in 2011, is like from amateurs to professional.
people’s offices, so I said you have to tell me what that is. He Pablo Escobar.
operations in ‘Killing Pablo.’ You did a good job of covering the roles of Delta Force, Navy SEALs and American law enforcement in the takedown of perhaps the biggest and most dangerous criminal in history, Pablo Escobar. Can you give us the backstory on that book?
Bowden: I got into the story of Pablo
Escobar when I was working on ‘Black Hawk Down.’ A special ops commander in Mogadishu had a picture on the wall in his office of a bloody dead fat man on a roof top with a bunch of guys posing around it. It is not the sort of thing you see in people’s offices, so I said you have to tell me what that is. He said, that, my friend, is Pablo Escobar. I keep it on my wall to remind me that in this life no matter how rich you are, you can still be too big for your britches. So I wrote Pablo Escobar in my notebook and underlined it about five times. The great thing about that story was that it was a mission for the special ops community, the military, the DEA, and it had a Foreign Service element along with the Colombian National Police. The DEA does not have the same restrictions as the military and those guys had all these files from the embassy in Bogota that were extremely helpful. At one point I briefly came into possession - I won’t tell you how - of the entire U.S. Embassy file. It was over a period of four or five years and it detailed all of the events and interviews and arrests and episodes. It was a challenge to make sense of them. The other real breakthrough for me was one of the Delta Force guys who was involved in that and was no longer in the unit traveled with me to Colombia as my guide and translator. He would never tell me anything about his involvement, but if I asked him a question, he would say, “all right I’ll take you to someone who can answer that question”. The story of Pablo Escobar is one of the most amazing and interesting stories of the 20th Century.
IACSP: Any movie plans for ‘Hue 1968’? Bowden: Yes. Producer and director
Michael Mann will make a ten-part series.
IACSP: Thank you for speaking to us.