For nearly two decades, U.S. and Colombian forces honed various high-tech surveillance skills and low-down warfare on the Medellín Cartel.

But it was only after kingpin Pablo Escobar escaped from La Catedral prison in 1992 that the game of cat and mouse exploded onto the streets of Medellín. To topple a hidden titan, law enforcement agencies built a convoluted system of radio surveillance and information sharing that spanned the winding streets of Medellín. In an era when only one million computers were connected to the Internet—and cell phones were just as bulky and rare as satellite phones—the race to capture Escobar called for an unconventional ground game.

To find their man, U.S. and Colombian forces relied on espionage equipment with origins in World War II and the Cold War—and old school techniques like radio triangulation and microwave data transmission—all as part of a search powered by soldiers, spies, politicians, policemen, and wonks. All of this tech went toward a seemingly impossible mission: to intercept the right call at the right time at the right place, and swoop in to capture Escobar.

Pablo Escobar

As played by Wagner Moura in Narcos

Alias
El Zar de la Cocaína, El Patrón

Devices
Radiophone, transmitter

Location
Hundreds of secretly held properties throughout Medellín. Escobar kept in constant contact with his associates and family through a rotating roster of radiotelephones.

Radiophone

Intel
Escobar always had a go bag full of guns, money and radios hidden close by. The kingpin’s foot soldiers also handed out radios to local children, who would then report back with the movements of law enforcement

officers. Escobar would stick to frequencies in the range of 120 to 140 MHz on calls and use special phrases to alert his associates of frequency changes. Most calls lasted under two minutes.

Juan Pablo Escobar

As played by Juan Murcia in Narcos

Title
Son of Pablo Escobar

Devices
Radiophone, transmitter, beeper

Location
Escobar family apartment building Altos del Campestre in Medellín. The kingpin would alert Juan Pablo of incoming calls via beeper.

Centra Spike

Title
U.S. Army SpecOps unit

Devices
Spy plane, satellite phone

Where
Airspace above Medellín

Intel
Two planes took turns coasting over Medellín, both tricked out to triangulate Escobar’s calls. Once a signal was locked, map coordinates were calculated to guide visual surveillance from Delta Force.

Satellite Phone

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Intel
Until Escobar’s frequency-flipping code was cracked, the best operators could hope for was about 20 seconds in which to find, confirm, and triangulate a signal’s source. Cracking the code provided more accurate location info as well as more audio intel.

Delta Force

Title
U.S. Army SpecOps force

Devices
8mm video camera, microwave relay

Location
Posted atop La Catedral’s observation tower overlooking Medellín from the south.

Intel
Armed with location intel from the spy planes and other coordinating sources, Delta Force peered into Medellín for visual confirmation of Escobar’s whereabouts with an 8mm video camera outfitted with zoom lenses.

Microwave Dish

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Intel
When operators hit their mark, the live 8mm video feed—a fuzzy blur by today’s HD standards—was beamed 17 miles to Delta Force and Search Bloc at the Carlos Holguín School via microwave-dish relay for visual confirmation.

Search Bloc

Title
Colombian Police special operations unit

Devices
Portable eavesdropping kits, unmarked surveillance vans

Location
Hidden in a former police academy overlooking the city and throughout Medellín.

Intel
With location intel confirmed from Delta Force, Search Bloc would make moves to capture. Several times Colombian forces were either too slow or too overt in their approach, giving Escobar opportunity to flee.

Spec Ops

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Intel
Finally, one special operations unit began roaming Medellín in unmarked vans. The surveillance team used air intel and their own radio-sniffing portable devices to search hot neighborhoods block by block.

Lines of Communication

While on the run, Escobar stayed in business by using a rotating roster of old-school cell phones, often making calls from the back of a car driven by a bodyguard. To force Escobar into the open, Colombian national police forbade the use of cell phones and shut down cell signal repeaters across Medellín.

  • The Cartel
  • The Law
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As the available communication technology changed, so did the rules of the game. Escobar switched to radiotelephones, which forced him to take line-of-sight positions in the hills above the city.

Meanwhile, an international coalition of law enforcement officers was listening in and building a complex web of data-sharing agencies.

Narcos Season 2: Clip

Narrowing down Escobar’s location required constant communication and real-time data-sharing between the surveillance teams of Centra Spike, Delta Force, and Search Bloc. To pull this off, the agencies pooled their most advanced surveillance equipment and vehicles. But this was the 1990s: Processor speeds were measured in megabytes, not gigabytes, and the military was just starting to use GPS satellites. To address the fast-paced and unusual needs of the mission, the forces were often tweaking the tech and hacking gear that hadn’t changed much since World War II.

Air

Centra Spike: Eavesdropping 25,000 feet above

To evade detection, the CIA set up a corporation called Falcon Aviation with the stated purpose of checking Colombia’s runway landing signals. The two prop planes were secretly loaded with $50 million in high-tech spyware to aid in the search.

  • Air
  • Hilltops
  • Ground

Hilltops

Delta Force: The hills have eyes

Delta Force operators stationed themselves high above the fray in positions like La Catedral’s observation tower. From their elevated police academy outpost, they relayed information and visual confirmations to Search Bloc.

  • Air
  • Hilltops
  • Ground

Ground

Search Bloc: Covertly waiting for Escobar’s calls

Armed with fresh coordinates from Centra Spike and video confirmation from Delta Force, Search Bloc sprung into action, hitting the streets of Medellín ready to sniff out the source of Escobarís fleeting radio traffic.

  • Air
  • Hilltops
  • Ground

Narcos Season 2: Clip

Escobar’s backchannel of low-tech communication networks was difficult to crack.

As the cartel’s lookouts got better at spotting the law, Search Bloc had to leverage its available technology to gain an advantage in this complicated game of cat-and-mouse.

To learn Escobar’s final location, Search Bloc used high-powered antennas to calculate the general direction of his transmission during a phone call with his son. Once this first bearing was charted and visually confirmed, roving pairs of high-tech surveillance vans crisscrossed the streets of Medellín in search of the strongest hits on Escobar’s frequency. When the operators’ equipment calculated the area where all three lines intersected, the race was on to close the distance. The search took agents to the Los Olivos neighborhood, where a block search finally yielded Escobar’s precise location.

Triangulation

Centra Spike intercepts Escobar’s call somewhere in the range of 120 to 140 MHz and adjusts course to track his signal.

Centra Spike approximates coordinates and relays them to Delta Force and Search Bloc tracking teams.

Mobile tracking teams rapidly deploy, using a third antenna placed on a hilltop to complete triangulation.

Mobile teams close the distance, locking in on an exact location and conducting door-to-door sweeps of the area.

  • Stage 1
  • Stage 2
  • Stage 3
  • Stage 4

Watch as the hunt for Escobar explodes onto the streets of Medellin in Season 2 of Narcos.

Narcos Season 2: Official Trailer