SMUGGLER: Barry Seal

Two weeks after offering to go to work for the vice president's task force, Barry Seal flew to Colombia to meet with the Medellin cartel's top leaders. At the Ochoa family ranch at Las Lomas, Seal met with Jorge, Fabio, and Juan Ochoa, and Pablo Escobar.

Things were going badly for cartel in Colombia. In March, Colombian National Police, under the direction of the country's new chief prosecutor, Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara, had raided the cartel's gigantic jungle processing plant at Tranquilandia and seized 14 metric tons of cocaine. A few weeks before, Colombian troops had raided seven cartel airstrips, seized seven of its aircraft, 12,000 drums of chemicals used to process cocaine, and huge amounts of the drug itself. All told, cartel losses were estimated at $1 billion.

At their April 7 meeting with Seal, the Colombian cocaine kings told the American smuggler they couldn't put together the 3,000-kilo deal they had promised him. The best they could do, they said, was 1,500 kilos. Times were tough in Medellin.

It was at that same meeting that Barry Seal first heard about the cartel's deal with Nicaragua. Officials within the Marxist Sandinista government had agreed to let the Colombians use their country as a base of operations until things cooled off back at home.

Good capitalist businessmen that they were, the Colombians were quick to point out to Seal that their agreement with communist officials in Managua was in no way an endorsement of their politics. It was strictly business.

"We are not communist," one of the cocaine kingpins told Seal. "We don't particularly enjoy the same philosophy that they do, but they serve our means and we serve theirs."

Seal flew back to Miami the next day.

When Barry's DEA handlers passed the word to Washington that their star undercover pilot might be able to get evidence implicating the hated Sandinista regime in smuggling drugs directly into the United States, there were some happy people in the top ranks of the Reagan administration.