Nearly 24 years ago, the United States deployed a small, secretive force to hunt for a drug kingpin whose merchandise had flooded American markets. Pablo Escobar's cartel was believed to smuggle in at least 80 percent of the cocaine in the United States, and was responsible for a wave of murders in Colombia that stretched back 15 years.
For more than a year, the U.S. military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) rotated teams into Colombia from the Army's elite Delta Force and the U.S. Navy's Special Warfare Developmental Group, commonly known as DEVGRU or SEAL Team 6, according to the book "Relentless Strike," a lengthy history of JSOC published last year by journalist Sean Naylor. The American Special Operations troops were supposed to be limited to training Colombia's elite military forces, but found ways to accompany them on missions.