BADASS WOMEN IN HISTORY SERIES
Guess Who Came to Dinner?
Women journalists who defied the odds to get the truth. The audacity and tenacity of Leslie Cockburn, Part 2.
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Leslie Cockburn paved the way for more female journalists. Her intrepid fortitude and unwavering tenacity to get the truth and the story brought awareness of other lives and countries that were directly impacted by US foreign policy.
Amazing work shelved
Leslie Cockburn had established herself as a prolific journalist with amazing skills of getting access to people who would have had their guard up if she were a man. Women journalists were rare and her subjects viewed her as a curiosity. Leslie’s relationship with CBS news was beginning to sour. Her work was getting stifled and shredded into smaller sound bites and clips.
Leslie had just returned from Lyon, France just south of Paris. It had been ground zero for victims she had convinced to return to the basement where they had been mercilessly tortured by The Butcher of Lyon Klaus Barbie. The place still gives Leslie nightmares to this day. Through his network of French collaborators and intelligence officers, Barbie, according to witness testimony, had ordered a group of French Jewish kids who had been sheltered at a farmhouse in Isieux to be killed. Collaborators had discovered their hideout and they were hauled away on Barbie’s orders and murdered. Everyone on the area had a vivid memory of those who were collaborators and those who were members of the Resistance. All of this ground work and legwork was shelved and the project ground to a halt and never saw the light of day. CBS was moving away from the hour-long documentary format. They wanted the fifteen minute fluff pieces with pop music infused over the camera work. Appeals to the young or wanting to be up with the times? Insanity, either way.
Leslie was asked to join PBS Frontline which was a just in time much needed lifeline. Her work deserves better treatment and showcasing.
Opportunity knocks
Her big break came in the form of filming the inside of the cocaine cartels in Columbia and interviewing their leaders.
For some backstory, things really had started going south in relations between the United States and Columbia when George Bush Sr. demanded that the Columbia Government extradite the captured cocaine capos to the United States. This presented several problems. One being that non citizens would not be afforded the rights and privileges of citizens under the law. You can always count on a Right Wing Evangelical authoritarian to make all the worst decisions and making a bad situation worse. These demands sent the cartels into a furious violent frenzy which made Columbia a dangerous place to be. Perfect for a docudrama camera crew from Frontline, no?
Another thing about moving to PBS was that Leslie was able to make her husband, Andrew, a co-producer on the project and not have to worry about “conflicts of interests.”
Husband and wife teams were a rarity and a curiosity. For some odd reason, this encouraged unsavory characters to be more open to revealing intimate secrets in confidence.
Mums the word at the dinner table
As time went on her work brought her closer and closer to seats and places of power which involved the shadow world of organized crime and intelligence agencies.
It got to the point where Leslie no longer felt safe discussing her work and what she was currently doing at the dinner table and at parties. She developed a mode of protection through conversation misdirection and changing the subject. Her eight-year-old daughter, Chloe, would find out which country they were headed off to for work next and she would inform them that there was a war going on over there.
Yeah, she was eight years old and already old.
Off to Columbia
It was off to the races. They sent in their updated last wills and testaments over to the lawyers while they battled the insurance companies for funding for security. After a bunch of back and forth haggling, the insurance broker, being the peach that he was told them that funding wouldn’t be a problem for this caper because it would provide endless bragging rights at cocktail parties. Party hearty and party hard.
They couldn’t rely on protection from the State Department, CIA, or DEA. Any hint of association with a government agency would be catastrophic for any journalist trying to get into the inner circle of the cartels.
They would need the guaranteed security of incarcerated cocaine trafficker George Morales from the Bogatán cartel who had done some previous work with the Contras in Nicaragua, and was also involved with the Haitian transshipment of drugs.
In order to pull this caper off, Leslie and Andrew would need to build up a persona of being in the business and connected. They touched down in Columbia dressed in Armani which would cause anyone to think twice about kidnapping them for ransoms. If anyone connected with the cartels were accosted in any way, their life would be worth less than dog shit.
Warring drug cartels
You had various warring factions of the Gacha, Bogotá, and Cali cartels who were constantly at each other’s throats.
Luckily for the Cockburns, the Cali capos were among the more enlightened and eschewed violence unless it was a business dispute or a business deal gone wrong. The Cali preferred to buy politicians, generals, judges and journalists as opposed to murdering them. It was bad publicity which made it bad for business. They sent their kids to elite schools like Oxford and Cambridge in the hopes that they would join the oligarchy of the ruling class.
The Cockburns were scrutinized and investigated by multiple cartels to see if there was a shred of connection between them and the United States. Ironically, the cartels had developed a top notch stellar intelligence organization, thanks to the training they received from officers of the CIA and various US intelligence agencies.
On one fateful Sunday, the Cockburns and the camera crew thought it a good idea to make their presence known by inviting themselves over to a home of one of the cocaine producers of the Cali cartel. They arrived at the fortress gates and from behind the walls in the courtyard they could hear children’s voices as they kicked around a soccer ball. Nothing sinister about that, they thought. Eduardo the camera man got out of the car and went to the front door to introduce the group to conduct an interview while their driver who had covered his head and face with a towel broke out into a sweat and sank below the steering wheel in his seat.
Eventually, four angry looking gunmen materialized from behind the iron gate while Eduardo made his way back to the car completely shaken and ashen. In a whispered hushed tone, he told them that they would be killed in twenty-four hours if they didn’t leave town. They retreated back to their hotel to regroup and strategize what their next move would be. Failure to get an interview was more depressing than the threat of assassination. Leslie got an idea to send a self — effacing letter to the chief apologizing for their rudeness for disturbing the family gathering. And asked that he not blame their cameraman Eduardo. To add touch, she included to cassettes of their last two documentaries films to assure the chief that they meant no harm. They sent the message and the tapes with a messenger and waited for word back. By midnight, the messenger returned with a message that the death threat had been withdrawn. As luck would have it, the cartel capo was an aspiring film artist who wanted to eventually get into the business and had his own amateur filming studio.
Dinning with the cartel
After that, the Cockburns were invited into his home where they had a gathering of various other capos and chiefs and multiple cartel members. While they were hobnobbing with the Cali Cartel, they learned that the entire Colombian army was looking for this particular cartel. Great timing for a party.
The documentary “Inside the Cartel” was an amazing success.
Imagine a member of US intelligence watching in shock as various familiar faces they were surveilling popped up on the screen one after the other.
According to a journalist acquaintance, when they saw all the details of the inner circle and various cartel leaders giving interviews on camera about their operations, a DEA agent and friend nearly fell out of his chair in shock.
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Sources
Frontline: Inside the Cartel
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