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James Comey, the director of the FBI, says the Internet is the most dangerous parking lot imaginable.
Meaning that, online, you'll get mugged in ways that you never saw coming. We saw what
he meant this month when JPMorgan Chase, the nation's largest bank, admitted that its system
was looted for weeks by computer criminals who stole personal information from 83 million
customers.
Last week on 60 Minutes, we spoke to James Comey about terrorism. Tonight, a surprising
conversation about our lives online, not only the criminal menace but also snooping by agencies
like the FBI. What does America's top cop think of government surveillance? Well, as
we said, it's a surprising conversation.
James Comey: I believe that Americans should be deeply skeptical of government power. You
cannot trust people in power. The founders knew that. That's why they divided power among
three branches, to set interest against interest.
Scott Pelley: With regard to privacy and civil liberties, what guarantee are you willing
to give to the American people?
James Comey: The promise I've tried to honor my entire career, that the rule of law and
the design of the founders, right, the oversight of courts and the oversight of Congress will
be at the heart of what the FBI does. The way you'd want it to be.
Scott Pelley: Does the FBI gather electronic surveillance that is then passed to the National
Security Agency?
James Comey: That's one of those things I don't know whether I can talk about that in
an open setting so I, I better not start to go down that road with you.
Scott Pelley: You have said, quote, "We shouldn't be doing anything that we can't explain."
But these programs are top secret. The American people can't see them and you can't explain
them.
James Comey: Right. We can't explain everything to everybody or the bad guys will find out
what our capabilities are, both nations and individuals. What I mean is I need to be able
to explain it either directly to the American people or to their elected representatives,
which we do extensively with Congress.
Scott Pelley: There is no surveillance without court order?
James Comey: By the FBI? No. We don't do electronic surveillance without a court order.
Scott Pelley: You know that some people are going to roll their eyes when they hear that?
James Comey: Yeah, but we cannot read your emails or listen to your calls without going
to a federal judge, making a showing of probable cause that you are a terrorist, an agent of
a foreign power, or a serious criminal of some sort, and get permission for a limited
period of time to intercept those communications. It is an extremely burdensome process. And
I like it that way.
That's a principle over which James Comey is willing to sacrifice his career. He proved
it in 2004 when he was deputy attorney general. Comey was asked to reauthorize a package of
top secret, warrantless surveillance targeting foreign terrorists. But Comey told us "significant
aspects" of the massive program were not lawful. He wouldn't be specific because it's still
top secret.
Scott Pelley: This was not something you were willing to stand for?
James Comey: No, I was the deputy attorney general of the United States. We were not
going to authorize, reauthorize or participate in activities that did not have a lawful basis.
At the time, Comey was in charge at the Justice Department because Attorney General John Ashcroft
was in intensive care with near fatal pancreatitis. When Comey refused to sign off, the president's
Chief of Staff Andy Card headed to the hospital to get Ashcroft's OK.
Scott Pelley: You got in a car with lights and siren and raced to the hospital to beat
the president's chief of staff there?
James Comey: Yep, raced over there, ran up the stairs, got there first.
Scott Pelley: What did you tell the attorney general lying in his hospital bed?
James Comey: Not much, because he was very, very bad off. I tried to see whether he was
oriented as to place and time. And it was clear to me that he wasn't. I tried to have
him understand what this was about. And it wasn't clear to me that he understood what
I was saying. So I sat down to wait.
Scott Pelley: To wait for Andy Card, the president's chief of staff?
James Comey: Yeah, and then White House Counsel Gonzales.
Scott Pelley: They spoke to Attorney General Ashcroft and said that the program should
be reauthorized and you were there to argue that it should not be. How did it end?
James Comey: With the attorney general surprising me, shocking me by pushing himself up on his
elbows, and in very strong terms articulating the merits of the matter. And then saying,
"But that doesn't matter because I'm not the attorney general." And then he turned to me
and pointed and said, "There's the attorney general." And then he fell back. And they
turned and left.
Scott Pelley: You'd won the day?
James Comey: Yeah, I didn't feel that way.
Scott Pelley: How did you feel?
James Comey: Probably a little sick. And a little sense of unreality that this was happening.
The next day, some in the White House tried to force the authorization through a different
way. So Comey wrote a letter of resignation to the president calling the situation "apocalyptic"
and "fundamentally wrong." He left the letter on his desk and he and FBI Director Robert
Mueller went to the White House to resign.
James Comey: Yeah. We stood there together, waiting to go meet the president, looking
out at the Rose Garden, both of us knowing this was our last time there, and the end
of our government careers.
Scott Pelley: Wasn't it your responsibility to support the president?
James Comey: No. No, my responsibility, I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution
of the United States.
Scott Pelley: This was something the president wanted to go forward with. And you were standing
in front of the president of the United States telling him he shouldn't do it. And if he
did, you'd quit. Do I have that right?
James Comey: Yeah, I don't think I expressly threatened to quit at any point. But that
was understood.
President Bush was persuaded.
Scott Pelley: The program that we've discussed, as I understand it, was in fact reauthorized,
but in a modified form? It was made to conform to the law in your estimation?
James Comey: Yes.
Scott Pelley: Help me understand the principle at stake here that caused you to write a letter
of resignation, to rush to the attorney general's bedside, to tell the president that he couldn't
have what he wanted, and to face down the president's chief of staff. What was it that
motivated that?
James Comey: The rule of law. Simple as that.
We talked with Comey, who is six foot eight, at his headquarters in Washington. In technology,
the cutting edge cuts both ways and Comey told us he's worried now that Apple and Google
have the power to upend the rule of law. Until now, a judge could order those companies to
unlock a criminal suspect's phone. But their new software makes it impossible for them
to crack a code set by the user.
James Comey: The notion that we would market devices that would allow someone to place
themselves beyond the law, troubles me a lot. As a country, I don't know why we would want
to put people beyond the law. That is, sell cars with trunks that couldn't ever be opened
by law enforcement with a court order, or sell an apartment that could never be entered
even by law enforcement. Would you want to live in that neighborhood? This is a similar
concern. The notion that people have devices, again, that with court orders, based on a
showing of probable cause in a case involving kidnapping or child exploitation or terrorism,
we could never open that phone? My sense is that we've gone too far when we've gone there.
The FBI is spending a lot of its time online these days. This is a new cybercrime headquarters
that the public hasn't seen before. We agreed to keep the location secret. They call it
"cywatch" and it pulls in resources from the CIA, NSA and others. Comey's agents are running
down leads in the theft of JPMorgan's data. Often in cases like that the suspects are
overseas. So the trouble is, in cyberspace, where do you put the handcuffs?
James Comey: It's too easy for those criminals to think that I can sit in my basement halfway
around the world and steal everything that matters to an American. And it's a freebie,
because I'm so far away.
Scott Pelley: A lot of those people are operating in countries where they're not going to be
give up to the United States.
James Comey: Yes.
Scott Pelley: Russia, China, elsewhere.
James Comey: Yep, a challenge that we face so we try to approach that two ways. One,
work with all foreign nations to try and have them understand that it's in nobody's interested
to have criminal thugs in your country and second, again, to look to lay hands on them
if they leave those safe havens to impose a real cost on them. We want them looking
over their shoulders when they're sitting at a keyboard.
Scott Pelley: When the phone rings in the middle of the night, which I'm sure it does,
what's your first thought?
James Comey: Something has blown up. Yeah.
Scott Pelley: It's terrorism that concerns you the most, even after all we said about
cybercrime.
James Comey: Yeah, I think that's right because it's terrorism that can have the most horrific,
immediate impact on innocent people
In the age of terrorism the budget of the FBI has doubled, adding capabilities like
this reference library for bombs. Since 2003, they've analyzed 100,000 bombs sent here from
40 nations. From blasted remains, like this circuit board, they can piece together the
'what' and the 'how' that leads to the 'who.' It's just some of the 21st century technology
that is transforming the 106-year-old bureau.
We also saw a new virtual world where agents are put through any nightmare that instructors
can program into their goggles. James Comey: To their mind's eye, they're
in an alley or they're in an apartment building or they're coming into a house. But because
the computer can create that through the virtual reality glasses that they wear. It's a great
way to be able to train lots of people for lots of different missions, all in a big empty
room.
[FBI! Let me see your hands!]
We're told that the deadliest avatar is a little old lady with a handgun.
[Subject detained!]
We also traveled to a town that doesn't exit on any map. It's a crime scene training ground.
And when we were there the agents were using lasers to figure out from which direction
shots were fired. A fog machine reveals the beam in daylight. But in this indoor town,
it can be night if need be.
With what the FBI can do expanding so rapidly, James Comey keeps this memo right on his desk
to remind him of what the bureau shouldn't do. Marked "secret," it's a 1963 request from
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Titled, "Martin Luther King Jr., Security Matter - Communist."
Hoover requests authority for "technical surveillance" of King. The approval is signed by Attorney
General Robert Kennedy.
Scott Pelley: And there was no court order. It was the signature of the FBI director and
the signature of the attorney general?
James Comey: Yep. And then open-ended. No time limit. No space restriction. No review.
No oversight.
Scott Pelley: And given the threats in the world today, wouldn't that make your job so
much easier?
James Comey: In a sense, but also in a sense, we would give up so much that makes sure that
we're rooted in the rule of law, that I'd never want to make that trade.
Some of the worst of the FBI's history is in its investigation of Dr. King. So on Comey's
orders, FBI Academy instructors now bring new agents here to talk about values lost
in the pursuit of the man who became a monument.
FBI Academy instructor: Character, courage, collaboration, competence. We have to be able
to call on those tools in our toolbox to be able to make sure that we are correcting some
of the things that have happened in the past.
Scott Pelley: What's the lesson?
James Comey: The lesson is the importance of never becoming untethered to oversight
and accountability. I want all of my new special agents and intelligence analysts to understand
that portion of the FBI's history, the FBI's interaction with Dr. King and draw from it
an understanding of the dangers of falling in love with our own rectitude.
You've just heard FBI Director Comey discuss the NSA surveillance program with Scott.
This is a story about another facet of the NSA program, involving wiretaps, and what
happens when the demands of national security collide with the public's right to know.
That dilemma is at the heart of the case of James Risen, a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative
reporter for the New York Times.
Risen was the first to break the story about the NSA's secret wiretapping program that
monitored Americans' phone calls without a court warrant. He's been subpoenaed to divulge
his confidential sources in a separate federal criminal trial. He appealed the subpoena all
the way up to the Supreme Court, but the court turned down his petition. Now, if he doesn't
name names, he could go to jail.
Lesley Stahl: Will you divulge your source?
James Risen: No.
Lesley Stahl: Never?
James Risen: Never, no. Basically, the choice the government's given me is: give up everything
I believe or go to jail. So, I'm not going to talk.
Those who know Jim Risen say he isn't bluffing, that he's stubborn, curmudgeonly and dogged.
Lesley Stahl: Sometimes you get yourself in trouble.
James Risen: Yeah, the government's been after me for quite a while now, so.
Lesley Stahl: Well, because of what you publish, not personally, right?
James Risen: Feels personal.
He says the current standoff with the government began in 2004 over what would become the biggest
story of his career that would win the Pulitzer Prize: the top-secret warrantless wiretap
program run by the National Security Agency.
James Risen: It was called "No Such Agency." And it was this massive part of the intelligence
community that almost no one ever wrote about. What they were supposed to do was spy on foreigners,
electronic eavesdropping of foreign people overseas. Basically, what I found out about
it was, they had suddenly turned this giant eavesdropping operation at the NSA onto the
American people, in secret. And that's what the story was.
Lesley Stahl: Were they actually listening in or just recording that metadata?
James Risen: They were doing both. They had the content and they were getting the metadata.
After 9/11, President Bush authorized the NSA to listen in on Americans suspected of
ties with al Qaeda - without a judicial warrant as required by law.
James Risen: I get these people who start telling me, in the government and elsewhere,
"There's this huge secret I can't tell you about."
Lesley Stahl: Did they say they were upset about it? That it...
James Risen: Yes. They were tortured by what they knew. But they were frightened at the
same time.
Over the next six months, he pieced the story together about the NSA surveillance program,
then called the NSA's press office for a comment.
James Risen: I said, "I need to speak right now to Mike Hayden," the NSA director.
Lesley Stahl: The head of NSA. You said that?
James Risen: The head of NSA. And I said, "I can't tell you why. It's urgent. But I
got to talk to him right now." And I was bluffing. But she, to my shock, she put him on the phone
immediately. And so as soon as Hayden got on the phone, I read him the top of the draft
of the story, the first few paragraphs. And I heard this [gasp]. And I knew I had him
right there.
It's a conversation General Mike Hayden will never forget.
Lesley Stahl: So what was your first reaction when you realized that the New York Times
was on to the NSA story?
Mike Hayden: Well, first reaction was this is not good news. This was a program that
we relied on a great deal. It was covering al Qaeda operatives inside the United States,
communicating with al Qaeda overseas and abroad.
Lesley Stahl: The FBI doesn't do that?
Mike Hayden: Well, not the way we did it.
He acknowledges the NSA program was "unarguably inconsistent" with the 1978 law prohibiting
the agency from eavesdropping on Americans without first obtaining a court warrant.
Mike Hayden: It was warrantless but not unwarranted. It would've been irresponsible for NSA not
to have done this in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 9/11.
Lesley Stahl: But it was eavesdropping on Americans? That was the story.
Mike Hayden: You know, one has to choose words carefully here, all right. We were allowed
to intercept international calls.
Lesley Stahl: Had to be overseas.
Mike Hayden: Had to be overseas. And we already had reason to believe that one or both ends
of the call were affiliated with al Qaeda.
Besides, government lawyers assured him that the president's authority as commander-in-chief
trumped the 1978 law. In their view, the program was both legal and constitutional, though
he acknowledges, just barely.
Mike Hayden: Hey, I knew we were playing up against the line.
Lesley Stahl: So what you're telling us is that you went into this knowing that if it
came out...
Mike Hayden: Oh God, yes.
Lesley Stahl: ...there would be questions of legality?
Mike Hayden: Of course, and appropriateness, and abuse.
Lesley Stahl: That's why you didn't want it to come out? See, that's what Jim Risen says.
You didn't want to be embarrassed.
Mike Hayden: Let me turn it, OK. Jim's going to go to jail. Why? Because Jim wants to protect
his sources. We're both in the same business, you and me, Jim and me. You have sources who
remain productive only as long as you can protect them from exposure. Exposing our tactics,
techniques, procedures, sources and methods harms us as much as Mr. Risen would be harmed
if he were forced in court to expose his source.
What followed was an all-out effort by the Bush White House to kill the story. Bill Keller,
then executive editor of the Times, was summoned to the White House for a meeting with General
Hayden and other top officials.
Lesley Stahl: Do you think that they were more worried about losing this tool to fight
terrorism or that they would be embarrassed by it? Because it was spying on Americans.
Bill Keller: I think both of those things concerned them. But it was a question of,
"If we publish this story, will it...," to put it bluntly, "cost lives?"
Lesley Stahl: Did they argue that, that it would cost lives?
Bill Keller: Yes. There's also a context. I mean it was not that long after 9/11. And
I think all of us were affected by that.
And so he decided not to run the story. Risen was livid. It was the latest run-in with his
editors, who he says had sided with the government on other stories of his involving national
security.
Lesley Stahl: What kept you from walking out?
James Risen: I wanted to get that damn story in the paper. It was the best story in my
life, and I wasn't going to let anybody else write it.
Lesley Stahl: General Hayden makes the argument that you didn't have the expertise or the
knowledge to know the whole picture and to understand the whole picture. And I guess
implicit in that argument is who the hell are you?
James Risen: Yeah.
Lesley Stahl: I'm serious. Who elected you, yeah.
James Risen: The whole global war on terror has been classified. If we today had only
had information that was officially authorized from the U.S. government, we would know virtually
nothing about the war on terror.
He teamed up with another reporter, Eric Lichtblau, and together they kept digging. Still, his
editors were not persuaded and killed the story again, two months later, in December
2004.
James Risen: The story was dead for good. I was furious and I said to myself, "I'm going
to put that in my book."
He was writing a book. And he was going to put several reports in it that his editors
had killed, along with the NSA story. Jill Abramson, then the Times' second-in-command,
says that was a turning point.
Jill Abramson: It would be potentially very embarrassing to the Times to have this big
story come out in Jim's book. And our readers would feel why was this not in the New York
Times?
Lesley Stahl: So he forced your hand? He did.
Jill Abramson: In some ways, he forced our hand. Sure he did.
Lesley Stahl: Had you fallen under the sway of the post-9/11 concerns about safety in
this country, security.
Jill Abramson: I think that I had a bit, and I don't think I was alone. I think that the
years right after 9/11 were a period when the Washington press corps, and I put myself
very much in that group, it wasn't our finest hour. It wasn't.
By 2005, the atmosphere had changed. The Iraq war had not gone well, and when no weapons
of mass destruction were found, the Bush administration's credibility suffered. That and the pressure
of Risen's book led to the Times putting the story back in play. And then came a climactic
meeting in the Oval Office among President Bush and General Hayden, Bill Keller and the
publisher of the Times, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.
Bill Keller: The president said, you know, "If there's another attack like 9/11, we're
going to be called up before Congress to explain how we let that happen. And you should be
sitting alongside us." It was, in effect, you know, "You could have blood on your hands."
Lesley Stahl: He was saying, "If anything goes wrong, we're going to blame you."
Bill Keller: Right.
Lesley Stahl: And you walk out with that on your chest.
Bill Keller: Yeah.
Despite that, the Times went to press, running the story on December 16, 2005, more than
a year after Risen had first offered it. And it was explosive, triggering congressional
hearings and an FBI investigation into who Risen's sources were.
The administration also reached out to Leslie Moonves, head of CBS, whose Simon & Schuster
division was the publisher of Risen's book, in an unsuccessful attempt to stop its publication.
After more than two years, the FBI stopped pursuing the leak investigation into Risen's
NSA story.
James Risen: The Bush administration I think decided they didn't want a constitutional
showdown with the New York Times over a story like the NSA story. And so I think they decided
to drop that investigation and then come after me on my book.
They came after him about this chapter, detailing a botched CIA operation called "Merlin," involving
Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Lesley Stahl: Well, it was classified information.
James Risen: It was classified information, but I believed that the government was trying
to cover up an embarrassment and it was not for national security reasons.
Risen was subpoenaed in 2008 to divulge his sources on Merlin. But when President Obama
was elected, he thought it would all be over.
James Risen: Now everything's going to be fine.
Lesley Stahl: He had talked about transparency and protecting whistleblowers in the campaign.
James Risen: Yes. And I was shocked. They said, "No, no, no. We want to keep this going."
And they subpoenaed me again.
What shocks him even more is that the Obama administration has prosecuted more government
leakers than all previous presidents combined and his Justice Department has seized the
records of phone calls made by more than a hundred AP reporters and investigated a Fox
News correspondent under the Espionage Act.
James Risen: In my case, it's come out that they got my travel records, my credit reports,
my credit card data, my phone records.
Lesley Stahl: From a court warrant?
James Risen: No.
Lesley Stahl: From what?
James Risen: It's secret. They won't say how they got it.
Lesley Stahl: So do you think that Jim Risen should be compelled to divulge his sources?
Mike Hayden: I am, like America, conflicted. OK?
Lesley Stahl: Really?
Mike Hayden: I am. I am. You're talking about ruining lives over things about which people
are acting on principle, so I'd be very careful about it.
Lesley Stahl: So you would not be pursuing Jim if you had the decision to make?
Mike Hayden: Frankly, Lesley, I don't understand the necessity to pursue Jim.
Lesley Stahl: You're shocking me that the former head of the NSA is saying that it's
coming down too hard.
Mike Hayden: I'm conflicted. I know the damage that is done. And I do. But I also know the
free press necessity in a free society. And it actually might be that I think, "No, he's
wrong. That was a mistake. That was a terrible thing to do. America will suffer because of
that story." But then I have to think about, so how do I redress that? And if the method
of redressing that actually harms the broad freedom of the press, that's still wrong.
The government needs to be strong enough to keep me safe, but I don't want it so strong
that it threatens my liberties.
That's the crux of the dilemma. For his part, Risen argues that what he revealed was not
a government secret, as much as a program he thought was illegal.
James Risen: We weren't revealing to anybody the fact that the United States listened to
terrorist phone calls. Everybody knew that. The terrorists have known that forever. What
we were revealing was that the U.S. government was violating its own laws.
Lesley Stahl: Did you think that the whole program, did you think it was useless?
James Risen: No, I didn't think it was useless. I thought that if we are going to fight a
global war on terror, we should follow the rule of law in the United States.
Risen remains at the New York Times, still covering national security. And he's written
a new book. He could be called to testify about his confidential sources as early as
January.
In the blood-soaked world of international drug cartels, for the top cops of U.S. law
enforcement, Joaquin Guzman was public enemy number one, a title not bestowed on anyone
since the gangster era of Al Capone and John Dillinger. He earned that status by putting
more narcotics on American streets than anyone in history.
Guzman, known by the nickname "El Chapo," Spanish for "shorty," gained an outsized reputation.
He bribed his way out of a Mexican prison in 2001, and for the next 13 years, he used
money, violence and gee-whiz escapes worthy of a James Bond villain to avoid capture.
A myth grew that he was untouchable.
But tonight we will show you how in February Chapo was finally caught.
After the death of Osama bin Laden, El Chapo became the most wanted man in the world.
Bill Whitaker: So getting him was a big deal for you?
Derek Maltz: Absolutely. In my world, it was like winning the Super Bowl, winning the World
Series. This was the actual trophy.
Bill Whitaker: He was number one?
Derek Maltz: Absolutely.
[Derek Maltz: This fight against drugs...]
Derek Maltz was in charge of the DEA's Special Operations Division tasked with finding Chapo.
Bill Whitaker: What put him at the top of the list?
Derek Maltz: Making billions of dollars, having a reach around the world in Asia, in Australia,
in Africa, in Europe. Putting poison on the streets, not just in the United States, but
all over the world.
Jim Dinkins was the head of Homeland Security Investigations. He pursued El Chapo for more
than a decade.
Jim Dinkins: He's a monster that happened to rise up in a criminal organization that
was making billions of dollars.
Bill Whitaker: A monster?
Jim Dinkins: A monster.
Until both men retired in recent months, Dinkins and Maltz helped coordinate the U.S. hunt
for Chapo. His real name: Joaquin Guzman. Incredibly, Guzman was on the Forbes magazine
list of billionaires. He was also known to be one of the most violent drug traffickers
in the world. As his Sinaloa cartel fought to dominate the drug trade, the war between
the cartels turned the southern side of the U.S.-Mexico border into one of the most dangerous
places on earth.
Derek Maltz: Thousands of people, electrocuted. Beheaded. Chopping off limbs. Throwing people
in acid. He committed some ruthless crimes in Mexico.
He's in custody now and doesn't look quite so ferocious - cowed, his head bowed. But
until he was apprehended by Mexican Marines, Joaquin Guzman, the illiterate son of a farmer,
ran a multinational criminal empire.
Jim Dinkins: They had not only transportation. They had manufacturing. They had domestic
and local distribution channels.
Derek Maltz: Very sophisticated, with narco-subs. With shipping vessels, with 747s, with private
vessels, with tractor trailers, rail cars. The drug cartel was run like a, you know,
a Fortune 500 company.
Jim Dinkins: He employed some very sophisticated counterintelligence operations to make sure
that if law enforcement was to get in close, they would never actually get to him.
Chapo devised ingenious smuggling methods.
[Man: Marijuana.]
He packed drugs into fake cucumbers and bananas and mixed them with shipments of real produce.
But the thing he worked hardest on was making sure he could always get away. Chapo was the
first Mexican drug trafficker to hire architects and engineers to build elaborate tunnels,
complete with railways, to ferry drugs under the U.S.-Mexico border and he spent millions
adapting them to use as escape routes from his many hideouts.
Bill Whitaker: This is very tight, very hot, very close.
We went down into a labyrinth of interlocking tunnels with the Mexican Marines who chased
him.
Bill Whitaker: Unbelievable.
This was one of the ways Chapo was able to elude capture time and time again. The Americans
thought he was being tipped off by corrupt Mexican officials. But the Mexicans bristled
at the accusation they could not be trusted.
Bill Whitaker: So there were suspicions on both sides of the border.
Derek Maltz: Absolutely, yes.
Bill Whitaker: So what was different this time?
Derek Maltz: The U.S. government and the Mexican government basically said, "Enough is enough."
And we actually, you know, rolled up our sleeves, got in a room, argued a little bit, put all
the intelligence on the table. Shared it with the Mexicans. And ultimately grabbed Chapo.
It started with a routine smuggling probe by Homeland Security investigators at the
border crossing in Nogales, Ariz. A wire-tap unexpectedly led to a phone linked to one
of Chapo's men. U.S. agents followed that thread for more than two years.
Jim Dinkins: Worked it from phone to phone. Device to device, person to person, until
they actually had wired out the communication structure. And the communication structure
was the key. It was a very clear picture to us on what was happening and how he was running
this business.
Several U.S. law enforcement agencies, the DEA, the marshals, Homeland Security, the
FBI, were all pursuing Guzman separately. But this time they decided to streamline their
efforts, and funnel everything through the DEA.
Derek Maltz: And we had one voice in how we were going to pursue, sharing intelligence
with the Mexican officials.
Bill Whitaker: Was that significant, that important, to have that one voice?
Derek Maltz: Absolutely. You can't do a job against Chapo Guzman unless you're working
together.
And Tomas Zeron was that voice on the Mexican side.
[Man: "Attencion!"]
Zeron is chief of the investigative agency of the Prosecutor General of the Republic,
Mexico's version of the FBI.
Bill Whitaker: The main U.S. assistance was surveillance? Wire tapping, phone surveillance
and that sort of thing?
Tomas Zeron: I will just tell you they help us with technology, because they're really
good in technology and that will encapsulate everything.
Zeron, in turn, tapped the Mexican Marines to execute the plan. They are elite special
forces, highly-trained and known for using deadly force.
We watched one of their training sessions - an assault on a mock up of a cartel hide-out.
And we traveled with the Marines to Sinaloa, a remote state on the pacific coast and to
its capital, Culiacan - Chapo's base of operations where his cartel still rules.
It was here in Culiacan, on February 12, after weeks of secret surveillance, the Marines
started to move on the cartel, rounding up Chapo's henchmen, who started to talk.
Derek Maltz: There was a lot of close associates of Chapo that were arrested over these periods
of time. And there was information developed that was provided to the Mexicans. So, it
wasn't just technical information. Bank information, surveillance information, documents, telephone
information.
Based on intelligence collected on both sides of the border, Marines raided a series of
cartel safe houses on February 17. They seized more than three tons of crystal meth and cocaine,
automatic weapons and ammunition, a rocket launcher and a diamond-encrusted pistol with
the initials of Joaquin Guzman. They also arrested one of Chapo's top lieutenants, a
man called "The Nose." And he flipped quickly. He told them where Chapo was hiding and how
he planned to escape.
Several weeks later, the Marines took us to the place where they were told Chapo was hiding.
This nondescript house in the midst of a middle class neighborhood was a fortress. They had
to ram their way through a reinforced steel door.
Bill Whitaker: It took you eight minutes to open the door?
Lobo: Si. Ocho minutos.
When they got inside, El Chapo was nowhere to be found. But they did find this.
Bill Whitaker: The tub. Look at this. The escape hatch.
The bathtub was equipped with a hydraulic lift. It's been turned off.
Bill Whitaker: Very steep. He couldn't have done this quickly.
But underneath is the entranceway to a hidden tunnel.
Bill Whitaker: While Marines were battering down the front door, they say Guzman, startled,
barefoot and in his underwear, clambered down these stairs and escaped through this tunnel
with his bodyguard and two women.
This was part of a maze of tunnels connected to the city sewers of Culiacan and, it turns
out, to six other safe houses, all equipped with hydraulically-controlled bathtub escape
hatches. Our guide told us that even though they had a ten-minute head start, he could
hear the fugitives splashing through the water.
But they were too far ahead to catch. When the Marines emerged from this spillway by
the river, El Chapo had vanished.
Bill Whitaker: So what did you think when he got away, once again, in Culiacan?
Derek Maltz: I never believed that he would ever be captured.
Bill Whitaker: Really?
Derek Maltz: I thought he was gone again. I thought he may have been tipped off.
Jim Dinkins: But the Mexican Marines just were relentless. And they went from house
through the tunnels, from tunnels to house from house. And just kept on going.
Chapo and his wife, a one time beauty queen, their twin toddlers, a nanny, a cook and his
most trusted bodyguard were desperately trying to shake the Marines off their trail. They
ditched their phones and got new numbers.
Jim Dinkins: He's a man on the run. You need money. You need food. You need weapons. And
he was also very interested in knowing who had been arrested, I'm sure, and what was
going on. So it was very hard for him to go into isolation, complete isolation.
Bill Whitaker: How is he communicating at this point?
Jim Dinkins: I'm sure multiple different ways but the ways that, you know, that were the
most vulnerable is back on cell phones. So...
Bill Whitaker: So he's back using the cell phones?
Jim Dinkins: Back using cell phones and you can't. Now you're on the run, so how they
going to know to call? You have to tell them, "All right, well, I got a new phone number.
Here it is." Well, you just told us too.
Five days later, the Americans traced the phone of Chapo's bodyguard to the resort city
of Mazatlan, 136 miles away. And to this beachfront building. They shared that intelligence with
the Mexicans.
At exactly 6:40 a.m. on February 22, the Marines crashed through the door of number 401.
When he saw the red beads of their laser sights speckled on his chest, the bodyguard threw
down his rifle and threw up his hands. Next, the Marines burst through the door of the
master bedroom where Chapo's wife stood naked by the bed. A Marine pushed past her and kicked
in the bathroom door. There was somebody behind it. It was El Chapo.
Back in Mexico City, Tomas Zeron and his team were listening in real time as the high-stakes
drama of Chapo's capture unfolded.
Bill Whitaker: Was there cheering? Was there high-fiving?
Tomas Zeron: Of course. It was a jubilee. We felt at that point that we were all one.
That we were all doing something to have a good Mexico.
Jim Dinkins: We did not ever anticipate that he'd be captured alive. We thought he'd fight
to the death.
Bill Whitaker: Are you surprised that he didn't?
Jim Dinkins: I was surprised.
Derek Maltz: I was shocked.
Bill Whitaker: Shocked?
Derek Maltz: Absolutely shocked.
Bill Whitaker: What shocked you more? That he was captured? Or that he was captured without
a shot?
Derek Maltz: Both. Captured without a shot was pretty amazing.
The once-mighty drug lord, who terrorized Mexico and out-foxed his pursuers for 13 years,
was defeated. Processed like any common criminal, Guzman was fingerprinted. Mug shots taken.
Then, he was paraded before the press like a trophy and loaded onto a helicopter.
Looking dazed, scared and docile, El Chapo was flown to Altiplano prison, Mexico's super-max.
Law enforcement officials vow he will never escape again.
Bill Whitaker: The Sinaloa cartel is still in business. It's still deeply involved in
drug trafficking. So Guzman is now gone but has anything really changed?
Tomas Zeron: The cartel continues, but even though it continues, we have made detentions
after we detained Guzman. We are not going to leave Sinaloa and are going to stay there
until we dismantled the cartel completely.
Jim Dinkins: We know that when you take out bin Laden, that the threat of terrorism did
not end. Nor will the threat of drugs end by taking out El Chapo. But it was still worth
every bit of effort to take that man off because it sends a signal that you are touchable.