Law enforcement

The Spyware That Brought Down El Chapo’s Drug Empire

In total, the FBI intercepted more than 200 calls from Guzmán himself, and hundreds more from his operatives, lieutenants, and family members. But only last week did the FBI reveal how: They had an inside man. In court last Thursday, the FBI agent Stephen Marston revealed a series of high-risk operations coordinated with the Sinaloa IT guy, and eventual federal informant, Christian Rodriguez, who has since relocated to the U.S. under FBI protection.

“We realized without insider access to the system we were not going to get inside,” Marston told the court Thursday.

Rodriguez’s first act as informant was to circumvent the secure network he’d installed in Guzmán’s mountain hideout. In May 2010, Rodriguez faked an outage that temporarily took the network offline. Jorge Cifuentes, Rodriguez’s then-boss, assumed the servers were down because Rodriguez had simply forgotten to renew the lease. In truth, the outage was orchestrated to force Guzmán and his agents to use compromised cellphones, which allowed the FBI to listen in on Guzmán allegedly negotiating a six-ton cocaine deal with members of the FARC guerrilla group.