THE raid had been a success. The gang who had stolen bags of cash from an armoured convoy operated by one of Britain’s most respectable firms lay dead.
They had been killed in a shootout at a remote farmhouse in South America.
Patrick Witcomb, a tall Brit working undercover for MI6, had led the raid by Colombian Special Forces to recover the money and send a brutal message to the country’s criminal gangs.
As he checked a back room for survivors, Patrick found a teenage girl lying in a pool of blood.
She had been shot in the back and was bleeding heavily. He removed his flak jacket and used it as a pillow.
As he eased her on to it, the girl winced. With tears streaming from her eyes, the girl whispered: “Mi hijo”. My boy.
In a cot in one corner of the room sat a chubby-cheeked, dark-haired boy, just a few months old.
As the young mum breathed her last, Patrick grabbed the boy and took him by helicopter to the Colombian capital, Bogota, where he gave the tot to a Catholic orphanage.
A month later, Patrick and his wife Joan officially adopted the boy, Roberto, and changed his name to Phillip Witcomb.
Official adoption papers the couple were given revealed their son’s dead mother, Maria Sendoya, was aged 14.
The boy’s biological father was Pablo Escobar, a 16-year-old bank robber living in Colombia’s second city who would go on to become the most notorious, and richest, drug baron the world has ever known.
Hit Netflix series Narcos told how school dropout Pablo Escobar Gaviria rose to become the ruthless founder and leader of the Medellin cartel, which controlled 80 per cent of the global cocaine trade.
By the time police shot dead “Don Pablo” on December 2, 1993, the day after his 44th birthday, Escobar had amassed an estimated fortune of £30billion.
His son Phillip has now written a book about the incredible twist of fate that led to Pablo’s boy being brought up by an undercover British agent whose orders were to infiltrate Colombia’s drug gangs.
In his life story, Son Of Escobar, serialised exclusively in The Sun this week, Phillip also reveals how the man who adopted him helped the drug baron hide millions of dollars.
A year after Escobar was shot dead by Colombian cops, Patrick Witcomb lay dying in a hospital bed in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.
And just before he died, Patrick gave his adopted son Phillip a code that, if cracked, it is claimed will reveal the secret location of Escobar’s missing millions.
In an exclusive interview with The Sun, Phillip says: “I’m not really religious but I give thanks every day that I was rescued and adopted by a British spy because I’m pretty sure I’d have ended up dead otherwise.”
Phillip, who looks like the notorious drug lord, counts on the fingers of both hands members of the Escobar family who were shot or blown up.
He says: “I don’t want to glorify the thugs who ran that organisation but they are all dead.
“If I had grown up with that man as my father I don’t think I would be alive today.”
Nearly 55 years after his mother was killed, Phillip is still haunted by the daring rescue mission that saved him from life as a member of the Medellin cartel.
He says: “I wake up in the night, hearing the bangs of the gunshots of that day when Patrick came into my life.
"I still have visions of a woman in a red dress screaming and a man covered in blood.
“In the years that followed, my two fathers became intertwined as Patrick, on behalf of the British government, worked covertly with Escobar to track the cartel’s billions.”
If I had grown up with Escobar as my father I don’t think I would be alive today.
Former pilot and ex-cop Patrick, from Hull, worked for British firm De La Rue, which had won the lucrative contract to print all bank notes for newly independent Colombia.
His job allowed him to operate undercover for MI6.
In 1959, Patrick and wife Joan, who had worked for the Foreign Office in London, were sent to Bogota to run De La Rue’s bank-note printing business, which also included operating a fleet of armoured vehicles to transport the cash.
Father-of-two Phillip, who now lives in a remote hideaway in Majorca with wife Julie, says: “As part of his work, Patrick needed to infiltrate the criminal gangs then gain a foothold in the country’s fledgling economy and pass back intelligence.
“Some of this information made its way back to UK secret services, but the main beneficiaries were their US counterparts in the CIA.
"The armoured car division often came under attack and their consignments of newly printed Colombian banknotes would be stolen.
“After one such robbery, in late 1965, Dad received intelligence on the whereabouts of the missing money.
“With the backing of his bosses and his handlers in UK intelligence, he mounted a heavily armed mission to recover the cash and that’s when my mother was killed.
“Patrick — the man I called Dad — had rescued me from the gang’s hideout and did the right thing taking me to the orphanage.
“I’m convinced he loved me and I absolutely loved him.
“But I’m not 100 per cent sure whether it was Dad who made the decision to adopt me.
"There was a bigger game being played and I wonder if I was part of his cover story. There was one thing James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, got wrong.
"True secret service agents working abroad aren’t single blokes who meet in smoke-filled rooms.
“They play happy families, meeting on the golf course or at weekend get-togethers, so you need a wife and kids.”
During our interview Phillip shows me a High Court decree, prepared by a Spanish judge, verifying that the adoption certificate given to the Witcombs — which names Pablo Escobar as the boy’s biological father — is genuine.
At the time the boy was adopted, Pablo Escobar was still a low-level criminal.
But as he rose through the criminal ranks he would become a useful asset for the intelligence services and Patrick would end up working closely with the father of his adopted son.
Phillip, who makes a living as an artist, says: “What began as an operation to transport government- issued banknotes exploded into a dangerous game.
“In those days the Americans were not bothered about the drugs. They were concerned with the money. Imagine you are the world’s largest economy and your dollars start disappearing. What are you going to do?
“You can’t print more because the value of your currency goes down. You have got to go and find these dollars.
"So they called in the Brits, who set up an infiltration and information-seeking operation to find out where the money was going and get it back. Ultimately that is what this was all about.”
There was a bigger game being played and I wonder if I was part of my dad's cover story.
So how does a Colombian school drop-out with very little education become the world’s most successful drug dealer and richer than Howard Hughes?
The answer, says Phillip, is you don’t, “unless you have had help from governments”.
He adds: “When I was a child I knew nothing of all this. I just thought Patrick — Pat to everyone who knew him — was a regular dad.
"There were an awful lot of guns and strangeness going on around our beautiful mansion in Colombia and sometimes it felt like violence followed us around.”
Patrick and Joan adopted a second baby, a daughter Monique, and the family, protected by bodyguards, lived in a luxurious home.
Summer holidays were spent in London with Joan’s elderly mother, May at her flat in Swiss Cottage, North West London.
Last week Phillip revisited the house and climbed up nearby Primrose Hill, where Patrick loved flying kites with his children.
Monique died in 2009 of a brain haemorrhage, age 44.
He says: “Pat adored being our dad and he enjoyed playing with us but I didn’t love my adopted mother.
“She must have had a warm side but we didn’t really see it.”
Phillip was just seven when he was sent away from home in Colombia to a private prep school, St Hugh’s in Faringdon, Oxon.
He says: “It was absolutely dreadful but you learn to survive. When I look back I see some of my real father in me then because the bits of darkness came from somewhere.
"I started controlling a group of kids and I was in charge. You have to be an animal in a pack at boarding school.”
When Phillip was nine years old, Patrick explained to the small, dark-haired boy that he had been adopted — but it would be another 15 years before he revealed the real identity of Phillip’s father.
Phillip says: “It was only when I was 24 that Pat told me the true story. By 1989, Escobar was losing his grip on his drug empire and retaliated the only way he knew how — by exacting more bloody revenge.
“Dad feared I was in danger from my real father’s enemies, like the Cali Cartel, who wanted to hurt him any way they could, including targeting his family and children.”
At the time, fluent Spanish speaker Phillip was living on the Costa del Sol with his first wife, Sue, and their children Jonathan, now 32, and Anna, now 30.
Phillip travelled to Madrid, where Patrick was living at the time, to learn the awful truth.
He says: “That day, Pat turned my world upside down. As the danger of anyone seeking to settle a score with Escobar was very real, he arranged for an ex-special forces soldier to provide personal protection.”
Phillip, who still keeps a .38 handgun in his bedroom for protection, says: “The more I learned about my real father, the more I realised what a despicable character he must be.
"No one could have predicted back then how big Escobar would become.
“It suited the American and British intelligence services to have the one kingpin in the drug business as someone they could monitor and, to a degree, control.
"What they did not account for was how firmly he would grasp the opportunity presented to him.
“Patrick told me, ‘We created a monster’. That monster was my father.”
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