Earlier that year, and in secrecy, an Army spy unit called Centra Spike arrived in Bogotá, Colombia, with the mission to offer training and the fruits of its intelligence-gathering technology to the Colombian police in their battle against the Medellín cocaine cartel. Centra Spike's "primary specialty," writes Mark Bowden in his new book "Killing Pablo," "was finding people."

Both of these books -- nonfiction suspense yarns full of intrigue and dirty doings, near escapes and double-crosses -- are about manhunts. But they're both also ground-level accounts of two cases that unfolded during the time when U.S. drug law enforcement morphed from a largely regional, wholly domestic matter into something that really did look like a war; in other words, the military and national security apparatus got involved. Underneath it all, they're both stories that detail the shift from one bogus crusade, against Latin American communism, to another, against the Latin American drug trade.

Harris describes the convoluted story of how three guys in South Florida -- two from the Drug Enforcement Agency and a U.S. attorney -- managed the improbable feat of getting Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega of Panama indicted by a grand jury and how, even more improbably, that indictment led to Noriega's capture by force in Panama City. Bowden relates the brutal life and predictably violent death in 1993 of Medellín cartel head Pablo Escobar at the hands of Colombian authorities -- a death hastened by the advice, and perhaps a good deal more, of U.S. personnel.

For Harris, the Noriega arrest was the result of a peculiar mixture of chance, opportunism, politics and a dash of idealism. It started with a couple of DEA agents, Steve Grilli and his supervisor, Kenny Kennedy, both stationed in South Florida. The way Harris tells it, the case began like a movie, with a high-speed air chase that ended when the pilot of a two-engine Cessna carrying 400 kilos of cocaine, pursued by a U.S. Customs plane, landed on a closed-off stretch of Interstate 75. Kennedy, who happened to be driving to work on I-75 at the time, gave chase, but the pilot escaped into the nearby swamp "by submerging and breathing through hollow reeds."

No event that follows in "Shooting the Moon" is quite this outlandishly cinematic, but that doesn't lessen Harris' verve in the telling. Grilli and Kennedy are two salt-of-the-earth guys, from Brooklyn, N.Y., and New Jersey respectively, and Kennedy voices their shared philosophy toward law enforcement in saying: "The taxpayers hired me to put fuckin' dope peddlers in jail, and that's what I do. Not sweetheart deals and that kinda bullshit."

They teamed up with U.S. attorney Dick Gregorie, who, in Harris' words, "treated the War on Drugs as a personal jihad." A couple of Gregorie's initiatives in this holy war -- specifically, indictments of Colombian drug lords -- had been thwarted when U.S. military concerns took precedence. In one scene from "Shooting the Moon," a "Department of Justice hack known as the National Security liaison" arrives in Miami to tell Gregorie to cool it because "the Communist guerrillas in the [Colombian] countryside would take advantage of the crisis this indictment might well instigate."

Always on the simmer, Gregorie blows his top at this outrage, yet another example in his mind of "how the War on Drugs was not being fought." It was also an example of something that would become increasingly rare -- an incident in which the anti-Communist agenda trumped the anti-drug agenda.

Because Harris never quite gets over seeing this story in Hollywood movie terms, he casts Kennedy, Grilli and Gregorie -- hardworking, conscientious straight arrows, totally committed to their jobs but with no knack for intradepartmental politics (or any other kind of politics) -- as its heroes. If he has reservations about Gregorie's fanaticism regarding the war on drugs ("The nation was at stake, [Gregorie] was fond of pointing out, and if they didn't turn the tide in Miami, chaos for the whole country wouldn't be far behind"), he keeps them to himself. By contrast, another major champion of the Noriega bust, perhaps the man most responsible for keeping the idea of deposing the general alive in Washington, Elliott Abrams, gets portrayed as an arrogant teacher's pet (he was, we're repeatedly told, a protégé of the secretary of state) who only adopted the cause in order to reburnish his stained image after the Iran-Contra scandal.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"