America’s Prisoner by Peter Eisner (3/11/1997)
America’s Prisoner by Peter Eisner
March 11, 1997
Rarely has a figure in this century been so universally vilified as Manuel Antonio Noriega. By 1993, when I was asked by Random House to interview Noriega — the deposed general and former leader of Panama, who sits in a federal prison in Miami — his infamy had become a matter of history. It had been four years since the United States invaded his country, killed untold hundreds of Panamanians and brought him back to the United States in chains to face drug charges. The name “Noriega” was employed to invoke images of vice, depravity and murder.
The resident wisdom told us that Noriega was the epitome of rank corruption and that while there might be lingering suspicions that something was wrong with the way the United States dealt with him, this foul man got what he deserved — a forty-year sentence for drug dealing and racketeering.
In post-Cold War America, Noriega was perhaps the first figure to be thus endowed with the inhuman qualities he is remembered for — pure “evil,” in the judgment of retired General Colin Powell; a “crazed dictator,” in the words of Washington policy makers; “just another crooked cop,” in the words of the U.S. prosecutors, who later were found to have negotiated a deal with the Cali cocaine cartel to obtain witnesses to testify against him.
The U.S. government, Noriega’s erstwhile benefactors, redefined him as a murderous drug lord and he joined the American government’s panoply of villains of the decade — along with Moammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro.
The ignominy with which Noriega became known was accompanied by an almost religious fervor in the American republic — an uncritical and angry view that rejected any attempt to deconstruct or reconsider the image of this singular personality. Americans seemed to need a devil in the person of Noriega as a repository of that which was vile, base and degenerate, almost to the point of parody.
I was fascinated by the vilification. I had written about Latin America since 1979 and had seen the poverty and suffering caused by corruption and authoritarianism. I witnessed death and violence propelled by superpower politics in Central America. By comparison, Panama was benign. Why was so much hatred directed toward a man who, stripped of the media hype, was hardly a Latin American enforcer in the mold of General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, who crushed dissent and murdered his opposition; Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, who stole millions of dollars in U.S. earthquake relief money in 1973 while his people lived in squalor; Roberto D’Aubuisson in El Salvador, whom a UN commission determined was responsible for the Salvadoran death squads, which killed thousands while the United States stood by; collectively, the nameless generals and colonels of Guatemala in the 1980s, responsible for tens of thousands of political murders? All of those men were supported to one extent or another by a succession of American presidents who turned a blind eye to their murderous abuses of power.
There is no way to defend the excesses of any military regime, including Panama’s. I made numerous reporting trips to Panama in the 1980s; there were press restrictions, legal and political controls and strong-arm tactics in Panama over the years, but it was obviously a safe haven from the war and destruction in most of Central America. Neither international human rights organizations nor the U.S. State Department could identify more than a scattered handful of politically related deaths in Panama in twenty years of military rule, nor did they cite huge numbers of political prisoners, massive exiles avoiding persecution or any of the other conditions of an extreme police state.
The reason for Noriega’s demonization was clear: the Bush administration wanted to invade Panama. First, Panama’s upper-class civilian elites — whose hatred for Noriega and the military ripened and increased during twenty years of military rule — had convinced the State Department, which in turn convinced Bush, that it was necessary to eliminate Noriega; second, Noriega’s ability to survive the U.S. propaganda machine, his rejection of U.S. attempts to buy him off and his ability to survive an October 1989 coup attempt in which Bush came off as weak and indecisive made it seem as though the Panamanian general could successfully thumb his nose at the eagle. The effect on Bush’s approval rating could be disastrous. And third, but not least, establishment of a government more responsive to U.S. desires could swing effective control of the Panama Canal back to the United States. As Noriega points out in his narrative, Panama was to assume superintendency of the canal for the first time on January 1, 1990 — only twelve days after the U.S. invasion of Panama — and Noriega had designated the person to serve in that position.
Any government prepared to intervene and wage war must convince its countrymen of the necessity of such action; it must use its propaganda machine to bring the debate down to the personal level — there must be a particular target of hatred to counteract and divert potential opposition. Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, by this view, was partly spared from direct U.S. intervention because the State Department ideological teams were unable sufficiently to imbue President Daniel Ortega, who avoided the center stage and who ruled with others, with the demonic qualities necessary for the job. Noriega was different; not telegenic, with poor public relations and more directly in control of his country, he could be objectified into the devil incarnate. Once done, the image passed into the realm of hardened resident wisdom.
President Bush said Noriega had to be ousted to restore democracy, echoing the rationale for U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, Grenada and Haiti. Less than a year after the Panama invasion, Bush nearly tripped into using the same justification for the Gulf War, except the idea of ascribing democracy to the emirate of Kuwait was so ludicrous that he had to divert attention toward nonexistent gas-laden missiles and work on demonizing Saddam Hussein, who was still receiving U.S. aid when the first U.S. missile attacks on Baghdad began. The cry for democracy rang hollow in the desert, much as it did in Panama, where the United States connived to create the country in the first instance and then meddled in its affairs, with no interest whatsoever in popular suffrage, throughout this century. As late as 1984, the Reagan administration winked and nodded at the disputed election result that saw Nicolas Ardito Barletta take the presidency over perennial caudillo Arnulfo Arias. It served U.S. interests to see Barletta victorious. In that election, Noriega followed the script and kept quiet. As Noriega fell from grace, the theatrical tears of George Bush and Oliver North could not hide the central reality: in Panama the name of the game was power and control. Noriega was a useful tool, but when he dared defy American authority, he had to be crushed.
When I was told that Noriega wanted to tell all about his relationship with the United States and about the events leading up to his political and military demise, my reaction was a combination of fascination and great misgivings.
On the one hand, it was a fine opportunity to examine the man close-up and fill in the missing documentary evidence on Panama — no one had heard Noriega’s version of events leading up to and during the 1989 U.S. invasion. To be sure, there was a historical value to that task. But how forthright would Noriega be? It was evident that with all the political subterfuge, vested interests and classified information, truth was very much a mutable commodity. Would the facts as I gathered them jibe with Noriega’s story or with the popular assumption of Noriega’s essential evil?
I remained fixed on one motivation for interviewing Noriega, rooted in memories of the smell of death after the U.S. invasion of Panama, which I had covered as a reporter: I had the certain queasiness that journalism once again had not properly set the scene or described the consequences of a remote political war.
Beyond the damnation of Noriega and the pitfalls awaiting me should I undertake the project; I was driven by wanting to know the story behind the story. I shared in the rising skepticism about U.S. actions before, during and after the December 20, 1989, invasion of Panama.
I covered the Panama invasion for Newsday. I wrote about Noriega’s capture on Christmas Eve 1989, his transport to the United States and processing in a Miami federal court and subsequent trial that led to his conviction in 1992 on charges of conspiring to deal drugs to the United States. He was sentenced to forty years in prison. I saw the madness of the post-invasion, slept with a cardboard sheet as my mattress at a U.S. naval base with other foreign correspondents, heard the gunfire, saw the human remains, smelled the smoke and the death and saw the fear and anger in the eyes of so many poor Panamanians. The invasion of Panama was the horrible and disgraceful result of American political folly.
Within the U.S. military, no one less than a retired general and former head of the U.S. Southern Command — based in Panama until he was fired six months before the invasion — told me that there was no justification for invading Panama and seizing Noriega. And he was not alone in his contention. Something was awry.
The U.S. invasion was a grotesque, shocking experience for Panamanians; theirs was a peaceful country, there were no wars, little violence. What could justify so much suffering at the hands of some distant, ignorant force? Panamanians experienced death, fear, wanton destruction, deceit and lies — the hidden truth about the invasion of Panama. Even newspaper publisher and banker Roberto Eisenmann, one of Noriega’s most ardent opponents, said that the invasion had created a “national psychosis” of unforeseen consequences for the future. Few Americans, least of all soldiers, who lived through the invasion of Panama thought it was their country’s finest hour. The Panamanian government, far from considering the U.S. invasion worthy of celebration, declared that December 20 would be commemorated as a National Day of Mourning.
Apart from limited appearances in the courtroom, Noriega’s voice had not been heard since the invasion. But illusion needed to be sorted from reality.
So we set up some ground rules. Nothing was off-limits; I would ask Noriega questions, challenge and record his responses. Noriega was allowed to review the transcript of his words in both Spanish and English, and to make any corrections or revisions so that his version of events was exactly what he wanted to say.
Next, I would produce introductory and evaluation material, based on the interviews with him and with other sources. Noriega was not allowed to review or contribute to the introduction and analysis of this book, for which I take sole responsibility. Footnotes accompanying the text were also prepared by me.
The final product would be divided into three main sections: this introduction; the Panamanian general’s first-person account of his rise and fall; and my afterword, which provides a ground view of the invasion of Panama and draws on interviews for an assessment of Noriega and the charges against him.
This book is the result of a three-year interview process, drawing also on my years of travels to Panama during crucial periods, including the immediate period before and after the U.S. invasion. The heart of this book is Noriega’s account of his years in power, culminating in that invasion and the subsequent drug trial against him. The Noriega narrative is the result of dozens of hours of taped interviews, held mostly in the office of the deputy administrator of the prison.
I told Noriega that he would get a fair hearing, but my role in interviewing him would not constitute a defense of his actions; I had no reason to see him exonerated or to embellish his career. I would report his words and I would use them to analyze the record.
While Noriega said he would deal openly with all issues, he would not discuss the seamier charges against him. For example, he did not provide detailed information about his finances other than to say he had his own sources of wealth, that the CIA paid him more than the U.S. government admitted in public and that much of his money came through his job as commander of the Panamanian military. Stripped of the power, he said, he was stripped of most of his wealth. In any case, he said, accumulating wealth in Panama is not a crime in the United States.
Noriega also was not interested in discussing his own sexual mores or those of anyone else, other than to say that sex and charges of infidelity are irrelevant to his case and are part of the “demonization” process he was subjected to by U.S. propaganda, leading to the U.S. invasion. It was also apparent that he was protecting once-and-future friends, both American and Panamanian — not wanting to tell tales out of school in what he saw as an ongoing process. Clearly, Noriega had not given up hope of being exonerated. Noriega did not see this book as a confession in the twilight of his career. His decision to speak was tactical.
Like any politician or interviewee, Noriega certainly wanted to put the best possible spin on events. At times, his remarks were obviously self-serving, but often he admitted to mistakes and miscalculations.
Noriega surely will face peremptory criticism that his words cannot be believed. However, a dispassionate assessment of his claims and those of his accusers evens the playing field. His accusers all spoke in their own self-interest; all had a keen stake in providing their slant on history. Twenty-six of those who testified against him at the drug trial were fallen and convicted drug dealers or political and military rivals. A deeper investigation of those accusers shows that most had their own agendas.
Some of his accusers were U.S. officials, all with reputations to protect. Some participated in hiding a full inquiry into the truth surrounding Noriega’s case, invoking secrecy provisions in the law. There is no inherent reason why Noriega should be believed any more or less than any of these sources; they were all participating in a soiled system of vested interests, which redefined what was true to mean what could not be hidden, and what was a lie to be anything the “bad guys” had to say.
Noriega’s commentary is not a comprehensive memoir of his life and times: for the sake of brevity and interest, the arcane details of Panamanian politics and military relationships are not included here. Noriega said he hoped that his words will begin to revise the record about his life and times. He said he would continue to comment about Panama and the history of its relations with the United States.
Instead, these Noriega interviews focused on key elements of his career and then vaulted to the major events involving U.S. policy during his tenure as commander of the Panamanian Defense Forces, from August 1983 through the invasion of Panama and Noriega’s transfer to U.S. custody.
My contribution is not meant to be an exhaustive biography or investigation. There are a number of sources, some cited in footnotes, that describe Panama, Noriega and his mentor, Omar Torrijos, at great length. Nor is the book intended to rehash the drug case against the deposed general. At least five major books have examined the drug charges, from various perspectives and with varying degrees of success. These books are also referred to both in the text and in the notes. Rather, my goal was to use the occasion of the Noriega interviews as an attempt to reassess the U.S. invasion of Panama and provide my analysis of the subsequent drug trial.
My questions were:
• What new information was there about Noriega’s relations with the United States, particularly with George Bush, William Casey and Oliver North, and what was his role in U.S. affairs during the Central American wars of the 1980s?
• What were the untold stories about the U.S. invasion from Noriega’s perspective?
• Was Noriega guilty of the drug conspiracy charges for which he was sentenced to forty years in prison?
Noriega dealt with these matters, but my analysis of the drug trial has nothing to do with his protests of innocence. I drew independent conclusions from the Noriega case:
• After sitting through the Noriega trial, reviewing trial testimony, interviewing lawyers, witnesses and investigators, intelligence sources and Noriega opponents, I found the drug case against Noriega to be deeply flawed and wholly circumstantial. Not only did the accounts by several scores of convicted drug dealers often not match on basic facts, but also, three years after the trial, at least half a dozen of those drug dealers were recanting or threatening to recant their testimony.
• I agree with an array of military, intelligence and political officers who said the U.S. invasion was unjustified on legal, political and moral grounds; it was wholly a result of hypocrisy and deceit in U.S. domestic politics. My analysis of the political situation and my reporting in Panama before, during and after the invasion brought me to the conclusion that the U.S. invasion of Panama was an abominable abuse of power. The invasion principally served the goals of arrogant American politicians and their Panamanian allies, at the expense of unconscionable bloodshed.
The Metropolitan Correctional Center, the setting for our conversations, is a mostly medium-security prison, located about twelve miles south of downtown Miami. Except for the razor wire and guard posts, the prison grounds are almost reminiscent of the well-sculpted campus of a state university, devoid of character and antiseptically neat and modern. One signs in at the visitor desk, then passes through a magnetometer, which is so sensitive that most people have to take off their shoes, because items as small as metal eyelets set off the alarm. Guards stamp an ultraviolet ink spot on the visitor’s hand to mark outsiders should there be some question later as to the identity of people leaving the grounds.
Next, an escort leads the visitor through a waiting area, past photographs of the president and attorney general, portraits that changed from George Bush and Richard Thornburgh to Bill Clinton and Janet Reno in the course of the Noriega interviews. Two heavy electronic sliding doors are then activated, one at a time, creating a sealed guard space between the visitor’s entrance and the prison yard. From behind smoked, bulletproof glass, another guard asks to hold the visitor’s driver’s license for the duration of the visit. The second steel-and-glass door trundles open and the visitor enters the prison yard, a series of low block buildings connected by cement pathways. Prisoners wearing neat khakis walk along, chatting quietly, or work in the yard, maintaining the smartly manicured lawns, swabbing the hallways or visiting the cafeteria.
For my first meeting with Noriega, in June 1993,1 was led to a small holding cell at the institution, which was still being rebuilt following extensive damage from Hurricane Andrew ten months earlier. At that first meeting, Noriega, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, and I were locked inside this solitary holding tank, a barren cement and cinderblock room containing nothing more than a stainless-steel table and toilet. Our conversation included an overview of events leading up to his imprisonment; Noriega repeated his pledge to discuss all aspects of his relationship with the Americans and his political history in Panama.
Noriega was at first reserved, evidently sizing up the reporter who had come to see him. While listening intently to what I had to say, he seemed almost to be cloaking his comments behind a dull mask. I could perceive an absence or withdrawal behind his eyes, as if he wanted to peer at me from a place in which his own personality was concealed. I talked to Noriega frankly about all I had seen in his country — both during the sometimes-brutal 1989 election campaign, in which paramilitary thugs patrolled the streets, ready to bash heads, but also during the U.S. invasion, in which I told him about the piles of Panamanian bodies I encountered at the city morgue. My intention, I said, was to research events leading up to the U.S. invasion and the reasons behind it.
The actual interviews began on September 11, 1993. Noriega was isolated from the rest of the prison population. Depending on the officer of the day, other prisoners were locked down in their buildings when two guards escorted Noriega from his quarters to the administration building for our interviews. Occasionally a fellow prisoner would shout a word of encouragement to him from the distance. He smiled and chatted amiably with the guards, most of whom — like the majority of the prison population — were Spanish speaking. “He’s very popular here among the prisoners,” one of the guards told me. “Sometimes they cheer or applaud when they see him.”
The only prisoner of war in the United States, Noriega has certain privileges under the Geneva Conventions, including the right to maintain contact with a U.S. military liaison officer, the right to his rank and uniform and the right to random meetings with representatives of the International Committees of the Red Cross. Noriega dresses for visitors in a pressed Panamanian Defense Forces general’s uniform and sparkling patent-leather shoes. At our meetings he usually wore a green Eisenhower jacket to ward off the cold air-conditioning of the jail buildings.
At first, I would meet him in the administration building; later, I was allowed to see him in his spartan quarters. The compound consisted of three small rooms, near clerical and medical offices in a small building separated from the main prison population by the winding cement paths. Noriega’s living space added up to about 250 square feet. There was a small entrance anteroom, where a guard sat reading a newspaper by a collect-call-only telephone that Noriega assumed was monitored constantly by the government. To the left of the entrance there was a small kitchen area, with a small table and microwave oven, where food trays were brought in to be reheated since, unlike other prisoners, Noriega ate alone. Beyond the tiny kitchen was a door leading to a small enclosed exercise area, where shafts of sunlight baked down through heavy wire grating onto a broken-down exercise bike. In one corner Noriega had small pots, where he was growing tomatoes and oranges culled from seeds from the produce served at his meals.
Noriega said he used the exercise bike frequently, his only source of recreation. Unlike the other fifteen hundred prisoners at the Miami Metropolitan Correctional Center, he did not have the freedom of going out in the prison yard.
In a separate small room to the other side of the entrance, there was a metal cot that served as his bed, a tall filing cabinet with a small color TV on top and a plain, lidless toilet and shower stall. Noriega’s movements were monitored twenty-four hours a day via a video surveillance system overhead.
Noriega spent hours on the telephone talking to family and friends. His biggest complaint with his quarters was the air-conditioning, which produced a strong chill even at midday in Miami’s subtropical summer. He laughed when, even with the door to his exercise area open to bring in blasts of hot air, visitors began shivering. “You should have brought a sweater, you can catch a cold,” Noriega said. “I never get over the chill.” Prison administrators said they could not control the climate in the room since it was attached to the medical compound, whose equipment had to be kept cool.
Because of the proximity to the medical compound, other prisoners were often hanging about outside Noriega’s cell, sometimes calling words of encouragement. “Tony,” they shouted, “hang in there.”
“Manny,” others called, adopting a nickname he has never used, “keep the faith.”
“Always, they say friendly things,” Noriega said. “No one is ever hostile.”
Lina Montgomery, the affable deputy administrator of the prison during most of the period of the interviews, said that Noriega had been easy to deal with and that his demands were few.
“One thing I have to say about Mr. Noriega is that he has never been the slightest trouble to anyone,” she told me. “He is always polite and cooperative and never for an instant loses his dignity, despite all he has been forced to go through. Everyone respects him for that.”
I observed closeness and affection for his wife, Felicidad, and his three grown daughters, Sandra, Thais and Lorena, who all dutifully contacted his friends, handled correspondence and visited him when they could, according to the prison schedule. There were no conjugal visits allowed at the prison, however. Montgomery said that a guard was always posted in Noriega’s compound when family, friends and lawyers came to visit.
Noriega was trim in appearance. He had no ailments of consequence, only occasional medical complaints — sporadic gastric distress or bouts with insomnia. He said he was well treated by the prison staff. He was disciplined and upbeat in the way he conducted a conversation, smiling easily, laughing, at times pointing to documentation he brought along with him to emphasize a point. The interviews were entirely in Spanish. His English appeared forced, although it improved in prison. He struggled when an English-speaking administrator spoke to him. The Metropolitan Correctional Center has a majority of Spanish speaking inmates, mostly imprisoned on drug charges, but not all of its staff is bilingual.
In the course of dozens of hours of interviews, I saw Noriega lift the veil. He was personable and witty in his conversation and showed surprising ability to make literary and stylistic references in his descriptions. Yet despite glimpses of openness, Noriega made every effort to mask inferences of his own personal weakness. When Noriega spoke about his years as a young man, working as a government surveyor, he brightened at the memory of being the only person — by virtue of his small size — who could jump along the muddy ocean floor and place measuring devices without sinking. There was pride and an extra resonance in his voice when he spoke warmly about his brother Luis Carlos, his mother, who died when he was a child, and Mama Luisa, his foster mother.
Noriega was keenly aware of his image in the mass media; he tried to avoid self-pity and he showed an ability to sympathize with others. He was capable of friendship and empathy and generated loyalty from those around him. Yet experience taught him those friends were capable of betrayal.
At one point, I described my personal interactions and perceptions of Noriega with a friend who is a psychoanalyst. “You are not describing a psychopathic personality, you are rather describing a generally balanced individual, someone who has many elements of a healthy internal life,” my friend said.
Often lost in the inflation of Noriega’s image was his inability to navigate successfully in foreign political waters. Astute as he may have been in dealing with Panamanian politics, he was inept at handling or even understanding the U.S. system. His legal representation, for example, was chosen at random and with little regard to political and legal realities. Frank Rubino, who became his principal defense attorney, was a streetwise, charming man who learned about the political questions surrounding Noriega as he went along. Rubino, a former Secret Service agent, was joined by Jon May, a former federal prosecutor with appeals skills but no trial experience. These men inherited the case from Raymond Takiff, a Miami attorney, who became a paid government informant for the U.S. attorney’s office in a local judicial corruption case even as he served as Noriega’s lawyer. Takiff, in turn, had come to the case on a lark — a friend in the Canal Zone provided the entree to Noriega, who accepted Takiff’s offer of representation without paying much attention to the U.S. indictment against him. One highly regarded member of the defense team was Neal Sonnett, a nationally acclaimed criminal lawyer. “Had Sonnett remained on the case,” Judge William M. Hoeveler told me in an interview, “I think the outcome could have been different — Sonnett could have won the case.” But Sonnett, forced into the role of playing second fiddle to Takiff, dropped out of the Noriega defense at the imprisoned general’s first appearance in Hoeveler’s court. “He said he was resigning and gave me his card,” Noriega told me. “I really didn’t know what was happening and I never called him.”
All of Noriega’s lawyers signed U.S. government documents that forced them to accept the secrecy determinations of the Bush administration as to what they could reveal about political aspects of the case.
Lost in all of this was an attempt by famed political lawyer William Kunstler to contact Noriega with an offer to represent him for free. Kunstler, who died in 1995, represented Noriega’s secretary, Marcela Tas6n, on unrelated legal matters in New York. “But when I tried to offer to work with Noriega pro bono, I never got a response. I was quite surprised by this,” Kunstler said in a 1993 interview. “I certainly would have highlighted the political aspects of the case. This was not really a drug case at all.”
As a sign of his lack of knowledge and naivete about the U.S. system, Noriega said he had never heard of Kunstler and did not receive any such offer of representation, indicating Kunstler’s offer was somehow intercepted. “I wish I had known that such a man existed and that he could have helped me,” Noriega said. “But I was so isolated when the Americans arrested me. I had no idea about who Kunstler was or that he had offered to be my lawyer.” Rubino, May and Judge William M. Hoeveler said they were also unaware of Kunstler’s overtures to represent Noriega.
Noriega’s comments were sometimes topical, other times ironic. He mentioned current events several times in the course of the interviews. Once, he was genuinely irritated when he read a news story that Colin Powell had been paid a $6 million advance to write his memoirs. “How can he be paid so much?” Noriega asked. “Who is he really but a yes-man for Bush? What did he really ever do?” My explanation that the market forces driving the publishing industry, along with Powell’s potential presidential candidacy, had established the price did little to mollify his distress. “I am sure that in the course of history, my name will be remembered far longer than his,” Noriega said.
Noriega’s reaction to Powell was filled with irony. He was feeling the competition of the literary marketplace with the general who launched the invasion that led to his capture. “Powell is a traitor to his own people,” Noriega said, having masterminded the invasion “which bombed so many black Panamanians in the barrio of El Chorrillo. He will have to live with his conscience.”
Powell seemed from his autobiography to know little, and care less, about Panama. He paid lip service to the selective old Bush administration catch phrase of “restoring democracy” as justification for circumventing international law. Panama was Powell’s trial by fire. After just twenty-four hours on the job as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, he participated in the botched support and amateurish analysis of an October 3, 1989, coup attempt against Noriega.
The “plotters had to express a clear intention to restore democracy or we don’t commit,” George Bush told Powell. After the coup, Powell agreed with Maxwell Thurman, the general in charge of the U.S. Southern Command based in Panama, “that if we were ever forced to act in Panama, we would recommend getting rid of the [Panamanian military]. Max began to develop a plan to do just that.”
On another occasion, Noriega called me from prison shortly after the not-guilty verdict in the 1995 O. J. Simpson murder trial. I asked Noriega his opinion of the verdict. “Well, that’s the American system and it doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “But really, let’s talk about reasonable doubt. If there was reasonable doubt in the Simpson trial, what about my case?”
Another time, he used Britain’s Princess Diana as an example of why it was sometimes best to allow rumors to lie fallow rather than dignify them with a response. Diana had just given an interview to the BBC in which she acknowledged having an affair with a British army captain after the collapse of her marriage to Prince Charles. “She didn’t need to admit that. It didn’t strengthen the rest of her case,” Noriega said. “Once you raise the subject yourself, there’s no end to it. People start examining the details and you’re drawn further and further into the subject, which may not have been worth all the attention in the first place. Better to maintain silence and focus on the subjects that you find more crucial to your defense.”
In the interviews, Noriega’s shrewd defenses and analysis were always at work. He viewed his prison stay as an opportunity to patiently pick away at the U.S. government actions against him. With time and patience, he said, he believed he would win.
“It is important not only to get out of jail,” he said, “but also to get out on my own terms — that is, with the American acknowledgment that they had committed the crime, not me.”
While he was surprisingly upbeat, I saw some reflective moments. One day, seated together in the deputy warden’s office, I saw him gazing out the window toward the parking lot, where visitors came and went. “I’ve never seen the front entrance of the prison,” he said. “Tell me what it looks like. I want to project in my mind to what it will look like on the day that I walk out of here for the last time, through the front door.”
All the while, Noriega reminded me, he was prepared for letdowns, for some erstwhile friend to cross him as had happened in so many cases — his closest friends and aides had ended up being traitors. As he often said, in almost a lament, “He is a friend … if one can say that there are any friends in this business.”
I reminded Noriega early on that we had met once before. The brief meeting came four years prior to our encounter in the Miami jail, on October 11, 1989, one week after a coup attempt that almost took his life.
At the time, the Soviet Union had not yet been dismantled. The Berlin Wall was still intact. Wars were still being waged in El Salvador and Nicaragua, although Central American presidents were negotiating around the United States toward a settlement that would end a conflict in which tens of thousands of people had been killed, and billions of U.S. dollars expended, in a supposed war to contain communism.
The United States was active in fighting a drug war in Colombia, and was controlling anti-narcotics forces in the South American countries of Peru and Bolivia, with the aim of destroying coca-leaf production, although endemic poverty was also at the root of cocaine production.
And in tiny Panama, a war was brewing. The United States had imposed economic sanctions on Panama after a federal indictment in Miami had charged Noriega, the U.S.’s longtime confidant on sensitive matters of international security, with drug trafficking and drug conspiracy.
The United States financed and supported the Panamanian opposition’s attempt to defeat Noriega’s Democratic Revolutionary Party in May 1989 balloting. Noriega’s government canceled the election count. The United States had invested money and prestige in the opposition candidates. By midyear 1989, the Bush administration had set up an invasion plan. Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Fred Woerner, the Panama-based head of the U.S. Southern Command, went to the State Department in early summer and voiced opposition to the invasion plan. They were both dismissed. Crowe, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone, was replaced by Colin Powell, catapulted in short order from staff aide to the highest rank in the military. Woerner, criticized by conservatives and Panamanian opposition leaders for being too soft on the Panamanian military, was replaced by Thurman, who was given the task of setting up the invasion.
Noriega and his forces were tense. There were occasional and escalating provocations with U.S. forces, who not only lived in absurdly close proximity to but also worked alongside their supposed enemies. The Panamanian Defense Forces, formerly the National Guard, and before that the National Police, were created and fostered by the United States. Noriega was a graduate of U.S. military training courses and the liaison between General Omar Torrijos and the Americans. Torrijos died in a plane crash in 1981, amid charges and countercharges, never proved, that the death was other than accidental. He was buried at Fort Amador, at a site that symbolized the absurdity of the situation. It was a small neck of land extending out into the Panama Canal, an enclave of ivy-covered administration buildings and tended greenery that evoked all the quaintness of the colonial protectorate that Panama had been since 1903. Amador and the Canal Zone at large had been returned mostly to Panamanian control in stages after the 1977 Panama Canal treaties, shepherded into existence by Torrijos and President Jimmy Carter. So now, next to Noriega’s command office at Fort Amador, framed by the mausoleum where Torrijos was buried, were buildings still occupied by the Americans; the fort was guarded by a joint Panama-U.S. military checkpoint. It was a coexistence borne of the colonial relations between a superpower and its surrogate army. But the surrogate army was in open defiance.
Noriega saw a widespread conspiracy against him and against Panama. He saw journalists, especially American journalists, as tools of that conspiracy, if not conspirators in their own right. And so, in the days after the October 3 coup, which found him huddled on the floor and praying for a swift and painless death, he banned the entry of American journalists into Panama.
I had gotten around that ban and was reporting on the growing war atmosphere. I had been seeking an interview with Noriega through his aides in Panama City, to obtain his version of the coup attempt. I was told that Noriega would be attending a diplomatic event at the Rio Hato air base — a onetime U.S. Army air base, about an hour’s drive up the Pacific coast from Panama City — and that this might be a good opportunity to approach the general. It was, indeed. Despite all the rumors about Noriega, about CIA plots and military plots to kill him, I was surprised to find that I could enter the Rio Hato base easily and was waved through a guard booth without so much as having to stop or show an ID card. I drove until I came to a party facility, a long slab of cement with a thatched roof but no walls, which had a bar at one end. Traveling with some friends, I parked my car across the street and walked to the party area. A number of men were gathered in small groups all around, drinking beers and chatting, among them some foreign military advisors. I remember a Canadian and a French military attaché. I spoke for a while to the Panamanian ambassador to Haiti, and to several other Panamanians, all the time wondering when Noriega would make his appearance. “When does he show up?” I asked one Panamanian standing nearby, who looked bewildered.
“Oh, he’s here,” the man said, and nodded toward a figure standing to one side of the building, in the shadows of the thatched roof, very close to where we stood. It was Manuel Antonio Noriega, holding a long-neck bottle of beer, dressed in field fatigues and a baseball cap, looking perhaps a bit out of place. I was surprised again that there was no security entourage at the base, or anywhere in evidence.
“General,” I said, approaching him and offering my hand. “I’m a reporter from the United States. I’d like to ask a few questions.”
Noriega appeared startled by the approach. “But don’t you know that I’m afraid of reporters?” he said. “I don’t like talking to reporters.”
“Well, no reason to be afraid of me,” I said. “At least I speak Spanish. I don’t see myself as being a bad guy.”
Only the very start of a smile reached his upper lip. “Well, talk to my aide, Lopez, and let’s see if we can work something out,” he said, and then walked off. Nothing was ever worked out.
Noriega told me he remembered the event that day, but did not remember my being there. It was the anniversary celebration of the Rio Hato air base’s relegation from U.S. to Panamanian control. Try as he could, he had no memory of an American reporter approaching him and asking for an interview. But it’s true, he said, “I was always afraid of reporters, the way they were going to twist my words and what I was trying to say. I still am.”
In the end, Noriega sought to avoid a tell-all tabloid account of sex and scandal; he wanted, rather, to correct the history of his life and times. During the 1992 presidential election, many people assumed that the imprisoned general would reveal some last-minute detail about George Bush or some other U.S. politician, perhaps a personal intrigue, perhaps information on a secret intelligence operation that would turn the tide of the elections. But Noriega said he had no such information — that the behavior of Bush and the hypocrisy and moral compromise of American policy were scandal enough. In part, Noriega clearly decided to take the high road. There were stories to be told in Panama about the drug use of one U.S. senator or the skirt-chasing activities of another, but Noriega chose not to tell them. If he had happened to have a juicy story about Bush, however, he might not have been so restrained.
Noriega as a man was rather reserved, not effusive, not charismatic. This is the story of the conversion of Noriega from man to image: an image that the United States needed to be built up so that it could be destroyed. Such a story is important in its own right for those who seek to understand U.S. foreign policy.
For those prone to dismiss Noriega’s words, they could do well to consider something that every lawyer knows: an honest man will get the facts wrong some of the time, and a liar must tell a measure of the truth. I take the odds, along with the measure of the man, in revisiting the historical environment and the train of events that led to the December 20, 1989, invasion of Panama. One should not dismiss out of hand what Noriega has to say. It’s certain that his percentages couldn’t be much worse than those of the convicted drug dealers and the scheming U.S. officials who participated in his demise.
Manuel Antonio Noriega probably will always be judged according to the refracted vision of the beholder: for some, he will remain the devil; for others he will be less so as the sordid manipulations swirling around him become ever more apparent.
His narrative is just what it appears to be — the version of one man, whose reputation has often been overinflated to mythic proportions. There can be much debate over Noriega’s account of his political life. It is certain that some of his accusations are accurate.
On the key points, I do not think the evidence shows Noriega was guilty of the charges against him. I do not think his actions as a foreign military leader or a sovereign head of state justified the invasion of Panama or that he represented a threat to U.S. national security.
This is a story about creating an image of guilt. If you strip away the costly U.S. campaign that inexorably attaches Noriega’s name in history to drug corruption, you find a prosecution that went overboard to convict. So many U.S. agents searched hard and long to convict Noriega, only to come up with the tainted and contradictory words of a brace of felons who won their freedom in return for testifying for the government, whether or not they knew anything about Noriega. For the prosecution, the standard of proof sometimes seemed to be less whether they were telling the truth than whether their stories would get by.
All of this did great damage to the U.S. criminal justice system. For that reason, I challenge those who say that the details of Noriega’s case didn’t matter: that he was dirty, that any means used to convict him were satisfactory. “I have no evidence, but nothing will dissuade my absolute conviction that he was involved in drug trafficking,” said former Ambassador Briggs.
There were three main reasons for the invasion, which had nothing to do with legitimate security interests: the wimp factor, that is, Bush’s desire to counteract a growing image of weakness and protect his approval ratings, Panama’s failure to help the United States with Iran-Contra and the right-wing U.S. concern that the United States would soon lose influence over the operations of the Panama Canal, with Japan waiting in the wings.
In these pages, I provide comments on Noriega’s claims, his relationship with the United States, the Spadafora killing and the drug charges, along with a perspective of the U.S. invasion of Panama. In brief:
• Noriega’s description of the plan to use explosives to sway opinion in the Panama Canal Zone in late 1976 squares with published information that an American army sergeant may have been involved in such an operation. At the time, the use of C-4 plastique was not widespread, and such explosives, which were used in the bombings, would likely be of U.S. origin. The CIA station chief in Panama in 1976, Joe Kiyonaga, died in 1988; his sons, John and David, both attorneys, said they knew nothing about the incident. The Defense Department and the CIA, responding to Freedom of Information requests, either said they had no information or that they would not acknowledge such information even if they did. Noriega’s account is the only one describing involvement by then-CIA director George Bush. I found no confirmation of Noriega’s account. I sent a letter to the former president, asking if he participated in the planning for the bombing, in preparation or training, whether he knew about American participation and whether he discussed the case at any time with Noriega. Bush’s spokesman replied by telephone: “According to his recollection, the answer is ‘no’ to all five questions. But to make sure, he sent your letter to John Deutsch [director of the CIA].” Several days later, the spokesman phoned again, saying, “The CIA has nothing to add to what President Bush already said.”
• On the controversial June 9, 1971, slaying of the Reverend Hector Gallegos, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reported that U.S. intelligence concluded that Noriega was personally responsible for the rural priest’s death. Noriega is familiar with the reports, adamantly denying them and calling for any evidence to be made public.
• On the death of Torrijos, there are charges and countercharges concerning the plane crash that took the Panamanian leader’s life. U.S. officials in Panama at the time of Torrijos’s death who were familiar with the investigation into the crash conclude that there was no foul play and that pilot error may have caused the accident.
• U.S. intelligence sources confirm Noriega’s accounts of meetings at their behest in Cuba; intelligence documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act confirm Noriega’s overtures to Fidel Castro concerning Central America and the Mariel boatlift, as well as his subsequent debriefing by William Casey. They also agree with his assessment that Casey would have blocked prosecution of Noriega on drug charges. I asked Colonel Matias Farias, the former U.S. military chief of protocol in Panama, about the relationship between Casey and Noriega. “I remember meeting Casey one time when he came to the Southern Command,” said Farias. “As soon as he got off the plane, Casey said, ‘Where’s my boy? Where’s Noriega?’ ”
Donald Winters, the CIA station chief in Panama for two years starting in 1983, said he was authorized by the CIA to describe his relationship with Noriega and what he knew about Noriega’s contact with Casey. “I was present during three meetings between the two men, two in Washington and one in Panama, and can attest that the relationship was neither close nor personal. Casey was always well briefed (normally by me) as to how he should deal with Noriega.”
• Intelligence officials deny that Panama or U.S. territory in the Canal Zone was used to train Salvadoran military or death squad members. But those denials may not settle the issue. Secret and compartmentalized U.S. operations in Central America during the 1980s took the concept of plausible deniability — the art of being able to lie because no witnesses could prove otherwise — to new levels of cynicism. Interviews with well-placed U.S. military personnel indicated constant efforts to deceive the American public about the relationship between the Salvadoran military, paramilitary forces and U.S. advisers and trainers.
Panama certainly was used to circumvent other congressional mandates on El Salvador, such as the limit on the number of U.S. advisers in the Central American country. The military and the CIA played loose with the concept of “in country,” ferrying people in from outside El Salvador for the day and having them spend the night elsewhere. They similarly disregarded other provisions, such as the rule that U.S. advisers not carry rifles nor operate in the field against Salvadoran rebels.
In 1985, The New York Times published a front-page story detailing armed U.S. C-130 reconnaissance overflights of Salvador operating out of Howard Air Force Base in Panama; the newspaper printed a photograph of one such plane, painted black and without any military markings. Independently, sources claimed that the fifty-caliber machine-gun fittings onboard these planes needed frequent replacement because of overheating from intense firefights. A key U.S. adviser told me that the United States manipulated the use of Panamanian and Honduran territory to make it appear they were complying with stated congressional controls on participation in the Salvadoran civil war.
• The U.S. government knew well that the 1984 presidential election was irregular, filled with corruption charges and probably was won by Arnulfo Arias. Nevertheless, the Reagan administration endorsed the election of Barletta, not only sending a message of complicity to the Panamanian people, but to Noriega. The irony of Jimmy Carter attending the 1984 inauguration, then criticizing the 1989 election process, is notable.
The May 7, 1989, elections were annulled before an election count could be completed, but there was agreement across the spectrum that, for whatever reason, Noriega’s candidates would have lost. Summing up the response was Marco Gandasegui, a Panamanian political analyst with strong nationalistic sentiments who vigorously opposed U.S. policy in Panama. “I think it’s clear that the government lost, or else they wouldn’t have annulled the elections. You have to remember that the people were not voting so much in favor of one side or the other; they were voting negatively. The people who voted for the opposition were voting against the economic malaise that the country had fallen into; those who supported the government were voting against men they perceived as being too closely tied to the United States?’
• Carter aide Robert Pastor rejects Noriega’s account of attempts to set up a meeting following the May 7, 1989, elections, saying he was denied access to the Panamanian general.
• Plainclothes thugs circulated in open vans around Panama City on the day that presidential and vice-presidential candidates were beaten in the Casco Viejo section. While no individual was blamed for the killing of Alexis Guerra during that incident, it was widely believed that PDF soldiers were responsible. There were cases of police mistreatment of protesters during the election period.
• In the death of Colonel Moises Giroldi after the October coup, there was sensationalistic reporting that Noriega had pulled the trigger himself in killing Giroldi. That charge has been discredited; it is believed likely that Captain Eliecer Gaitan ordered the execution of Giroldi and nine other coup participants, in a preemptive warning to all future coup plotters.
Noriega and the United States
Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Matias Farias is not shy about his qualifications for giving political advice. In the course of his twelve years as a political adviser to the U.S. Southern Command, Farias has used his skills in understanding Latin America to counsel the governments of half a dozen countries, along with providing guidance to his superiors in the U.S. military. “I don’t want to inflate myself, but it came to where people knew that I was someone to listen to. I’m the one that told them that Daniel Ortega would lose the elections in Nicaragua to Violeta Chamorro; I’m the one who told [Chilean dictator Augusto] Pinochet to allow civilians to take over…. He listened to me and everything was fine. I have a reputation for knowing what I am talking about.”
So he was not surprised when he got a call one day in February 1988 from General Manuel Antonio Noriega. “My problem was that I needed to get permission from my superiors to be able to talk to him. It went all the way up to Admiral William Crowe, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and took three days before they gave me the okay.”
The timing for the United States and for Noriega was crucial. Noriega had just been indicted on drug charges in the United States; Panama’s civilian president, Eric Arturo Delvalle, was preparing to side with the Americans and call for Noriega’s ouster. Noriega had maintained only casual contact with Farias over the years. But now, the Cuban exile’s special ability literally and figuratively to speak the language of Latin America was in demand.
Farias drove to Noriega’s command headquarters on Avenue A in Chorrillo. He was ushered into Noriega’s office, where he found the general wearing camouflage fatigues. They shook hands, then sat down alone.
“Colonel, it is said that you are the chief political analyst for the Americans here. You are the one they depend on. I’d like your advice as well. How do you see the situation?” the general asked.
“General, I must be frank with you: the situation is deteriorating. Every system has to pay a political cost for staying in power. And now the military is experiencing that reality. Unfortunately, the Panamanian people want a change.”
Noriega listened intently as Farias spoke, and then responded evenly, obviously wanting to probe the matter deeply. “Colonel, everyone must understand that Panama has changed from what it was twenty years ago. The poor people now have a chance; they have more access to power, to wealth; the masses of Panamanians now have a future.”
Farias nodded in agreement. “But the problem is one of perception,” he said. “The people have the feeling that the defense forces have their hands on everything — ”
“But the people have a civilian president who does make his own decisions,” Noriega said.
“General, regardless of what you and I think, the people feel that the military has to back off. It is their perception; it is a reality for them. You may say that you have your supporters, but you no longer have a majority. The people are tired; if an election were held today, you would lose it heavily, probably by three to one.”
“Is that what the Pentagon and the State Department think?” Noriega asked. “What about my friends in Washington?”
“General, you may have friends in Washington, the same ones you always had; but for the first time, you have some very powerful enemies. I don’t think the situation is going to change.”
Within days of Farias’s meeting, on March 15, 1988, a group of Panamanian officers, led by Major Leonidas Macias, staged an abortive coup against Noriega. Macias and his co-conspirators were captured
and imprisoned. U.S. officials were forewarned, and while Farias said he was not party to the plan, Noriega assumed that he was. The two men had no further meetings.
Nevertheless, Farias is one of a number of U.S. officers who break ranks with the prevailing wisdom about Noriega and his Panamanian Defense Forces. U.S. military analysts gave the PDF under Noriega high marks for professionalism.
Indeed, independent assessments by U.S. military sources said that Noriega had upgraded an organization that started out as a police force into the military organization it needed to be in order to protect the Panama Canal. “Noriega brought the PDF into the twentieth century,” said one U.S. officer. “The goal was incorporating the military into canal defenses. I was personally disappointed with the invasion and the decision to dismantle the military.”
Significantly, the officer said, under Noriega’s tutelage the PDF developed far-reaching social programs. “I don’t think there was a better civil affairs unit in all of Latin America. They sent doctors to remote villages and taught agricultural techniques to peasants. I think this was a very serious, well-intentioned organization.”
General Woerner, the Southern Command chief until the fall of 1989, agreed with several key assessments by the men who had day-to-day contact with Noriega and the PDF. “Overall, I never saw any credible evidence of drug trafficking involving General Noriega,” he said. “My analysis was that the U.S. policy of isolating Panama and its military was counterproductive to U.S. interests.”
It was Woerner who, forced into retirement for refusing to invade Panama, had a concise answer to the question, Why did the United States invade Panama?
“The invasion was a response to U.S. domestic considerations,” he said. “It was the wimp factor.”
A declassified defense department intelligence report in 1976 described Noriega as a “Caucasian with apparent Negroid trace, 5 feet 6 inches tall, 150 pounds, medium build.
“As a student at the Instituto Nacional, he was active in socialist youth activities and became a member of the Panamanian Socialist Party, a Marxist-oriented group … inactive since the mid-1960s… . While attending secondary school, Noriega wrote a number of nationalistic poems and articles which were published in local newspapers.”
Large portions of the intelligence document were blacked out by censors, including areas dealing with Noriega’s private life and personal acquaintances. But the document does say that
Noriega has maintained a friendly and cooperative relationship with U.S. military personnel since prior to joining the National Guard in 1962…. He has a decided preference for U.S. style food and a particular fondness for hot dogs. He likes the finest brands of Scotch with water. He chooses his friends carefully when drinking. He does not like coffee and would rather drink tea or juice. He does not smoke, but chews gum. He likes caramel and taffy type candies.
No [police] record available. Noriega admits that he and fellow high school students used to throw rocks at the Panamanian Police during his high school days. It can be concluded that any arrest record was destroyed after he became the National Guard G-2 (intelligence).
Noriega is a (Catholic), but his religion has little, if any, effect on his military or political views. Noriega is intelligent, aggressive, ambitious and ultra-nationalistic. He is a shrewd and calculating person. Although loyal to Brigadier General Torrijos and respectful of his superiors, he berates peers and subordinates, often in the presence of others. He has a keen mind and enjoys verbal “jousting” matches with U.S. contacts. He is a persuasive speaker and possesses rare common sense. He is considered to be a competent officer with excellent judgment and leadership ability. He has long been one of Torrijos’ principal political deputies and has played a significant role in shaping international policies of his country. With his experience as G-2 since 1970, which includes control over the National Department of Investigations (DENI), concerned with internal security and criminal investigations, and the Immigration Section of the Ministry of Government and Justice, Noriega seems assured of maintaining a role of “power broker.” It should be of no surprise to some day find this officer in the position of…
In the event of a confrontation between the U.S. and Panama’s current regime Noriega would be a capable adversary, but it is believed he would endeavor to maintain a limited liaison contact with certain U.S. officials as has been his policy in the past. Noriega feels the U.S. should “normalize relations with Cuba as a means to combat Cuban fanaticism.” Past reports reveal Noriega’s belief that “the best way to control your enemies is to maintain close contact.” The organization of his G-2 offices reaches out to all sectors of the public domain and provides collection of raw data and intelligence which permits Noriega to be the best-informed individual in Panama. He is often selected to represent the Government of Panama on diplomatic trips and/or on important military conferences and negotiations abroad. He is considered to be one of the most powerful figures in Panama with close ties to Torrijos.
He is a man of action and not afraid to make decisions. For example, in January 1970, he refused to allow hijacked aircraft to be refueled and in the subsequent attempt to capture the hijacker, the young man, a mental case, was shot and killed without quarter. This incident, the only recorded hijack attempt in Panama, served to earn Noriega the grudging respect of the public and gave advance notice of his capability. Subsequently in 1970, Noriega directed the pursuit of a small terrorist/guerrilla band with helicopters.
Noriega is an aggressive leader. He is respected by friends and feared by enemies. He depends upon his intelligence organization and close relationship with Torrijos for the maintenance of power. He is considered to be at the top of the list of several likely successors to Torrijos as commandant of the National Guard should that position become vacant. Some observers view him as the possible future dictator of Panama. He was instrumental in Torrijos’ countercoup of December 1969 and since 1970 has been the leader of one of two informal officer “cliques” within the National Guard. His personal financial status appears excellent. Although his record of association with U.S. military goes back over 15 years, he is becoming increasingly distant toward the U.S. He maintains open channels with Cuban, Soviet, Chilean and other political representation in Panama. He is probably the second most powerful man in Panama and, therefore, possesses almost unlimited military and/or political potential.
During the Torrijos period, Noriega was a relatively low-key presence. Rumored to have the country wired, with some sort of intelligence information on almost everyone, he became a shrewd and trusted player behind Torrijos.
U.S. intelligence officials said that Noriega never earned the reputation as the brutal leader of a police state. U.S. human rights information never pointed to massive concerns with civil or human rights abuses. True, members of the oligarchy often did not fare well under twenty years of Torrijismo. There was no love lost between the supporters of Arnulfo Arias and the Panamanian military. In all, estimates were of three hundred political exiles from 1968 to 1989. That was less than the number of refugees fleeing their homes in El Salvador every day for several years at the height of the guerrilla war.
What about repression on the streets? There were incidents, but even during protests by the Civic Crusade, said one U.S. military analyst, there was always an attempt by the Panamanians to maintain the peace. “I always felt that they tried not to have confrontations.”
One of the street commanders monitoring the protests, ironically, was Eduardo Herrera Hassan, later brought in by the United States after the invasion to reorganize a Panamanian police force. “Herrera was bending over backwards to avoid violence. But where do you draw the line between civil disobedience and keeping the peace? I never felt like there was a lot of oppression.”
It was impossible to say that Noriega was wildly popular on the streets of Panama; he was not. Noriega underestimated the power of the Civic Crusade, which was much more broad-based than he realized. Panamanians saw their country in contrast to Central America on one side and the wealth of the Americans on the other. There were no wars and little violence in their country of two million; no killings or death squads as in El Salvador, no guerrilla attacks or civil war as in Nicaragua or Guatemala. People looked around them and saw that their lives should have been better. Where was the prosperity they hoped for; why had the promise not been achieved? People blamed the Panamanian Defense Forces, even before the U.S. pressure and all the more later; with the U.S. economic sanctions, they were squeezed harder than ever. There wasn’t much Noriega could do but the unthinkable — sacrifice sovereignty in return for economic growth and go into exile. It was a terrible bargain and he refused.
Questions about Noriega and the Panamanian human rights record began being raised with the deterioration of Panamanian-U.S. relations, linked directly to the Reagan administration’s pursuit of its dirty wars in Central America. By the late 1980s, the United States had failed in its policy of arming the Nicaraguan Contras to overthrow the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. U.S. intelligence officials who were close to the operations in Central America said Noriega was peripheral to these activities. Significantly, however, when Noriega was asked by Oliver North to participate in the dirty wars by mining Nicaraguan harbors, he says he refused. North has claimed that the offer to participate in Central America was a Noriega initiative. North’s own associates, however, reject this. “I love Ollie,” one associate said. “But he knows that the idea was his alone. Noriega refused to go along with it.”
“Unfortunately, the problem with Ollie is that you can never believe anything he says,” said Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA deputy regional director who was second in command to North on the National Security Council.
The story of the Noriega meeting with North in London was further complicated when special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh released copies of North’s notebooks, which indicate that Noriega was the source of the offer. There are opposing views on the significance of these notebooks, which indicate a detailed contact with Noriega regarding the Panamanian leader having offered to take action.
Canistraro and other U.S. intelligence officials said that offer would have been out of character. “That’s the Ollie North factor. Ollie having discussions with people and exceeding his brief was a common thing. That happened a lot. He was doing all sorts of strange, curious things. We know that now. I would tend to believe Noriega.”
If there was one man who epitomized the U.S. policy in Central America during the period, it was not North, but Elliott Abrams, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. Abrams had turned his office into a soapbox for railing against communism in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
“Mr. Abrams’s attitude descends from the notorious pronouncement made nearly a century ago by Secretary of State Richard Olney: ‘The United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition,’ ” wrote historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., describing Abrams as “an official with no visible qualifications for the job, who is both disbelieved on Capitol Hill and disliked by Latin Americans.”
Abrams says that when he entered office as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs in July of 1985, he sought “a hemisphere wide human rights policy to deal with Stroessner, Pinochet and Noriega. It is also the case that Noriega’s behavior was getting worse all the time.”
At first he was stymied in his attempts to change official policy toward Noriega, with the Department of Defense and CIA arguing they were satisfied with the status quo.
“The DOD argument was that this is all intellectual nonsense: Noriega is our ally in protecting both U.S. citizens in the Canal Zone and the canal itself. The CIA said — we work with what we have.
“Why did State win this battle? I think the answer is drugs — once it became clear that the amount of drug trade was increasing.
“Let’s be clear here, I was in charge of the policy,” Abrams said.
Rumor and raw intelligence about Noriega and drugs carried more weight than persistent information linking Nicaraguan Contra weapons shipments to drug flights in Honduras and charges of drug corruption in El Salvador’s military. Panama was a convenient target and a good escape valve to divert attention, because Reagan and Bush administration prestige was involved. The United States was pumping billions of dollars into El Salvador and Honduras to fight Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and El Salvadoran guerrillas, looking the other way while the Salvadoran military trampled human rights in its country and keeping up the funding to the Nicaraguan Contras in their CIA-orchestrated effort to overthrow the Sandinistas.
Abrams and the Reagan administration, more than 100,000 deaths later in El Salvador and 50,000 deaths later in Nicaragua, were cynical enough to imply that their policy succeeded. “We were not playing to win, we were playing for a tie, and that’s what we got,” said one well-placed U.S. participant in the U.S. Central American operations.
Central Americans left Abrams and the rest of the administration out of the real solution to Central American problems. Where Abrams conspired repeatedly and secretly to foment a U.S.-led invasion of Nicaragua, the Central Americans waged peace. Noriega was friendly both with the Costa Rican president Oscar Arias and with the Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, convincing the reticent Ortega that meeting with Arias on what would become known as the Contadora Peace Plan was a good thing. Contadora, an island off the coast of Panama, was the venue for the first Central American meeting to find a solution to the regional civil wars of the 1980s.
The United States first rejected, then grudgingly went along with the Central American peace process. But Abrams and company, so identified with the anti-Nicaraguan cause, were incensed. They aligned with a small group of Panamanian antimilitary elite bankers and businessmen to lash out at Noriega as having locked Panama in the grip of military repression. To whatever extent this was so for the white, English-speaking upper classes, the story among the working class was different. In twenty years of military rule, impoverished and, importantly, mostly African-origin and mixed-ethnic-Panamanians for the first time were coming into their own. Sons and daughters of slum dwellers were obtaining a secondary-school education, were advancing to the University of Panama and were becoming civil servants, doctors, lawyers and university professors.
Some of these new educated masses adopted leftist political views; this estranged them from the political mainstream — the right-wing populist politics of Arnulfo Arias’s Arnulfista party and the center conservative Christian Democrats were the major players. Instead, sharing the nationalism of the newly constituted Panamanian Defense Forces, the new Torrijista-raised middle class somewhat reluctantly sided with Noriega. One distinguished, well-spoken young doctor told me that he was proud to support Noriega in the May 1989 elections, not as a vote for corruption, but as a vote against the United States and in favor of Panamanian independence.
But the United States never wanted to hear much about Panamanian sovereignty. Lost in the indignation about the May 1989 elections, which were canceled by Noriega, was the obvious and well-documented reality that the United States has always helped manipulate the Panamanian political scene. Americans looked the other way in 1984 when questionable balloting procedures produced a presidential election victory for Nicolas Ardito Barletta, a University of Chicago-trained economist and sometime protege of then Secretary of State George Shultz. His opponent was Arnulfo Arias, by then an octogenarian, perennial candidate seeking the presidency for a fourth time. Arias’s fascist, racist views were an embarrassment to the United States. His frank admission to Noriega that he would try to abolish the military — as he had done in 1968 — brought strong efforts by the ruling military to ensure that he would not be elected. Former U.S. ambassador Everett Briggs said in an interview that the United States was content with Barletta becoming president even though the Reagan administration knew that he was not fairly elected. “Barletta really was Shultz’s student at the University of Chicago,” Briggs said in an interview. “Everybody believed that Arnulfo Arias had won by a hair. The analysis done for me by the embassy staff was that he probably beat Barletta by less than 10,000 votes. But even the more responsible politicians in the opposition were willing to give [Barletta] the benefit of the doubt.”
Also ignored by the resident wisdom about Panama under Noriega was that his strongest opposition in the United States came as a result of defections from the ranks of his supporters. Gabriel Lewis Galindo, for example, had worked side by side with him and Torrijos during the negotiation of the 1978 Panama Canal treaties. But Lewis and the Noriega camp had a falling out over personal financial matters. Lewis became an archenemy of Noriega and one of the inner circle of anti-Noriega plotters, who had the ear of Elliott Abrams back in Washington. Also on the list of disaffected plotters was Jose Blandon, the Panamanian consul in New York, who was deeply insulted when Noriega stripped him of his post. Abrams said he based his pursuit of Noriega on Blandon’s charges about drugs. After months of searching for evidence against Noriega and coming up with nothing, “suddenly the answer was ‘yes, we have the evidence.’ The difference was Blandon.”
Blandon was also close to Deborah DeMoss, the Machiavellian Latin America specialist on the staff of archconservative Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. DeMoss was able to use Helms’s position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to promote Blandon’s charges that Noriega was dealing drugs in association with Fidel Castro and Colombian drug lords. Other members of the committee, including Democratic senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, were persuaded to publicize the Noriega charges in the name of sounding firm in prosecuting the supposed U.S. war on drugs. While many of Blandon’s accusations about Noriega have become part of the historical record, his fabrications and outright prevarications were considered so dangerous that U.S. government prosecutors did not even call him as a witness at the Noriega drug trial.
None of this adds up to justification for a U.S. invasion. All of the alleged reasons — supporting democracy, blocking drug trafficking, protecting the honor of a woman, responding to Noriega’s alleged declaration of war — were lies.
Spadafora
Colonel Al Cornell, the military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Panama, rushed into the office of the charge d’affaires, William Price, with the startling news: the decapitated body of Hugo Spadafora had been found under a bridge in Chiriquí province.
“Did you hear the news?” he asked. “Somebody’s killed Hugo Spadafora. This is a big problem for this government and this military.”
“What’s the big deal, Al?” asked Price. “He’s just some left-wing Torrijista. No big deal.”
“I’m telling you, Bill, this is going to have long-term repercussions for this government. This thing is going to cause big-time heartburn.”
Cornell and other U.S. officials investigated the case. “I find it hard to believe that Noriega was involved,” he said. “I don’t think Spadafora was a great threat in any case. Only a fool would have done something like order the killing. He’s no fool; he’s a smart guy and a very bright street fighter.”
Don Winters, the CIA station chief, agreed with Cornell that there were big problems. But he doubted Noriega’s involvement. “First, it doesn’t follow Noriega’s MO,” he told friends. “The Panamanian military doesn’t kill people. Exile is the most common method of dealing with enemies; for them, getting tough is a little bit of roughhousing and their predilection for shoving things up the rear ends of people to humiliate them. But that’s about it.”
The U.S. investigators on the scene saw proof beyond a reasonable doubt that two auxiliary policeman in Chiriquí were responsible for the killing. They were unable to find a clear motive. Perhaps, Cornell said, the underlings thought they were doing their boss, Noriega, a favor by getting rid of Spadafora.
“Well, possibly,” said Winters, but he doubted that. Spadafora was no real threat to Noriega. Despite irritating news reports and columns written by the Panamanian exile, he really had very little impact in Panama.
All of them discounted reports that Spadafora was killed before he could deliver secret information about Noriega to the U.S. embassy in Panama City. They described Spadafora as a low-level intelligence contact for the United States. If he had special information about Noriega, which they doubted, he could have delivered it in San Jose, Costa Rica, where he lived. In any case, he certainly would have had multiple copies of the information. No such information has surfaced. Floyd Carlton, however, told DEA agents after his arrest in Costa Rica that he had provided Spadafora with information to be passed along about Noriega.
Despite reading news reports on the subject, the men never saw any credible information that Noriega was involved. “At the most,” said Colonel Matias Farias, “one could say that Noriega participated in a cover-up, or at least allowed the case to go unprosecuted. But I don’t believe he was involved.”
Any time Cornell, Farias or the CIA station chief at the time, Donald Winters, were questioned by colleagues or friends, their contention of Noriega’s lack of involvement was met with disbelief. Hadn’t they seen the National Security Agency transcript of the conversation Noriega had with his commander on the scene, Major Luis (Papo) Cordoba?
“I don’t know anything about that,” Farias said. “Neither do Cornell and Winters. And if they don’t know about it, you can be pretty sure it doesn’t exist.”
Without a doubt, linkage of Noriega to ordering the Spadafora killing was the most significant item cited in rallying opposition to him both in Panama and the United States. Indeed, even when federal Judge William M. Hoeveler pondered the possibility that Noriega was innocent of drug charges against him, he told me that he was placated by the knowledge that Noriega was a bad character, in any case — “he was involved in the Spadafora killing.”
The judge’s assumption of the resident wisdom about the Spadafora case prompted a deeper look at the background of the charge that Noreiga ordered the killing of Hugo Spadafora.
Interviews with government officials and journalists who wrote stories about the Spadafora killing have failed to develop an original source for the NSA transcript.
All published reports I could find concerning the alleged National Security Agency quote were traced back to Guillermo Sanchez Borbón, whose column in the anti-Noriega newspaper Let Prensa first published charges of the general’s involvement in the killing. Sanchez Borbón said candidly in an interview that he could not confirm the source of the quote and that his book about Noriega, In the Time of the Tyrants, was not entirely true.
“It was not an objective book, it was a combative book. It has its inaccuracies,” he said. Stopping short of saying the National Security Agency reference was invented, he said he had never heard the tape nor seen the transcript of such a statement.
Sanchez Borbón’s American alter ego, novelist and raconteur R. M. Koster, was deeply involved in creating the popular impression in the United States and elsewhere that Noriega had ordered the killing of Spadafora. An expatriate writer and onetime nominee for the National Book Award, Koster has lived in Panama for forty years. His most recent novel is Carmichael’s Dog, in which the title character is host to an infernal demonic universe whose members sometimes leap out of the ear of the pooch into the brain of the master.
As a young man in the 1950s, Koster served in the U.S. Army 470th Intelligence Brigade, based in Panama. He is a Democratic Party activist, and attends most party conventions as an expatriate delegate. At the height of U.S. anti-Noriega policy, he was one of a select group of English-speaking informed sources, tipsters and fixers used by U.S. foreign correspondents, including those of Newsweek, Newsday and The New York Times to provide background on the Panama scene. Most recently, Koster is a source for a John le Carre novel about Panama, which portrays Panamanian military and political life.
His role as independent pundit was questionable. Koster penned the English version of the story about the National Security Agency intercept, first in a 1988 Harper’s Magazine article, later in their joint post invasion book, In the Time of the Tyrants.
Three U.S. military and intelligence sources, Winters, CIA station chief in Panama, Dewey Claridge, his superior at the CIA in Washington, and Cornell, the military attaché in Panama, all on post at the time of the Spadafora killing, said they had never heard such an intercept and did not believe it existed.
In the same Panama book, Koster — who sometimes ghost-wrote the Sanchez Borbón column under the byline “El Gringo Desconocido” (the Unknown Gringo) — admits to having met in Washington in 1988 with members of the Bush administration’s National Security Council, calling for the U.S. invasion of Panama and likening Noriega to Hitler.
“ ‘How are we going to get Noriega out of Panama?’ Senator Kennedy’s aide Gregory Craig asked R. M. Koster in January 1988.
“The same way we got Hitler out of Europe,” he writes, continuing in the third person.
Six weeks later, Koster was in the old Executive Office Building in Washington, saying much the same to staffers of the National Security Council. The indictments made the breach between Noriega and the United States irreparable, no matter what his remaining Washington friends might wish. The United States could not leave Panama for twelve years, until the appointed time for handing over the Canal to the Panamanians. Noriega would not leave unless he was forced to. The people of Panama couldn’t, so the business would end in U.S. military action. The sooner this happened, the fewer people would die.
Despite promoting this tack, Koster says that this was not “advocating a course of action,” but rather “predicting an event.”
I interviewed a number of journalists, politicians and government officials who either reported Noriega’s alleged involvement in the Spadafora case citing other sources, or as a given without documentation.
Murray Waas, a freelance journalist, wrote an article in The Village Voice, citing the Harper Particle. “I got it from the Harper’s Magazine piece by Sanchez Borbón,” Waas told me. “I probably should have checked it better. I’m getting this sick feeling in my stomach that I didn’t check it hard enough. … I assumed it.”
Koster said he had gotten the NSA intercept report from Sanchez Borbón. Borbón said he didn’t remember the source, but suggested investigative journalist Seymour Hersh; Winston Spadafora, brother of the slain Noriega opponent; or French intelligence.
Hersh said in an interview that he didn’t know who Guillermo Sanchez Borbón was and that he received first word of the NSA quote about Spadafora years later in Panama while researching a possible film script in Panama for director Oliver Stone. The U.S. intelligence sources denied that Winston Spadafora had received any information on an intercept from the United States and doubted that there was any French report on the subject.
Carlos Rodriguez, a former Panamanian vice-presidential candidate and anti-Noriega political lobbyist in the United States, said he had heard the report from Roberto Eisenmann, Sanchez Borbón’s boss at La Prensa. Eisenmann said he didn’t know where the report came from, but always assumed Sanchez Borbón had come up with the story.
The manager of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America during the Reagan administration, former assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams said he did not know the source for the Spadafora report. But he said, “Official reporting as I recall it made it clear. I would say my memory of this was that the Spadafora affair was the first crack in the Panamanian Defense Forces.”
Briggs, the U.S. ambassador to Panama at the time and an avowed Noriega enemy, said he doubted the existence of such a National Security Agency intercept. “1 don’t remember intelligence reports or any privileged reporting on the case. I think it’s entirely possible that Sanchez Borbón made the whole thing up.”
Dwayne “Dewey” Clarridge, the retired CIA chief for Latin America, shed light on several points. He said that there was never any evidence linking Noriega to the Spadafora death. “It’s ridiculous, I would have known about it, but I didn’t because there was no evidence and no intercept.”
The entire affair, he said, including the drug charges against Noriega, were “a travesty.” In the case of Oliver North’s charges that Noriega offered to attack targets and assassinate Nicaraguan Sandinista leaders, he subscribed to the theory that one of the many unofficial intermediaries used by North’s makeshift Contra operations was brokering a deal to convince North and Noriega to work together. Noriega said the intermediary, Joaquin Quinones, a Miami-based Cuban exile, was his constant pipeline to North. But Quinones, who died in 1990, was never on the NSC staff and apparently was bartering influence between the two men.
A Trial Outside the Trial
Other than the government witnesses against Noriega and those officials and opponents in Panama who said he “must be guilty” of drug charges, I found few people close to the situation who thought the drug conspiracy charge was valid. Fernando Manfredo, longtime Panamanian deputy director of the Panama Canal Commission and a respected political figure, defended the general. “No, there was none of that,” Manfredo said, asked about drug trafficking. “Perhaps some money laundering, but not directly by Noriega. But as for drug dealing, no, that’s not Noriega’s style.”
Eduardo Herrera Hassan, the former officer under Noriega who was almost drawn into plots to kill his former boss, said he didn’t think there was evidence linking the general to traffickers. “I never saw or heard any evidence of it,” Herrera said.
The denials of Noriega’s involvement in drug dealing came from disparate quarters. Agents of the CIA, the Israeli Mossad, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Drug Enforcement Administration men who were close to the action in Central America said that the Noriega drug charges were trumped up.
At the DEA, there was much consternation over the drug charges. The Noriega trial produced a major rift between the DEA district office in Miami and the field agents who had worked in Panama for the previous decade. The field agents had grown close to their Panamanian counterparts, who helped them haul in drug busts and sometimes protected their lives. When they protested the drug indictment against Noriega, they were told they had been duped by Noriega’s intelligence apparatus.
One former DEA official told me in private that he did not think Noriega was guilty, then appeared at the drug trial to leave a far different picture. Averting his eyes, the DEA officer downplayed praise of the Panamanian Defense Forces’ drug efforts, contained in frequent written commendations sent to Noriega and his aides.
The trial threatened to be undone when one of the DEA sources, apparently upset that he was being pressured to provide a deceptive impression of U.S.-Panamanian drug interdiction efforts, leaked a file that contained a trove of previously unrevealed cooperation between the Drug Enforcement Administration and Noriega’s forces. The cooperation was so extensive that it had been given a code name: Operation Negocio, or “business” in Spanish; revelation of this material broadened the scope of Noriega’s cooperation with the United States, both as a paid Central Intelligence Agency informant and in helping to halt major drug operations in the middle to late 1980s. Some of the same DEA operatives who testified against Noriega paradoxically told prosecutors that Operation Negocio was an effort to identify pilots and planes flying drug money into Panama from 1983 to 1987.
James Bramble, who served as die agency’s liaison to Panama from 1982 to 1984, was known to be concerned about charges of drug trafficking that took place allegedly in Panama during his watch. It was Bramble who flew to Darien near the Colombian border in 1984 with Noriega’s chief drug agent, Luis Quiel, to examine the site of a major cocaine-processing laboratory that had been destroyed.
While Bramble previously claimed that he was certain the laboratory was found by accident and was not a result of illegal activity by Noriega or Quiel, he gave no such testimony at the drug trial.
The drug conspiracy indictment was mostly the work of the U.S. attorney in Miami, Leon Kellner, and an honorable, tough-minded assistant U.S. attorney named Richard Gregorie, whose single-minded goal of halting drug dealing ruffled feathers in Washington when he suggested before Congress that politics and lack of commitment from policy makers was blocking progress in the campaign to stop cocaine trafficking in the United States.
While Kellner’s goals were largely political, Gregorie was uncompromising. Gregorie’s campaign to investigate the drug business in Miami, in cooperation with the Drug Enforcement Administration, coincided with intense efforts in Washington to fund the Contras. It has been widely reported, but not widely documented, that many of the pilots, clandestine airstrips, contract air lines and operatives working with the effort to fund the Nicaraguan Contras were also showing up in reports on drug investigations. Men like Floyd Carlton Caceres and Cesar Rodriguez, both later implicated in the Noriega case, were transporting drugs for the Medellin cartel and guns-for-hire in Central America.
But the Contra wars were not on Gregorie’s watch. He was chasing the drug dealers who were poisoning the streets of America; every individual off the street was a small victory in that war. If the victory against the tons of drugs coming into this country involved using evidence linking Noriega to the crime, all the better.
There was never any chance of bringing Noriega in for trial; the considerations that a U.S. attorney would analyze in deciding to threaten to take someone’s liberty away did not apply. Noriega was an unpopular figure; linking him to a trial would bring publicity that could lead to convictions and more drug trials. The fact that the indictment mentioned Noriega didn’t matter in terms of having to prove the allegations; no one would have to present evidence against him, anyway.
Then Washington, under Abrams at the State Department, disdaining Gregorie’s idealism, saw an opportunity. After refusing to cooperate or even listen to his warnings about the extent of cocaine trafficking in the Americas, suddenly Abrams paid attention; the indictment was a perfect foreign policy tool to meet other ends.
Gregorie never was told about how close his investigation into the drug business came to the heart of Iran-Contra. “If that were true, if the government was hiding behind a smokescreen the whole time that I was investigating drugs, and they knew that the men I was interviewing were also working for them, then that would be a major scandal,”
Gregorie said in an interview. “But nobody ever told me that and if that was true, I was kept in the dark.”
But Gregorie also never expected his indictment to yield a trial against Noriega and neither did reluctant policy makers in Washington. After the invasion, with the sudden prospect of having Noriega in custody, the drug accusations became a useful — indeed, the only — means of justifying his capture.
By then, Gregorie was out of the U.S. attorney’s office. He watched the Noriega trial from the sidelines.
The principal source in his drug investigation, ultimately leading to Noriega’s indictment, was Carlton, who turned state’s evidence after being captured in Costa Rica and testified before Congress and in intensive debriefings with Gregorie about the drug business. “Floyd was always solid and everything he said always checked out,” said Gregorie.
The original blueprint for the Noriega drug conspiracy and most of what is assumed about his guilt is based on the testimony of Carlton. It was taken by all advocates of Noriega’s guilt that Carlton told the truth. He had sufficient motivation, however, to be lying about Noriega’s relationship to his operations. He was promised a free ticket out of jail, the right to remain in the United States, along with his family and a domestic servant, entry in the Federal Witness Protection Program, continued financing from the U.S. government and retention of his private pilot’s license. Carlton had been captured by the United States in Costa Rica on January 18, 1985, for drug trafficking in an operation that included two other key witnesses in the trial — a former Panamanian diplomat and businessman named Ricardo Bilonick and an admitted American marijuana dealer named Steven Kalish. Noriega’s G-2 investigators provided evidence that helped in the apprehension of all of these men. The men were operating through a company called DIACSA, a private plane dealership that worked alongside Bilonick’s Inair at Paitilla Airport, with two State Department contracts totaling $41,130 to fly humanitarian aid to the Contras.
Carlton said that Noriega threatened him with jail when he brought up the subject of drug trafficking in a conversation in 1982. For reasons that were unclear, he said Noriega suddenly agreed to receive $100,000 for each of four cocaine shipments that Carlton handled. In return, however, Carlton acknowledged under questioning that he neither informed Noriega about the timing or location of such shipments, nor did he receive Panamanian protection.
But the larger questions about Carlton had not been revealed: that he was employed by the United States in the Contra arms-smuggling pipeline and that his activities were known both to Noriega and to the United States. That connection, blocked from revelation at the drug trial, made it unlikely that Noriega would choose this known clandestine U.S. operative as his partner in cocaine dealings.
At the trial, Judge Hoeveler angrily blocked attempts by Noriega’s lawyers to delve into Carlton’s pro-Contra arms smuggling. Rubino hit Carlton with a series of questions about his gun-flying activities, asking if they were ordered by Oliver North. Hoeveler sustained prosecution objections and grew testy as Rubino persisted. “Just stay away from it,” he snapped.
Rubino also produced a tape transcript in which Carlton lashes out at Noriega for having him imprisoned and seizing his airplane. Carlton acknowledged the conversation, which took place at the time he was in U.S. custody testifying before a Senate foreign relations subcommittee.
“Do you remember referring to General Noriega, saying, ‘That bastard took my airplane’?” Rubino asked. “Did you say … you were going to ‘thank’ General Noriega and then start laughing … Is not this your opportunity to get your revenge?”
Carlton appeared before a U.S. Senate subcommittee with a bag over his head to prevent identification and possible reprisal by drug traffickers. Reprisals or not, the employ of such men in the drug trials of the 1980s was a spectacle that fed the frenzy about how to fight a supposed drug war. A supposition in the war was the naive notion that men like Carlton, Bilonick and Noriega’s other accusers had turned state’s evidence for some purpose higher than getting out of jail. Carlton, Bilonick and Kalish, like many of the witnesses against Noriega, served only brief jail terms. U.S. prosecutors measured the testimony of these felons and thieves, not against the truth, but against whether their versions of events could be contradicted easily. They looked into the limpid eyes of these trusty prisoners and found what they saw to their liking.
The system left Floyd Carlton with only one logical choice: insert Noriega’s name in his confession of drug dealing and reap the benefits of the plea bargaining system. Instead of serving a lifetime in jail for his crimes, Carlton was allowed to keep his drug profits, retained his pilot’s license, won a new identity and a clean slate, hidden somewhere in the United States.
“It’s the only way we have to prosecute drug criminals,” said Gregorie. “It’s an imperfect system, but what do you expect? You’re not going to find Boy Scouts to testify against drug traffickers. And you’re not necessarily going to have the standard types of evidence. You have to make deals to get testimony from people on the inside.”
Gregorie’s argument goes on to say that such testimony becomes valid when many such witnesses provide information that coincides on basic facts. And that is precisely where the Noriega prosecution fails.
Carlton’s testimony at the trial was surprisingly weak, did not jibe with the testimony of Kalish and Bilonick and was subject to impressive impeachment by the Noriega defense. In the end, his testimony — the underpinning of the original indictment — was an afterthought; the DEA created a new ad hoc case against Noriega. Carlton was only one of twenty-six witnesses at the trial who were felons who won leniency, were paid and kept their drug earnings in return for testifying against Noriega. Most could not testify that they had met Noriega or even had firsthand knowledge of his alleged drug dealing. The trial divided the Drug Enforcement Administration between those tasked with convicting Noriega — “We had no evidence, so we had to do our duty and convict him anyway,” one of these agents said — and those who leaked information showing that Noriega had worked with the DEA.
Many of the original witnesses against Noriega were allowed to remain in hiding, because prosecutors and DEA investigators feared their questionable versions could be revealed as lies. Boris Olarte, a convicted marijuana dealer from Colombia, was supposed to testify that he had given Noriega four million dollars for a drug deal. In fact, it was his testimony before a grand jury that created the prosecution theory in the case — that greed had driven Noriega to sign up with the Medellin cartel, demand millions in protection money, then hide his participation in the affair behind his office. But the prosecution realized to its horror that Olarte’s testimony was inconsistent with other witnesses’. Olarte, who was arrested by Noriega’s anti-narcotics forces and, like Carlton, might have revenge as a motive, could actually sabotage the case by describing the wrong four million dollars delivered at the wrong time by the wrong man. Olarte was allowed to flee to Colombia because of an alleged mistake by a veteran federal agent who had him in custody. The twelve-member jury never found out about Olarte. The prosecution argued successfully to Judge William Hoeveler that Olarte was not germane to the case.
Olarte was not alone in testifying about the four-million-dollar payment to Noriega: Carlton, Kalish, Ricardo Tribaldos and Noriega’s former aide, Luis del Cid, all gave conflicting and mutually exclusive accounts of delivering alleged cartel protection money to Noriega.
If, for example, Carlton was delivering relatively small quantities of drugs on behalf of the cartel under Noriega’s protection in late 1983 through a clandestine airstrip, why was his business partner paying to ship far greater quantities directly through a Panama City airport, in a much easier operation?
Both Carlton and Bilonick claimed separately that they were responsible for developing Noriega’s relationship with the Medellin cartel. They contributed to at least three different explanations of how Noriega allegedly received four million dollars from the Medellin cartel, each contradicting the other. Another version was expected to come from a drug dealer named Ramon Navarro. Navarro died in an unexplained one-car crash in rural Dade County Florida months before the start of the Noriega trial.
Carlos Lehder, a Colombian drug dealer condemned by other U.S. prosecutors as a liar, was brought in to testify against Noriega, even though he had never met him. Gregorie was appalled that Lehder should be brought; Robert Merkle, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted Lehder in Tampa, was livid when he heard a deal had been struck. “This man is an enemy of the United States; he is an unrepentant, pathological liar.” Lehder won a secret deal with the government in which he was withdrawn from the maximum-security Marion Federal Penitentiary, along with a vague promise that he might be able to get out of his life sentence. In 1995, Lehder wrote a letter to Hoeveler, threatening to recant on the grounds that the government was reneging on its bargain. After the trial, a juror told a reporter that he had been most impressed by Lehder’s testimony.
Another witness, Gabriel Taboada, wrote the judge, also threatening to recant. Several other witnesses have recanted to friends and associates since the 1992 drug trial, saying the information they gave at the trial was based on a script supplied by prosecutors. Their words were shielded by journalistic pledges of keeping material off the record, or by their unwillingness to step forward for fear of continued government harassment.
“The whole case was a fabrication and I know Noriega didn’t do what I was asked to testify he did at the drug trial,” said one of these witnesses. “I doubt if any of the charges against him are true.”
This witness said he was coerced by the government to testify in order to get out of jail. “I have a life, but they still watch me,” the witness said.
While Noriega’s lawyers were stymied in every attempt to bring up politics at the trial, politics could not be separated from the proceedings. Then U.S. attorney Dexter Lehtinen and Michael Sullivan, the lead prosecutor in the case, were both told by Justice Department officials in the Bush administration that Noriega had to be convicted at all costs. They put out the word to potential witnesses among the prison population that a get-out-of-j ail-free option was there for the taking.
In late 1995, as the case moved toward a federal appeals court, Hoeveler was petitioned by the defense to hold a new trial. A key witness in the case, Ricardo Bilonick, had been brought in to testify as a result of bargaining between the U.S. attorney’s office and Colombia’s Cali cocaine cartel.
A onetime Panamanian diplomat, Bilonick operated an air-transport business in Panama called Inair, which sometimes handled weapons deliveries and other clandestine operations for the CIA. That line of inquiry was censored out of the Noriega trial. But Bilonick admitted that Inair did indeed transport drugs for the Medellin cartel.
Federal prosecutors admitted negotiating with Joel Rosenthal, a former U.S. prosecutor turned indicted lawyer for Jose Santacruz Londono, leader of Colombia’s Cali drug traffickers, to win Bilonick’s testimony. Moreover, they acknowledged the allegation that the Cali cartel may have paid Bilonick $1.25 million to induce him to testify.
In return, the government agreed to recommend leniency in a separate drug case involving Luis Santacruz (Lucho) Echeverri, the half-brother of Jose Santacruz Londono, leader of the Cali cartel. With Bilonick’s testimony, they bartered eight years off Lucho’s twenty-three-year trafficking sentence. Secret negotiations between the U.S. prosecutors in Miami and Joel Rosenthal.
Rosenthal and other Cali representatives landed Bilonick after they went out shopping for a “dynamite witness” who would be a valuable enough catch to bargain for leniency.
“I believe that you should give Lucho credit if Bilonick comes in and pleads guilty,” Rosenthal wrote to then U.S. attorney Myles Malman and his partner in the Noriega case, lead prosecutor Sullivan. “I cannot stress to you how critical it is to this agreement that my client’s role and identity be kept secret. He cannot withstand the exposure.”
“Remember, the appearance will be that you have made a deal with the Cali cartel to secure the cooperation and specific testimony of a witness against the Medellin cartel,” Rosenthal told the prosecutors.
“The conduct of the prosecutors in this case is so reprehensible, so lacking in moral compass, that it nearly defies rational analysis,” Noriega’s attorney said in a court brief. “Before this case, it would have been inconceivable that our government would enter into a mutual assistance agreement with a criminal organization. Yet the documents now before this Court prove without doubt that the United States Attorney’s Office contracted with the Cali cartel for a ‘dynamite’ witness to be used against General Noriega.”
Judge Hoeveler did not concede in public that a fraud had been committed by the prosecution, but he did recognize the seriousness of the charges about winning testimony as a result of using cocaine cartels as a mediator.
“Bilonick’s testimony hurt Noriega very badly; so did the testimony of Kalish,” Hoeveler said, amplifying on a statement he made at Bilonick’s sentencing hearing. “I think by anybody’s standards, he was one of the more important witnesses the government presented in the trial of the case, providing some essential connections that were not otherwise provided…. Those things were, I am sure, important to the jury.”
The problem was that if Bilonick and Carlton worked together and were employed by the Medellin cartel, as they testified, why would Carlton be shipping several hundred pounds of marijuana to the United States via a clandestine airstrip, paying Noriega $100,000 per flight in cartel money, while simultaneously Bilonick was shipping tons of cocaine directly into Panama City’s Paitilla Airport, with payments of $500,000 per flight to Noriega?
The answer, said Noriega’s defense, was that both men were lying — Carlton, to please the U.S. attorney’s office, save his skin and win revenge against Noriega; and Bilonick, because he was paid, and perhaps threatened, by the Cali cartel in return for his testimony.
Judge Hoeveler denied the defense motion for a new trial. He said “the evidence presented at the hearing is troubling,” but not serious enough to force a new trial. Privately, Hoeveler told me that he hoped the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals would rule on the case quickly, believing that ultimately the questions surrounding the Noriega case would and should be handled by the Supreme Court.
Death
I covered the Panamanian elections of 1989, the deteriorating relations with the United States, on through the October coup. On December 20, I was home with my family, preparing for the holidays, when I received a call from a friend in Washington. Our mutual Pentagon source, he said, was telling me to get to Panama immediately, that the U.S. invasion was about to begin.
I had just returned from a long stint in Colombia, where I wrote about the death of Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, the notorious don of the Medellin cartel. My later reporting would show that U.S. government advisers participated in the killing of Gacha, although President Bush would later deny any official U.S. role. From my vantage point in Bogota, I could not fully perceive the drumbeat and rhetoric building against Noriega. It seemed incredible to me that such an attack would actually take place; I did not believe the United States would invade Panama. I refused to take the advice of my source, even though I knew the information was authoritative.
By midnight, I knew I was wrong. I had to wait two long days before a journalists’ charter could fly to Panama to cover the invasion. Our Lockheed 1011 jet was hit by rifle fire from snipers below as it landed at Howard Air Force Base in the Canal Zone.
The U.S. military would not allow journalists to venture out of their perimeter and held the two hundred-odd reporters on that flight in protective custody overnight before releasing us. The next morning, the scope of the invasion was clear. Despite sniper fire and isolated skirmishes, the Americans had applied massive force that left the country devastated and the Panamanian Defense Forces decimated. In Chorrillo, the slum that surrounded the Panamanian Defense Forces headquarters, there was only charred wreckage from a fierce firefight that destroyed a neighborhood of shanty dwellings. The Americans said few civilians died, hardly any of them in Chorrillo. But some civilians claimed they trampled over dead bodies to flee for their lives that night. A blasted vehicle contained the carbonized remains of a human being, the body almost melted by whatever had attacked him.
Wherever there was death or destruction, the U.S. military assured reporters that it had been caused by Noriega’s men or by Dignity Battalions, whom Noriega described as civil defense but the Americans dismissed as thugs. This carbonized body was that of a member of the Dignity Battalions, we were told, although I doubt any identification was possible or had even been attempted. Using the words “Dignity Battalion,” I assumed, justified the remains being there, making the death a little more acceptable.
To find out more about the death, I went to the central city morgue at Santo Tomas Hospital. It was Christmas Eve. Small groups of people, mostly women, huddled outside the morgue, oppressed by the fetid smell of death in the tropical sun. They wailed and sobbed, holding handkerchiefs to their mouths as they tiptoed around pools of blood to enter the rank-smelling morgue and search through the bodies. The odor of death in the tropical heat would linger with them.
One of the women was looking for her brother, a navy lieutenant who had left home the night of the invasion and had not been seen since. She stood about fifty paces from the entrance to the morgue, a cement ramp-way surrounded by tropical contrasts — palms, bright flowers, casting occasional shadows across the entranceway. She waited for nothing but the courage to summon up a move toward the door. Her whimpering breath mingled with the sounds of others, whispering, turning away from the wind, which carried the terrible scent on the breeze, on to the city and the Pacific Ocean, where its essence was never quite gone.
A hospital official checked a list; her brother was not on it. “Go home before you look here; wait another day,” the official told her.
The sun slipped intermittently behind clouds that dimmed the tropical heat. The shade was good, but by afternoon, when the sun was bright again, the stench was overpowering.
Her brother had come home on December 20, 1989, the Wednesday afternoon of the U.S. invasion, to the family house in a nice section of the humble San Miguelito district and stayed — for a while. He spoke a bit, but in the hours before it became clear that Noriega was out he had kept mostly to himself, pacing in the yard or in the small living room. Then he had slipped away from home to go fight the Americans. The family feared he would now be one of the nameless dead, so she and her sister had come together to the morgue.
In the office, blessedly, air conditioners relieved the ever-present smell. There was a small Christmas tree on the desk, a poster reminding Panamanians to make cornea donations to the eye bank, and a prayer: “Lord, discover my solitude that I may later work with Thee for the salvation of the world.”
“Can we see the list of bodies brought in since Friday?” the older of the sisters said, placing a paper towel over her nose as she approached an orderly. “Go to the chapel tomorrow,” the worker said. “They will have pictures of the dead from all over the city.” It was a relief for the sister that she would not have to enter; the seventy bodies had been piled on top of one another, and trying to identify each one was a grisly task.
As she left the building, she glanced left and saw a body wrapped in embroidered cloth. “How do people work here?” she asked softly, half to herself. “How can this be happening?”
Standing nearby was another woman, a stranger seeking solace and giving some. Her daughter had been killed by a sniper’s bullet at a downtown hotel. She had come to recover the body. “She was twenty-five years old, so young,” the woman said, struggling to speak. “Bullets were flying everywhere. And one came through the window and got her here.” She placed an index finger in the furrow of her brow.
A doctor came along with another list of the dead. “What is this list?” someone asked. “It is the dead we have registered here,” said the doctor. It contained the names of more than one hundred people who had died in downtown Panama City in the seventy-two hours since the December 20 invasion of Panama. “But please understand,” the doctor said, grasping my arm. “This does not include the babies and children. You must understand me.” He then walked hurriedly away, ignoring a request that he explain what that meant.
The Americans and the Panamanians who took power when Noriega was overthrown said 326 Panamanians were killed. A doctor at the American Gorgas Hospital in the old Canal Zone said the number was impossibly low. The number and the reality had become a political affair — some declaring the low figure, some declaring ten times more deaths, but none fully justifying their claims.
“It is not the quantity of the dead,” said Juan Mendez, the executive director of the Washington-based independent human rights organization, Americas Watch, when asked how he would recommend solving the question of how many people died. “It is a question of why anyone had to die at all.”
While Noriega stood on a promontory and watched the firefight in Panama City on the first night of the invasion, Roberto Miller Saldana lay dying. Miller Saldana and four fellow transit policemen were standing at a small highway guard post near Howard air base when the first wave of U.S. troops arrived. Miller Saldana was one of the three thousand or four thousand members of Noriega’s Panamanian Defense Forces who was no soldier at all. Miller Saldana was a cop on the beat.
When the Americans began pouring out of the U.S. base, Miller Saldana and his friends on duty nearby started to run. He didn’t make it; the others did. So the likely first casualty of the U.S. invasion of Panama was a Panamanian policeman shot in the back. His cousin, Milsa de Hastings, told about Miller’s life between gagging breaths outside the morgue. It was her grim task to identify Roberto’s body.
“He was a transit cop — he wouldn’t fight, he wouldn’t resist, all he had was a pistol. One of his friends called us — they made it, he was the only one that didn’t. I guess he just didn’t run as fast as the others.”
When Miller Saldana’s wife, cousin and brother-in-law, Walter Valenzuela, arrived at the hospital, security was tight. U.S. soldiers wearing camouflage gear and greasepaint checked identification of those entering and exiting the grounds. There was confusion about where to receive information on the dead. The information desk had ceased reading out the list of names, and anxious people were unsure where to go to search for missing family members.
Finally, they were allowed to walk into the makeshift morgue. They found the ghastly scene of bodies splayed upon bodies, blood congealing on the floor and splattered on the walls, flies getting caught as they flicked at the sticky red pools. After stepping around the room, they found a tag with his name and looked over the remains. Walter walked back from the morgue. “It was him, I got a good look,” Valenzuela said. “There were two bullet holes in his back.”
On a tour of Panama City, I observed that the damage was extensive. The key military buildings of the Panamanian military were gutted. The headquarters of the National Investigative Police, the DENI, was a shell. Along city streets, fires burned, vigilantes bullied people and anarchy was evident. Every road was blockaded by citizens protecting their property and by U.S. soldiers, who patrolled only strategic checkpoints.
Later, the U.S. military commander, General Maxwell Thurman, would face criticism for failing to protect Panamanian civilians. Americas Watch said the United States violated its obligations under the Geneva Conventions. “With respect to the United States forces, our report concluded that the tactics and weapons utilized resulted in an inordinate number of civilian victims, in violation of specific obligations under the Geneva Conventions. The attack on El Chorrillo, and a similar attack in an urban area of Colon, were conducted without prior warning to civilians, even though the outcome of the attack would not have been effected by such a warning. Under the Geneva Conventions, attacking forces are under a permanent duty to minimize harm to civilians. We concluded that the command of the invasion forces violated that rule.”
One young man who fought in the Panama war was a nineteen-year-old American paratrooper named Manny, a Hispanic kid from Arizona. I met with Manny at Fort Bragg, NC, interviewing him on condition I not use his full name. The experience of the Panama invasion left emotional scars; he saw his life running an endless newsreel in the seven seconds it took to jump from a U.S. Air Force C-130 transport into the brief but confusingly fierce battle at Rio Hato airfield.
It was now the stuff of his recurrent nightmare: fires were blazing below him in the darkness; as the land came up beneath him, and amid the sparks of gunfire and explosions, he had the comforting feeling that it would all be quick, that death would be rapid and numbing.
Suddenly there was gunfire and blood all around — four people dead on the highway. And in the transition from sleep to consciousness, he realized again that it was no dream. It was the invasion of Panama, and he was the killer.
“I look back at Panama, and I think sometimes that I’m too sensitive, maybe too nice for the job. I was always taught that human life was sacred. To me, the hardest thing is having to deal with the fact that I took another life — a couple of them. … It bothers me to see these guys [who have never seen war]. It doesn’t faze them at all.”
Manny’s one-night war, the night of the Panama invasion on December 20, 1989, went far beyond anything he could have prepared for. Manny went through hell that night.
When the jump was over, he was stuck with tons of equipment on his back, a turtle rolled over on its shell. He struggled free, marveling at being alive, and ran till he found some other men.
They mounted a roadblock on the Pan-American Highway, which cuts straight across the Rio Hato airstrip. “We had been told to shoot at anything that moved. And all of a sudden, a car came through. It jumped the road parallel to the runway we were guarding. They wouldn’t stop, so we lit the car up right there on the runway. And we didn’t know exactly who was in it. But since I spoke Spanish and all, I had the lovely job to see what we had gotten. We were thinking that they might have been Machos del Monte, but they weren’t. Right there — boom, boom, boom, boom — all four of them bought it.”
Manny and his companions tried to tell themselves that maybe these were spies or special forces operatives, but the truth was evident. They were two teenage couples out on a date.
“There was a lot of blood…. Not a pleasant sight, not a pleasant sight at all. But what are you going to do? If you would have hesitated, with my luck, it would have been a carload of heavily armed infantry types who would have handed the rest of those guys up. I couldn’t see myself having to deal with the fact that because of my hesitation four or five good American boys died.
“I’d like to go back to Panama, maybe with my father, take a look in other circumstances — tell the people that I didn’t go down there to kill Panamanians, not by any stretch of the imagination. I’d like to do that.”
There was disagreement about exactly what happened at Rio Hato. U.S. spokesmen said there was fierce fighting, but Panamanian civilians said the attack was a one-sided assault by U.S. troops, with only a minimal response from Panamanian fighters, mostly in the first moments as they saw paratroopers landing against the moonlit sky.
After that, they said, most of the Panamanians and students at the school ran off into the bushes and kept running. Apparently, a few Panamanian soldiers stayed around for a day or two, taking occasional potshots or directing mortars at moving targets.
A U.S. intelligence source in Panama agreed that there was little resistance after the parachute landing at Rio Hato. “There was some firing at first, but there really wasn’t much of a fight,” the source said. “They either surrendered or mostly fled to the hills.”
One of the witnesses to the attack was Javier, a thirty-nine-year-old civilian teacher at the air base. The teacher said that after he was captured, he saw one student whose intestines were split open by a horizontal burst of automatic weapon fire. That student, he said, appeared gravely injured. He said he also saw several students with lesser bullet wounds. He overheard Americans talking about their losses. “They said six had died,” he said. He had seen two dead paratroopers.
A special forces soldier gave a tour of the quarters of the officer in charge of the military academy. It was evident that someone had burst into the room, tossed in a grenade and fired a headboard volley of machine-gun fire at the major. Pieces of brain were scattered in pools on the floor. I was told that several students were killed and perhaps these were the remains of one of them.
An American soldier stood outside and spoke to me when no one else was around. “When do you think Bush will be satisfied with what he’s done and let us go home?” he asked.
U.S. military planners said they came to Rio Hato highly armed — with Army Ranger paratroopers, helicopters and special forces units — because their aim was to carry out a quick operation inflicting the fewest casualties and suffering the fewest losses possible. Rio Hato was considered critical to the United States because it was home to two units of the Panamanian Defense Forces considered to be among the most loyal to General Manuel Antonio Noriega.
“What they wanted was a coup de main [overwhelming shattering blow] and they put all the force in there and the equipment,” said a high-ranking military source in the U.S. Southern Command in Panama.
Descriptions of the operation at Rio Hato from both Panamanian and U.S. sources show that the poorly trained Panamanian Defense Forces were totally unequipped for the sophisticated attack launched by the United States.
Panama seemed a proving ground for American military mobilization. It marked the debut of the multibillion-dollar Stealth bomber in combat, fighting an enemy that had no radar to be fooled by its supposedly low profile, no planes or rockets with which to challenge its domination of the airways. The debut was not a glowing success: two bombs dropped and both missed the airstrip. One was a dud, leaving a crater near a barracks; the other fell on a village about a quarter of a mile away.
“You could probably do without those [Stealth bombers],” said an officer at the U.S. Southern Command. “That was probably a political decision. Somebody had to prove it could at least fly.”
Rio Hato, which served as a World War II air corps staging point for the United States, had no home air fleet. In fact, Panama had no fighter planes at all and its few helicopters and small plane fleet were immobilized in Panama City moments after the U.S. invasion began in the early morning hours of December 20.
As evidence of the rudimentary, failed effort to protect the base, a U.S. infantryman who gave a tour of the battle site showed an overturned Panamanian personnel carrier in a ditch with an unused antitank weapon, probably the highest-power weapon available to the Panamanians.
“We don’t know how it got there; maybe they were trying to get away and it flipped, but it wasn’t hit,” he said. Two days earlier, he said, they found a boot with part of a leg still in it in the cab of the vehicle.
A witness to the assault at Rio Hato was visibly shaking when a tall American man approached him. Eyes to the ground, he would not speak. “Don’t worry,” the teacher was telling Baltasar, a twenty-year-old student who asked that his last name not be used. “He’s an American, but he’s a newspaper reporter. He won’t hurt you.”
Baltasar, who lived with his family in a bullet-scarred house in a civilian setdement about a mile from the Rio Hato base entrance, said he saw many civilian injuries that night.
“I saw cars blasted,” he said, pointing to the Pan American Highway, several yards from his house. “I saw them grab one guy a few days ago on his bicycle and throw him to the ground…. The Americans were just shooting at anyone on the road, taking prisoners and taking control of all the cars.”
After the attack, Baltasar was taken with all the other males of Rio Hato and neighboring towns to a detention center on the base. He was released after several days and returned to the ruins of his neighborhood.
“The soldiers came back afterwards, and they deactivated nine mines on this side of the fence,” he said. “But on the side you are on, they didn’t remove any mines; they didn’t tell us where they are. They just told us to walk where we have already walked.”
This was the Panama I saw during and after the U.S. invasion: no enemies among the barefoot poor folk huddled in tents behind barbed wire after their houses were destroyed; there was no guerrilla war, no high-and-mighty international agenda in Panama. I saw suffering and disgrace and I was embarrassed by the fear I invoked because I was from the nation of the conquerors.
Noriega’s decline and fall, the U.S. invasion of Panama, the Noriega drug trial and conviction have been transcended, perhaps, by events of greater specific weight on the scales of world history. But for those who lived through the invasion of Panama, the death and destruction they suffered are universal. And for journalism, Panama stands apart as a microcosm of what can go wrong, a dismal lesson in how the resident wisdom can guide the course of events and misguide an understanding of what happened.
“There never was a just [war], never an honorable one on the part of the instigator of the war,” Mark Twain wrote. “… statesmen will invent cheap lies putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked; and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities … and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
The death, destruction and injustice wrought in the name of fighting Noriega — and the lies surrounding that enterprise — were threats to the basic American principles of democracy. That will not change until history is repaired, until self-deception is replaced by common sense and chauvinism is erased by reality. My effort was to go beyond the obvious and the already written, to show that behind the complacent sense that nothing went wrong, much to the contrary, U.S. policy toward Panama in the 1980s was on an ignorant, twisted and deadly course.
Nothing makes a soldier so angry and can be so unfair as the suggestion that he is callous about having to kill; if he is balanced, a soldier hates to kill. He kills because he is so trained and so ordered. He does so with faith in his country, whatever country, and with anguish in his heart.
Soldiers were ordered to kill in Panama and they did so after being told that they had to rescue a country from the clamp of a cruel, depraved dictator; once they acted, the people of their country marched lockstep behind them.
It was left for the Panamanians and the few observers of that attack to ask how it could have happened. Mostly, the event receded into a vague history, forgotten and cast aside. But this was the United States of America, under whose laws the president and the Senate by a two-thirds vote in 1977 pledged to never again interfere in the internal affairs of Panama — Panama, a creation of Teddy Roosevelt; Panama, the prototype of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine.
The signing of the Panama Canal Treaty was a watershed in relations with Latin America; a decided turn away from past conduct and intended to establish a new relationship of equality not only with Panama, but also with all of the hemisphere. This was so much the case that the United States under President Carter invited the other countries of the hemisphere to sign the Panama Neutrality Treaty to cement a new regional partnership based on sovereignty and mutual respect.
To say that the situation on December 20, 1989, was so extraordinary that Noriega, whatever he did, was worse than Pinochet or Stroessner or any other dictator in Latin America or that Panama deserved what it received is to divert attention from the essential truth: the United States under George Bush invaded Panama because he had the power and was able to do so to meet his own agenda. Bush needed no declaration of war and any justification would do; he was convinced and self-deceiving in his decision; the consequences and the lives were beyond his consideration.
The shambles of U.S. actions and responsibility in Panama were the result of the actions of rigid and ruthless ideologues; Noriega was the target, but the responsibility lies with a country whose citizens should not be so complacent as to fall for the rhetoric. At the very least, the consequences must be analyzed, the impact must be seen and the culprits must be revealed for the sake of history.
Peter Eisner wishes to thank Les Payne, Knut Royce, Michael O’Kane, William Dorman and Richard Cole, among many colleagues and friends who provided encouragement. Musha Salinas Eisner, who transcribed and edited taped sessions, provided boundless love and support. This work is in memory of Bernard Eisner.
