A mutilated corpse without a head, stuffed into a canvas bag made for delivering U.S. mail, set off the long chain of events that led the United States to invade Panama and overthrow its leader. The remains were those of an outspoken Panamanian patriot who disappeared on an autumn day in 1985. His head was never found.
The murder of Hugo Spadafora, one of the most flamboyant figures in modern Panamanian history, stunned a country where such crimes are all but unknown. Revulsion rose to a new level when the results of an autopsy on Spadafora’s torso were released, showing that he had suffered through hours of unspeakable torture and that his head had been slowly severed while he was still alive. These facts alone, however, were hardly enough to rouse the United States into action. During the mid-1980s, senior American leaders, including President Ronald Reagan, vigorously supported military regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador, whose troops carried out comparable crimes every day. What made the Spadafora murder such a crucial turning point in Panamanian history was that it signaled the regime’s slide into irrationality. That is a quality the United States can tolerate in many of its allies but not one whose domain is so close to the Panama Canal.
General Manuel Antonio Noriega, commander of the Panama Defense Forces, had good reason to believe himself above the law. Within Panama he ruled almost by whim. In the wider world, he had accumulated a remarkably diverse set of friends. He collaborated simultaneously with some of Colombia’s most powerful drug dealers and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration; with the Sandinista army in Nicaragua and guerrillas who were fighting to depose it; with the CIA and the Cuban intelligence service. Wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of an illegitimate child of the Panama City slums, amply supplied with all he needed to feed his considerable private appetites, and with powerful allies around the world, he came to consider himself invulnerable. It took a full-scale military invasion to show him he was wrong.
Noriega rose from the streets, but despite his occasional stage-managed parachute jumps and scuba diving expeditions, he never became anyone’s real hero. He was short and stubby, and had a diffident manner, a weak handshake, and a face so badly pockmarked that behind his back, people called him cara de piña—pineapple face. Although he was capable of extreme cruelty, he could collapse into tears when he thought danger was approaching. He chose the military as his only realistic chance for advancement in life, and his early career was marked by episodes of rape and other sorts of brutality. Twice he attended courses at the U. S. Army School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone. The first course was in jungle warfare, and his performance was abysmal; he finished 147th among 161 students. In his second, though, he was a great success, and rated “outstanding” by his instructor. That course was in counterintelligence. Noriega had found his life’s work.
As Noriega was climbing out of Panama City’s hardscrabble Terraplen district, Hugo Spadafora, who was six years younger, came of age in the prosperous seaside town of Chitré, a hundred miles to the southwest. From his earliest years, Spadafora lived a life very different from that of the man who would later become his mortal enemy. His father was an immigrant from Italy, a cosmopolitan intellectual who owned a furniture factory and became popular enough to be elected mayor of Chitré. The family sent Hugo to medical school in Bologna, and while he was there, he fell in with a group of leftists who were closely following the progress of anticolonial revolutions in Africa. Fired with enthusiasm for their cause, he decided to offer his medical services to rebels fighting in Portuguese Guinea, now Guinea-Bissau. He spent a year with rebels in the Guinean jungle, impressing them deeply enough so that after they won independence, in 1974, they named a street in the capital after him. Upon returning to Panama, he wrote a book called Thoughts and Experiences of a Medical Guerrilla. By the time he was thirty, many Panamanians knew his story and considered him a romantic hero.
In 1968, Panamanian military officers seized power in a bloodless coup. Spadafora joined an underground cell devoted to overthrowing their regime. He was soon arrested. In other Latin American countries he might have rotted in jail or been made to “disappear,” but the new Panamanian strongman, General Omar Torrijos, was not a dictator in the classic mold. Although hardly a paragon of democratic virtue, he was a visionary determined to wrest power from the country’s entrenched elite and pull the Panamanian masses out of poverty. Two weeks after Spadafora was arrested, Torrijos summoned him from his cell for a long conversation about revolution, social reform, and the challenges of power. When it was over, he made Spadafora an offer: instead of returning to prison, he could go to a remote spot in the Darién jungle and open a health clinic. Spadafora instantly accepted and plunged into his work with zealous passion. Later Torrijos named him director of medical services in Colón, the country’s poorest province, and then promoted him to deputy minister of health. In the late 1970s, bored with the bureaucrat’s life, Spadafora asked for and received Torrijos’s permission to raise a guerrilla squad to fight alongside Sandinistas, who were rebelling against the dynastic Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua.
Only a leader as multifaceted as Torrijos could have nurtured the careers of both these men. They represented the two sides of his character and his regime. Like Spadafora, Torrijos was an idealist who scorned the ideologies of left and right, and looked everywhere for ideas that were practical enough to improve the lives of ordinary people. He was also a career soldier who had seized power in a coup, knew he had many enemies, and relied on amoral thugs like Noriega to protect his oneman rule. In 1970 he promoted Noriega to one of the most sensitive of all government posts, chief of G-2, the office of military intelligence.
Spadafora was everything Noriega was not: tall, fair-skinned, highly articulate, improbably handsome, and immensely self-confident. Over the years, as Noriega slipped steadily toward the criminality that would become his hallmark, Spadafora came to detest him. In 1981 he presented a sheaf of evidence to Torrijos.
“Omar, you have to be very careful with Noriega,” Spadafora warned Torrijos. “Noriega is controlling you. Noriega is involved with drugs. Noriega is trafficking in arms. Noriega is going to kill you.”
Torrijos asked Spadafora to repeat these charges in Noriega’s presence, and, with typical fearlessness, Spadafora did so. He accused Noriega to his face not only of smuggling guns and cocaine but of running a lucrative racket in which he had his men spy on wealthy Panamanians so he could learn their private secrets and blackmail them.
“Noriega was shocked,” the Wall Street Journal reporter Frederick Kempe later wrote. “No one had ever dared confront him so. Everyone knew Spadafora had driven the final nail either into Noriega’s coffin or into his own.”
Six months later, on July 30, 1981, Torrijos died in a helicopter crash. It was ruled an accident, but more than a few Panamanians suspected foul play. Whatever the truth, the force that had kept Noriega and Spadafora from each other’s throats was gone. Their rivalry intensified. It spilled into public view when Spadafora told journalists that he had evidence of Noriega’s crimes and would soon present it so Panamanians could learn the truth about this “pseudo-commander who has reached his position and rank through treason and opportunism.” Noriega was not amused.
“Hugo could die any day now,” he told one of their mutual friends. “Maybe even by swallowing a fishbone.”
This looming confrontation was averted, at least temporarily, when Spadafora turned his attention back to Nicaragua. He had become disillusioned with the Sandinista regime he had fought to install, and spent several years trying to organize a force to help overthrow it. But because he refused to cooperate with the CIA, which was directing the anti-Sandinista army known as the contras, he was cut off from vital supplies and military intelligence. Finally he turned his focus back on his homeland, and particularly on Noriega. Against the advice of friends and relatives, he decided to return openly.
At his home in San José, Costa Rica, Spadafora rose early on September 13, 1985. He began his day with yoga exercises, then ate breakfast and set off in a taxi toward the Panamanian border. One of his friends had offered to meet him there and drive him to Panama City, but Spadafora decided to take a bus instead, fearing that if he traveled in a private car, Noriega’s men might arrange to kill him in a staged crash. The bus made its first stop in Concepción, a dusty little town about ten miles inside of Panamanian territory. There an officer of the Panama Defense Forces stepped aboard, found Spadafora, and lifted his bag off the rack above his head.
“Come with me,” he said simply.
Spadafora rose to follow. As he was leaving the bus, he stopped to show his identity card to the driver.
“So you will know who I am,” he said. “I’m Dr. Hugo Spadafora. I’m being detained by this member of the Defense Forces.”
The driver asked Spadafora to pay his fare, which was $1.20, and then watched as the two men crossed the town plaza. Another officer joined them. They walked three blocks to the local military post and disappeared behind its gate.
The next day, a Costa Rican farmer who lived near the Panamanian border was rounding up stray chickens when he saw two legs sticking up from a muddy pond. He waded out and found that a human body had been dumped into a sack marked as property of the United States Postal Service. When police arrived, they found that the body had no head. The next day it was identified as that of Hugo Spadafora. It bore clear evidence of torture. The stomach was full of blood that Spadafora had swallowed as his head was being slowly cut off.
“They Executed Spadafora!” screamed the banner headline in the beleaguered opposition newspaper La Prensa. It carried a statement from the victim’s father, a revered figure in his own right, that set the terms for the conflict that would build for the next four years before exploding into a world crisis.
“The macabre murder of Dr. Hugo Spadafora was planned and coldly executed by the chief of G-2, Colonel Julio Ow Young, carrying out the orders of the commander of the [Defense Forces], General Manuel A. Noriega,” the statement said. “We have complete and authentic proof of these facts.”
FROM THE DAYS OF SPANISH COLONIAL RULE, PANAMA HAS BEEN PRIZED FOR the short, low-lying route it offers between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In the nineteenth century, officials in Washington began dreaming of a sea route across the Central American isthmus. Their decision to build a canal through Panama instead of Nicaragua led them to foment the bloodless revolution that brought the Republic of Panama into existence. The canal, which opened in 1914, gave the United States sovereignty over the Canal Zone and a unique stake in the new nation. It also led to the steady growth of patriotic nationalism there. This nationalism inevitably took on an anti-Yankee tone. Over the years it led to spasms of violence.
The bloodiest outburst came in 1964, when several hundred Panamanian students marched toward the canal carrying their flag and a banner reading, “Panama Is Sovereign in the Canal Zone.” Clashes broke out, and in one of them the Panamanian flag was ripped. That set off three days of rioting in which twenty-two Panamanians and four American soldiers were killed, hundreds were wounded, and $2 million worth of property was destroyed.
The 1964 uprising marked the emergence of a new form of Panamanian nationalism. It was focused on a specific goal: taking back the Canal Zone and giving Panama control of the waterway that is its greatest resource. This movement also became the instrument by which the country’s poor, nonwhite majority hoped to take control of their country from the pro-American oligarchs they called rabiblancos, or whitetails. The 1968 military coup in which Torrijos seized power was its triumph.
“I do not want to enter history,” Torrijos said in one of his first speeches after the coup. “I want to enter the Canal Zone.”
In an act of courageous statesmanship, President Jimmy Carter launched an urgent round of talks on the canal’s future soon after he took office in January 1977. Later that year, American and Panamanian negotiators reached agreement on two treaties that fundamentally altered the long-standing relationship between their two countries. The United States agreed to withdraw completely from the Canal Zone by 2000 and turn the canal over to Panamanian control. Panama, in exchange, guaranteed the canal’s “permanent neutrality.” The treaties stirred intense debate, but both countries ultimately ratified them.
These treaties might have led Panama toward stability, but that prospect began evaporating soon after Torrijos perished in 1981. His successors shared his thinly veiled contempt for traditional democracy but not his passion for social justice. By 1983, one of the most notoriously corrupt among them, General Noriega, had emerged as commander of the National Guard—which he renamed the Panama Defense Forces—and the country’s strongman. The first figure to dispute his power was Hugo Spadafora, who paid for his brazen challenge with his life.
Noriega was at a dermatology clinic in Geneva when Spadafora was killed, undergoing treatment that he hoped would repair his deeply scarred face. There he received an urgent telephone call from Major Luis Córdoba, head of the unit that had captured Spadafora. Evidently neither man realized that American intelligence agents were eavesdropping.
“We have the rabid dog in our hands,” Major Córdoba told his commander.
“And what does one do with a rabid dog?” Noriega asked in reply. That was the go-ahead soldiers needed in order to begin the long night of torture that ended in Spadafora’s decapitation.
A year earlier, Noriega had directed an electoral fraud from which Nicolás Ardito Barletta, a brilliant but colorless Chicago-trained economist, had emerged as president of Panama. Now he demanded that Barletta publicly absolve him of involvement in the Spadafora murder. Barletta refused, and on September 27,1985, two weeks after the murder, Noriega forced him to resign. He left office with a prophetic warning.
“Listen to me,” Barletta told Noriega. “The day will come when you are sorry for what you are doing. Remember my words.”
NORIEGA HAD GOOD REASON TO BELIEVE HE COULD RIDE OUT THIS STORM. He had accumulated an extraordinarily diverse and powerful group of friends. Among them were dictators, guerrilla fighters, drug smugglers, and a variety of high-ranking American officials.
The CIA first recruited Noriega as an informer when he was a young cadet at the Peruvian military academy. His salary increased as he rose through the military ranks, and by the time he became chief of military intelligence, it reached $110,000 annually. He was one of the agency’s most important “assets” in Latin America, even meeting personally with CIA director George H. W. Bush during a visit to Washington in 1976.
In the early 1980s, Noriega formed a partnership with the drug cartel based in Medellin, Colombia, allowing it free access to clandestine airstrips in Panama from which it shipped vast amounts of cocaine into the United States. For this service, the cartel paid him fees in the range of $100,000 per flight. Typically for Noriega, however, he was also working as a principal informer for the Drug Enforcement Administration. He gave it valuable information that led to the arrest of hundreds of traffickers from rival cartels, and to the seizure of tons of cocaine. Senior American officials sent him flattering letters of commendation.
During this period, Noriega further endeared himself to the Reagan administration by agreeing to help the Nicaraguan contras. While publicly mouthing platitudes about the need for peace and cooperation among Central American countries, he gave the contras invaluable covert support. He welcomed their leaders in Panama, permitted the United States to train their fighters in secret at Panamanian bases, and turned a blind eye when the Americans began using Howard Air Force Base, in the Canal Zone, for clandestine flights carrying weapons to their bases along the Nicaragua-Honduras border.
After Noriega forced President Barletta out of office, the American ambassador in Panama, Everett Briggs, wanted to begin increasing American pressure on him. His boss, Undersecretary of State Elliott Abrams, a vigorous supporter of the contras, overruled him. Two months later, eager to learn firsthand what the United States thought of him, Noriega traveled to Washington to meet the CIA director, William Casey. Casey had been the chief architect of the contra project, and rather than reprimand Noriega or demand that he change his behavior, he was downright friendly.
“He let Noriega off the hook,” a senior State Department official, Francis McNeil, later told a congressional committee. “He scolded Noriega only for letting the Cubans use Panama to evade the trade embargo, but never mentioned narcotics nor, if I remember correctly, democracy.”
At the end of 1985, the newly appointed national security adviser, Admiral John Poindexter, came to Panama to meet with Noriega, and although according to some reports he was tougher than Casey had been, he was not forceful enough to impress his host. The Reagan administration was so obsessed with the idea of overthrowing the Sandinistas that it was ready to support even a scoundrel like Noriega as long as he continued to help the contras.
As this became clear to Panamanian opposition figures, they began looking for other ways to influence American policy. One of them, Winston Spadafora, a brother of the murdered dissident, flew to Washington and managed to persuade Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs, to hold hearings on Panama in the spring of 1986. A week before the first scheduled hearing, Abrams called Helms and asked him to cancel it. He said that Noriega was “being really helpful to us” and was “really not that big a problem.”
“The Panamanians have promised they are going to help us with the contras,” Abrams said. “If you have the hearings, it’ll alienate them. It will provoke them, and they won’t help us with the contras.”
Helms went ahead with his hearings anyway. They led to no spectacular revelations but drew attention to the administration’s extraordinary level of tolerance for Noriega. A couple of months later, the New York Times published a front-page story by reporter Seymour Hersh headlined “Panama Strongman Said to Trade in Drugs, Arms and Illicit Money.” The Washington Post followed the next day with an even more damning story, cowritten by another widely respected reporter, Bob Woodward, that added details about Noriega’s crimes and detailed his long relationship with the CIA.
Opinion in Washington slowly began to turn against Noriega. The director of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Jack Lawn, began a quiet investigation of his role in the drug trade, and refused a request from one of Noriega’s advocates, Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council staff, that he call it off. Then two United States senators from opposite ends of the political spectrum, Helms and John Kerry of Massachusetts, introduced an amendment to the 1986 Intelligence Authorization Act that required the CIA to investigate Noriega’s involvement in drug trafficking, arms smuggling, money laundering, and the Spadafora murder. Casey was livid.
“You don’t understand!” he told Helms in an angry telephone conversation. “You are destroying our policy. There are some things you don’t know about, things Noriega is doing for the United States.”
The amendment passed anyway, but it had only symbolic effect, since the CIA report on Noriega’s activities was bland and inconclusive. As 1987 began, el man, as he was called—a play on his initials, MAN—had reason to feel secure. He met regularly with American military commanders and with the new American ambassador, Arthur Davis. Confident that he had outwitted his enemies in Washington, he decided to move against his most powerful Panamanian rival, Colonel Roberto Díaz Herrera, who was second in command of the Panama Defense Forces.
The two officers had been on uneasy terms for several years. Both had wanted to succeed Torrijos, and several months after his death, they agreed on a compromise under which Noriega would take the strongman’s role until 1987, and then resign to make way for Díaz Herrera. As the date for the transfer of power approached, it became clear that Noriega had no intention of stepping down. That sent Díaz Herrera off on a bizarre adventure that took him beyond politics into the realm of the occult and supernatural.
With its broad racial and cultural mix, including influences from Africa, the Caribbean, and South America, Panama is overlaid with interest in spiritualism. Many people believe in hexes, curses, faith healing, time travel, reincarnation, and astral projection. Few considered it strange that Noriega consulted spiritualists and that he felt safe only when he was near his amulets and charms. No one, however, could have imagined that this aspect of Panamanian life would play a decisive role in bringing him down.
As Díaz Herrera fell under increasing pressure from Noriega, he came into contact with an elderly mystic whose guru was an Indian holy man named Sai Baba. She told him that Sai Baba had the power to “stop rainbows, heal the sick, materialize all kinds of objects, read the past, present and future of everyone, and transform himself into any human or non-human form.” He was fascinated, and spent hours poring over a book of Sai Baba’s wisdom.
“You must dive deep to get the pearls,” the book said.
Díaz Herrera meditated at length on what this and other obscure maxims meant for him. He also began behaving in odd ways. Fellow officers reported that he walked through corridors of La Comandancia, the headquarters of the defense forces, with his arms held out in front of him to absorb psychic energy. He gave up alcohol, stopped seeing his mistresses, took up a diet of natural foods, and lost more than thirty pounds. Using his government expense account, he brought a series of occult practitioners to Panama.
“Noriega is your enemy,” one of them told him. “He is evil, and will do everything in his power to destroy you. The big war we talked about is now clear to me. It is between you and him. It will start soon.”
That “big war” exploded in June 1987. It began with Noriega dismissing Díaz Herrera from the defense forces; offering him a diplomatic post in Japan, which he refused; and then announcing that he would remain as commander of the defense forces for another five years. Days later, Díaz Herrera struck back with the only weapon he had. He began spilling Noriega’s secrets.
In a series of spectacular interviews with reporters from Panamanian newspapers and television stations, Díaz Herrera confirmed many of the most serious charges against his former comrade. He asserted that Noriega had directed the 1984 electoral fraud that put Barletta in office, worked closely with the Medellin drug cartel, and ordered the murder of Hugo Spadafora. Never had anyone so close to Noriega turned against him with such vehemence.
An outraged Noriega denounced this attack as “high treason” and “assassination because it comes from the bosom of the institution.” That did nothing to calm the explosion of support for Díaz Herrera that burst forth in the hours after his interviews were broadcast. Scores of supporters, including priests and nuns, crowded into his living room, jostling for space with a swarm of journalists, and spilled out onto the lawn. Winston Spadafora turned up. So did Father Javier Villanueva, a Roman Catholic priest who had emerged as one of Noriega’s boldest critics. Through it all, Díaz Herrera remained serene. He sat on a prayer rug in his living room, holding near him a gold-colored plaque that depicted a lotus flower surrounded by symbols of the world’s major religions.
“I am a criminal,” he confessed. “I am ready to go to jail for my crimes, but I think Noriega should go with me.”
These potent charges set off days of anti-Noriega protest. Thousands of people poured onto the streets of Panama City. Noriega responded by sending soldiers to fire tear-gas grenades at them and beat them as they fled.
On June 26, over the objections of the Reagan administration, the United States Senate passed a resolution calling on Noriega to step down while charges against him were investigated. Senator Kerry, who had become chairman of the Senate subcommittee dealing with drugs and terrorism, intensified an investigation of Noriega that he had been pursuing for more than a year. Even after the street protests in Panama City ended and Díaz Herrera faded from the scene—he issued a statement repudiating his charges, then fled the country—the anti-Noriega movement in Washington continued to gain momentum. Two of Noriega’s most powerful supporters in the Reagan administration, Elliott Abrams and Oliver North, fell from power as a result of their involvement in the Iran-contra scandal, a covert scheme to sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to prop up the contras. Then, early in 1988, two grand juries in Florida handed up criminal indictments charging Noriega and more than a dozen others, including Pablo Escobar, the boss of the Medellin cartel, with conspiring to send tons of cocaine into the United States.
These indictments were not the only reason the United States began turning against Noriega. He had embraced a peace plan for Central America—named after Contadora, the Panamanian island where regional leaders launched it—that the Reagan administration strongly opposed. Noriega’s friends in Washington began looking for a way to ease him out of power. During 1988 they made a series of overtures to him. At one point, the White House even announced publicly that it would seek to have criminal charges against him dropped if he would agree to retire. Although he came close to accepting this offer, he changed his mind at the last moment. His obstinacy seemed like madness in the face of the forces that were aligning against him, but as the veteran foreign correspondent Tom Buckley later speculated, there may have been method to it.
Why shouldn’t Noriega just retire—and enjoy his millions? That was one idea heard over and over in Panama around this time; everyone assumed the general was finished. But Noriega could not have retired; he would have been murdered by the Medellin cartel. In power, Noriega was useful to them. Out of power, he was dangerous; he knew too much. Staying in power and staying alive were the same for Noriega.
Presidents of Panama never meant much to Noriega. He insisted that they obey his every order, and fired them when they balked. When an opposition figure, Guillermo Endara, won the presidential election held in May 1989, Noriega simply ignored the result and imposed his own candidate instead.
For many years Noriega seemed able to manipulate presidents of the United States almost as easily. Jimmy Carter cut off his CIA stipend but blocked efforts to indict him on drug and arms-smuggling charges. Ronald Reagan ignored his crimes in order to ensure his continued support for the contras. When George H. W. Bush, a former CIA director who was intimately aware of Noriega’s activities, took office, in January 1989, Noriega had good reason to believe he had another friend in the White House.
Bush, however, came into office with the handicap of being considered weak and indecisive, and had to deal with what commentators called “the wimp factor.” In May, after Noriega imposed his own president against the will of Panamanian voters, Bush announced that he was sending 1,800 troops to American bases in Panama, a step that was intended as a message to Noriega. When a reporter asked the president what he would like the Panamanians to do, Bush replied that they should “just do everything they can to get Mr. Noriega out of there.”
During that summer of 1989, American and Panamanian soldiers engaged in an extended test of will. They stopped each other at roadblocks, arrested each other, and sometimes abused each other. Among the newly arrived soldiers was a group of marines who were known as “hard chargers,” evidently devoted to provoking confrontations. They found the defense forces in an equally aggressive mood. By autumn, a list the Americans had compiled of injuries their men and women had suffered at the hands of Panamanian soldiers included bruises, broken fingers, and loosened teeth. Their refusal to respond to these abuses with force led some soldiers to suggest that instead of continuing to refer to the United States Southern Command as Southcom, they should start calling it Wimpcom.
In August, at the recommendation of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, President Bush named a new commander of Southcom. To those familiar with the American corps of general officers, this was a clear signal that a crackdown was at hand. The new commander, General Max Thurman, spoke not a word of Spanish and readily admitted that he knew nothing about Latin America, but the focused intensity behind his oversize eyeglasses was so renowned that other officers called him “Mad Max” or “Maxatollah.” Before he left to assume his command, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe, told him he would soon be at war.
“We’re going to go,” Crowe told him. “Your job is to put that place on alert, get the population down, get things we don’t need out of there, and be prepared to go.”
Thurman assumed command on Saturday, September 30, 1989. In his inaugural speech, which Noriega attended, he declared that the United States would “not recognize or accommodate with a regime that holds power through force and violence at the expense of the Panamanian people’s right to be free.” The next evening, however, he turned down a chance to force the strongman from power.
A senior officer in the defense forces, Major Moisés Giroldi, sent word to Thurman that he was planning to stage a coup against Noriega the next day. Giroldi commanded the 200-man unit that controlled La Comandancia, the military headquarters in Panama City, and served as Noriega’s inner line of defense. Now he was prepared to strike against his commander. All he asked from the Americans was that they block roads that lead to Panama City from the north, so that Noriega’s elite fighting brigade, the Machos del Monte, would not be able to rush in and rescue him.
General Thurman was not interested. He had been sent to Panama to lead an American military action against Noriega, and was in no mood to settle for a “Panamanian solution.” Such a solution could remove Noriega, but the Americans wanted something more: the destruction of the Panama Defense Forces. As long as it existed, even without Noriega, it was likely to be a power unto itself, and not necessarily responsive to the United States.
“You had to take down not only Mr. Noriega, but take down elements of his supporting entity—to reduce the PDF to nothing,” Thurman said afterward.
At two o’clock on Monday morning, Thurman telephoned General Colin Powell, who had just taken over from Crowe as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He easily persuaded Powell that it would be best not to help the plotters. Powell, in turn, shaped the White House response. The Americans would block no roads.
Giroldi never envisioned his coup as an American operation, and did not consider canceling it after learning that the Americans would not support him. He postponed it for just a single day. His men struck as Noriega arrived for work at La Comandancia on Tuesday morning. Within forty minutes, after a series of gun battles, they captured him.
“Some rebels wanted to shoot him on the spot,” one reporter wrote afterward. “All watched as Noriega burst into tears and begged for his life. Some of his captors jeered, yelling that a narco-trafficker deserved to die.”
Giroldi decided that rather than killing Noriega, he would turn him over to the Americans. He dispatched several of his aides to Fort Clayton, in the Canal Zone, to pass the offer on to General Marc Cisneros, second in command to General Thurman. Cisneros kept them waiting for half an hour, and then, after talking to Thurman by telephone, said he would accept Noriega only under a detailed set of conditions. Meanwhile, the Machos del Monte were racing to Noriega’s defense along the very roads that Thurman had refused to block. As they closed in on La Comandancia, Noriega regained his old swagger. He dared Giroldi to kill him, and spat at him in contempt when Giroldi refused.
The Machos del Monte and other troops loyal to Noriega stormed La Comandancia shortly after noon. Within an hour they had recaptured it. They brought the rebel leaders to Noriega. Giroldi wept and pleaded, just as Noriega had done a few hours earlier. The commander was unimpressed.
“I’m tired of these bastards,” he told the soldiers who had rescued him.
To emphasize his point, Noriega pulled out his pistol and shot one of the rebels in the face. Then he ordered a slow death for Giroldi. An autopsy later showed that before he was executed, Noriega’s men shot off his elbows and kneecaps, broke one of his legs and one of his ribs, and cracked his skull open.
“I blame the Americans for my husband’s death,” Giroldi’s embittered widow said after fleeing to Miami. “They only had to show off their power and equipment, and his coup would have worked.”
This episode produced a storm of criticism in Washington. Senator Helms called President Bush, General Thurman, and the rest of the administration’s team “a bunch of Keystone Kops.” The military analyst Harry G. Summers wrote in his syndicated newspaper column that the American national security apparatus was “in chaos.” In the unkindest cut of all, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, Representative Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, said that Bush’s failure to act had led to “a resurgence of the wimp factor.”
TENSION CRACKLED THROUGH PANAMA CITY IN THE WEEKS AFTER THE FAILED coup, but that did not stop four testosterone-driven marines from driving to the Marriott Hotel on Saturday night, December 16. They were among the “hard chargers,” and the prospect of facing off with Panamanian soldiers was hardly enough to keep them from the hotel bar, which often drew sassy rabiblanca women. They were disappointed to find it half empty.
On their way back to the Canal Zone, the marines took a shortcut that led them into a barrio of cobblestone streets and dead ends. They became confused and suddenly found themselves at a roadblock. To make matters worse, they saw that they were just a block from La Comandancia.
Their weathered Chevrolet immediately drew a crowd. Soldiers with the scruffy beards and black T-shirts that were trademarks of Noriega’s elite Machos del Monte surrounded it. They waved their Kalashnikovs and ordered the marines out of the car.
“Shit, it’s the fucking Machos!” one of the marines cursed as he saw them.
“They just locked and loaded!” shouted the driver. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
He pushed the gas pedal to the floor and crashed his car through the roadblock. Soldiers fired at it as it fled into the darkness. One bullet hit Lieutenant Robert Paz, a marine intelligence officer. The driver made for Gorgas Hospital in the Canal Zone but had trouble finding it. When he finally did, doctors were unable to save Lieutenant Paz.
That was also the night of the annual Christmas party at Fort Amador, in the Canal Zone. Children were singing “Feliz Navidad” when a messenger brought General Cisneros news of the shooting. He waited for the song to end and then announced it, not saying that the victim had died. Then he ordered all officers to report to their duty stations immediately, and advised their spouses to return home and stay behind closed doors.
“That was the beginning,” one officer’s wife recalled afterward. “From the sixteenth on, you saw your husband occasionally.”
By the time Lieutenant Paz was killed, Thurman and his new staff officers had finished drawing up a plan for what was dubbed Operation Blue Spoon, a full-scale American invasion of Panama. Their superiors at the Pentagon had approved it. President Bush was determined that it should go forward. All that had been needed was a spark, an episode that could be cited as the last straw. The Paz killing provided the justification.
The next morning, Bush attended a church service at a military base in Arlington, Virginia. Reporters shouted questions about what he was intending to do in Panama. He made no reply. After the service, he was driven to the White House for brunch. When it was over, he pulled Vice President Dan Quayle aside and told him he had decided to strike against Noriega immediately. Then he summoned his senior advisers to the Oval Office.
General Powell presented the Blue Spoon plan. It was to be a massive invasion by 25,000 troops, about half of them from the Canal Zone and the other half from bases in the United States. They would strike twenty-seven objectives simultaneously, destroy the Panama Defense Forces, capture Noriega, and oversee a quick return to civilian rule. Bush asked if a smaller operation, targeted specifically against Noriega, might be feasible. Powell said it was not, because Noriega moved quickly and American commandos might not be able to find him.
“This guy is not going to lay off,” Bush sighed after General Powell finished answering his questions. “It will only get worse. Let’s do it.”
Powell was back at the Pentagon by four o’clock. His first call was to General Thurman in Panama. “The President said I should be sure to tell you that enough is enough,” he told Thurman. “Execute Blue Spoon.”
“Roger, sir.”
“D-day, twenty December,” Powell continued. “H-hour, oh-one-hundred.”
“Yes sir,” Thurman replied. “I understand my orders.”
Monday and Tuesday were days of intense activity at the Pentagon and half a dozen military bases from California to North Carolina. Army Rangers were mobilized, Navy Seal teams prepared for action, and air force commanders marshaled a force of 285 planes to bring the fighters and their equipment to Panama. At one of the last Pentagon planning sessions, General James Lindsay, chief of the Special Operations Command, raised an unexpected concern. He didn’t like the name of the operation. How would it feel years from now, he asked his comrades, when veterans would have to tell stories of their exploits in Blue Spoon? It sounded like the title of a jazz tune, or the name of a remote frontier town.
For years, a computer at the Pentagon had been generating the names of American military operations. It spat out Blue Spoon after producing nearly a dozen others for preceding operations in Panama, including Elaborate Maze, Nimrod Dancer, Purple Storm, Sand Flea, Prayer Book, Golden Pheasant, Fissures One, Elder Statesman, and Blade Jewel. This time, commanders overruled the computer. They decreed that the invasion of Panama would henceforth be known as Operation Just Cause.
On Tuesday evening, December 19, as Noriega was sipping Old Parr whiskey with a couple of other officers at a command post in Colón, his telephone rang. He switched on the speakerphone. One of his staff officers was calling from Panama City.
“General, all the indications I’m receiving point to a major military action by the gringos sometime tonight,” the officer reported.
Noriega pressed for details. Despite all that had happened, he never seriously believed that the Americans would try to dislodge him by force. After hanging up, he poured himself another glass and told his secretary to “make some phone calls, find out what’s happening.” Then his well-honed survival instinct took hold. He called for his driver and slipped out into the night.
The Panama Defense Forces had 13,000 soldiers, but most of them were police officers, customs agents, or prison guards. Only about 3,500 were trained or armed for combat. They had no hope of resisting the overwhelming power that came down upon them in the predawn hours of December 20.
More than 3,000 Rangers parachuted onto and around airports, military bases, and other objectives in Panama, making this the largest combat airdrop since World War II. In most places, Panamanian defenders surrendered or simply melted away. Those that held out were quickly silenced by the devastating firepower of Spectre gunships.
The invaders’ most important target was La Comandancia. Columns of tanks and armored cars closed in on it soon after one o’clock in the morning. Rifle platoons followed close behind. They smashed their way through barricades and poured heavy rifle and rocket fire into the flimsy wooden buildings around them. Many went up in flames. Terrified residents rushed into the streets, some of them only to be cut down by gunfire. Children shrieked as parents pulled them out through clouds of smoke. Guns blazed for much of the night. Not until six o’clock were the Rangers able to move into the smoldering ruins of La Comandancia.
While fighting raged around La Comandancia and other combat units were seizing targets across the country, small squads of American commandos crept through Panama City on special missions. One found and destroyed Noriega’s private Learjet, which the Americans feared he would use in trying to flee. Another raided a prison to free an American who had been arrested for collaborating with the CIA.
A third commando squad was to have been sent to find Guillermo Endara, who had won that year’s presidential election but had been prevented from taking office, bring him to the Canal Zone with his two running mates, and swear them in to head a new government. Instead of sending this squad, however, American commanders came up with a less risky idea. They simply invited the three men to dinner at Howard Air Force Base on December 19. When the guests arrived, an American diplomat told them that an invasion was imminent and that the United States wanted to hand the government over to them. They were stunned.
“I felt like a big sledgehammer hit my head,” Endara said later.
After waiting for several hours, the three men were brought to another American base in the Canal Zone, Fort Clayton. Shortly before two o’clock in the morning, with Panama City in flames, they took their oaths of office. Fort Clayton was the headquarters of the new government for the next thirty hours. Only then, with the victory won, did the Americans allow Panama’s new leaders to return to Panamanian territory.
At seven o’clock that Wednesday morning in Washington, President Bush broadcast a message to the nation. He said he had ordered the invasion “only after reaching the conclusion that every other avenue was closed and the lives of American citizens were in grave danger.” By the time he spoke, American forces had already secured all of their important objectives. One uncomfortable fact, however, made it impossible for him to declare victory. Noriega was nowhere to be found.
Several commando units were assigned to capture Noriega, but none was ever given a timely enough tip to do so. On Wednesday afternoon, American commanders offered a $1 million reward to anyone who would turn him in. His network of girlfriends, Santería practitioners, and military comrades, though, served him well. The Americans could not find him. World attention quickly focused on this high-stakes catand-mouse game.
Although Noriega managed to elude his pursuers for several days, he soon realized that he could not hide indefinitely. Holed up in a small apartment on the edge of Panama City, he became morose. On Sunday afternoon—it was Christmas Eve—he decided to call Monsignor José Sebastián Laboa, the papal nuncio in Panama City. Laboa was an outspoken critic of Noriega and the defense forces, but also a sophisticated diplomat who wished to see this conflict ended without more bloodshed. He agreed to grant Noriega asylum at the nunciatura, as the Vatican embassy was known.
Rather than go himself to pick up the deposed dictator, Laboa sent Father Villanueva, the fiery opposition hero who prayed for the soul of Hugo Spadafora at every Mass. Villanueva arrived at the designated spot, a Dairy Queen parking lot, in a four-door Toyota Land Cruiser with darkly tinted windows. He saw no one. Finally, a van that was parked nearby edged toward him and pulled into the space next to his. Noriega emerged, wearing a baseball cap, a T-shirt, and a pair of blue shorts. He slid into the backseat of the Toyota. After the door slammed shut, Villanueva turned around to see the man against whom he had campaigned so long and loudly.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“Yes, unfortunately,” Noriega replied curtly.
Both men were silent during the short ride. At the nunciatura, Noriega told his hosts that he wished to ask for asylum in Spain. Laboa called the Spanish ambassador, who told him the request was impractical because Spain had an extradition treaty with the United States. Noriega then suggested Mexico, but the Mexican ambassador made himself unavailable.
Monsignor Laboa had promised Noriega never to hand him over to anyone against his will. His task now was to persuade the fugitive that surrendering was his best option. Later he said he never doubted Noriega would ultimately agree.
“He is a man who, without his pistol, is manageable by anyone,” the wise nuncio surmised.
The Americans, however, were not in a patient mood. As soon as they learned that Noriega was inside the nunciatura, they sent troops to surround it. Then, on the afternoon of Christmas Day, General Thurman himself appeared at the gate. He spent forty minutes trying unsuccessfully to persuade Laboa to surrender his guest. Barely twenty-four hours into the standoff, some frustrated American officials began invoking the specter of Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, who took asylum at the United States embassy in Budapest in 1956 and remained there for fifteen years.
Acting on recommendations from psychological warfare specialists, Thurman ordered a convoy of armored cars to encircle the nunciatura as closely as possible, even pulling onto adjacent sidewalks, and gun their engines continually. Then, late on Sunday night, he sent soldiers to burn the brush off a nearby lot and turn it into a helicopter base. Finally, in what became the most surreal aspect of Operation Just Cause, he had enormous speakers placed around the nunciatura so that rock music could be continually blared into it at deafening volume. The songs his advisers chose had titles intended as messages to Noriega, among them “I Fought the Law (and the Law Won),” “You’re No Good,” and “Nowhere to Run.”
The Americans may have hoped that this tactic would force Noriega to run out of the nunciatura begging for mercy. Instead it led Laboa to announce that he was suspending negotiations until the noise ceased. After several days of stalemate, the Americans shifted to a more diplomatic approach. They moved their armored cars away from the nunciatura, disconnected their loudspeakers, and withdrew most of their soldiers. On January 2, Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger arrived in Panama. That same day, Laboa, who until then had left Noriega largely to himself, began encouraging him to think about surrender. He pulled a curtain aside so Noriega could see the angry crowd that had gathered outside, chanting “Murderer!” and “Kill Him!” At one point he even obliquely suggested that Noriega reflect on the fate that befell the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who in 1945 was captured by his enemies as he tried to flee, executed, and then hung upside down in a public square.
On the afternoon of January 3, eleven days after entering the nunciatura, Noriega finally realized that he had, as the song said, nowhere to run. He asked to attend a Catholic Mass before surrendering. Father Villanueva was indignant at the very idea.
“Does God love this man?” he asked Laboa incredulously.
“Obviously,” Laboa replied.
Laboa himself celebrated the Mass that evening. When it was over, Noriega went to his room and put on a neatly pressed tan uniform that one of his mistresses had sent him. Shortly before nine o’clock, he walked toward the door of the nunciatura. As he was about to open it, Villanueva spoke to him for the first time since their encounter at the Dairy Queen.
“I will pray for you every day,” he said.
“Thank you,” Noriega replied.
With that, the defeated strongman walked out. As soon as he was off the embassy’s property, American soldiers pounced on him, taped his wrists behind his back, and hustled him into a waiting helicopter. By sunrise the next day, he was in a cell at the Metropolitan Correction Center in Miami.