ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, Max Thurman took over the Southern Command from Woerner in Panama. The senior U.S. military officers and the attachés from the embassies of the other Latin American nations attended the change-of-command ceremony in Panama City. Afterwards, Thurman went right to work, receiving extensive briefings—“the dump,” as he called it—on each country in his new area of responsibility. He worked a full day the next day, a Sunday. After supper, at about 9:30, he took a call from one of his assistants. The CIA station was reporting that it had received information from the wife of a fairly senior PDF officer—the name was unclear—that her husband was planning a coup against Noriega the next morning, and wanted the U.S. military to block some roads. The woman’s information was vague.
“Okay,” Thurman said, “you’ve got to break through all of that crap and get to the guts of whoever it is saying what they want to do. . . . Find out what the hell’s going on.”
Thurman went to his command center at the Tunnel, his secure complex in the side of a hill at Quarry Heights in Panama City. At about 2 a.m., two CIA men arrived.
“I’ve got bad news,” one of them said. “We don’t like the guy that’s running it.” They identified him as Major Moises Giroldi, a quiet, 38-year-old member of Noriega’s PDF leadership. The CIA men had met first with his wife, then with him. As a major, one of the senior ranks in the PDF, Giroldi was in a position to carry out a successful coup. But they had discovered that he had helped Noriega crush a coup only 18 months earlier, in March 1988. Giroldi had turned in the coup participants, and Noriega had them jailed and tortured. Now this same guy was requesting U.S. military roadblocks at two key routes into Panama City, to block Noriega’s troops.
Thurman suspected immediately that this was an attempt to drag him personally into some crazy sting operation, get him out front with military support, then expose him as a sucker, destroying his credibility in his first days of command.
So what is the Giroldi plan? he asked. What do the plotters plan to do with Noriega?
“They’re going to talk him into retirement,” one of the CIA men explained.
“Say what?” Thurman exploded.
“They’re going to talk him into retirement. They hope he’s not in the Comandancia when the coup gets going.” Giroldi planned to seize the Comandancia, Noriega’s headquarters, cutting the general off from his communications and staff, and then get in touch with him and convince him his rule was over and he ought to retire peaceably to the countryside.
“Let me see if I get this straight.” Thurman said. “He’s outside the Comandancia and they’re going to talk to him on the telephone and ask him to retire gracefully?”
“Yes.”
“It’s preposterous,” Thurman said. “Why wouldn’t they grab him and do something with him? I’ve never heard of such a thing—that’s cockamamie.”
Just over 24 hours in command and now this. Thurman concluded he had better report to Washington. He reached General Kelly at home at 2:30 a.m. on his secure phone.
“Got a report for you,” Thurman said. “There’s a coup going down.” He summarized what the CIA men had said, adding that the coup was scheduled for 9 a.m.—about six hours away—and that Giroldi said it was going to be announced 15 minutes in advance on the local television stations.
“What’s your recommendation, sir?” asked Kelly, who had three stars to Thurman’s four.
“Simple,” Thurman said. “This is an ill-motivated; ill-conceived—they are going to talk this guy into retirement, hoping he’s not there; ill-led—this guy doesn’t know who is going to be in the coup; fatally flawed plan. I’d recommend you stay out of it. Stay out of it big time.”
• • •
Powell, who had taken over the chairmanship of the JCS at midnight on October 1, without fanfare or ceremony, had spent Sunday at home waiting for his first duty day on Monday. He was asleep when Kelly called him.
“We have some indications in Panama there’s going to be a coup,” Kelly told his new boss.
Powell agreed to meet Kelly at the Pentagon within the hour, but first he woke up Cheney to tell him. Then he headed out into the rainy predawn to start his first day four hours early. Arriving at the National Military Command Center, the sealed-off part of the Pentagon where the Secretary, the Chairman and their top assistants often go to monitor and direct operations, he ribbed Kelly for getting him out of bed so early. They put a handful of officers on stand-by as a Crisis Action Team (CAT) to follow the situation and coordinate any use of force.
It sounds goofy, Powell said after he saw a summary on the coup. There seemed no reason for the United States to sign on. Neither Powell nor Kelly liked the idea of a snap involvement. Getting rid of Noriega was something to do on a U.S. timetable; not a half-baked coup with a half-baked coup leader, Powell said.
Because he wanted to take minimal action and not have the United States commit itself to anything foolish, the specific requests presented problems. A normal exercise could be staged by a company of several hundred U.S. troops on one of the roads the coup plotters wanted blocked. This was recommended and approved by Cheney. The second request, to secure the Bridge of the Americas, which traverses the canal into Panama City, would take U.S. forces close to Noriega’s Comandancia headquarters and could not be masqueraded as a routine exercise. Powell did not recommend it.
• • •
One floor directly below Powell’s office, Rear Admiral Edward D. “Ted” Sheafer was busy culling through the intelligence. Sheafer, 48, was the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency for JCS support—Powell’s intelligence officer. He was a longtime Navy intelligence specialist who had good lines into all the military intelligence agencies and the CIA. He used them that morning to put together an assessment for Powell. In intelligence language, Major Giroldi could easily be a “dangle”—a decoy sent out to mislead or trick—Sheafer said, adding, “Noriega might be trying to make us look like assholes.” Giroldi seemed to be planning a coup against the Comandancia, not against Noriega. If it was genuine, it was based on the mistaken idea that seizing a building constituted seizing power. It was absurd, flaky, right down to the notion of retiring Noriega to the countryside with a full pension. Sheafer told his boss that the CIA was not on top of the situation.
Powell took Kelly and Sheafer up to Cheney’s office. The White House was trying to set up a secure video conference with the Pentagon so President Bush could be briefed, but the equipment wasn’t working properly. Scowcroft suggested that Cheney, Powell, Kelly and Sheafer should all come to the White House at 9 o’clock that morning to meet with the President.
Cheney and Powell took one car, and Kelly and Sheafer followed in a second. In the Oval Office, Powell summarized the situation: neither the leader of the coup nor the plan was reliable. He recommended the President hold off and await further information. If there is a coup, watch it develop before acting, Powell said.
The President agreed.
When the coup did not go off that day, Giroldi’s wife passed word that it would start the next morning.
Cheney and Powell went through scheduled meetings with Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov, the first Soviet defense minister to visit the United States since World War II.
Before leaving the Pentagon for a dinner in honor of Yazov at Anderson House, a palatial old mansion on Massachusetts Avenue frequently used for the entertainment of foreign dignitaries, Powell spoke to Kelly. They agreed that the coup was probably just talk. Sheafer reported that they had equally fuzzy information about still another coup being hatched. Soon they were talking about Coup 1 and Coup 2.
“My guess is there won’t be a coup,” Kelly said.
• • •
The next morning in Panama, Thurman was up at five. At 7:40 a.m. there was shooting at the Comandancia, about a mile from Thurman’s Quarry Heights headquarters. Thurman called Powell. “Allegedly, Noriega’s in there but I can’t attest to it because I haven’t heard his voice,” Thurman said. He liked to listen in himself to the electronic eavesdropping devices.
By 9 a.m., it was clear to Powell that a coup was under way, but there was still no definitive intelligence about whether Noriega was in the Comandancia. Powell phoned Cheney, who was on a bus with Yazov touring the Gettysburg Civil War battlefield in Pennsylvania, to tell him the coup had started.
Just after noon, U.S. forces in Panama blocked the road outside Fort Amador, under the guise of a routine exercise. The Panamanian Fifth Infantry based at Amador was the PDF unit closest to the Comandancia. Ten minutes later, local radio announced the coup.
At about 12:18 p.m., Thurman was notified that two Panamanian lieutenants identifying themselves as coup liaison negotiators were at the front gate of Fort Clayton. He gave approval for Major General Marc Cisneros, a two-star who headed the U.S. Southern Command’s Army forces and was fluent in Spanish, to talk with them.
The lieutenants said that Noriega and his staff were inside the Comandancia under the control of the coup leaders, who were looking for an honorable way for Noriega to remain in Panama.
Cisneros said that the United States would take Noriega into custody if he was brought to Fort Clayton.
The lieutenants said they had no intention of turning anyone over to the United States. They wanted the Bridge of the Americas blocked.
Thurman got on the secure line with Powell at 1:30 p.m.
Powell had one intelligence report that Noriega was locked in a room where he had a telephone. Perhaps he was still in charge. Although the rebels did not seem to have Noriega under their full control, he had not appeared on television as he would be expected to do if he had put down the coup, so he was probably in some kind of trouble, Powell thought.
Thurman said he was not sure what was going on, either. The only thing he was sure of was that there had been shooting in the morning. For the moment, he was following standing Bush policy to avoid conflict or an escalation with Noriega or his forces. Since it was not a U.S.-sponsored coup, Thurman wondered what he could do. Could he apprehend Noriega?
“If they bring him to you,” Powell said, “you can do it, but you don’t have authority to go in and get him.” A voluntary turnover was okay.
“Roger,” Thurman said.
Powell worked out three options with Thurman:
1. If Noriega was brought to a U.S. base by the rebels, he could be accepted—“in a heartbeat,” Powell said.
2. If U.S. forces could be used very discreetly and covertly to assist the rebels in bringing Noriega to a U.S. base, that too could be done on Thurman’s authority. Thurman could tell the rebels, “If you need assistance to bring Noriega out [and] that will not involve a show of U.S. force, we’ll do it.” That would mean one or two U.S. soldiers helping, not much more.
3. If Thurman thought there was an opportunity to go get Noriega overtly with just a very small U.S. force, he could go ahead and plan that. But that would clearly be an escalation, requiring a new administration policy. This small-force option would have to be approved by President Bush. “We reserve that authority up here,” Powell said. “I’ve got to go to the President.” Powell added that communications to the White House were set up and he could get presidential permission quickly if Thurman thought it might work.
Having consulted with the lawyers at the JCS, Powell instructed Thurman to make sure that a U.S. law enforcement officer—FBI or DEA—was on hand to actually make the arrest. “I want a good bust,” he said.
Though the coup held some promise at this point, Powell did not feel he should recommend that it be given any more U.S. support. At least not until Thurman came back with more information. Powell cleared all this with Cheney, who was back at the White House, still with Yazov. Cheney left the Soviet minister in an outer office while he briefed Bush, Scowcroft and Baker, and obtained presidential clearance for the options. Both Cheney and Powell now felt that it might be time to act and they wanted to make sure Thurman was ready—leaning forward, but not so far forward as to cross or fall over the policy line the President had set.
At about 2:30 p.m., Thurman passed up word that the coup had failed. It was over, Powell realized, and so were the opportunities, however inexact or fleeting they may have been. Noriega was soon on Panamanian television condemning the rebels and the United States for an attempt to “install a government of sellouts.”
The White House moved quickly to distance itself from the coup, insisting that it was neither an American nor an American-sponsored operation. Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said that administration officials had only heard “rumbling” about the planned coup, they had not been directly informed.
“If we were, the President doesn’t know about it,” he said, “the Secretary of State doesn’t know about it and the Secretary of Defense doesn’t know about it.”
Cheney arrived back at the Pentagon as employees were streaming out to fill up the parade ground overlooking the Potomac. They were gathering to witness Powell’s full honor arrival, the military equivalent of an inauguration, scheduled for 3 p.m. It had turned into a fine Indian-summer day. There was a strong wind beating across the river.
The crowd cheered as Cheney escorted Powell to the reviewing stand. Inspecting the ceremonial troops, Powell stepped rapidly, and then Cheney told the assembled group that over the next four years he would spend more time with this new Chairman than with his family.
Powell appeared relaxed as he sat with his legs crossed. The only suggestion that he might have something on his mind was the folding and unfolding of his large hands. When it was his turn to speak, he described a painting hanging in a Pentagon stairwell, depicting the inside of a church. “A large church, with bright sunlight streaming through a beautiful stained-glass window. The church is empty except for a single family praying at the altar rail. The sunlight is falling on the family. There is a mother and father, and a young son and daughter, and the father is in uniform. You can sense from the painting that the family is praying together one last time before the father goes off to war.
“Every time I pass that painting a silent prayer comes to mind for all those who serve this nation in times of danger.
“Beneath the painting there is an inscription from the prophet Isaiah. The words read: ‘And the Lord God asked: “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” And the reply came back: “Here am I, send me.” ’ ”
Later in the speech, Powell said, “I am also very mindful today that the period we are entering may be the most historic period in the postwar era.
“President Bush and Secretary Cheney have set the proper course—to take advantage of every opportunity while exercising prudence and caution.
“And if we are successful,” Powell added, “the men and women of our armed forces will pay only the price of eternal readiness, and not the tragic and precious price of life.”
Marybel Batjer, Powell’s former White House executive assistant, went up to him. Both her parents were ill, and over the past several weeks Powell and Armitage had taken turns touching base with her, one of them calling every day. She had heard the news about the Panama coup and she could tell that Powell was jittery.
How’s it going with Cheney? she asked. She knew that Powell had had his worries about Cheney during the Iran-contra investigations. Cheney’s uncritical support for Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North had bothered Powell.
Powell smiled. The coup was precisely what he and Cheney needed to break down the barriers, he told her. “The bonding process is working,” he said. “There is nothing like a crisis for good bonding.”
• • •
Pete Williams spent lots of time in Cheney’s office that day as Powell, usually accompanied by his operations chief Kelly and his intelligence chief Sheafer, came in repeatedly to provide new information and updates for the Secretary. Williams was struck by how on-point Powell’s summaries were. If a stranger had come into the room and been told that one person there was new to his job, he would never guess it was Powell. The new Chairman was utterly confident. He absolutely filled the room. There was a quality about him that announced, “Hi, get the hell out of the way, I’m Chairman.” Williams noted that Powell was working hard to control all the information flowing to Cheney.
“Do you have a dropline to me?” he asked Williams after one of these sessions, as the two walked down the corridor. A dropline is an automatic telephone link allowing two people to reach each other instantly; the push of a single button on one telephone console triggers a ring and light on the other end.
“No, sir.” Although for protocol purposes Williams had the rank of a four-star, he liked to show respect when he addressed the Chairman. He had not had a direct line to Crowe and would never have thought of requesting one.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Powell.
• • •
Over the next two days, Wednesday and Thursday, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress attacked the administration for failing to exploit the coup attempt. Democratic Representative Les Aspin said, “We ought to be ready at any opportunity to use the confusion and the uncertainty of a coup attempt . . . to do something about Mr. Noriega.”
Senator Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican and one of the Congress’s chief anti-Noriega crusaders, called the administration a bunch of “Keystone Kops,” and said, “After this, no member of the Panamanian Defense Forces can be expected to act against Noriega.” On Thursday, Helms took to the Senate floor and delivered a speech in which he claimed, based on his own sources, that the coup leaders had offered to turn Noriega over but that the United States had declined.
“Occasionally,” said Sam Nunn, “we have to foresee our policy of encouraging a coup might succeed, and we ought to be prepared.”
Congressman Dave McCurdy, a moderate Oklahoma Democrat, said, “Yesterday makes Jimmy Carter look like a man of resolve. There’s a resurgence of the wimp factor.”
Editorials compared the incident to Carter’s Iran hostage rescue mission and President Kennedy’s fiasco at the Bay of Pigs.
George Will’s column in The Washington Post, critical of Bush’s handling of the coup attempt, was headlined “An Unserious Presidency.”
At a White House meeting at the end of the week, deputy national security adviser Robert Gates gave a spirited defense of the CIA, and the intelligence on the coup. Because it had not been a U.S.-controlled and -sponsored attempt, there had been no way at the time to know whether Noriega was in custody. It was known only now that the rebels had had Noriega for at least two hours.
The missed opportunity prompted a reconsideration of the administration’s objectives in Panama. Was the goal to overthrow Noriega? Was it to arrest him and bring him back to the United States for trial? To help establish a new government?
It was pretty clear that Bush’s hard-line anti-Noriega rhetoric was not matched by specific plans or contingencies, either by the CIA or the military, Powell realized.
John Sununu was very agitated. This was a coordination issue—his primary task as White House chief of staff—and there had not been much to coordinate. He put his spurs into people very hard.
“Amateur hour is over,” Bush declared. He told the National Security Council that Noriega would overstep some day and he wanted them to be ready. Nothing should be left to chance. “I want some follow-through planning,” the President said.
• • •
On the afternoon of Friday, October 6, Bush went into Walter Reed Army Medical Center for removal of a benign cyst from one of his fingers. After the operation, a reporter asked, “Sir, how about Panama? Simply put, a lot of critics say you blew it.”
“Well,” Bush said, “what people—some people seemed to have wanted me to do is to unleash the full military and go in and, quote, get Noriega. I think that’s what—the charge by those who are—feel as frustrated as I do about the results. But I think that’s the allegation. So you say, What could a commander-in-chief have done? I suppose you could have gone to general quarters. But that’s not prudent and that’s not the way I plan to conduct the military or foreign affairs of this country.”
Asked if he would use military force to help, Bush said, “I would not rule out any option. Any option. But you have to look at the facts at the time. And you’ve got to keep in mind the lives of American citizens, lives of your own troops, and what you’re trying to do. But I wouldn’t—certainly wouldn’t rule that out.”
At a morning news conference on October 13, Bush faced still more questions on Panama.
“I wouldn’t mind using force if it could be done in a prudent manner,” Bush said. “So, in other words, I’m not ruling out the use of force for all time.”
He also said, “I have at stake the lives of American kids, and I am not going to easily thrust them into a battle unless I feel comfortable with it and unless those general officers in whom I have total confidence feel comfortable.”
In answer to the question, “Has anybody been fired lately?” Bush replied: “No, and they’re not going to be over this because they all did a good job—a good job. . . . And I haven’t lost any confidence in our top people that are handling these matters, including—and I want to repeat it here—our military officers in Panama. None at all. And certainly not General Powell.”
Powell, who followed every presidential statement closely, could have done without the “I-haven’t-lost-any-confidence” endorsement. He knew well that such a sentiment was articulated when it was in question. “My God, what has happened to this town?” he thought to himself. He had seen emotional foreign-policy battles before, but never piling on of this intensity, and across the whole political spectrum. It was as if there was a lynch mob out there. He had been away from Washington only six months, but something had changed.
He thought he saw several reasons for the frenzy. First, it had been a slow news week. “Newsies,” as Powell called them, abhorred a vacuum and always found something to fill it. Second, whenever there was a simple contradiction between rhetoric—as in Bush’s earlier statement, “They ought to just do everything they can to get Mr. Noriega out of there”—and action, reporters jumped hard. Third, frustration with Noriega was at a fever pitch. Fourth and most important, perhaps, was the question of presidential image—lingering doubts about Bush as wimp. Nine months into his presidency, Bush still had not defined himself, and this failure left open a basic question: was the essential Bush indecisive and hesitant?
Powell felt that this was the wrong case on which to judge the Bush presidency. With some passion, he told the President that “there was no there there”—the rebels had not been sufficiently determined and they had had no real plan. U.S. participation would probably only have made it worse.
An old friend of Powell’s, retired Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., who once had held the General Douglas MacArthur Chair at the Army War College, wrote a syndicated newspaper column on the episode. Under the headline, “Panama Coup Bumbling Is the Least of Our Worries,” Powell read: “Last week, whether we realized or not, we had a glimpse into the abyss. Our national security decision-making process, the very heart and soul of our national defenses, was revealed to be in chaos. It was a frightening revelation. . . .
“If our national leaders bungled so badly on a minor crisis like Panama, what would they do in the face of a major threat? Would they still be shuffling papers and staffing options while enemy missiles were inbound?”
Summers named Baker, Cheney and Powell as the new “best and the brightest” and “veterans of crisis management at the highest levels. Yet they failed.” He attributed this to the committee approach to command decision making—“a very bad case of arteriosclerosis at the very top—a potentially fatal clogging of the military command and control.”
The columnist suggested that the President, the commander-in-chief, deal directly with the military as President Roosevelt had done in World War II.
Powell did not feel that was possible. Committee decision making, taking into account the perspectives of all the departments and agencies, was here to stay. But he did agree more could be done on the military end to make sure that the communications link from himself as Chairman to the CINCs and other combat commanders was more straightforward.
Cheney and Powell got together for one final scrub. They asked, if this had been the right moment, the right coup, one the United States could and should have supported, would they have been ready? The answer, unfortunately, was no.
If things were so bad that officers like Giroldi, a former close Noriega ally, had been willing to try to overthrow him, Cheney thought, others would try again. It was time to go back to the drawing board.
• • •
In Panama City, Thurman put his feet up, looked out his window, and identified a first step. If there was going to be a major fracas with Noriega, he had to get the U.S. dependents out of Panama. So he began issuing a series of requests to Washington for authorization to send the dependents home to the United States or to move them onto U.S. military bases in Panama.
He was summoned to testify at closed-door sessions of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. After ten years of such appearances, Thurman felt confident about testifying; he’d learned the importance of doing his homework and dropping new tidbits to the legislators. In separate sessions of three hours each, he was faced essentially with a single question: Did we miss a golden opportunity? His answer was no. He presented the information that was available at the time of the coup, and the details from the after-action interrogation reports of those who had been eyewitnesses at the Comandancia. By stitching this together in a blow-by-blow narrative, he was able to show that at the time the coup liaisons were talking to General Cisneros, the coup was over inside the Comandancia.
“I’m going back to Panama and get me a good contingency plan,” Thurman told the senators.
Thurman had read the papers. It was clear that nobody—not President Bush, Cheney, Powell nor he himself—could withstand another failure, or perceived failure.
Twenty-two years earlier, Major Max Thurman had spent a year at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. One of the lessons he learned there was that an officer had two jobs: first, to obey the explicit orders of his superiors; and second, to understand the implicit tasks that were part of those orders and make sure they too were accomplished. The higher up you went, the more implicit tasks you encountered.
The implicit task in Panama was simple: If it ever happens again, you better be ready. The “it” was not only a coup attempt, Thurman calculated, but anything that might suggest that George Bush, Max Thurman and everyone in between was not on top of things.
Thurman went to see Powell.
Is the planning on track with a new intensity? Powell asked.
A new intensity, Thurman promised. He was six years older than Powell, and until two weeks earlier had been senior to him. Thurman knew the rules and he was respectful, but it had been a long time since someone had ordered him around.
“You polishing up your plans and all?” the Chairman asked.
“Sure,” Thurman said, “that’s what we are doing. We get paid for doing that. We’re busy at it. When I get it done, I’ll report to you.”