Noriega Tells All-Almost
Pastor, Robert A.
Noriega Tella All-Almost This kiss-and-tell memoir leaves out some inconvenient-and incriminating-details By Robert A. Pastor GEN. COLIN POWELL, THE Mr. Clean of American politics, once...
...When a military coup in 1968 unseated Panama’s President Arnulfo Arias, a populist with fascist sympathies and racist inclinations, the officers asked Torrijos to take charge...
...Panamanian polls showed that 92 percent of the population supported the invasion-not because they liked Americans, but because they despised Noriega...
...Manuel Antonio Noriega as pure “evil...
...What is most interesting about this troubled background is that one can only piece it together after reading two obscure appendices at the end of the book, written by a half-brother and another acquaintance...
...invasion of Panama...
...When Eisner checked the story, Bush denied it...
...intelligence community believed Noriega had a detailed plan to resist a U.S...
...then he replaced the results with obvious forgeries...
...Of course, both episodes would have contradicted Noriega’s thesis that he was a close ally of the United States until Reagan and Bush turned against him...
...Torrijos believed that the United States was behind the aborted coup, and he turned to Noriega to establish a serious intelligence capability for the first time in Panama’s history...
...Later, he describes his heroic fire-fights apnst vastly superior U.S...
...Still, Noriega went to work for the International Geodesic Service as a cartographer and engineer and claims he would never have joined the National Guard had it not been for a chance encounter with Omar Torrijos, a handsome, charismatic officer, who would change Panama and its relationship with the United States more than any leader in the 20th century...
...Noriega studied hard and was accepted by a Peruvian military college...
...Torrijos had little respect for democracy, but under pressure from his friend Jimmy Carter, he gradually began to liberalize the political system...
...Upon returning to Panama, he found a country dependent on the Canal, foreign trade, and the U.S...
...military...
...invasion as “a response to U.S...
...Noriega found in Torrijos not only the father he never had, but a leader who transformed Panama: “For the first time, people from the country’s poor neighborhoods...
...presence beyond the year 2000...
...The second reason is that Panama’s “civilian elites” convinced Bush to help them get rid of the lower-class Noriega...
...It was foolish to deal with him during those moments, but he was no one’s tool...
...Why...
...The real story, however, is in what Noriega omittedfrom the sources of his wealth to the brutal way he trained and dispatched his goon squads...
...Woerner characterized the U.S...
...Most of all, he negotiated the Panama Canal Treaties with Carter, thus giving the country a sense of national purpose and dignity...
...domestic considerations...
...government to desperation if he kept it completely in the dark, so he opened up just a few channels...
...Torrijos shut down all contacts with the United States...
...The one part of Noriega and Eisner’s thesis that’s harder to dismiss is one they cite from Gen...
...Governed since its founding in 1903 by a small, predominantly white elite, there were few avenues for advancement by the poorer people of mixed racial background...
...English for “hombd’ Short, brown, and with such bad skin he was often called “pineapple face” (though not in his presence), Noriega had the added burden of being illegitimate...
...Noriega and Eisner agree on these charges, but Noriega’s memoir includes a string of other accusations that Eisner, to his credit, evaluates in an extensive “afterword,” based on other documents and interviews, including one with President Bush...
...Soon after his birth in Panama City, his mother, a young peasant woman, took him with her to the southern province of Darien to attend to her dying mother...
...It was the wimp factor!’ Having been criticized for his failure to remove Noriega, Bush had to act...
...owed Noriega a favor for a mission that he had recently undertaken in Cuba at the request of the CIA...
...In contrast, his principal aide later admitted that, when the invasion occurred, Noriega was with a prostitute in a hotel near the airport and that he was drunk, incoherent, and scared until he finally escaped to the Vatican Embassy...
...Noriega writes that he “told him not to worry...
...Noriega’s defiance made Bush seem so weak that Bush felt compelled to act...
...politics was delaying negotiations on a Canal Treaty, and proposed that the CIA train a group of Panamanian military “in demolition tactics and then send them back to the Canal Zone for a high-profile but harmless bit of sabotage, which would add urgency to the canal negotiations...
...He was smart enough to know, however, that he would drive the U.S...
...When I arrived in Panama, I was given, by sources I judged to be close to the CIA, a hefty volume describing how Noriega would manipulate the election...
...A child of school teachers, Torrijos graduated from the Salvadoran military academy, and on returning to Panama, rose quickly through the ranks of the National Guard, recruiting educated young lower class men like Noriega along the way...
...One reason might have been that the U.S...
...When Torrijos was almost toppled in 1969, Noriega organized a risky but triumphal return for his mentor...
...Noriega claims that Bush wanted the meeting to be reassured that Noriega would not disclose that the CIA was involved in the bombings...
...Carter and I tried to meet with him to persuade him to accept the results and offer a face-saving “exit,” but he refused to see us...
...To reach the pinnacle of power in Panama, Noriega surmounted many obstacles, but none compare to the challenge of his memoir-to defend a reputation that seems indefensible...
...Southern Command until late 1989...
...Eisner calls Noriega “a useful tool...
...On December 20,1989, after two American soldiers were shot for running a roadblock next to Noriega‘s headquarters, President George Bush ordered a massive attack against Panama...
...Whose Intelligence...
...rose up from poverty into the middle class with newfound social status, no longer pariahs in their own country...
...Noriega was captured and brought to Miami where, in 1992, he was convicted of drug smuggling and sentenced to 40 years in prison...
...He remained in control until his death in an airplane crash in 1981...
...government would ask Noriega to be its intermediary with Castro...
...But the fact is that Noriega usually said “yes...
...It is not easy to understand why the U.S...
...forces to remain in Panama, both governments have shown little interest in completing the talks to extend a small U.S...
...Eisner and Noriega offer numerous answers to this question, all of which can be summarized in three arguments...
...Noriega believes that, had Casey lived, he would have prevented the U.S...
...On December 8,1976, Noriega met with Bush in Washington...
...invasion, the world is better off with Noriega behind bars...
...He was his own person, and he knew the code of his profession: He used others as others used him...
...Noriega himself begins his history by writing: “Our family lived humbly, but there was food and I remember being a happy boy...
...Relations with the CIA began improving, to the point that in late 1975 or early 1976, according to Noriega, CIA Director George Bush delivered a sensitive message to Torrijos...
...That is a surprising statement, although Eisner notes that virtually all of the witnesses who testified against Noriega were felons paid by the U.S...
...Although its true that the upper class hated Noriega, the invasion can hardly be classified as an elitist plot...
...Bush was concerned that U.S...
...rather indictments against Noriega for drug-trafficking compelled the U.S...
...It was not Noriega5 rejection that led Reagan to impose sanctions against his regime...
...Fred Woerner, head of the Panama-based U.S...
...In his account, Noriega stretches credulity when he describes the cheers that greeted him as he marched along the main avenue of Colon on the eve of the invasion...
...these were serious mistakes, displaying a shortsightedness that led both administrations into the destructive blunders of Watergate and Iran-Contra...
...Like other militaries in Latin America, the National Guard of Panama was one of the few institutions in which people of color could be promoted...
...The first is that Bush wanted to retake control of the Canal...
...Indeed, despite opinion polls showing that 75 percent of Panamanians want U.S...
...Noriega tries to use his book to show that he was an effective instrument of the CIA, particularly during the tenure of director Bill Casey, who used him at least two more times to convey messages to Castro-once to release some Cuban exiles in prison and again on the eve of the 1983 U.S...
...But he did agree to let observers come...
...In our conversation, Noriega, who was half-drunk, at one point began stomping on a table and began throwing things at me...
...By this time, the CIA had evidence of Noriega’s involvement in the bombings and other unsavory acts...
...Noriega takes great pride in this success, which he achieved by persuading Castro that such a favor would help Panama in its Canal Treaty negotiations with the U.S...
...In his view, Noriega was unfairly demonized because “the Bush administration wanted to invade...
...Now, in an unusual memoir, Noriega comes to his own defense, finally telling all that he had previously threatened to tell...
...According to the Panamanian Foreign Minister, who attended the meetings, there was a brief exchange on the bombings and indirect references to spies...
...With the help of Peter Eisner, a talented journalist who has covered Latin America for 15 years, Noriega’s story is readable and, at times, credible...
...Just a month after the invasion, Panamanians assumed predominant control over Canal operation, and that control will become complete in 2000...
...Following her own mother’s death, Noriega’s mother contracted malaria and tuberculosis and dispatched her baby to live with her godmother in Panama City...
...Both characterizations have a small grain of truth but are far from the mark...
...invasion of Grenada...
...Noriega writes that he became Torrijos’s single channel with the CIA, but Torrijoslet several people think that each was the only channel...
...He helped Reagan in his war against the Sandinistas, and Noriega describes many missions he undertook at the CIA’S request...
...But either this plan was also a fake, or Noriega simply didn’t implement it...
...The idea that the CIA would have trained Panamanians to attack the Canal area is implausible, but a legitimate question could be asked as to why Bush met with him at that time...
...Noriega Tella All-Almost This kiss-and-tell memoir leaves out some inconvenient-and incriminating-details By Robert A. Pastor GEN...
...Also omitted is the fact that the Nixon administration considered assassinating Torrijos in 1971-72 and that the Carter administration stopped paying Noriega because it saw no reason to trust him...
...No one in either the Bush or Clinton administrations has suggested that the United States should take back the Canal...
...Similarly, the U.S...
...In fact, Carter’s announcement that the opposition had won and his denunciation of the fraud left Noriega no alternative but to annul the election...
...In the end, whatever one thinks of the US...
...There were moments in the Nixon and Reagan eras when the United States turned to Noriega for some specific task...
...to change its policy...
...I had argued weeks earlier with Pastor and others, that given the United States’ attitude, this would just be another infringement on our rights...
...In his memoir, Noriega blames me for pressuring him to accept international observers: “We had been reluctant to do so...
...government and who had their sentences reduced or suspended...
...Some Bush administration officials opposed Carter’s monitoring of the election, fearing he was so wedded to the Canal Treaties that he would conceal the election fraud...
...But the United States was not responsible for Noriega...
...forces, comparing himself to de Gaulle fleeing the Nazis...
...Clean of American politics, once described Panamanian Gen...
...He repeatedly rejected efforts by the Reagan and Bush administrations to enlist him in the war against the Sandinistas, and he resisted U.S...
...ROBERT A. PASTOR, a professor of political science at Emory University, was National Security Adviser for Latin America duting the Carter administration...
...But this argument was not persuasive at the time and is even less so today...
...I helped organize the Carter-Ford observation of the ’89 elections...
...His Greatest Blunders Noriega also fails to offer a credible explanation of his reaction to the 1989 Panamanian elections and the invasion...
...He discovered this rather late in the game and tried to shut down the count with his usual brutality...
...It turned out to be bogus...
...In the book‘s introduction, Eisner calls the invasion of Panama “completely unjustified” and an “abominable abuse of powe...
...In another book, John Dinges similarly describes him as “our man in Panama...
...Noriega had no plan...
...This left his government without any legitimacy, and opened the way for OAS condemnation...
...His job had been to persuade Fidel Castro to release the captain of a ship that helped Cuban exiles attack villages on the coast of Cuba...
...However, we had one, based on a “quick count” that permitted us to determine by the early morning after the election that Noriega’s candidates had lost by a sizeable margin...
...The third explanation is that the United States hated Noriega because he said “no7’ to the American colossus...
...Torrijos found in Noriega a person of unquestioned loyalty and reliability...
...invasion...
...Woerner also says that he “never saw any credible evidence of drug trafficking involving General Noriega...
...efforts to drive him from power...
...A M.A.N.’s Life He liked to refer to himself by his initials, M.A.N...
...Noriega was a brutal, corrupt dictator with a dossier overflowing with actual and alleged crimes that include pushing a priest out of a helicopter, beheading a political rival, forcing two of Panama’s presidents to resign, and trafficking in drugs...
Vol. 29 • June 1997 • No. 6
