Noriega’s ‘Evil Empire’ Described to Senators : Panama Leader Also Received Classified U.S. Data on Key Lawmakers, Ex-Aide Tells Panel

Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega heads “an evil empire, one that moves faster than the United States” and that nets millions of dollars each year from domestic graft, international drug running and arms smuggling to leftist guerrillas, his one-time adviser told a Senate panel Tuesday.

In sometimes impassioned testimony, Jose I. Blandon warned that drug-financed corruption, directed from Colombia and encouraged by Panama and Cuba, has penetrated most Central American military forces and threatens the region’s political stability.

He also described a Panamanian “kleptocracy” in which Noriega and his aides made secret profits from banks, airlines, newspapers and television stations, customs and immigration services and even duty-free airport shops.

Feigning Cooperation

Blandon charged that Noriega repeatedly has deceived the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration by feigning cooperation with U.S. narcotics agents while giving Colombian drug kingpins free rein in his nation.

Panamanian officials who work with the DEA secretly oversee movements within the nation by members of Colombia’s infamous Medellin drug cartel, Blandon said, and turn over to American agents mostly those narcotics traffickers who displease Noriega or the Medellin group.

Blandon also accused U.S. agencies, which he did not name, of providing Noriega with sensitive and “classified” personal and political data on U.S. senators and their aides. The data, said to include reports on Sens. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and their staffs, was supplied before trips by the lawmakers to Panama, Blandon said.

A subcommittee aide said later that Blandon was referring to documents prepared by the National Security Council or the CIA. He did not say when the documents were provided.

The accusations, made in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on terrorism, narcotics and international operations, drew quick denials from some Reagan Administration officials.

A CIA spokesman flatly denied charges that the agency had given the Panamanian government any political information on senators or their staffs, adding that such an action would violate federal law.

A DEA spokesman said Blandon’s charges that Noriega co-opted the agency are largely old and unproven.

“All we’re saying as an agency is that when we asked Noriega to do something for us in the narcotics area over the last several years, he has always done it,” spokesman Bob Feldkamp said.

In a statement, Kennedy said it is “unconscionable to think that the CIA knew about Gen. Noriega’s drug-trafficking activities and continued to work with him. . . . But it is even worse to think that the CIA would provide information about Noriega’s leading American critics to the general himself.”

Testified in Miami

Blandon, who was Panama’s consul general in New York City and a top political adviser to Noriega until the general fired him last month, gave key testimony to a federal grand jury in Miami that indicted Noriega and 15 other Panamanians last week on drug-smuggling and racketeering charges.

Noriega has dismissed the charges as part of a U.S. plot to regain control of the Panama Canal. In a televised speech Monday, he supported a call by his officers for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from his nation, saying that their presence is “in violation of the neutrality of the Panama Canal Treaty.”

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said that the United States has no intention of removing its forces.

“He’s made a lot of comments in the last few days that we really don’t want to have any response to,” Fitzwater said. “Under the Panama Canal Treaty, of course, they (U.S. troops) have every right to be there. And we don’t anticipate any change in that status.”

Linked to Castro

In his testimony Tuesday, Blandon said that Noriega and Cuban President Fidel Castro have joined forces to promote drug-financed guerrilla movements throughout Latin America, justifying the actions as retaliation to the U.S.-backed Contra war against Nicaragua’s Marxist-led government.

Calling the Noriega-Castro alliance “an evil empire” that U.S. foreign policy has been unable to contain, Blandon accused Noriega of selling weapons directly to Marxist guerrilla movements in El Salvador and Colombia, as well as agreeing last August with Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime to smuggle weapons through Nicaragua to the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front, the major Communist insurgency in El Salvador.

Such an agreement would violate Nicaragua’s pledge to abide by a Central American peace accord, signed last August, which calls for an end to outside aid to insurgencies.

Most of Noriega’s efforts centered on Colombia, Panama’s southern neighbor, where both Noriega and Castro worked to aid the powerful M-19 terrorist organization and the Medellin cartel, a multibillion-dollar drug production and smuggling ring, Blandon charged.

Mediated Bitter Dispute

He said that Noriega had sold at least one cache of smuggled weapons to the M-19 group in 1980 and that the strongman and Castro had personally drafted a plan to end a bitter dispute with the Medellin cartel over its rights to operate drug “factories” in southern Panama.

The cartel and Noriega eventually struck a deal under which Medellin movements in the country would be dictated by under-the-table payments to the strongman or his agents, Blandon said. Since then, he charged, the Medellin cartel has set up similar factories in Nicaragua and has infiltrated the armed forces of Nicaragua and Honduras.

The drug kingpins’ move into the military, accomplished by massive payoffs at the top of the armed forces hierarchy, already has toppled Panama’s legitimate leadership and threatens to undermine democratic rule in the entire region, Blandon said.

“Panama is not in the hands of its leaders. It is in the hands of drug traffickers and those who obey them,” he said. “There is a multinational force being created, one headed by drug traffickers, that has power over Central American states.”

Staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this story.