NORIEGA: The Big Ditch in Panama

The Central Intelligence Agency really knows how to pick ‘em--the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and now Panama’s military dictator, Brig. Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega. Defenders of the agency are saying the marriage of convenience with Noriega was another legacy from the late William J. Casey, whose death last year has made him a convenient scapegoat for a dismal string of CIA blunders and failures. Noriega’s indictment early this month on federal drug charges finally put him publicly beyond the pale and ended U.S. support. From there it was an easy step for Washington to orchestrate the failed firing attempt against Noriega on Thursday. But the sad truth is that for years Noriega was the agency’s kind of guy--cynical, brutal and corrupt.

This is a harsh judgment, but consider the evidence. When Noriega murdered an opponent three years ago, Dr. Hugo Spadafora, the U.S. intelligence community was almost the first to know because the National Security Agency heard the crime discussed over the phone. Naturally the NSA said nothing, but according to a former Panamanian official, the CIA’s chief of station in Costa Rica, Joe Fernandez, went further and provided Noriega with a “witness” who claimed Salvadoran rebels had murdered Spadafora. Still unclear is whether the agency knew about this gesture, and perhaps approved it in the hope it would be something to hold over the Panamanian’s head.

If that was the plan, it failed. Noriega has been anything but pliant. He occasionally provided the CIA with information on the Sandinistas, Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro and the rebels in El Salvador, and at the same time he shipped arms, technology and information in the opposite direction.

But these are only sidelines. Noriega’s principal means of support has been the traffic in cocaine grown in Columbia and consumed in the United States. While Panamanian pilots, planes and airfields have all been used in this drug traffic, Noriega’s principal service has been the laundering of billions of dollars shipped to Panama in cash, and then returned in the form of conventional bank deposits--minus Noriega’s commission--estimated at several hundred-million dollars.

Noriega’s most impressive achievement was his unerring instinct for what officials in Washington wanted most--military and intelligence bases (including the NSA listening posts that picked up Noriega and his cronies on the phone), secret information about the Sandinistas and practical aid for the Contras fighting to overthrow the regime in Nicaragua. The Contras seem to have been President Reagan’s favorite issue over the last seven years, and it is a rule of thumb that the CIA can’t say no to a President. If Noriega could help the CIA give Reagan his heart’s desire, then the agency might notice but would certainly overlook other scams he might be running on the side.

Noriega’s personal history, which includes the rape of a 13-year-old girl in addition to numerous murders, is a grisly example of the sort of company the United States has been keeping in Central America in recent decades. In addition to killing Spadafora, whose headless body was dumped across the border in Costa Rica, Noriega was responsible for the murder of the son of one of his fellow generals in the Panama Defense Force, a large army of the sort the United States creates for its friends. It has even been suggested that Noriega played a role in the death of his patron and predecessor, Gen. Omar Torrijos, who died in a plane crash in 1981.

But Noriega was not the only U.S. ally in Central America who seems to leave murder in his wake. Political murder is a way of life. At varying times over the last 30 years, U.S. allies have systematically murdered their political opponents in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador. This is not the occasional leader shot on his way to the office, but wholesale slaughter--with scores, even hundreds, of victims. In El Salvador, for a time, fresh bodies were found every morning at the city dump. In Guatemala, entire Indian villages were wiped out. But why limit ourselves to Central America? The same thing has happened in the Dominican Republic and Argentina and Chile.

It’s a tough world, the realists say; you have to take it as you find it. Noriega may be a son of a bitch, but he was our son of bitch (as Lyndon B. Johnson once said of an ally with the same sort of troubling resume). Life is full of hard choices, if you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen, the CIA isn’t the Boy Scouts--all true enough. But ask yourself: Why do we so often end up on the side of brutal thugs with numbered Swiss bank accounts? Is it the luck of the draw, or something we are doing to ourselves?

Americans hate this sort of question. We treasure our innocence, trust our intentions and sleep easy in the fact that the home team has the good guys. Maybe it works this way in every democracy. But we cannot put off forever the hard questions about our long history of choosing allies who lay down the burdens of state craft when the time comes, as it must to all men, by skipping out of town with their bank books, one jump ahead of a howling mob. Noriega is still hanging in there, but the pattern of his career so far earns him a place in the wax museum of grotesques collectively known as “our sons of bitches.”

Alas, it’s a noisome crew. From one point of view the choice of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, was a good one. He held power for 25 years after the CIA rescued his throne in 1953--an early agency “success” that convinced us no regime was so broke it couldn’t be fixed. The shah was on our side all right, but his departure left Iran in the hands of embittered Islamic fundamentalists who are convincing when they insist they will hate us forever. If we’d only had the courage of our faith in democracy we could have seen this coming when the shah spent millions to invite skiing friends from Switzerland to watch him crown himself on the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian empire. The shah’s secret police, trained and equipped by our own, tortured people who objected to this fantasy, and to the family corruption that went with it; it was probably inevitable that we would be blamed for both. Much the same might be said of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, or the Marcos family in the Philippines--their boundless greed was dismissed by U.S. officials as if it were a quirk of personality, like a taste for catsup on eggs.

Different as these countries are, the national leaders we have backed to run them seem cast from the same mold. In each case, their political power derives from the army--the only “modern” element of national society--and the leader and his immediate family are compulsively corrupt. The armies in particular are U.S.-made, right down to the jeeps, olive-drab uniforms and above all the tendency to solve every tactical problem in combat with firepower. These carbon-copies of the U.S. Army are the most lavishly funded state institutions, and like the Praetorian guard of Rome, they determine who rules. To a considerable extent the corruption is U.S.-made as well, because the first thing the United States does when it grows alarmed about the security of a friend is to pump it full of money. Long, melancholy experience suggests that these sudden millions don’t make countries safer, but they do make their leaders greedier.

It would be unfair to imply that the U.S. government has no standard but convenience in choosing allies. Idi Amin in Uganda and Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier in Haiti, both of whom developed a taste for personally torturing their enemies in dungeons, were eventually declared untouchable. But the more common rule has been that of the blind eye. If a foreign leader was willing to help our friends and confound our enemies and, above all, if he was willing to lend his territory for the listening posts that are the life-support system for U.S. intelligence, then we would ignore pretty much anything else he might choose to do.

The result has been a dazzling worldwide network of high-tech intelligence gear to keep track of the Soviets, polite and usually warm liaison with intelligence services that do things to their enemies which can’t be printed in a family newspaper and the moral insensitivity that comes with long practice of not noticing. As they used to say in Congress, to get along you’ve got to go along. None of it is pretty. Among the inevitable results are dishonesty, since we can’t admit what we’re doing--and secrecy, so we can hide what we’re doing.

But is it really fair to blame the CIA for this pattern of expediency and the ills that follow? The agency doesn’t make policy, just carries it out for officials too busy, or too squeamish, to pay attention to the details. Blaming the agency is the working principle of plausible deniability. Better--in any event more honest--to say that if it weren’t for the colossal scale of Noriega’s drug-running, he’d still be our kind of guy.