Smuggler Tells of Panamanian Drug Proposal

A convicted marijuana smuggler told Congress today of an offer eight years ago by then-Panamanian ruler Omar Torrijos and an aide--Manuel A. Noriega--to use an island off Panama for drug shipments.

But the smuggler, Michael P. Vogel, said he and an associate rejected the offer because the two Panamanian leaders “were being extremely, extremely greedy.”

Vogel said he traveled to Panama in late 1979 or early 1980 with a Cuban associate who was interested in establishing a shipment base for drugs. They met with Torrijos and Noriega, who now is Panama’s military ruler and under U.S. indictment on drug charges, for about three hours, he testified.

$100,000 per Trip

“They wanted ‘x’ amount of dollars for each pound of marijuana,” or about $100,000 per trip, Vogel said, an amount out of proportion to the small shipments he had planned.

Vogel also described for the Senate Foreign Relations narcotics subcommittee the elaborate methods he and other smugglers developed over his 14-year career to evade U.S. drug interdiction efforts.

The methods included intelligence collection, sometimes using officials inside federal agencies, and electronic countermeasures to detect law enforcement vessels. Smugglers would obtain the radio frequencies officials used for communications, and even had the frequency of Air Force One, the President’s plane, at one point, he testified.

Vogel now is serving a 12 1/2-year sentence for his activities, and testified under oath on the second day of a weeklong continuation of the panel’s investigation of the drug trade.

Aid to Honduran General

On Monday a former U.S. ambassador told the panel that Reagan Administration officials helped get a lighter sentence for a Honduran general involved in a drug-financed plot to assassinate that country’s president.

Francis McNeil, former U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, testified that top U.S. officials interceded on behalf of Honduran Gen. Jose Bueso Rosa because he had helped the Reagan Administration’s program of aiding the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.

Among those who interceded on Bueso Rosa’s behalf was Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, the Administration’s top official in charge of inter-American affairs and a prime architect of the Contra policy, McNeil said.