COMBAT IN PANAMA : U.S. Investigators Start Uncovering Millions Stashed Away by Noriega : Drug money: Panama strongman may have funds hidden around world. And it may include investments in U.S. real estate.

U.S. forces in Panama have found personal records of deposed strongman Manuel A. Noriega that could help investigators find millions of dollars in illicit drug profits that he has stashed around the world, including possible investments in U.S. real estate, Justice Department officials said Friday.

The Treasury Department has joined the effort by appealing to foreign governments under terms of U.S. treaty agreements to freeze any identifiable assets of Noriega’s, the officials said. The treaties mandate such cooperation, even in nations with bank secrecy laws, if there is evidence that hidden funds resulted from criminal activities.

David Runkel, a special assistant to Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh, said U.S. military authorities “have seized a sizable amount of records” belonging to Noriega in connection with their assault on the headquarters of the Panamanian Defense Forces, which he commanded.

Although the headquarters building was leveled in the initial nighttime attack by U.S. forces early Wednesday, the records were seized from an office used by Noriega within the PDF compound that apparently was still intact, Runkel said.

Noriega is under indictment in the United States on charges that he accepted millions of dollars in bribes to help members of Colombia’s Medellin cartel launder drug profits in his nation and ship cocaine to ports in Florida.

Runkel said documents obtained from Noriega’s office also “might suggest that he looted from the public treasury.” He declined to elaborate.

The seized records, if they prove relevant, will be made available to federal prosecutors if Noriega is captured and brought to the United States to face drug-smuggling charges on which he and others were indicted in February, 1988, authorities said.

A government attorney with experience in drug matters said he doubts Noriega would prevail in a U.S. court by arguing that the evidence against him was illegally seized in a military attack on his country.

“Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure stop at the water’s edge,” the attorney said. “They generally do not apply outside the United States, especially when the defendant--like Noriega--is a foreign citizen.”

However, any future trial of Noriega could be complicated by the fact that he once served as a key informant for the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Agency and perhaps other intelligence agencies, according to the government lawyer and other sources.

They said that Noriega could be expected to argue that his drug trafficking was condoned by U.S. intelligence agents in return for information on subjects of interest to the United States.

The Justice Department, according to one official, was so concerned about Noriega’s intelligence connections that a special meeting was called late last week by Mark M. Richards, a high official of the department’s criminal division. Those attending included representatives of the FBI, DEA and Customs Service, as well as the U.S. attorneys from Miami and Tampa, Fla., where the indictments against him were returned.

Richards concluded, however, that there is “sufficient evidence to make this a winnable case,” an official said.

If Noriega sought to compel production of embarrassing records showing his past ties to the U.S. intelligence community, a federal judge would be required to examine such records in private before deciding if they were relevant to the charges against the dictator.

“They might well be judged to be irrelevant and Noriega would get nowhere,” one attorney said.

Miami attorney Neal R. Sonnett, one of Noriega’s lawyers, confirmed that he would seek to obtain and introduce such documents. He said that Noriega’s past connections to the U.S. government “are no secret” and that “some of those issues would be relevant to our defense.”

If a judge ruled in Noriega’s favor and if Thornburgh determined that such material was too sensitive to produce at trial, the attorney general would have to risk dismissal of the case. That situation occurred for the first time last month in the Iran-Contra case, when a judge dismissed all charges against Joseph F. Fernandez, a former CIA station chief in Costa Rica.