Panama Operation Hurt by Critical Intelligence Gaps

At H-hour, 1 a.m. Wednesday, a team of 20 Navy SEAL commandos stole onto Paitilla airfield intent on disabling the airplanes that Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega was expected to use to flee the massive American onslaught. According to intelligence reports, the airfield was lightly defended.

But instead of the expected cakewalk, the SEALs encountered three armored personnel carriers full of heavily armed and well-trained troops. A “hellacious fire-fight” ensued. Carrying only light machine guns and demolitions for the aircraft, half the SEAL team was killed or wounded.

And evacuation of the casualties was hampered because the SEALS had set their radios to a different coded frequency than the one used by the pilots of the Medevac helicopters. Eventually, the airport was secured, cutting off one escape route for Noriega and closing down an airfield that could be used to reinforce the Panama Defense Forces.

The battle of Paitilla field illustrates a set of basic problems and failures that marred what otherwise appears to have been a meticulously planned and crisply executed assault, perhaps the most ambitious joint U.S. military operation since World War II:

-- Repeatedly, U.S. units with critical missions were hampered or frustrated entirely by poor intelligence.

-- At the field command level, at least, U.S. commanders underestimated both the strength and the determination of the enemy.

-- Despite massive force, U.S. troops were not prepared for the violence, looting and anarchy that erupted in Panama City after the invasion.

“Our military objectives were limited, perhaps too limited,” a senior Administration official said at week’s end. “They did not include political realities. To paraphrase (Prussian military strategist Karl von) Clausewitz, politics is war by other means. If you ignore the political objectives, then you’re not pursuing the war properly.”

Divide, Destroy

About 22,500 U.S. troops, coming from a total of a dozen different military bases in the United States and Panama, mounted separate actions across Panama to divide and destroy Noriega’s forces. Despite the complexity of the operation, the initial assault appears to have been carried out with surprising precision, considering its scope and the distance many American units had to travel.

Paratroop drops were performed with precision; early targets quickly seized.

Administration officials portrayed the massive military operation as brilliantly conceived and masterfully executed. The Panamanian military was quickly neutralized, Noriega was driven into hiding and a government democratically elected last May was installed before sunrise. There appear to have been few of the snafus that marred recent U.S. military operations in Iran, Grenada, Beirut and the Persian Gulf.

But according to many government and private analysts, the invasion suffered major flaws. Critics inside and outside the government listed a catalogue of American mistakes and miscalculations:

-- U.S. planners failed to anticipate the civil anarchy that would follow the “decapitation” of Panama’s government and armed forces and now express surprise that they are involved in what the senior U.S. commander in Panama on Friday called a “real war.”

-- They misjudged the quality and persistence of continuing resistance from remaining elements of the Panama Defense Forces and Noriega’s so-called Dignity Battalions of young urban vigilantes.

-- American officials failed because of faulty intelligence to capture Noriega at the outset of the operation. They neglected to anticipate that the wily fugitive would be able to direct a campaign of sniping and terror that has no end in sight.

-- They failed to prepare for the still-uncounted civilian casualties, thousands of refugees and the ill will created by the demolition of the civilian neighborhood surrounding Noriega’s Panama City headquarters and action in other poor residential areas. The U.S. military brought little food and few medical supplies to aid wounded and displaced civilians.

-- And the U.S. military now appears to have bought itself months of unexpected occupation duty as the United States tries to restore order and build a government amid a restive population in a country where, at least in the capital city, the situation has been reduced to chaos.

Admiral’s View

“I think our emphasis was mainly on war fighting and we didn’t give proper consideration to the relationship with the civilian population and to the political aspects,” said Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., the recently retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Panamanian people feel more threatened since the Americans arrived than they did when Noriega still held power, an Administration official said.

“In other words, we have so far failed in our political objectives because we still have to prove to Panamanians that we are better than the guy we replaced,” this official said. “We still can’t offer them more security, and therefore our strategy is, in part, failing.”

Military analysts called the plan a classic large-scale operation designed to divide, decapitate and dismember Noriega’s 15,000-member defense forces. It was, analysts said, a brute-force approach designed to compensate for the Pentagon’s unwillingness to run the risk that it might have neither the intelligence nor the skill to snatch Noriega.

Once Noriega’s power base was “neutralized,” the military planners assumed Noriega himself would quickly tire of the fugitive life and surrender--or be betrayed--to U.S. forces.

“That’s pretty wishful thinking to think you’re going to smoke him out like that,” one former special operations officer said. “If we didn’t have the intelligence on exactly where he was, we have done a poor job on penetrating his circle.”

But some military analysts believe that the strength of Operation Just Cause--its reliance on overwhelming firepower--also dictated some of its worst shortcomings. When the Pentagon chose to mass a multipronged assault with traditional military objectives, it assured that U.S. troops, bedeviled by communications problems of their own, would be left picking up after a shattered political and economic infrastructure amid armed chaos.

Narrow Definition

The military’s narrow definition of its job also contributed to the apparent contradiction between the ground commanders’ rosy assessment of the operation and the chaos and resistance that made a mockery of their words.

Military officials said the military plan put into effect Wednesday had been in the works for 18 months, constantly updated and reworked. Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, extensively modified the scheme after he took office two days before a group of mutinous Panamanian officers unsuccessfully tried to topple Noriega on Oct. 3.

The Pentagon had undercover commando teams from the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy SEALS on the ground in Panama continuously after Oct. 3, tracking Noriega’s movements and relaying intelligence about arms depots and the political reliability of units of the PDF, U.S. sources said.

Their surveillance of Noriega was spotty. He often eluded them by moving constantly from safe house to safe house in Panama City, and, according to one report, using a double to throw trackers off his scent.

During this time, President Bush considered a limited commando operation to kidnap Noriega, but it was never tried because the Pentagon never had enough of a specialty team in place or adequate intelligence about his whereabouts to pull it off, military officials said.

Then, earlier this month, Noriega declared war on the United States, and last week an American Marine officer was killed and a Navy officer and his wife were beaten and harassed by PDF troops.

Bush ordered the Pentagon to move on Sunday. On Monday, planes began ferrying troops and equipment into Panama from bases around the United States. H-hour was set for 1 a.m. Wednesday.

Among the first objectives of the plan was to collar Noriega--and in that critical assignment the military failed.

Escape Downplayed

Administration officials tried to play down the importance of Noriega’s escape, portraying the deposed dictator as merely a nuisance “dashing around the country,” in Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s words. But by the end of the week, the intelligence failure came back to haunt the generals, who concluded that Noriega was directing resistance from an undetermined hiding place.

By Wednesday afternoon, U.S. officials began referring to the remaining U.S. operations in Panama as “mopping up.” That quickly proved embarrassingly over-optimistic.

Resistance to the invaders, at first described as sporadic and unorganized, grew in scope and sophistication. Gen. Maxwell R. Thurman, the four-star commander of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, said Friday that attacks on U.S. troops appeared to be “centrally controlled.” He ordered 2,000 reinforcements flown in from the United States--and not military police, but fresh combat troops.

“This looks like a little bit more than mopping up,” one U.S. Marine in Panama said Saturday. “Hell, this is rock ‘n’ roll.”

Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “No plan ever survives contact with the enemy, and you’ve got to take it the way it comes once you engage in combat.”

According to all early accounts, the troops performed crisply on the ground. Air drops went off with precision, with none of the bumbling and collisions that marked the failed Iran hostage rescue mission in 1979 and the Grenada invasion of 1983.

With isolated exceptions, communications and coordination between units was described as excellent. The terrain had been well mapped out and targets effectively identified, although of course the United States had the advantage of a long and important military presence in Panama.

Major Panama Defense Forces installations were taken in the first hours of the assault, numerous Noriega escape routes were sealed off, and Special Forces troops liberated Panamanian prisons, all according to plan.

Precision Planning

The movement of the massive U.S. force was planned with equal precision, said senior Pentagon officials: Air Force transports leaving Ft. Bragg, N.C., were escorted past Cuba by fighters and airborne jamming and surveillance craft. They dropped 4,500 paratroopers on target and on precise schedule after flying distances of up to 3,500 miles.

But several analysts said that the elaborate planning left out some of the smallest and cheapest details of such an operation, including civil affairs specialists and special operations units trained in “psychological operations.”

Only a small contingent of these forces, trained in winning the hearts and minds of local populations, was included in the operation, officials said.

“The worst part of it is that I don’t see that kind of thinking going on even now,” said Nestor Sanchez, a former top Pentagon official with long experience in Panama. “It’s been a Pentagon military operation. Where’s the civilian side of it?”

Similarly, one knowledgeable source said that the Pentagon’s plan did not include the use of a special electronic warfare plane that is designed to jam the signal of radio and television transmitters. Several military experts said that seizure or destruction of the means of communications should be one of the first objectives of a military operation.

As a result, a key Panama City radio station continued for at least a day into the invasion to broadcast messages from Noriega, leading some of the population to believe he was still in control.

In addition, officials said military engineering units were limited to those trained strictly in combat engineering jobs. Civil engineers who might have helped repair damaged civilian neighborhoods stayed home.

The Pentagon’s heavy firepower approach to the mission also failed to anticipate an effective form of modern warfare--hostage taking.

As Air Force C-130s and C-141s arrived in waves into U.S. air bases Tuesday night, no troops were used to bolster security at the U.S. Embassy. Nor were hotels and residential areas full of vulnerable Americans given any special protection.

Pentagon officials maintained that taking such steps would have been a costly diversion of troops from their main objectives. They added that such moves might have compromised the secrecy of the mission, although the noisy preinvasion buildup tipped off virtually everyone in Panama to what was about to occur.

One knowledgeable Army official said the prospect of hostage-taking was a deliberately low-priority question: U.S. forces believed that crushing Noriega’s major fighting units would eliminate resistance.

“People were always confident we could do the military operation,” an Army officer based at the U.S. Southern Command in Panama said Saturday. “What came afterward is what we worried about.”

Times staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this story.

PANAMA UPDATE The Fighting

Two thousand fresh American troops were airlifted to Panama, bringing the total number of U.S. forces there to more than 25,000, according to the Pentagon. U.S. military commanders in the field reported “significant progress” in ending resistance and restoring order in Panama City, despite continued clashes with irregular forces loyal to fugitive Gen. Manuel A. Noriega.

Hostages

CBS News reported that pro-Noriega forces had released Jon Meyersohn, a CBS producer, and GTE Corp. executive Doug Mullen, an American businessman not previously identified as a hostage. “They’re both well and were well treated,” CBS spokesman Tom Goodman said. Meyersohn was abducted Wednesday. Goodman said he did not know when Mullen was seized.

United Nations

The United States, Britain and France joined together to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning U.S. military intervention in Panama and demanding the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. The resolution, calling the intervention “a flagrant violation of international law,” was supported by the Soviet Union, China and Nonaligned nations.

Casualties

U.S. officials reported that, since “Operation Just Cause” began early Wednesday, 25 American servicemen and two civilians have been killed, 238 have been wounded, and one serviceman is missing. U.S. figures on Panamanian casualties were 139 dead and 95 wounded, with 2,250 PDF troops being held prisoner.