Combat In Panama : Noriega: Dictators, Dolls and Dollars

Among a bizarre collection of his personal possessions, the leather-bound photo albums found in Manuel A. Noriega’s private residence may best shed light on the fallen dictator whose lust for power was coupled with concern about the fate that might ultimately befall him.

Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi features prominently inside: There are pictures of him beaming with two of Noriega’s daughters. But so, too, do stark snapshots of Kadafi’s plaster-strewn home just days after the 1986 U.S. air raid that nearly claimed the life of the man who then headed America’s list of international outlaws.

With Noriega’s own home now occupied by the 82nd Airborne and a menacing American tank now parked in his driveway, the images of Kadafi provided a chilling sense of the complications to autocracy that might have been weighing heavily on the mind of a complicated man.

Reporters permitted to scrutinize Noriega’s home and his principal office Saturday found some evidence to suggest that he had prepared for such a challenge to his power, including a cache of arms and a bedroom safe that held more than $3 million in $100 bills. But the tours, organized by the U.S. military, also provided a glimpse of appetites so contradictory as to be linked only by the eccentricity they had in common.

Where hundreds of automatic weapons lay stacked downstairs in Noriega’s Ft. Amador office as part of what U.S. officials said was his private arms collection, upstairs, Noriega displayed dozens of carved frogs in a glass case and an assortment of stuffed bears clad in combat fatigues.

The avowed Buddhist also maintained a separate room to store the trappings of voodoo, and he set aside a private chapel and made a virtual Christian shrine of the massive desk upstairs in his suburban home.

Noriega’s tastes at home ran to kitsch and toys, with small carvings filling countless glass display cases and cartons filled with Barbie dolls waiting in a storage area next to his beribboned Christmas tree. And there were posters and figurines paying homage to selected dictators: Kadafi, Napoleon and Hitler.

Such revelations seemed likely Saturday only to add to the outpouring of fury against their former leader exhibited by many Panamanians in the streets of the capital.

“Thank you, President Bush,” a resident of the burned-out barrio of Chorrillos yelled in broken English as a busload of American reporters arrived to survey the damage there. “You got the S.O.B.”

Neighbors who gathered in the streets outside Noriega’s home also cheered the end to his rule, breaking into shouts of acclaim when an American paratrooper posed atop the armored personnel carrier that had battered down the gate that long blocked the bamboo-forested estate from view.

U.S. troops descended on both Ft. Amador and on Noriega’s home almost immediately after their invasion began at 1 a.m. Wednesday. The separate attacks left the bunker walls penetrated at one point by cannon fire and his home littered with splinters of glass and wood.

And, while their failure to apprehend the Panamanian leader remains a fundamental shortcoming of the American attack, military officials proudly exhibited their discoveries in his quarters as further evidence that separating him from his power and wealth was achievement enough.

The officials suggested that the weapons, money and massive stocks of clothing found at Ft. Amador and in Noriega’s home demonstrated that the dictator was not merely a thief who stole from his people but was also laying in stores in preparation to fend off a determined attack.

“We knew he was dangerous before, but this goes beyond anything we might have expected,” one Army officer said.