COLUMN ONE : Invasion: A Web of Surprises : The fighting in Panama was no snap. Citizens fended for themselves amid anarchy. Both sides miscalculated.

It was in the wee hours of the morning last Wednesday, and Jorge Ortega and his mother were still up, putting the finishing touches on the Christmas tree in the apartment they shared in the modest barrio of Chorrillo.

The television, tuned to a station beamed from a nearby U.S. military base, flickered quietly in the background. Then, at quarter till 1, an announcer broke in with a few words that shocked Ortega to attention and turned his Christmas, his home, his neighborhood and his country upside down.

“Condition Echo,” the American announcer said.

The invasion was on, Ortega told his disbelieving mother. Fifteen minutes later, bombs began to fall near their high-rise home adjoining the fortified Comandancia, headquarters of the Panamanian military.

It was the start of a “surprise” attack that was hardly a surprise at all. Over the last few days, a flood of stateside reinforcements had swelled to nearly double the size of what had been a 13,000-strong American military garrison in the strategic isthmus nation. And U.S. strategists made little attempt to disguise heavy troop movements around Panama City, the capital.

Panamanians had been expecting such a move for months, some with dread and many with eager anticipation. They had watched as their crafty, charismatic dictator--an engaging, acne-scarred martinet with an instinct for intrigue matched only by his reputed appetite for women, alcohol and, perhaps, even cocaine--had thumbed his nose at the American Goliath even as he stood accused by Washington of lining his pockets with drug money.

“Condition Echo,” a readiness state unprecedented in nearly nine decades of U.S. military involvement here, presaged the largest and deadliest U.S. military assault since the Vietnam War and signaled a call to arms whose strains had reverberated long before it was officially sounded. That gave each side ample opportunity to take the measure of the other.

But, as so often happens in war, both sides were in for a surprise. Manuel A. Noriega, the one-time U.S. ally who now delighted in taunting Washington--just days before the attack, his puppet legislature declared unilateral war on the United States, and Panamanian soldiers shot and killed one U.S. officer--may have never believed that the superpower who seemed to always talk tough but do little would hit back with so much muscle.

And George Bush, for whom the decision to use First World might to conduct a Third World coup was a rite of passage in a presidency mocked for its irresolution, saw his troops pinned down for a time by an armed resistance whose dedication and organization had clearly been underestimated by Pentagon brass.

Meanwhile, the 2.3 million Panamanians were left to fend for themselves in a situation that rapidly deteriorated into anarchy.

In broad strokes, “Just Cause,” the code name Washington applied to the operation, may have seemed to critics like ham-handed gunboat diplomacy. Others--including hundreds of thousands of Panamanians who cheered advancing American troops like liberators--thought it an unavoidable if regretful confrontation needed to oust a brutish and increasingly quirky megalomaniac who had robbed his country blind and threatened the stability of strategic American interests, including the Panama Canal.

Personal Impact

But to many caught in the middle, Just Cause had an immediate and more personal impact.

For Lt. Col. Luis A. del Cid, a close Noriega associate who guided military operations in the nation’s western frontier, the attack set in motion longstanding plans to lead an armed resistance in the wilds with a band of criminals that he had sprung from jail.

For Cpl. Frank Mungia of Lewisville, Tex., it meant a parachute drop off-target and hours of disoriented groping through dense jungle grass before he could make his way back to his unit. Then, under searing tropical heat, he faced an all-day assault up steep hills that, even when finished, left Mungia and his buddies from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division pinned down by mortar attacks from irregulars in mini-vans.

And, for Melquiades Dominguez, a security guard at an American-owned electronics warehouse in Panama City, it meant five days as a one-man police force, using a 12-gauge shotgun to fend off a horde of vandals and thieves who, with all civilian authority vanished, plundered the city’s shops and homes and terrorized its inhabitants.

Dominguez, waiting atop the building shortly after midnight for a cup of coffee that never came, had a grandstand view of the opening salvos. As American troops and tanks massed at the gates of Albrook Air Station not far from Panama City, they exchanged fire with Panamanian troops who had become unnerved by rumbling tanks and armored personnel carriers throughout the day Tuesday.

By 12:20 a.m.--40 minutes before the pre-arranged “H-Hour” when Americans were supposed to launch a coordinated attack at several key facilities--tracer bullets already whizzed across the blacked-out base.

Those first flashes in the night followed months of tension that came to a head after the Dec. 16 killing of a U.S. soldier at a Panama City checkpoint. On that Saturday night, U.S. military installations were put on “Delta alert,” effectively restricting personnel and dependents to bases. At the same time, troops of the Panama Defense Forces donned battle gear and deployed combat vehicles outside the gates of American bases in an attempt to intimidate those inside.

Decision Taken

On Sunday, Dec. 17, Bush and his advisers made the decision to attack and oust Noriega from power. And the wheels of Just Cause began to turn.

A Christmas in the tropics was about the last thing that Baxter Ennis or anyone else in the 82nd Airborne had on their minds when they rolled out of the sack on the morning of Monday, Dec. 18, at Ft. Bragg, N.C. It was freezing.

An Arctic blast of cold and sleet had enveloped the South, plunging temperatures into the 20s and coating the ground with a nasty layer of icy rain. The 37-year-old Army major was not in the best of humor because his wife, who had been out of town visiting relatives, could not drive home because of the weather.

It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be home that night anyway.

When Ennis returned from his daily six-mile run, he was told to prepare for an EDRE, military lingo for Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercise. Still, nothing seemed unusual because the 82nd, the Army’s premier division of paratroopers, ran such full-scale, unscheduled drills about once a month.

Not until noon, when Ennis and 2,000 others in the division moved into a secure holding area on the edge of their base, did they learn that this was to be no test. The objective, they were told, was a “parachute assault” on Torrijos International Airport in Panama, as well as other targets.

Only a few in the division, the veterans of the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, had ever made a hostile jump. At first, the rookies were ecstatic.

“Most of the young guys were really excited,” Ennis recalled. “But as time wore on and reality set in, the mood grew somber.” Confined to poorly heated Quonset huts till they left, the men of the 82nd shivered through a cold, sleepless night, and several thumbed through Bibles distributed by a chaplain.

“A thousand may fall at your side and 10,000 at your right hand, but it shall not come near you,” Ennis read in Psalm 91.

Back in Panama, U.S. forces also were preparing, openly positioning troops for battle even though that risked tipping the enemy. The atmosphere grew tense. Pro-Noriega Radio Nacional broadcast repeated exhortations to loyalists to defend their nation.

“For Panama,” the bulletins said, “your life.”

On Tuesday afternoon, a contingent of American armored and infantry battalions shifted from their base at Ft. Clayton, on the outskirts of the capital, to the U.S.-controlled half of Ft. Amador, a base that the two sides operated jointly. The Americans positioned themselves just across a golf course from the three-story barracks building that served as Noriega’s principal headquarters.

As darkness fell, a Marine convoy of light armored vehicles eased from the gates of the U.S.-controlled Rodman Naval Station and headed down Panamanian roads and across a swing bridge to link up with an armored Army battalion on the outskirts of Panama City.

Simultaneous Assaults

Though the moves were easily traceable, American strategists deemed them vital to their hopes of delivering a quick knockout punch by launching simultaneous assaults at nearly a dozen key Panamanian installations. Chief among the targets were those where intelligence indicated that Noriega, who had taken to shifting his position three or four times a night since a failed October coup attempt, might be captured.

“The idea was to be in position so as to execute as close as possible to H-Hour,” said Chief Warrant Officer Charles Rowe, a Marine spokesman.

As both sides prepared for battle, Guillermo Endara prepared for dinner. “El Gordo,” as the obese, 54-year-old lawyer is known to his countrymen, had been invited, along with Ricardo Arias Calderon and Guillermo Ford, two other prominent opposition politicians, to a late-night supper by John Bushnell, the de facto head of the U.S. diplomatic mission. Instead of food, however, the main course was a surprise.

The three Panamanians had led an anti-Noriega ticket in national elections last May in which Endara, the presidential candidate, was widely regarded to have won. Before the official vote tally was over, however, Noriega nullified the election, outraging Endara’s backers and triggering bloody street confrontations with the so-called Dignity Battalions, organized bands of street thugs loyal to the dictator.

At dinner, Bushnell informed his guests of what was about to take place. “We were told, very diplomatically, but we were told,” Endara said later. “We were not really consulted.” His initial reaction, Endara recalled, was like “a kick in the head.”

Still, at H-Hour, Endara took the oath of office at a private home somewhere in the city. Calderon and Ford were sworn in as his vice presidents. They were then whisked away to an American military base, where they were kept under U.S. protection and out of public view for two days.

Sky Turns Red

The attack came at precisely 1 a.m. Suddenly the sound of explosions rippled across the city, and the sky turned red from the blasts of bombs and gunfire.

A pair of C-130 gunships roared over Chorrillo to bombard PDF headquarters with 20-millimeter cannon fire. Bombs rained down on Omar Torrijos International Airport while Army Rangers dropped from the sky to capture the strategic site. A five-platoon team of Navy SEALs slipped quietly ashore at Paitilla Air Base, where Noriega’s Lear jet was parked.

Helicopters landed on the golf course in front of Noriega’s Ft. Amador headquarters. To break through the walls outside, a Sheridan tank opened fire--the first time the tank had been used in a hostile engagement since the Vietnam War.

And 75 miles away, at the Rio Hato headquarters of the PDF 6th and 7th Infantries, the fiercely loyal troops whose intervention helped rescue Noriega from the October coup, a single Stealth fighter dropped a pair of earth-shaking one-ton bombs near the barracks that so stunned some recruits that they fled still clad in pajamas.

One of those attacks, intelligence officials predicted, was bound to flush out Noriega, the elusive quarry who had survived several coup attempts. But the intelligence was wrong.

According to an official American account provided later, Noriega was not far away. When the bombs began to fall, he was in the PDF officers’ club on the military side of Torrijos airport, where he had retired to a bedroom with a prostitute. As the explosions crashed around him and parachutes filled the sky, he simply drove out of the parking lot and spent the night driving in circles around Panama City, somehow evading American troops.

Meanwhile, the Americans scurried to close off escape routes. A compliment from Task Force Semper Fidelis, a blend of Marines and light infantry, pounced quickly on the Bridge of the Americas, the main access across the Panama Canal.

At the same time, a few miles west up the Pan American Highway, a squad of Marines inched toward a small traffic police station that American officials had long suspected was being used by Noriega as a control point for guerrilla incursions into a nearby fuel-storage facility for the U.S. military.

Shot in Throat

“Surrender!” Cpl. Garreth Isaak shouted to a small contingent of Panamanians inside. The response was a gun blast that blew a hole through Isaak’s throat. Other Marines fired back and killed Isaak’s assailant. They took three other Panamanians prisoner and found a cache of AK-47 assault rifles--hardly standard issue for police on traffic duty. Isaak, of Greenville, S.C., was the first American to die in Just Cause, but he would not be the last.

The fighting was no snap on the more populous eastern side of the canal either.

For instance, a force of SEALs, who had been sent to Panama before the main invading force began arriving Monday, was assigned to seize Paitilla Air Base and disable the airplanes and helicopters there that might be used by Noriega to escape.

The airport, located between the Marriott Hotel and the Comandancia in the eastern part of Panama City, was thought to be lightly guarded. The SEALs, named for their ability to operate on sea, air or land, carried light machine guns and demolitions for the aircraft.

However, the SEALs were met by three armored personnel carriers full of heavily-armed PDF troops. A “hellacious firefight” ensued, forcing the SEALs to take cover behind one of the airport buildings. They tried in vain to figure a way to use their explosives as weapons against the armored Panamanian vehicles.

Eventually the SEALs subdued the Panamanians and proceeded to destroy Noriega’s aircraft. But the cost was heavy: Four SEALs were killed and seven wounded.

The air base was a critical objective because Noriega’s loyal Batallon 2000 had used the field in an end run around U.S. forces during the failed Oct. 3 coup attempt.

From Ft. Clayton, an armored convoy that sped to the Comandancia drew heavy fire from snipers armed with automatic weapons and grenades long before it ever reached the Panamanian military command center.

Once there, Americans encountered stiff resistance, despite a special surrender plea drafted by psychological warfare specialists that boomed from loudspeakers on nearby Ancon Hill. Anticipating the assault, Panamanian troops scurried to sandbagged barricades in nearby housing projects and fired down on the Americans from all sides.

“We did not have as much tactical surprise as we expected,” said Lt. Col. James Reed, commander of the battalion that mounted the assault.

By 2:30 a.m., said Army Capt. Joe Cravens of Kentucky, “basically all hell broke loose, and it was rockin’ and rollin’.” The all-out battle, the fiercest fighting of the entire engagement, left four Americans dead and dozens of civilian dead or wounded. The firing triggered flames that engulfed much of the surrounding neighborhood.

One of those forced to flee the inferno was Ortega, who never got to finish trimming his tree after he saw the ominous television broadcast. He and his mother were safe, but hundreds of other civilians, caught in flames and crossfire, would flood into nearby hospitals.

Elsewhere, American commanders encountered a different form of resistance. As paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne hit the Panamanian garrison of Panama Viejo in the old part of the capital, defenders melted into the surrounding neighborhood and began to assault Americans with hit-and-run guerrilla tactics.

“We were actually fighting in the streets and side streets,” said Army Col. Harry Axson, who oversaw the operation.

The way the Panamanian troops responded elsewhere to the Yankee invasion varied, sometimes dramatically. There were stories of valiant resistance by low-ranking soldiers, like the defenders of Ft. Amador, who held off the attack for a day and a half under heavy bombardment. And there were those like Del Cid, commander in Chiriqui Province, the Panamanian version of the Wild West, who slipped with his ragtag team of regular troops and freed convicts into the jungle soon after news of the invasion in the capital reached his remote outpost of David.

Planned Response

The sight of Panamanians fleeing before their eyes no doubt pleased American troops boastful of their superior firepower. But as the frustrated invaders were to discover, the retreat, in many cases, was hardly cowardice; Panamanian commanders had anticipated the blow and responded according to pre-arranged plans. Those who shed their incriminating uniforms and fled, whether in city or country, were to join resistance bands that Gen. Maxwell Thurman, the American commander-in-chief in the region, acknowledges were “organized, clearly organized.”

Still, official American pronouncements oozed bravado, sounding initially as if little more was left to the military mission than a mop-up and transforming the hunt for Noriega, who had eluded the initial assaults, into something right out of “America’s Most Wanted.”

“Yesterday a dictator ruled Panama, and today constitutionally elected leaders govern,” Bush said in an early morning television address last Wednesday. Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, boasted that the Noriega dictatorship had been “decapitated” and that Noriega was nothing more than a fugitive from justice. A $1-million reward was offered for his capture.

But by nightfall, despite the price on his head and the massive manhunt, a familiar, blustery voice once again boomed across Radio Nacional, his propaganda outlet, which American troops had inexplicably failed to knock off the air.

It was Manuel Noriega, safe in a hideaway, exhorting Panama to stand fast against the “Yanquis.”

“We’re in trench warfare now, and we will maintain the resistance,” he growled. Like so much else that was said over the years by Noriega, it was a prophecy that had the ring of truth but would ultimately prove hollow.

For Cpl. Frank Mungia and many of his fellow 82nd Airborne paratroopers in Charlie Company, dawn provided the light that helped them make their way at last through the jungle to their assembly point near the control tower at Torrijos Airport.

The Air Force C-141B Starlifter that had dropped them from a scant 500 feet had missed its target badly, its pilot perhaps still disoriented by a maddening delay at Ft. Bragg, where the planes had to be de-iced before heading for war in the tropics. That meant that while Bush was on the air proclaiming virtual victory, Mungia, 20, was just climbing into a helicopter that would take him to the fight of his life.

Their target was Tenijitas, a hilltop fortress above the Panama City suburb of San Miguelito that served as headquarters for the “Tigres”--one of the most-feared battalions in the PDF. The heavy fire began even before their choppers touched down two hills away and rarely stopped as Charlie Company climbed under a sun so brutal that more than a dozen soldiers fell victim to heat exhaustion.

And even by mid-afternoon Wednesday, when the climb was over and an air strike had silenced the remaining defenders, the troops were far from safe. Nightfall brought horrifying sounds and sights. Mortar shells shrieked in the darkness before exploding with a sickening thud.

Shrapnel Wound

“That shook us up pretty good,” said Sgt. Jeffrey Connin, who watched the soldier next to him writhe in pain from a severe shrapnel wound.

And the mortar attacks, believed launched by Panamanian soldiers who now led Dignity Battalion members in mobile guerrilla bands, were not the end of the horrors. What Charlie Company could see and hear from San Miguelito last Wednesday night made clear to the troops that their invasion had unleashed anarchy on the 300,000 residents below.

Vandals set a supermarket warehouse aflame. Stolen cars were abandoned and turned upside down. The Dignity Battalions roamed the streets, rattling off bursts of gunfire.

“You could see the fires and the Molotov cocktails,” said Sgt. Jeffrey Newport, of Springfield, Mass. “You could hear the screams. It was amazing what they were doing to themselves.”

In Panama City and across the country it was much the same. Whether seeking to extend their reach or consolidate their hold, American troops came under organized attack from men without uniforms.

In Panama City and in Colon, on the Atlantic Ocean side of the isthmus, the void of civil authority opened the floodgates to lawlessness. Armed thugs took American journalists hostage at the Marriott Hotel soon after the invasion began. Others broke into houses and terrorized the residents.

And from his rooftop post at the electronics firm, Melquiades Dominguez watched in fear as a band of thieves across the street at the Superior Products warehouse began the organized looting that would leave the stores plundered and the city littered with boxes discarded from stolen televisions sets, refrigerators and shoes.

Dominguez, a husky 33-year-old who munched cookies and sipped soft drinks from the storeroom during the siege, scattered refuse to create the appearance that his building had already been sacked and kept disbelievers at bay with his shotgun.

Night of Terror

But for most of Panama City, Wednesday was a night of terror. Insurance salesman Felix Larrinaga watched helplessly from his balcony as roving bands on the streets below stole all the cars from the parking lot at the Hertz agency and shot out the lock on a jewelry store door.

“It was like the worst nightmare,” he said.

In the war of the streets, it often proved difficult to distinguish bettween the attacks that were organized and those that were not.

Sniper fire rained down from high-rises. Men in civilian clothes staged ambushes and lobbed explosives.

In Panama Viejo on Thursday, armed Panamanians adopted an abandoned tractor-trailer truck as their mobile bunker, firing automatic weapons out of makeshift portholes as they careened down the street, while a man beside the driver lobbed grenades out the window.

The same day in Penonome, 90 miles to the west, about 250 Noriega loyalists in groups of a dozen each sought to harass Americans at the nearby air base of Rio Hato, which had been occupied by U.S. troops since five companies of Army Rangers parachuted in amid the disorder created by the one-ton bombs.

And from their post atop Tenajitas Hill in San Miguelito, Charlie Company sentries watched through binoculars as a motorist stopped to erect portable mortars by the side of the road.

Was this the Panamanian army in another guise, acting as guerrillas because there was no other way? Or were they desperate renegades, going down in an orgy of violence?

The answer was to change as Thursday turned to Friday, and the American invasion began to turn the corner.

At first, U.S. military commanders tried to discredit their adversaries as mere terrorists. Eventually, however, they grudgingly conceded that the resistance, though crude in many places, was more sophisticated than it seemed. Despite significant lapses, there were signs that it had been centrally controlled, reflecting an unexpected depth of support for Noriega.

Indeed, American officials who interviewed captured Panamanian forces found evidence that they had followed a 48-hour battle plan drafted in advance for use when the Americans invaded.

The instructions called for loyal Panamanian officers to take command of irregular armies comprised mainly of the Dignity Battalions organized by Noriega earlier in the year to intimidate his politcal opposition.

In Chiriqui, Del Cid, the military commander who was also wanted on U.S. drug charges with Noriega, may have been following just such a contingency when he escaped last Wednesday into the jungle with his band of felons.

By Thursday, however, Del Cid already had second thoughts. With Roman Catholic priests acting as middlemen, Del Cid agreed to talk surrender over the telephone with Gen. Marc Cisneros, head of the U.S. Army in Panama. And by Friday morning, a white flag flew over Del Cid’s camouflaged jungle headquarters.

“We’re alone,” Del Cid told his men. “Alone. We don’t have the support of a single foreign country. There is nobody to help us.”

Communique Read

A communique urging Dignity Battalion forces in Chiriqui to turn in their weapons was read over local radio. Within the hour, they were lining up to do just that, collecting in the process the $150 bounty promised by the United States.

Similar pleas were repeated over and over Thursday and Friday by representatives of the new Panamanian government. Meanwhile, U.S. military officials worked with PDF representatives who had already surrendered to persuade other commanders and troops to give up.

“This is suicide,” the callers would tell anyone who answered the phone. “Pack it in.”

Not everyone was so contrite. Rigoberto Paredes, Noriega’s wealthy political boss in Arrijan, apparently missed the comforts of home after being forced to flee when American soldiers closed in. On Thursday night, he called his house, now occupied by a contingent of GIs, and smugly insisted that they get out.

“He was told he’d get it back when he surrendered,” said the soldier who took the call.

The air of resignation, however, began gradually to take hold. Maj. Daniel Delgado, head of the San Miguelito battalion whose members had stubbornly defended Tenajitas from the 82nd Airborne, ordered his executive officer to tell the Americans that he had abandoned the base three hours before the invasion began.

And in addition to Del Cid, four other regional commanders by the end of the week pledged loyalty to new President Endara and were allowed, at least temporarily, to maintain their powerful posts.

Yet all the backroom negotiations could do little to suspend the violence that seemed to grow progressively less coordinated, but remained deadly all the same.

Outside the Commandancia on Thursday, American troops still shouted into loudspeakers in hopes of persuading snipers hiding in the bullet-scarred high-rises to lay down their arms and surrender.

Ambushes continued to claim American lives. High on Tenajitas Hill, Cpl. Mungia and much of the rest of Charlie Company took turns digging a bunker in the rocky soil to protect themselves from further fire.

And then, on Friday, a bloody noontime mortar attack just down the hill from Southern Command headquarters jolted U.S. soldiers, and wrought havoc at a swearing-in ceremony for Panamanian policemen about to pledge loyalty to the new government.

“It’s a war out there,” Army Col. Ronald Sconyers told American reporters, urging them to keep clear of Panama City.

Horror Show

Even when things cooled down, up on Tenajitas, soldiers sat on the rocky plateau at night and watched a horror show unfold in the down-and-out neighborhood beneath them. Small bands of armed thugs wandered through the barrio , raping, stealing and murdering at will. Members of Alpha Company watched in horror Friday night as a man got out of his car, walked to another parked beside him, drew a gun and killed the driver.

Where it could, the military sought to intercede. In the Atlantic Coast port of Colon, a city blockaded but not occupied in the American invasion, U.S. forces on Friday launched an amphibious assault in answer to the pleas of businessmen made frantic by the looting of luxury automobiles and other goods.

“Have you ever seen a BMW going down the street on a forklift?” asked Lt. Col. Johnny Brooks, who oversaw the team that tried to stop it.

But even Friday, there was little practical authority. That left safety to the citizens, who tried to fight back as best they could in a city without a police force. In Panama City, weary, beleaguered residents dragged stones, lumber and even abandoned refrigerators into the streets to keep the roving bands of looters away.

Wary at first, they found courage in numbers--particularly if a neighbor was willing to loan a gun.

By Friday night, most of the men in the capital were sleeping in shifts, taking their turns at manning the barricades.

“We had good teamwork,” said one Panama City merchant who together with others on his block had made a 4 a.m. citizen’s arrest of three suspected Noriega loyalists whose car trunk was filled with machine guns.

“We had no choice,” said Larrinaga, the insurance salesman, who left his balcony and took up a street-corner post. “We were our own security.”

As Saturday dawned in La Chorrera, some 20 miles west of the canal, the reign of looters and thieves in the city of 70,000 was about to end.

Civil authority there had been crushed when a Marine Corps armored battalion called in a pair of A-7 attack jets to dislodge the PDF forces from their garrison. But then the Americans had withdrawn, leaving the city at the mercy of Dignity Battalions and free-lance hooligans.

Now, however, the infantry was moving in at last, stationing themselves in the vacated PDF headquarters, which had sustained surprisingly little damage in the earlier fighting. By dawn, knots of spectators were already forming outside the station. And by midmorning, the crowds had swelled to thousands.

Time to Party

After three days of fighting and several years under Noriega, the arrival of the Americans meant it was time to party. People whooped and hollered, flashing peace signs and waving at the GIs. Women, undeterred by menacing smears of green military-issue camouflage paint, planted sloppy kisses on the cheeks of grinning soldiers. Like spectators at a parade, people roared their approval each time a PDF member or someone from the hated Dignity Battalions filed by to turn himself in.

The resolve of the resistance had clearly been broken, and similar scenes of jubilation were erupting elsewhere. “I drink the beer in celebration,” shouted Isaias Gonzalez, sharing a celebratory bottle with his buddies in Arraijan, on the outskirts of Panama City.

In the capital, it was the first time since fighting began that many residents felt confident enough to venture outside. Dominguez, the vigilant security guard, left his post for the first time in days and went home for a few hours to change clothes. Long lines formed outside the few food shops that had escaped looters, the doors now guarded by armed American troops.

An effigy of Noriega hung ominously from a stop sign on the Via Espana, a main shopping district now littered with homemade barricades and debris from looters. “Se busca “ (wanted) read a sign that hung from the mock dictator’s neck. Still missing, Noriega was very much on everyone’s mind. Radio stations repeatedly aired reminders of the bounty that awaited anyone who turned in the deposed strongman.

“Think of what you can do with $1 million,” an announcer said in Spanish. “You can get $100,000 a year in interest alone for the rest of your life.”

The more relaxed atmosphere on the streets did not mean that tensions had abated. American soldiers, still dogged by occasional sniper fire, crouched into firing positions when civilians approached.

‘Tense Situation’

“Everyone in this country has a weapon,” warned Axson, the Army battalion commander. “We’ve still got a tense situation on the streets.”

The new Panamanian rulers of U.S.-occupied Panama felt confident enough of the stabilizing situation to conduct their first news conference and begin a schedule of public activities. Endara announced the official dissolution of the PDF, to be replaced by a stripped-down and renamed fighting force called the Public Forces of Panama.

Symbolically--if unintentionally--underscoring the real power in post-Noriega Panama, officers announced that the revamped military force would be issued new uniforms identical to fatigues worn by American troops.

Question Remains

By Sunday, the new Endara government was firming up, large numbers of PDF members had surrendered and pledged allegiance to the new order, and the streets and countryside, if not calm, were calming.

One question remained, however, and loomed large over a military action that--viewed at one level--may have been the most sophisticated and expensive posse of all time. Where was Manuel A. Noriega?

He had not been seen or heard from since that defiant Wednesday evening broadcast. Rumors placed him just about anywhere one could imagine--he was here, he was there, he was dead--but no one stepped foward to claim the $1 million. Just in case he tried to parlay anti-American sentiment into a promise of diplomatic immunity, American soldiers surrounded the Nicaraguan and Cuban embassies. And all week long, an Army Special Forces task force chased around the capital following up tips.

But in the end, not one of the 24,000 U.S. troops involved in the operation found the man they had been sent to look for. No one else captured Noriega, or collected any reward. And he didn’t fight to the end, as he had vowed.

Instead, on Sunday afternoon, with cronies and once-loyal officers now deserting the cause en masse, he managed to elude a massive dragnet and drove, alone, to the mansion of the papal nuncio, the official Vatican emissary in Panama. Noriega asked for and was granted political asylum.

No one can say for sure what Noriega did on the run, but an account pieced together by American investigators melds neatly into a previous U.S. effort to portray Noriega as a man driven by his appetites for pleasure and power.

Among the bizarre collection of personal possessions shown off by the Americans who seized Noriega’s quarters were hoards of cash, cocaine, pornography and even the remnants of blood and bowels thought to have been used in rituals of macumba, a form of voodoo practiced by some Brazilians.

By the latest U.S. report, pieced together from interviews with PDF officers now in custody, Noriega spent the several days following the invasion shuttling between homes of civilian associates.

He seemed agitated, the sources told the Americans, and shunned his military friends for fear of a trap. At no time, they say, did he have control of his forces in the field.

He is said to have contacted the Cuban ambassador, but nothing came of it. He steadfastly refused pleas of those who wanted him to leave the city, causing the few still around him to abandon him. When he found that even Del Cid had given up, he finally made his way to the papal nuncio.

A week ago, Noriega was the supreme force in his country. Now, though technically free, he is trapped inside a small urban villa, surrounded by American troops and at the mercy of uncertain diplomatic courtesies.

In just over seven days, Noriega has lost his aura of invincibility. If the latest U.S. claims are to be believed, he may have lost something else, too.

Noriega, sources said, wore red underwear to ward off an “evil eye.” He always carried voodoo trinkets for luck. But in his desperate flight, he lost them.

Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux, Marjorie Miller and Ken Freed contributed to this story.

THE PANAMA STORY

Washington

The Bush Administration said it is working on two fronts against Manuel Noriega. It is using diplomatic channels to try to gain custody of the deposed Panamanian strongman and is working through legal channels to freeze his foreign bank accounts, which it believes may contain as much as $10 million. Noriega has taken refuge in the Vatican embassy in Panama City.

Panama

The streets of Panama City filled with cars and people returned to work for the first time since U.S. troops invaded six days ago, and life appeared to be returning to normal. But it was a normality ensured by the heavy presence of American soldiers.

Mission Against Noriega THE INVASION

(1) 12:20 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 20--American and Panamanian troops exchange sporadic fire at Albrook Air Station.

1 a.m. (H-Hour)--After a dinner with John Bushnell, senior U.S. diplomat in Panama, Guillermo Endara is sworn in as Panama’s president at a secret location somewhere in Panama City. At the same time, U.S. forces launch simultaneous attacks at nearly a dozen key Panamanian installations.

(2) A pair of C-130 gunships hit the Comandancia, headquarters of the Panama Defense Forces (PDF), with 20-millimeter cannon fire.

Bombs strike Omar Torrijos International Airport, and Rangers parachute in to secure the site.

A few miles west up the Pan American Highway, a squad of Marines attacks a weapons supply point, where Cpl. Garreth Isaak is killed, the first American to die in the attack.

(3) Navy SEALs fight their way ashore at Paitilla Air Base, sustaining heavy casualties.

(4) Helicopters drop onto golf course by Panama strongman Manuel A. Noriega’s Ft. Amador headquarters, and U.S. Sheridan tanks open fire. The fort proves hard to capture, holding off the assault for a day and a half.

(5) At Rio Hato headquarters of Panamanian 6th and 7th Infantries, an American Stealth fighter aircraft drops two one-ton bombs near the barracks.

(6) Task Force Semper Fidelis, a mix of Marines and light infantry, captures Bridge of the Americas, main causeway across the Panama Canal.

(7) Paratroops from the 82nd Airborne land near Torrijos Airport in the San Miguelito suburb, then fight their way toward the hilltop fortress of Tenijitas, headquarters of the elite “Tigres” battalion. The fighting lasts until mid-afternoon.

(8) At mid-morning, on the east side of the canal, a U.S. armored convoy meets stiff resistance in trying to take the Comandancia. The engagement is the heaviest fighting of the Panama engagement, leaving four Americans dead.

(9) Troops of the 82nd Airborne assault the Panamanian garrison in the old part of the capital. Defenders melt into the neighborhood, then begin hitting the Americans guerrilla-style.

THE AFTERMATH

U.S. officials post a $1-million bounty for Noriega’s capture.

(1) In Panama City’s Marriott Hotel, armed thugs take American journalists hostage. One of them, a CBS producer, will be held for three days.

(2) Luis A. del Cid, Noriega’s commander in westernmost Chiriqui province, and his troops slip into the jungle near the remote outpost of David to organize a guerrilla resistance. However, two days later, Del Cid surrenders.

(3) With the collapse of civil authority in the capital and in Colon, on the Atlantic side of the isthmus, lawlessness takes over. Looters plunder food, furniture and electronics stores, and guns are everywhere in evidence.

Following Del Cid’s example, four other regional commanders swear loyalty to the Endara government.

By the weekend, the last of Noriega’s regular troops have surrendered, the reign of looters appears largely over and the mood of Panamanians turns more celebratory.

(4) On Sunday, Noriega--who eluded a massive manhunt for four days--turns up at the residence of the Vatican emissary in Panama. For now, he has found refuge.