COLUMN ONE : Accuracy a Casualty in Panama : First reports from the battlefield often are less fact than fiction. But they’re still likely to leave a lasting impression.

Four months after the American invasion of Panama, it has become evident that crucial military accounts of the celebrated operation suffered a malady common in combat: Truth is an early casualty.

Early reports said that more than 300 Panamanian soldiers were killed; in fact, the military acknowledged recently, the number was closer to 50. Cocaine reported found in Gen. Manuel A. Noriega’s headquarters proved not to be cocaine but tamale powder. Stealth fighter planes said to have performed with “pinpoint accuracy” are now acknowledged to have missed their targets badly.

The emerging picture does not contradict the overall view that the operation was a military success. But the marked revisions, some made months after the fact, make clear that the lasting impressions of those days in December were often less fact than fiction.

The consequences of the spread of such false information can be severe, experts say. These may include not only a distortion of history but, far more dangerously, an erosion of public confidence in the armed forces.

How could the military have been so wrong?

An examination of important inaccuracies in accounts of the invasion makes clear that even in the high-tech Panama invasion, which boasted communications more advanced than ever before in battle, truth was obscured for the same reasons that have always muddied the history of war.

According to historians and experienced officers, the key factors are these: the storied “fog of war”; the battlefield inexperience of most soldiers and officers; a desire to get information to the public as quickly as possible, and, in some cases, the deliberate or careless circulation of misinformation as part of psychological warfare.

In many cases, the experts say, the errors are compounded by a reluctance to set the record straight--particularly when the initial accounts were more favorable to the military.

“We have an expression,” said retired Army Gen. Fred F. Woerner, who commanded U.S. forces in Panama until last summer. “Never believe the first report, and be very suspicious of the second, third and fourth.

“In the heat of battle,” Woerner added, “you find powder, and you’ve been saying (Noriega) is a narco-terrorist, so it must be cocaine.”

Michael Howard, a leading British authority on the history of war, called the inaccuracies “really very worrying. . . . Immediate claims of casualties or successes are almost invariably wildly wrong.”

Historians say that the first reports of combat, amplified and authenticated in bold newspaper headlines and television bulletins, are what shape the public’s most enduring impressions.

Early perceptions of American dominance in the Vietnam War were forged in large part by U.S. estimates of enemy casualties that were later disclosed to have been deliberately inflated. Two decades later, that breach of trust continues to feed a public mistrust of the military.

With far more serious consequences, a falsehood that emerged from World War I helped shape World War II. Official British accounts during World War I asserted that German soldiers committed brutal atrocities against women and children in Belgium.

Later, those assertions were acknowledged to have been false, but the resulting public cynicism caused many citizens of Britain to dismiss early reports of the Holocaust during World War II. In the latter case, the accounts proved, if anything, to have been understatements.

“In a ghastly kind of way, that kind of propaganda--distressingly effective in the short run--was ultimately very counterproductive indeed,” said Howard, now a professor of history at Yale University.

Misleading accounts of the invasion of Panama appear to have been neither so deliberate nor so dramatic. Even as those accounts have been corrected, there has been no indication that public views about the merits of the invasion have changed.

Yet the parade of revisions and corrections has begun to stir resentment in Congress, where some members say that the experience of the last four months has made them less trustful of the military.

“In the heat of battle you expect some things to be distorted,” said Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee. “But this has really gotten to the point where you think it was almost a P.R. (public relations) war. They’re destroying their own credibility. The whole thing looks more and more like a carnival.”

The military’s slowness to correct errors has its roots both in combat and in the military bureaucracy. War is the most unforgiving of human enterprises; one misstep can cost a soldier his life or the lives of his comrades. Military careers involve keen competition for promotions, and even minor errors can overshadow years of successes.

Pete Williams, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, acknowledged that the military circulated some inaccurate accounts of the Panama invasion. But he said that he knows of no cases of deliberate misinformation.

“Every time we hear about something that initially wasn’t correct, we’re concerned and we try to fix it,” Williams said.

The military did little to provide reporters with access to scenes of fighting, and in many cases it actively impeded journalists’ efforts to report the action firsthand.

In a scathing report on the operation of the Pentagon-sponsored “pool” of 16 reporters that was sent from Washington to cover the invasion, retired deputy Pentagon spokesman Fred S. Hoffman said that the military’s “excessive concern for secrecy” thwarted the pool’s intended function of covering the invasion.

Hoffman blamed officials, from low-level public affairs officers in Panama to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, for mishandling news coverage of the operation from start to finish.

Reporters not in the pool were kept out of Panama for more than two days after the invasion began and then corralled on military bases for another 30 hours by officers who claimed to be concerned for the journalists’ safety and the operation’s security. The fighting was largely over before most reporters even got into Panama.

The press itself bears some of the blame for the inaccurate and occasionally sensationalistic early reporting from Panama.

Rather than adopting a skeptical approach to official pronouncements from the Pentagon and the Panama-based Southern Command (SouthCom), U.S. television and newspapers generally reported them uncritically. Pentagon spokesman Williams observed: “Who wants to write a story that begins, ‘Based on initial reports that may be wrong . . . .’ ?”

Some of the areas in which inaccuracies occurred:

Stealth Accuracy

The F-117 Stealth fighter was used in combat for the first time in Panama, with the mission of dropping two 2,000-pound bombs near Panama Defense Forces barracks at Rio Hato, a key invasion target. The intent was to stun but not kill the enemy, to give a U.S. Ranger unit the chance to capture the site with minimal casualties.

Officials, including Cheney, said the fighters performed their mission flawlessly, precisely hitting their intended targets after flying all night from their base in Nevada.

Early this month, however, responding to a reporter’s questions, the Pentagon admitted that the pilots had confused their targets, hitting one out of sequence and missing the second badly.

Casualty Estimates

An equally glaring distortion was contained in American estimates of casualties among enemy soldiers.

From the outset, official accounts indicated that far more Panamanian soldiers than civilians were killed. The number of enemy dead was consistently estimated to be at least 10 times greater than the 23 American soldiers killed in action.

Not until late March--more than a week after the inconsistency was disclosed by a human rights group--did the Southern Command acknowledge that of the 314 Panamanian soldiers estimated on Jan. 11 to have died, only about 50 bodies had been recovered. Pentagon officials now say they have no evidence that any more than 53 Panamanian soldiers died.

“None of us are too proud of this,” Pentagon spokesman Williams said. SouthCom officials explain that the too-high estimate was based on uncorroborated battlefield accounts that may have been inaccurate. “It was like bang, bang, I got one,” one official said.

But SouthCom has not revised its 314 figure. Any future “refinement,” the command said in a memorandum earlier this month, “is the proper role of the Panamanian government.”

The U.S. military has similarly abandoned efforts to produce a final tally of civilians killed in the invasion. Estimates range from SouthCom’s 202 to more than 3,000 once reported by former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark on the basis of information he was given that has since been repudiated.

Inquiring human rights groups and Panamanian officials say that SouthCom’s figure is probably too low, but not by much. Most groups say that about 300 civilians died.

Weapons Toll

Yet another counting problem had to do with enemy guns found by American forces. As the official SouthCom tally rose by late December to 76,000, military officials said the final total could exceed 100,000--an extraordinary number in a small country.

But on Jan. 12 came an official revision: Only 52,000 guns had been found after all.

“In time, there are an awful lot of things to be counted,” said Army Lt. Col. Robert Donnelly, the deputy director of public affairs at SouthCom. In retrospect, he said, “we probably didn’t do a very good job at it.”

Noriega’s ‘Drugs’

The well-publicized and ultimately fanciful case of Noriega and his cocaine stash was another in which early accounts provided a misleading image.

Soon after Gen. Maxwell R. Thurman, head of SouthCom, announced that U.S. soldiers on Dec. 22 found 50 kilograms of cocaine in a house used by the Panamanian strongman, Army investigators discovered that the report was wrong. The suspicious substance was a flour-like powder used to make tamales.

It was not until a month later, however, that SouthCom, under questioning by reporters, revealed that there had been no Noriega drug stash. Officials blamed overblown reports from inexperienced infantrymen who had never seen cocaine.

But the report was left uncorrected long enough to contribute to a broader American effort to demonize Noriega in the public mind. One long press release issued in Panama cited a series of unsubstantiated allegations--including the charge that the Panamanian leader wore red underwear as a voodoo rite--about “this truly evil man.”

Fighting by the Rules

Army officials said initially that U.S. troops had meticulously followed strict rules of engagement in Panama--that is, firing only when fired upon and making every effort to give enemy soldiers the opportunity to surrender before shooting.

Not until three months after the invasion--and only after the independent newspaper Army Times reported it--did the Army acknowledge that it had received 60 allegations of misconduct by U.S. troops in Panama.

One noncommissioned Army officer is facing charges of premeditated murder in the alleged death of a Panamanian prisoner, and seven other noncombat deaths remain under investigation, Army officials said. A total of 20 serious charges remain under scrutiny.

Gen. William C. Westmoreland, former Army chief of staff and the controversial commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, said, “Inaccurate or exaggerated initial reports are implicit in the system.”

He said he did not believe the errors were premeditated lies--a charge he frequently faced in Vietnam--but rather the result of green troops in combat for the first time who reported what they heard or thought they saw.

“Remember you’ve got a bunch of kids, 18, 19, 20 years of age,” Westmoreland said. “They’re good kids. But they’re still young men, and this is their first action. There will be some overreactions, some double counting (of casualties). It’s almost inevitable.”

Deliberate or not, critics say, the military’s credibility suffers. And that in turn damages prospects for sympathetic treatment from Congress and the general public.

“I think they thought this would be a good chance to help themselves get a big defense budget,” said Rep. Schroeder. “But I’m afraid they ended up harming the overall cause.”