THE SPOOKS, THE KOOKS & THE DICTATOR : If Noriega Goes Down, He’s Threatening to Take the CIA, the DEA and the White House With Him

The crowded courtroom fell silent. * A white-haired judge, straight out of central casting, peered down thoughtfully from his lofty perch. The man before him was short and stood very erect, no expression on that famous pockmarked face. He wore a khaki uniform with four stars on each shoulder and spoke Spanish in urgent, even tones. * “When I was brought to the United States, I mistakenly believed that I would be able to receive a fair trial,” Manuel Noriega began. “In order for this to come true, I also believed that I would be able to use my money to hire the lawyers of my choice. It is painfully obvious that the United States government does not wish me to be able to defend myself and (has) done everything possible to deprive me of a fair trial and due process.”* Noriega paused for the interpreter to catch up. Then he started again: “They have taken my money, deprived me of my lawyers, videotaped me in my cell, wiretapped my telephone calls with my lawyers and even given them to the press.” * The deposed dictator of Panama accused the U.S. government of waging a one-sided courtroom war, the equivalent of its December, 1989, invasion of his country. And he let it be known that he, too, has weapons in his arsenal. Nearing the end of his 18-minute oration, he mocked the U.S. government’s claim that it could not force foreign banks to any of the $20 million frozen in Noriega’s accounts to pay his defense lawyers. * He knew the power wielded by the men in Washington, he said, for he had once done their bidding. On his orders, Panamanian-flagged ships were searched in international waters, fugitives were sent to the United States for trial, Panamanian banking laws were breached--all at the behest of U.S. authorities. * “The Drug Enforcement Administration knows this, the White House knows this, and the State Department knows this,” he said. “I know that when the government of the United States wishes something to be done, they obtain it.”* When Noriega demanded the release of his money to pay his lawyers last November in his only courtroom statement to date, the general also delivered a threat: If the United States puts him on trial this fall, he intends to turn the tables and put the United States on trial, too.

MANUEL ANTONIO NORIEGA, NOW 57, stands accused of turning his country into a way station for the murderous Colombian drug smugglers known as the Medellin cartel. According to the government, Noriega allowed the cartel to ship American-bound cocaine through Panamanian ports and air strips, protected its drug-processing laboratories, provided safe haven for traffickers and helped launder narco dollars by the suitcase. Along the way, he supposedly collected at least $4.6 million in bribes.

The indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in February, 1988, claims that Noriega was on the cocaine kings’ payroll throughout the 1980s as he rose from colonel and intelligence chief in the Panamanian Defense Forces to general and de facto ruler of the nation.

In the 19 months since Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces, the prosecution has methodically strengthened its case against him. Dangling the promise of lenient sentencing and reduced charges, prosecutors have struck deals with witnesses that they believe will bind Noriega to the Medellin cartel. By one insider’s count, 16 people--maybe more--will provide firsthand testimony about those links. Three years ago, the number was six.

“They have left no stone unturned,” says Joel Rosenthal, the Miami attorney for Amet Paredes, a Noriega co-defendant until he pleaded guilty in a government deal. “The slimiest of eels and the most honest types, they’ve knocked on all their doors and given away the courthouse--within the rules, of course.”

Further, the brute force of the U.S. Army and the cooperation of the Panamanian government installed after the invasion netted a mountain of documents to bolster the prosecution. The list in court records goes on page after page: reports to Noriega on drug smuggling, bank and credit-card records, telephone logs, personal papers, travel itineraries.

As the September trial date approaches, prosecutors still face a nagging dilemma: For most of the time he was allegedly rented by the drug traffickers--and for many years before--Noriega also was on the U.S. payroll.

Notable among his employers were the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Together, over two decades, those agencies paid him at least $322,000 in secret stipends. But Noriega was promiscuous, available--for a price--to all sides, from the DEA and the Medellin cartel to the CIA and Cuban intelligence. Some of that CIA cash made its way into Noriega’s bank accounts when George Bush was the agency director. How much did Bush know then?

When the clerk rises in Courtroom Nine of the U.S. Courthouse in Miami and calls out case 88-79, the United States of America vs. Manuel Antonio Noriega et al, the former American ally plans, as much as he is able, to reveal just how he was earning his money on the payroll of the United States.

The full range of Noriega’s intrigue remains hidden in the shadow agencies, but even the bare outlines are juicy--and perilous for the government. While he was being criticized by the Reagan Administration for corruption and drug trafficking, he was being praised by the DEA for battling the drug trade. While elements of the U.S. government were accusing him of consorting with the Cubans, a White House National Security Council aide named Col. Oliver North, and others, were using him to train and arm Nicaraguan Contras.

Noriega’s archives are filled with commendations from DEA administrators and personal correspondence from the likes of William Webster, the outgoing director of the CIA. When prosecutors try to tar Noriega by showing a photograph of him with Fidel Castro, a potent weapon with a Miami jury, defense attorneys can respond with a picture of their client chatting amiably with then-Vice President George Bush in 1983.

The very records that incriminate also could exonerate, and a protracted court battle is under way over how much of this classified dirty linen the Noriega team will be allowed to air in public. In their demands for the U.S. documents Noriega wants to use to defend himself, defense lawyers already have forced prosecutors to acknowledge that Noriega provided secret information to the Americans during negotiations over the Panama Canal treaty. This, the general’s lawyers argue, buttresses their claim that federal agents also condoned his illicit drug-running activities as a way to obtain information on the Medellin cartel.

In the view of many lawyers and law-enforcement authorities close to the case, Noriega’s slim chance of winning an acquittal depends on how well he can cloak himself in his work for the U.S. government.

“The best defense is to stalemate the prosecution by virtue of Noriega’s historic role with the intelligence agencies and the DEA,” says Samuel Burstyn, a Miami defense attorney. Burstyn represents a former Noriega aide who has pleaded guilty and will testify against his ex-boss. “He has to claim that what he did was with innocent intent, that he was helping out the CIA, the DIA and the DEA by getting close to the cartel.”

Against this defense, the prosecutors will argue that Noriega was motivated not by a desire to help win the war on drugs but by the same factors that drive other traffickers--greed and corruption. No matter how hard they try, though, the prosecutors will be unable to cast this as just another drug case.

YET, THAT IS HOW IT BEGAN, AS JUST ANOTHER drug case.

One day in the fall of 1985, a DEA agent named Danny Moritz sauntered into the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, plopped into a chair and told the chief of narcotics prosecutions that he had a line on a guy who could bring down Manuel Noriega. After more than a decade as a prosecutor, Richard Gregorie was used to the boasts of young agents. But that day his skepticism was tempered by two things: He knew Moritz was a dynamite agent, and he thought Noriega was dirty.

Gregorie had handled a lot of big drug cases in Miami, including some with political overtones. For two years he had been seeing surveillance photos of known drug traffickers hauling boxes and suitcases into Panamanian banks under military escort. That had made him suspicious of Noriega, who controlled the military. And just the year before, there had been Barry Seal.

A former Army Special Forces pilot, Seal had turned to flying drugs for the Colombians for fun and profit. In 1983, he was arrested and became perhaps the most successful drug informant in U.S. history.

On a 1984 undercover trip to Panama City, he had met with leaders of the Medellin cartel. When he returned, he told Gregorie that the coke kings were living in a hotel under Noriega’s protection. They were waiting until Colombia cooled off after the murder of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, which was widely blamed on the cartel.

The pictures and the protection story meant Gregorie could not simply dismiss Moritz as a bragger.

For months, Moritz had been undercover, worming his way inside a Colombia-Miami cocaine-smuggling ring. His initial target was Floyd Carlton Caceres, a 37-year-old Panamanian pilot and drug smuggler rumored to be working for Noriega. An informant introduced Moritz to Caceres in early 1985, and Moritz waited patiently for the payoff. Finally, in mid-’86, it came.

Caceres had been indicted in Miami, and a former drug associate cooperating secretly with authorities lured him to San Jose, Costa Rica. Not long after Caceres arrived in his ex-associate’s room at San Jose’s Cariari Hotel, he opened the door to the knock of room service and discovered that the man in the waiter’s uniform was Moritz, accompanied by 50 Costa Rican cops.

It took Caceres until the summer of 1987 to decide to cooperate, but when he did, the DEA agents who’d taken over the case from Moritz found that the smuggler had an excellent memory. He provided dates and places as he described the relationship between the Medellin cartel and Noriega. When the Colombians recruited Caceres in 1982 to approach Noriega about providing safe passage for their drugs, they offered to pay Noriega $20,000 to $30,000 a load. Caceres said he relayed the offer to Noriega.

“He laughed, and he told me that if these people thought he was begging, they were wrong,” Caceres later said. “And so I asked: ‘How much do you want?’ And he said: ‘I won’t take less than $100,000 for the first trip, and I want that in advance.’ ”

Between 1982 and 1984, Caceres said, he delivered four payments from the Colombians, starting at $100,000 and rising to $250,000. Unfortunately for the investigation, he said Noriega had instructed him to give the money to a bagman, usually a military officer named Luis del Cid.

When Caceres handed over a box containing the first $100,000, he recalled, Del Cid joked: “What’s in here? A bomb?” Caceres responded, “If it blows up, it’ll be a very big bomb.”

Caceres also said that in 1984 Noriega had been paid $4 million by the cartel for protecting its leaders after the murder of Lara Bonilla. He said they lived in a Panama City hotel. The story corroborated Barry Seal’s account, but Seal would be telling no tales. He had been murdered by a Colombian hit team in Baton Rouge, La., a year before Caceres began talking.

The challenge for Gregorie and the DEA agents was to locate witnesses to back up Caceres and add more details to the relationship between Noriega and the kings of cocaine.

As the hot Miami summer turned to fall in 1987, Gregorie had come up with only one other significant witness, a pilot named Antonio Aizprua. But like Caceres, Aizprua had exchanged his cooperation for leniency, which would leave him vulnerable to attack by defense lawyers.

WHEN GREGORIE BRIEFED DEA HIGHER-UPS on the evidence against Noriega in October, their reaction was blunt. “The case stinks,” said Thomas Byrne, the DEA’s intelligence chief. “You’re not going to be able to make it.” Even if they found more informants to corroborate the details they had so far, Gregorie and his boss, Miami U.S. Atty. Leon Kellner, knew that they faced roadblocks in Washington because of Noriega’s covert work for various U.S. agencies. In particular, DEA was still using Noriega.

But Gregorie was undeterred. His close-cropped beard and balding head make him look like a monk, but he has the character of a bulldog. He went home more determined than ever to make the case. And a few days later, he got a lucky break.

When a drug informant mentioned Noriega in a debriefing with a DEA analyst in Seattle, the analyst recalled an internal memo on the Miami investigation and phoned the Miami agents directly. Steve Grilli of DEA and Gregorie interviewed the witness, Boris Olarte Morales, listening intently as he described paying $4 million to Noriega on behalf of the drug cartel in 1984.

Christmas season brought a bigger gift. A TV producer offered to give Gregorie access to a potential key witness if the producer could interview Caceres. When Gregorie agreed, he was introduced to Jose Blandon, Noriega’s former political intelligence chief.

Slowly, over the past several months, Blandon had turned against Noriega and begun working with a small band of Panamanians to overthrow him. To Gregorie, Blandon offered a fascinating inside look at Noriega’s corruption. Even better, he was not one of the few potential witnesses trying to get off the hook on a drug charge and would be far more palatable to a jury.

Gregorie was riveted as Blandon described how Castro had negotiated a truce between the Medellin cartel and Noriega after a $5-million cocaine lab in Panama was seized by Panamanian forces in 1984. The Colombians claimed they had paid Noriega to protect the lab and planned to kill him in retribution.

According to Blandon, Castro struck a deal in which the $5-million value of the lab would be returned to the cartel and the Colombians arrested in the raid deported. In exchange, the cartel dropped its plans to murder Noriega. As a bonus, Blandon provided photographs of Noriega and Castro in Havana.

On Feb. 1, 1988, three days after Blandon told his story to the grand jury in Miami, two teams of federal prosecutors flew to Washington. Gregorie and his boss, Kellner, formed one team. The other team came from Tampa, where a parallel investigation of Noriega’s ties to a marijuana-smuggling ring was under way. Both groups were seeking final approval for their indictments from top Justice Department officials, right up to then-Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III.

Going in, they knew the case had a major weakness: Noriega could use his work for the CIA, DEA and other agencies to claim he was trying to get close to the cartel for his American handlers. And the prosecutors had no idea just how much work Noriega had done for the U.S. government because no one had let them examine intelligence files at the CIA and elsewhere.

Given the links between the government and Noriega, the Reagan Administration was less than eager to go after him, as Kellner had learned when he had attended a meeting of the National Security Council at the White House. “I never understood that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida was going to make foreign policy,” an official had said to him.

“I don’t make foreign policy,” Kellner replied. “I indict dope dealers.”

But 1988 was a presidential election year and the Iran-Contra scandal was still unfolding. No one was willing to block the indictments. So on Feb. 4, at a joint press conference in Miami, the two indictments against Noriega were unveiled. Among the 15 people charged in the Miami case with him were leaders of the Medellin cartel and Col. Luis del Cid, his alleged bagman.

Beyond the reach of U.S. law in Panama, Noriega thumbed his nose at Washington. The indictments, he said, were “strictly a political act aimed at frightening me and other nationalist Latin American leaders who dare to criticize the United States.” He scoffed at the charges and held out letters of praise from DEA administrators.

While Gregorie had put the case together as he would have any big drug-conspiracy case, he was acutely aware that Noriega was the first leader of a foreign country to have been indicted by the United States. But he was not the first to have worked in secret for the U.S. government. There was no telling how this relationship would go down with a jury.

Then, too, there were the doubts that Noriega would even be brought to trial. At a hearing in Miami two months after the indictment, U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler made plain his views on that issue, saying: “Noriega is a fugitive. The court has no expectation that he will be brought into the jurisdiction to answer the charges against him.”

For 20 months it seemed that he was right. But Hoeveler had not counted on George Bush.

Shortly after one o’clock on the morning of Dec. 20, 1989, a battalion of U.S. Army rangers parachuted onto the runways at Torrijos airport on the outskirts of Panama City in the first wave of the invasion. Within days, the armed forces of Panama had been subdued, and their leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega, driven to sanctuary at the Vatican Embassy in Panama City.

Twenty-five American soldiers and hundreds of Panamanians were killed in the invasion and its aftermath. Damage to Panama was estimated at $1.5 billion.

Ten days after he slipped onto the church property, Noriega emerged carrying a toothbrush and a Bible and was taken into U.S. custody. Stripped of his military uniform and dressed in a drab flight suit, he was flown aboard a military plane to Florida. He soon found himself in the steel-lined warren of cells below the Miami federal courthouse. The circus was about to begin.

IN THE 1980S, THE COLOMBIANS TURNED MIAMI into a cocaine Casablanca. The savagery of their gun battles on Miami’s streets warped the city’s reputation. Their tainted cash filled its banks and stoked its economy. Among those who profited were Ferrari dealers and criminal defense attorneys. The “white-collar bar” was transformed into the “the white-powder bar.”

These lawyers drove the same makes of fast and expensive cars popular with their clients, wore Rolex watches and lived in mansions ringed by high-tech security. They occasionally accepted cars or jewelry in place of fees. Some became so enraptured by the high life that they crossed the line from attorney to partner.

It was from that number that Noriega drew much of his defense team. Whispering in Noriega’s ear during early court hearings was a lawyer named Joaquin (Jack) Fernandez. Around the middle of 1990, Fernandez disappeared from the courtroom. He had gone off to prison for his part in a cocaine-trafficking ring.

Defending Fernandez in his skirmish with the other side of the law had been Raymond Takiff, who also happened to be Noriega’s chief lawyer. Two other Noriega lawyers, Frank Rubino and Steven Kollin, also represented defendants in the Fernandez case.

Rubino, like most lawyers, won’t discuss how he gets his clients and will say only that he and Takiff were contacted by Noriega associates three days before the 1988 indictment. But the story in Miami legal circles is that Fernandez had Panama connections from a money-laundering case in the early 1980s. His friends there had recommended him to Noriega, but because of his own legal problems, Fernandez had passed the case on to Takiff and Rubino. Their antics soon raised eyebrows.

For instance, in October, 1989, Noriega was repressing an attempted coup, and Takiff showed up on ABC’s “Nightline” program. Cellular phone at his side, Takiff said he had talked with the general, and Noriega was in control of the country.

Two months later, as U.S. troops swarmed over Panama, Rubino assured reporters: “The general is alive, well and somewhere in Panama. And he is on top of the situation as far as leading his troops.”

To some, this smacked of cheerleading, not lawyering, and the most prominent defense lawyer, Neal Sonnett, wanted no part of it. On Dec. 27, 1989, Sonnett, former chief of the U.S. attorney’s criminal division, asked to withdraw from the case, telling the judge that his refusal to “make any statement not directly related to the pending proceedings” put him in conflict with Noriega’s other lawyers--who thought he, too, should be a mouthpiece dealing with the press.

Not long after Noriega was brought to Miami, Takiff suffered a heart attack and dropped out. Certainly he was under extraordinary pressure. It was disclosed in June that, at the same time he was representing Noriega, Takiff was an FBI informant in an undercover sting against Dade County judges. It was called Operation Court Broom, and Takiff represented fictitious defendants charged with made-up crimes.

Takiff’s departure left the spotlight on Rubino, an ex-cop, former Secret Service agent and race-car driver. The attention was not always flattering.

For instance, a Miami Herald story disclosed that two thugs had stuck guns to Rubino’s head and forced him to sign over his half interest in a $200,000 boat, taken his Rolex and his Ferrari. Yet Rubino did not report the crime until it came to light when L.A. authorities cracked the sensational Cotton Club murder case.

In investigating the murder of producer Roy Radin, L.A. police picked up the trail of a Ferrari sold by one of the suspects to a Beverly Hills man. They traced the car to Rubino in 1989. According to a sworn statement by Rubino, he owned a charter fishing boat, The Sleuth, with one of his drug clients, Larry Greenberger. On July 25, 1986, Greenberger and his wife, another Rubino drug client, Karen DeLayne (Lanie) Jacobs Greenberger, came to Rubino’s office and claimed he owed them $20,000 in connection with the boat. The boat’s pilot later told police that Lanie contended that Rubino had “screwed her out of $1 million” in an unidentified business deal.

To collect, Rubino said, they brought two gunmen who threatened him and took the black Ferrari Mondial, which had been given to him in lieu of a legal fee, and the gold Rolex, a birthday gift from a client.

Rubino avowed he had kept quiet because the thugs had threatened to kill his family, and by the time he told his story to the police, Greenberger was dead. His widow said he shot himself. The coroner ruled the death a homicide, and it remains unsolved.

Not all the bizarre stories are about defense lawyers. The acting U.S. attorney in Miami, former state legislator and Stanford Law School graduate Dexter Lehtinen, could fill a scrapbook with bad clippings.

Lehtinen, who replaced Leon Kellner in mid-1988, reportedly ran the office with a discipline left over from his days as a by-the-book Army lieutenant in Vietnam. At a staff meeting he exhorted prosecutors to victory by waving a plastic model of an AK-47 assault rifle and passing out printed slogans: “No Guts, No Glory.”

Justice officials in Washington began to express doubts about Lehtinen. His plans to try the Noriega case himself withered under the press assault. The lead in the biggest criminal case in Miami history was handed over to two career prosecutors, Myles Malman and Michael Sullivan.

BLAME IT ON THE SUB-tropical heat. Strangeness dogs the Noriega case. A widely publicized flap erupted when the television network CNN got copies of taped telephone conversations Noriega had made from his three-room cell, dubbed “the dictator’s suite,” at the Metropolitan Correctional Center southwest of Miami.

CNN broadcast the tapes last November in defiance of a court order, creating what most lawyers connected with the case believe was much ado about little. The calls were placed to Rubino’s office and then forwarded to Panama and elsewhere. Among Noriega’s phone mates were his mistress, her mother, his children and officials at the Cuban embassy in Panama City.

Noriega seemed to use a homemade code. Transcripts of the calls, eventually released by Hoeveler, contain such mystifying passages as this one:

“It occurred to me . . . that at a given moment there we have . . . a good towel,” says the mother of Noriega’s mistress.

“Ah, perfect,” replies Noriega.

“And the important thing is it shouldn’t be a hand towel.”

DEA agents listening to the tapes could not make sense of them, but they suspected something nefarious was afoot. So for help they turned to a man familiar with Noriega and Panamanian politics, someone who was already cooperating--Jose Blandon.

According to sources, Blandon grew alarmed when he reviewed the tapes. It sounded to him as though Noriega was kindling a revolt in Panama from his jail cell. He copied some conversations on his own machine and passed them on to the Panamanian government, the sources said. Somehow the tapes also got into the hands of a CNN reporter.

CNN’s possession of the tapes prompted Rubino to accuse the government of savaging his client’s right to a fair trial and violating his attorney-client privilege. He demanded dismissal of the charges. Rubino said he was astounded. He said he had no clue Noriega’s calls were being monitored.

Yet just a month before, Rubino’s story had been different. When told by a Newsday reporter that the U.S. government had intercepted Noriega’s coded calls, Rubino said he and Noriega knew that all calls by prisoners are monitored.

Judge Hoeveler was angered by the leak to CNN. Trying to mollify him, the prosecutors promised a full-scale FBI investigation. The chief suspect turned out to be Blandon, which left the government in the unusual and uncomfortable posture of investigating a key witness against Noriega.

The legal antics and general weirdness have kept the white-powder bar and others buzzing for months. They were the topic of a conversation between two lawyers outside the federal courthouse in Miami--one from Miami and one from Washington.

“You know the most wonderful thing about Miami is its location,” said the local lawyer.

“What do you mean?” the visitor asked.

“It’s so close to the United States.”

IN A CASE WHERE THERE once was a paucity of witnesses, there is now competition for bragging rights among lawyers about whose client will provide the most damaging testimony.

“My guy is the main witness,” says Sam Burstyn, the lawyer for Del Cid, the bagman Caceres had met. Del Cid was a close friend of Noriega’s and former commander of the troops in their home province. “My guy is unblemished, a friend with no ax to grind. This creates an aura of credibility. He was the man Noriega trusted to run the Army. It will be hard to call him a liar.”

Del Cid had been with Noriega when the Americans invaded. “Luis, you’re in charge,” Noriega told him. “Fight to the last man. I’ll be at headquarters directing the battle.” The next time Del Cid saw Noriega was on television. His commander-in-chief was walking out of the Vatican Embassy.

By then, Del Cid had surrendered, too. When asked his motive, Del Cid said simply: “Do you have children? Well, I have 10 children. They all would have died if we had resisted.” He turned out to have a strong survival instinct.

By January, 1990, Del Cid was locked up in a cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. He occasionally bumped into Noriega in the prison’s common areas, and they exchanged a few words. This was before Del Cid joined what inmates call “the rat brigade.”

From the start, Del Cid was an important potential witness for the government. Prosecutors believed he could link Noriega to the cartel payoffs delivered by Caceres, and Del Cid had been on the trip to Havana.

The plea agreement reached last December is testament to Del Cid’s value to the government. He pleaded guilty to a single charge, and the government agreed to recommend a three-year sentence after the Noriega trial. The government also will offer Del Cid and his family new identities in the witness-protection program, ask Panama not to prosecute him and to release his pension from 23 years in the military, and oppose any effort to deport him.

Enrique Pretelt, a wealthy Panamanian businessman and pilot who pleaded guilty in the Tampa case, is expected to testify in Miami about what he saw during nearly 20 years as Noriega’s companion and associate. Del Cid’s importance lies in the evidence he can present; Pretelt’s value to the prosecution rests also in the way he looks.

“He is a clean, good-looking, well-dressed businessman who speaks good English,” says George Tragos, his lawyer. “He is one of the cleanest government witnesses. And he will be able to corroborate what went on at a lot of key meetings, because he was there.”

But Pretelt is testifying to reduce his own punishment, exposing him to defense charges that he is saying what prosecutors want to hear to save himself.

Floyd Carlton Caceres has a similar liability. He earned his freedom through extensive cooperation. His nine-year sentence on the 1986 drug case that led to his cooperation was cut in half last year, and he was freed on probation. At the probation hearing, Noriega prosecutor Michael Sullivan told the judge, “Mr. Carlton Caceres is the most important witness in that prosecution.”

That’s because testimony stemming from a plea bargain is not automatically disqualified by juries. For proof of that, Noriega’s lawyers need look no further than what happened in March in Courtroom Nine.

There, in the trial of two minor co-defendants in the Noriega indictment, the prosecution’s case rested on testimony by Amet Paredes, the young Panamanian playboy, about a guns-for-drugs deal allegedly blessed by Noriega. The son of a general who had been one of Noriega’s most bitter rivals, Paredes, indicted with Noriega, had traded his cooperation for a maximum sentence of 10 years.

The two defense lawyers were relentless in attacking Paredes. Attorney Richard Sharpstein hammered away at the six sworn statements that Paredes had given authorities in Panama and the United States in which he denied involvement in the drug deal and specifically said Noriega was not part of it.

“You lied under oath,” Sharpstein said over and over to Paredes.

“Yes, sir,” came the reply each time.

“You made (up) a story in Panama?”

“That’s my mistake.”

“Three times?”

“That’s mistakes.”

At the end of the trial, which took more than three weeks, it was clear that the jury had found Paredes persuasive. It needed less than four hours to reach a verdict of guilty on all counts--and spent half that time picking a foreman.

Drawing too many parallels between the warm-up act and the big show would be a mistake. But Noriega’s defense lawyers were reminded that they must do more than attack the credibility of government witnesses.

SO FAR, FRANK RUBINO and his associates appear to have done little more than say they plan to put the U.S. government on trial and generate publicity for themselves. Court files and people familiar with the case indicate that the defense was slow to develop a comprehensive strategy and implement it by questioning key witnesses at the pre-trial stage.

“There has been no defense,” said one lawyer involved in the case, echoing the comments of many colleagues. “Rubino hasn’t done squat.”

But, while prosecutors must reveal their case in advance, often the defense is like an iceberg: Only the tip is showing.

To have a prayer of winning, the defense must raise doubts about whether the jury is getting the whole story about why U.S. troops invaded Panama, and suggest that the government is concealing much of the work Noriega did for it. The defense must bring in former CIA agents and ex-DEA agents to testify about Noriega’s efforts on behalf of the United States. It cannot rely simply on tough cross-examinations of prosecution witnesses.

But simply trotting out retired spooks and commendation letters from the DEA will not save Noriega. The defense faces the much more difficult task of providing the jury with a reason to want to help him. It must find some way to elicit sympathy for a man who will be painted as the corrupt and venal gatekeeper for a tidal wave of cocaine that saturated the United States.

Manuel Antonio Noriega no doubt recognizes that to survive he must cast himself as the underdog. That was, after all, part of the message last November when he compared the courtroom war to the invasion of his country, when he complained that he was denied a fair trial by people he once helped.

Now, as his day in court approaches, Noriega is prepared to wage his own battle against the government that once paid handsomely for his services. But just as his armed forces were outnumbered and outgunned when U.S. troops swept into Panama shortly before Christmas in 1989, Noriega is operating at a strategic disadvantage that seems to put victory out of his reach. The question remains, however: How much damage can he inflict on his former allies on the way down?