DEA Witnesses Tell 2 Sides of Noriega Story on Drugs

As U.S. drug enforcement agents continued to parade to the witness stand, both sides in Manuel A. Noriega’s drug-smuggling trial appeared to be scoring points.

Defense attorneys have gotten agents to acknowledge that the former Panamanian dictator was helpful in fighting drug trafficking, but in cross-examining them, federal prosecutors have shown that Noriega also provided substantial help to drug runners.

The prosecution wants the jury to see Noriega as a “crooked cop,” a man who accepted millions of dollars in payoffs from Colombian drug traffickers to allow their cocaine shipments safe passage through Panama to the United States.

The defense is trying to portray Noriega as a cooperative friend of U.S. anti-drug efforts, as a man falsely accused by others.

Defense attorneys have been calling drug enforcement agents to the stand and showing them reports they wrote from Panama in the 1980s--suggesting that Noriega and his military aides were reliable allies.

The agents, while reluctant to help the defense, have been forced to acknowledge that Panama’s G-2 military intelligence unit, headed by Noriega, gave them the names of drug-money couriers arriving at Panama’s airports and the amounts of cash they carried.

The U.S. agents also have conceded that G-2 officials seized shipments of chemicals passing through Panama en route to cocaine processors in Colombia. And, at the request of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the G-2 unfailingly permitted U.S. authorities to board any Panamanian-registered vessel they suspected of carrying contraband--most often marijuana--according to the agents’ reports.

Prosecutors have tried to rebut the damaging testimony by cross-examining each agent, seeking to impress the jury with the government’s theory of this case: that Noriega was a skillful intelligence official “working both sides of the street and playing both sides against each other,” as one government source expressed it.

To date, the most helpful witness to the defense has been Thomas Telles, DEA supervisor in Panama from 1984 to 1986. In three days of testimony, Telles told of enjoying a close working relationship with Luis Quiel, the chief of Noriega’s anti-narcotics police.

Telles said that Quiel and his men provided security for DEA undercover operations in Panama against drug-money launderers and even furnished information on some of the activities of Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa, two leaders of the Medellin cocaine cartel with whom Noriega has been accused of conspiring.

On cross-examination, chief prosecutor Michael P. Sullivan elicited from Telles testimony that cooperation from Noriega and his men often was limited.

The defense witness most helpful to the government’s case has been DEA supervisor James Bramble, Telles’ predecessor as chief agent in Panama in the early 1980s.

While Bramble acknowledged the same kind of cooperation from Noriega’s police as did the others, he pointedly testified that the police protected close associates of the former strongman from DEA scrutiny.