(President for Life Manuel Noriega)

I am still feeling the effects of the weekend ramble across the vastness of the eastern heartland of America. In a way, the traumatic effect on the body has been good; I did not for an instant think about Financial Reform; the Johnson County War; Oil and Gas law; or failed relationships.
 
Well, the lattermost is not true. But it is different this week, and like the rain clouds that have blown by there is some distance and light on the horizon and that is all one can really hope for.
 
I was mulling what to be alarmed about this morning when the radio solved the problem for me. As always, there is something from the past that informs the future. In this case, it was Pizza Face going home to the place he had never been.
 
There was a time when Panama was not just a place to consider getting away from Family Practice lawyers and the Fairfax County Courts. Once, it was the vital American construction project, and U.S. soil, taken by hook and crook from our current ally Colombia.
 
Grandpa was a Western Electric engineer, and among other things, he put the telephone system in Panama City, Panama, a century ago. The story in the family goes that he once saw General George Washington Goethals at lunch and made a bold decision.
 
The General was a builder of things in spectacular scale in the mold of Montgomery Meigs. In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him chief engineer of the Panama Canal. He was a wild man, having come up in the Corps of Engineers channeling the Ohio River, among other things. Like the rivers, he was a force of nature.
 
The building of the Canal- a feat that had stymied the French and baffled the best engineering minds in the world- was completed in 1914, a full year ahead of the target date.
 
Grandpa stopped at the general’s table that day, long before the first voyage across the Isthmus was undertaken, with the idea that the signal flags used to transmit the command to open the great locks at Gatun could be replaced by telephonic communications. The General was a visionary, and took the suggestion on board.
 
Consequently, the family has always had a certain connection to the Canal and The Zone in which it was nestled. I was just entering the Navy when Jimmy Carter gave away the farm, so to speak. He had one of those wild hairs about the injustice of the 1903 Hay-Bunau Varilla Treaty, which had seized the Zone for America in order to construct the canal between the worlds. .
 
Jimmy negotiated the Commander of Panama’s National Guard, General Omar Torrijos. Although Torrijos had seized power in a coup in 1968, it was generally considered that strongman had enough support to justify the legitimacy of his signature on the documents. I don’t know about that, and frankly, if Gibraltar is still British soil, I would have had no problem with the Zone still being America.
 
That accounted for some of my fascination with the place.
 
General Torrijos died when his DeHavilland Twin Otter aircraft crashed during severe weather in 1981. Maybe that is true, and maybe it isn’t. The crash occurred shortly after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan and only three months after Ecuadorian president Jaime Roldós died in strikingly similar accident.
 
I did not get to Panama in person until three years later, when I managed to con my boss at Third Fleet into the idea that a joint target board meeting at SOUTHCOM needed Fleet representation. The HQ was still at Quarry Heights in the former Zone, part of the piece-meal handover of installations across the isthmus that would culminate in the impossibly future year of 1999.
 
The Cold War was in full flower at the time, if you will recall, and the kicker was that we had installed some special collection gear at the Naval Security Group compound  at Galeta Island to monitor the ominous Analogous Response surge of Soviet submarines into the eastern Pacific, and we needed more information than we were getting.
 
It was a Two-fer, and the trip was approved.
 
I ran the Honolulu Marathon a couple hours before the flight left, and I discovered that a dozen or so hours of enforced confinement in the airline seat was sufficient to mold my muscles into pretzels. My luggage stayed in Miami, on the transfer from Hawaii to LAX to JFK and finally to the jump across the pond to middle America.
 
I did not care. I took a copy of Graham Green’s marvelous book “Getting to Know the General” with me, along with David McCullough’s thorough account of the Canal, “The Path Between the Sea.” It was good background, and I didn’t even blink when I walked out of the airport at Panama City to see the heroic bust of the dead dictator.
 
Green described the contingency plans Torrijos had to destroy the Canal if he could not get it by negotiation. It was later confirmed by plans captured by the U.S. military in Operation JUST CAUSE. The documents had hand-written notes on them from the architect on the National Guard Staff, a guy with beady brown eyes and a very bad complexion.
 
His name was Manuel Noriega.
 
I followed his career with some interest. He played both sides of the street. He was on the CIA payroll for years, and made special concessions to the US government that included the existence of places like Galeta Island. The Cubans had a Russian car distribution center just next door, right under the microwave link from the US facility back to Quarry Heights.
 
Go figure.
 
If Noriega was a CIA asset, he worked hard on his street creds as a nationalist. U.S. Army personnel were harassed by the National Police on a regular basis, and American uniforms were prohibited on the public streets. The few Navy guys assigned there didn’t mind so much, since they could just take off their khaki shirts, don one of those long white short-sleeve shirts the locals wear, and walk home in mufti. The Army officers had the black stripe on their trousers, and if they tried the same thing the puffed-up bantam cops with the swoopy saucer hats would beat them up if they felt like it.
 
Noriega strengthened his position as the de facto ruler of Panama the year before I got there, without uniforms, which remained in Miami. In August 1983, he promoted himself to full general. The de facto situation was ratified by the legislature after six years, but the process was essentially the same as the way Omar Torrijos did it- raw power, backed by The Guard.
 
In later years, Noriega insisted that his policy during this period was essentially neutral, allowing partisans on both sides of the various conflicts free movement in Panama, as long as they did not attempt to use Panama as a base of military operations.
 
The war in El Salvador preoccupied policymakers through the period, but the tit-for-tat harassment of Americans kept the kettle on the boil. In June of 1989, I was embarked in the good ship Forrestal on work-ups for a deployment to the Med. We were operating off Roosevelt Roads near Puerto Rico in one of those stylized exercises when one night we were suddenly directed to darken ship, leave the formation and steam at best speed to the west.
 
The black helicopters showed up after midnight and some hard-eyed characters from the Special Operations Command began to eat with us in the wardroom.
 
That mission was to snatch Noriega from his love-nest in Panama, but someone leaked the fact that we were coming, and we were directed, sadly, to go back to routine training.
 
We were in the Med when the invasion went down, and after hiding out at the Papal Embassy and being blasted by bad Disco music for a while, he fell into US custody. That was at the beginning of information operations as a warfare specialty, by the way, and there are several related stories that I can’t get to today.
 
Noriega has been in US custody right up until yesterday. The interesting thing is that Pizza Face was whisked out of jail in Miami, and today is living a much better life as a guest of the citizens of France.
 
Bienvenue, Manuel!
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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