The Capture Of General Noriega - 5 January 1990

At this time of the year, every journalist who has a regular outlet is required to let out his or her deep thoughts about the events of the past year, a duty that applies as much to a gardening correspondent or a lacrosse watcher, as to a Gorbachev watcher.

This year, because the calendar suddenly says 1990, everyone automatically assumes we have come to the end of the '80s and so we are obliged to be wise about the events of a whole decade.

Two distinguished American columnists have declined to do their duty on the ground that the present year, 1990, marks the beginning, not the end, of the last year of the '80s decade. I'm afraid they're not going to get anywhere with this arithmetical logic. When people see 1990 on their calendars, they're not going to keep the fireworks dry for another year. And no editor is going to allow his stable of pundits to put their cosmic thoughts on ice until Tuesday, 1 January 1991. They didn't do it on Monday, New Year's Day 1900.

The best social history of the United States covering the first 25 years of this century – the first 24 years I mean – actually spent the first 500 pages of a first volume of 600 pages reviewing the events, civil and military, foreign and domestic, the household habits, the food, songs, the architecture, literature, inventions of the whole 19th Century.

So, bowing to the popular will, I shall shortly try and remind myself – as much as you – of some of the happenings of the '80s that seem to have changed our lives. But first we have to catch up with the sudden turn in a story that obsessed the American people during the last week of the old year – our old, or new, malodorous friend, General Manuel Noriega.

Talking of obsession, I have to tell you here about a good friend of mine in San Francisco, a surgeon and a crack amateur golfer who takes a citizen's interest in American policy but not to the exclusion of his daily work with the knife and the putter.

But he says for the past eight years, he's never been able to get out of his mind the presence and the doings of the Panamanian dictator and the Nicaraguan dictator, Daniel Ortega.

That's because he lives in a leafy suburb of San Francisco, close by the huge, bosky Golden Gate Park and because of the freakish fact that while his own street is called Marcela, it is bound on each side by two other streets, one called – wait for it – Ortega Street and the other, Noriega Street.

They've been there so named for years and years. And until the nasty little matter with the Contras and then with the Colombian drug cartel, the names didn't mean a thing.

Well now, General Manuel Noriega. The background, the immediate background, to his surrender. You will remember that once he got into the papal mission, President Bush – thwarted by what he said was the first aim of the invasion – demanded that the general be turned over at once to the United States, to be flown to Miami to face charges and ultimately a trial on 12 criminal counts, including drug trafficking, bribery, laundering the proceeds of the drug cartel, conspiring with Cuba's Fidel Castro to protect a drug laboratory.

Most of the counts touch on the shifts and ingenuities of maintaining the flow of drugs into the United States.

The Vatican does not react kindly to peremptory demands from anybody, especially if they appear to violate the church's ancient tradition of sanctuary. Until three or four days before the end, the Vatican said it would not consider turning the general over to an occupying power, a definition of the American military presence shared by the outraged 20 South and Central American republics by the United Nations and by practically the entire press of Europe and Asia.

So then the White House, fuming but still diplomatically praising the Vatican's statesmanship, turned to Mr Endara, the new Panamanian president installed by the American military during the first days of the invasion, but, a president truly elected in a democratic election last May that the general declared null and void.

Hope glimmered for a day when Mr Endara's new attorney general said the new government wanted the general to have him tried in Panama. But the attorney general evidently had his wires crossed with Mr Endara who begged the Vatican not to release the general to the United States because the Panamanian Constitution had no extradition treaty.

He also didn't want the general back on his own ground because, President Endara protested, "We have no supreme court, we have no judicial system. We cannot give him a trial by due process." The White House dug its heels in and went back to saying "our position is what it's always been. We want the general to stand trial in the United States".

It will be interesting to know which of the early explanations of the general's release is true. Whether the Vatican did decide that sanctuary did not apply to a common criminal who could no longer be classified as a fugitive from persecution, or as a political fugitive. Whether he felt intolerably cornered, whether his personal friends turned against him, or whether, as seems quite likely, he decided, in his desperate last stand, he could mount a defence so wounding to the United States and its president, that the trial might have to be called off on the ground that the confidential documents he's boasted about owning were to have to be suppressed as endangering the security of the United States.

At this woeful stage of his criminal career, this guess may sound desperate indeed. But we shouldn't forget that there is an ample, and highly embarrassing, record of Noriega as the cherished agent of the United States and that the well-documented memory of those years was enough to have several White House advisors hope and pray that President Bush would not get what he said he wanted, namely what has just happened, the surrender of Noriega to the processes of American justice.

Consider the attitude and the complicity of the United States during the 20 years of the general's engagement with American intelligence. By 1969, he was a paid agent of the CIA when he was only a junior officer. He remained so throughout the 1970s, he, eventually, earning in that sideline $200,000 a year.

In 1976, American drug enforcers discovered that Noriega himself was a trafficker in the drugs he was supposed to be suppressing. They passed on the word to the director of the CIA, one George Bush, who met him, talked things over, no doubt the general convincingly dismissed these preposterous rumours and he remained in place as America's man.

In 1983, the American drug enforcers had proof that Noriega was now a principal agent of the Colombia drug cartel. Mr Bush, now Vice President Bush, met him again.

That must have been a difficult meeting. Noriega was now a valued helper in the Reagan administration's efforts to supply the Nicaraguan rebels, the Contras. He'd made Panama into a base for weapons, for supply, for intelligence. It seemed better, evidently, to leave him in place. Still well paid.

Anyway, in that year, 1983, Officer Noriega was General Noriega and the actual ruler of Panama, with American support. And in 1984, there was an election, the first in 16 years. The new president lasted barely a year and resigned and was replaced by a hand-picked Noriega man. But General Noriega, with American support, again ran the whole show.

There came a time, 1987 – and we don't know really why – the United States decided that the general was too hot to handle in the warming climate of the Colombia drug business. By the next year, 1988, he was dropped and disgraced, and in Miami was indicted by a grand jury on the charges on which he was arraigned on Thursday. A principal witness then was a man long associated with Noriega in the drug business who presented horrifying details of the general's involvement. We shall no doubt hear from that man again.

Another we shall certainly hear from is Colonel Luis del Cid, the right-hand man of the general's who was his courier with the Colombia drug traffickers. Colonel del Cid turned himself in last week and the department of justice expects great things from him, if he decides – as he surely must – to be what the lawyers call a cooperative witness.

Meanwhile, the FBI and the administration's drug enforcers are plunging into the general's fat files in Panama. Might they not want to suppress or shred all, or some, of the stuff that the general boasted was deeply embarrassing to Mr Bush? They might.

But the general's defence lawyers are on hand and if they proved that documents to be used in the general's defence had been withheld, the judge, under the Classified Information Procedures Act of Congress could declare a fair trial to be impossible.

If all, on the other hand – the juicy stuff, is submitted to the court, the justice department might succeed, as it did with Colonel North, in declaring much of it unusable for reasons of national security.

The legal twists, turns and stratagems are interminable. And some very competent lawyers cheerfully remarked this week that the general's trial could go on for months, nay, for years.

What happened to all those events that changed our lives during nine years of the '80s decade? They will wait. Not a year. But a week, maybe.

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