The failed coup against Manuel Noriega - 13 October 1989

I think it's fair to say that if there are two topics that have engrossed Americans this week more than any other, they are war and mini-war.

Not to tease you any longer, I'm talking about the progress – some say the foul-up – of the coup against Panama's dictator, General Manuel Noriega.

And over this weekend and through, we expect, most of the coming week, there's another battle that will engage the loyalties and the passions of more millions of Americans that can accurately place Panama on a map.

That is not a sarcastic remark. After all, only recently a survey of California college students revealed that something like 30% of them could not define New England on a map of their own country. And more recently still, only the other night, we heard that about 20% of college seniors – that's people in their last university year – were enlightened to hear that Germany and Japan were not America's allies in the Second World War.

The mini battle, which might sensibly require President Bush to put his political agenda on hold, is the one being fought on both sides of San Francisco Bay, the battle for four games out of seven between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics which will decide the World Series, the baseball championship of 1989.

This year, even those un-American Americans who inexplicably take little interest in the incomparable national game have had their curiosity tweaked by the rare fact that for the first time in 33 years, the series is being played between two teams whose home grounds are a mere tube ride away from each other, between two cities – San Francisco and Oakland – that for many years have maintained, like Manchester and Liverpool or Edinburgh and Glasgow, if not a scornful, at least a sniffy view of each other.

But for now we must take up the real war, or what one national magazine dubs "Amateur hour on the battlefield". It would be nice – and what you'd expect of me – to begin by sketching a clear outline, a simple chronology of what happened in Panama when a rebel rump in General Noriega's army decided to overthrow him.

But from the moment the rebels swooped on the general's headquarters, indeed from hours or days before it happened, there's no agreed chronology, no accepted account of who was doing what to whom and – most especially – when the United States was approached to help, if it was approached, and what it did, or didn't do, once the coup was under way.

In the beginning, the story seemed sad but short and simple. In the early afternoon of Tuesday 3 October, we heard, in one breath, one television report, that rebel officers of General Noriega's army had attempted a coup against him, that it had failed and the leaders had been shot.

What is certain is that the whole uprising took about five hours, from just before eight in the morning to a few minutes after 1pm. Now if this had happened somewhere in Africa, or even in South America, it would have been in the news and out of it in a day.

But ever since Mr Khrushchev secretly planted missile sites in Cuba 27 years ago and scared the daylights out of President Kennedy's America, Central America has been looked on as the backyard of America's security and any belligerent dictator of the left or right, as a potential threat to the buffer state of Mexico, and hence to the southern borders of the United States.

Panama, of course, is a special case, because of the United States' ownership of the Panama Canal, which, while it has only a few more years to run, is considered a trade lifeline between the oceans and a vital American security base.

And the Panama of General Noriega makes him a very special, painful case. Early last year, he was indicted by the American State's government on charges of drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering. There was never any hope of getting him extradited to stand trial here so the Congress slapped heavy economic sanctions on him which made a shambles of his economy but had the effect also of making an impoverished population poorer still.

The United States, through its diplomats and the CIA, has worked ever since to encourage rebel elements and made no bones about it. Mr Reagan wanted him out. Mr Bush wants him out.

There was an attempted coup last March which failed. Since Mr Bush came in, he has said constantly that the United States would support – he never said with the military – would support an uprising. But Noriega, who outside his own country is regarded as a particularly repulsive example of a Central American tyrant, has flourished and flaunted his contempt for what he laughingly calls "the giant of the north".

So any time there's a rumour of a coup, Americans at once ask if their own country was behind it. Within an hour or two of the reports of the recent failure, Congress was bristling with questions and charges and counter-charges. Was Mr Bush in it? If not, why not? Did he get into it too late? Didn't he know it had been plotted?

A minority, a small minority, goes on saying that the troubles and turmoils of the Central American republics are their own business and that any American involvement, especially covert involvement, could produce another fiasco on the model of Nicaragua and the Iran-Contra affair.

Well, by the evening of D-Day, which was also VN Day – Victory for Noriega day – Mr Bush said it had been exclusively a Panamanian coup and the United States had no part in it. To the charge that the United States ought to have hopped in there, in some undefined way, to help the rebels, Mr Bush replied, sensibly – as it then appeared that the rebellion came from within Noriega's own army – there was no guarantee that it would constitute a democratic uprising and that if the United States had rushed in, it might soon have found itself backing another military dictator.

This explanation was acceptable for about a day and a night. The New York Times was the first to come out with a long report which amounted to a charge that President Bush, his security advisor and his shief of staff and others had, indeed, been in on the plot, had been poorly informed during the hours that Noriega's headquarters were being stormed, and, on the whole, had missed a golden opportunity.

Then other papers and network correspondents came tumbling in with more reports, the gist of their judgement being that the administration had shown inexperience and unpreparedness. By the end of the week, there was a credible running story.

Since the failed March coup, American intelligence had not made close enough contact with likely rebel elements to identify the major – Major Giraldi – who was the leader of the coup. By the time the major led his men into Noriega's headquarters (which is in sight of the United States army garrison), nobody in the administration knew first whether Noriega was at home, so to speak, then whether he'd been trapped in a part of the building, or whether the rebels were actually holding him in the flesh.

It came out, too, that in spite of the early protestations of innocence, the president, the state department and the CIA had all been warned a day and a half before it happened that a coup was imminent. And they learned it from Major Giraldi.

He requested – and by now the president's national security advisor has confirmed this – he requested that American troops should block off two roads along which Noriega could expect quick reinforcements.

Correspondents found out there was a third road which was not blocked and along which an ample rescue force did in fact pour through, save Noriega, overwhelm the rebels and, late in the same evening, executed them.

Mr Bush's national security advisor, Mr Scowcroft, admitted all this on a television panel show last Sunday. But he pointed out two snags – that the administration chose not to block the third road, because it ran through the heart of the city and any attempt to seize it would have entailed much loss of life among civilians.

The second point is one that goes to the heart of covert action planned by any administration and frustrates it before it can be carried out. Mr Scowcroft reminded us and, most pointedly, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee sitting opposite him, of a presidential order which has been in force for 14 years but not publicly discussed before last Sunday, a presidential order which forbids the Central Intelligence Agency from attempting any political assassination or, by obvious extension, planning or assisting in any coup that might entail the death of the principal target.

This prohibition, which even Washingtonians either never knew about or have forgotten, goes back to 1974 when it was first admitted that the Kennedy administration had tried to have Cuba's Fidel Castro assassinated. So, in that year, '74, Congress insisted that from then on, its intelligence committee should be made privy to all covert actions planned by the administration. And in 1976, President Ford, under constant pressure from Congress, delivered the executive order which prohibits covert action that might result in a leader's death.

Within days of the failed Panama coup, a national poll here found 60% of Americans saying they would have supported an American intervention but only if there was no likelihood of heavy American casualties. The Americans are still mortally afraid that, as with Vietnam, sending in a raft of military advisors might, in the long run, turn into the despatch of half a million men.

So, if you add to the fact that Congress must know ahead of time all intended covert action, the nasty fact that Washington is an information dam riddled with leaks, add, also, the public fear that military action may mean Americans will get hurt, it means that no president will be able to say, like Napoleon, "If you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna".

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