Byline: Frederick Kempe Wall Street Journal
When Maj. Moises Giroldi, the leader of the abortive coup in Panama, was buried recently, his body showed several gunshot wounds, a cracked skull and broken legs and ribs. They were the signature of his adversary, Panamanian leader Manuel Antonio Noriega.
The rebel officer's slow and painful death, at the headquarters of Panama's Batallion 2000 squad, was personally supervised by Noriega, says a U.S. official with access to intelligence reports. Leaping into rages, sinking into bouts of drunkenness and mistrust, Noriega has put to death some 70 of his troops involved in the failed coup, according to U.S. officials monitoring crematoriums and funeral parlors in the area.
He is changing the place he sleeps every night, sometimes several times nightly. His meals most often are prepared by the only women he trusts - his full-time mistress, Vicky Amado, and her mother, Norma. And he is collecting the names of those who telephoned the coup leaders to congratulate them during their brief time in control of his headquarters. More names of more enemies to be dealt with.
In the three weeks since the coup attempt, Noriega has been at his most brutal - and efficient - in maintaining power. While seen by some outsiders as a fiasco of U.S. foreign policy, the coup, which the United States ever so tentatively supported, was only the latest and most publicized chapter in a 30-year undercover relationship between Washington and Noriega. For most of that time it was a marriage of convenience.
Back in 1960, for example, when Noriega was both a cadet at Peru's elite Chorrillos Military Academy and a spy-in-training for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, he was detained by Lima authorities for allegedly raping and savagely beating a prostitute. The woman nearly died. But the Central Intelligence Agency, rather than rein in or cut loose its new spy, merely filed the report away. Noriega's tips on emerging leftists in Latin America were deemed more important to U.S. interests, a conclusion that would shape Washington's view of the Panamanian's misadventures during much of the next three decades.
The United States has befriended and later turned against many dictators, but none quite so resourceful. Noriega isn't as smooth as the shah of Iran, as well-born as Nicaragua's Anatasio Somoza, as imperious as Ferdinand Marcos of the Phillippines or as brutal as Haiti's Baby Doc Duvalier. Yet Noriega has proved more resilient than any of them.
"The U.S. underestimated Noriega all along," says Ambler Moss, a former ambassador to Panama. "He has mastered the art of survival."
In keeping with America's long history of propping up Noriega, recent U.S. actions have extended rather than shortened his survival. Noriega might have fallen of his own weight in 1988 because of Panama's dire economic situation, says Moss, but increasing external pressure has only given him additional excuses for repression, and a scapegoat for his own mismanagement.
"If the U.S. had sat back and done nothing, he might not have made it through 1988," Moss contends.
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