UNNECESSARY EVIL

U.S. foreign policy created the occasion and Tony Noriega rose to it. Sexually deviant, psychologically savage, and politically sensational, he schemed his way from the obscure fringes of the Panamanian demimonde to the office of Maximum Chief. T. D. ALLMAN profiles an unnecessary evil

T. D. ALLMAN

I am, l am Tony Noriega and he does not have any inhibitions, or traumas or indecisions; he does not bask in flattery, adulation or pomp. —Thought, Doctrine and

Practice of Comandante Noriega*

aybe it's nothing to brag ab°ut' but within fifteen seconds of meeting General MaAntonio Noriega, I made him laugh.

A Panamanian acquain-

tance had just spirited me through the three tiers of thugs separating Panama's most hated man from the wrath of his people and the ire of the Reagan administration. Inside this cordon sanitaire, a plastic-cups-and-whitewine cocktail party, complete with toothpicked hors d'oeuvres in stainlesssteel chafing dishes, was going on.

My guide stationed us near a pillar in the corner of the room nearest the entrance. Ten feet away, dressed in a starched brown-and-green camouflage uniform, and wearing what looked like a white-and-red baseball cap, stood the man who's knocked the Ayatollah Khomeini off the charts to become Washington's Most Hated Dictator of the Year.

Noriega finished adjudicating some small dispute between two sup‡ plicants. As he strode toward the center of the room, the man beside me called out, ''''Comandante!"

Without breaking stride, Noriega swiveled and walked straight up to us.

As introductions were made, half a dozen people gathered around us in a deferential semicircle four feet in radius.

" jMucho gusto!" exclaimed the general, vigorously pumping my hand.

"Encantado, General," I replied. "Is it true you have the Mark of the Three Sixes engraved on your skull?"

A sudden silence overtook my unfortunate interpreter as, having automatically, almost involuntarily, translated my query into Spanish, he considered the full significance of the words which had just issued from his own mouth. The semicircle was silent too.

Then everyone was laughing because the general was laughing. Noriega's ample, muscular tummy was heaving up and down. His bright-white teeth flashed. His eyes, which appear so reptilian on the covers of U.S. newsmagazines, sparkled with what one unaware of his satanic notoriety would have described as human mirth.

*The quotes used throughout this piece are reprinted from General Manuel Antonio Noriega's only published book. Edited by the Panama Defense Forces, it contains excerpts from speeches, conversations, and interviews chosen to provide a definitive presentation of his political and military thinking, and his philosophy of life.

"I broke the crystal. I tore the wallpaper from the wall,"

"See for yourself," he answered, obligingly sweeping his cap off his head and running the fingers of his right hand through his coarse, wavy black hair. General Noriega bent forward so I might personally inspect his receding hairline and the scalp underneath.

Then he shook my hand a second time. "My name's Tony, not Damien, and I'm not the Antichrist. That senile jerk up in the White House," he went on, "is the one who's trying to unleash ..." Noriega couldn't think of the word he wanted, so he made a small gesture with one of his fingers, the one that had his military-class ring on it.

A fleshy man wearing a canary-yellow sport shirt and two gold chains was instantaneously at the general's elbow.

"You studied for the priesthood," Noriega said. "What's the name of the last book of the Bible?"

"The Book of Revelations, General."

"And what's the name of that big battle they have there?"

"The Battle of Armageddon, sir," the man replied, immediately reverting, like a discharged proton, to his four-foot orbit.

Now everybody was laughing again because, for the second time, the general was laughing.

"Yes, that's it!" Noriega exclaimed. "Reagan's screwed up in El Salvador. He's screwed up in Nicaragua. He's a washed-up old loser, but he wants to go out of office with a big victory. So he's trying to unleash Armageddon on Panama."

The general held forth jovially for ten minutes on the duplicity, cynicism, arrogance, incompetence, and impotence of the administration in Washington.

I asked him what he thought of the powerful American enemies he had made —people like former national-security adviser John Poindexter and current assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams.

Again everyone laughed because Noriega laughed.

"They deal in drugs to support the contras," he announced. Those around him nodded in agreement. "They kill thousands in Central America to no end." More nods of agreement. "They consort with terrorists and the kidnappers of U.S. citizens in the Middle East. They lie to Congress and violate the Constitution. And they accuse me of being a lying, drug-dealing murderer!"

More nods, more laughter at the gringo absurdity of it all. "My dear friend," Noriega said, playfully tapping my shoulder, "tell me what you think. Be honest. Who is the real criminal—Colonel North or General Noriega?"

The reception hall, located in a modern, American-style convention center, was icily air-conditioned, and even as the beads of sweat forming on the back of my neck turned cold, I remembered what Noriega's own actions had demonstrated many times: the best defense is a strong offense.

So I looked straight at him and said, "It goes far beyond any question of criminality, General. You are the most hated man in the United States. Taxi drivers who two years ago were telling me we should nuke Qaddafi now say you are evil incarnate."

Among those who know him, Noriega has a reputation for shyness—a tendency almost to blush in the face of praise that deeply touches him. Now I saw what they meant.

His extroversion was replaced with what in anyone else would have seemed bashfulness. He lowered his eyes, as if considering his unworthiness of the great honor just now bestowed upon him.

Then Noriega looked up. The dark eyes of this short, squat, pockmarked mestizo stared directly upward into mine, communicating delight, but also dubiousness.

"Do they really hate me even more than Qaddafi?" he asked.

"Even more than Qaddafi," I assured him.

Noriega laughed with pleasure and satisfaction. "We must talk more, but not now. I have so much to do. I hope you will excuse me. You see, this is Holy Week."

As General Noriega took his leave, the crowd applauded. He turned to acknowledge the applause; our eyes met.

Noriega winked.

The only changes l foresee are those of the weather . . .

At that time General Noriega had many good reasons to laugh and wink.

During the preceding weeks, he had crushed a mutiny among his own troops. He had driven peaceful demonstrators from the streets with tear gas and gunfire. He had suckered "mediators" from three continents into imagining he could be negotiated out of power, and so gained valuable time to fly in arms from Cuba and find new sources of money to replace the funds the Americans had frozen.

He'd also thumbed his nose at President Reagan, and made an absolute idiot of Elliott Abrams, who, on national television, had boasted that, just because the U.S. wanted him to go, Noriega would go—in fact, would be gone within days.

Then, just twenty-four hours earlier, Noriega had pulled off another bravura coup. The place where I met the general is called the ATLAPA (for Atlantic-Pacific) Center. Just across the street is the Marriott Cesar Park Hotel. And until the previous night the Marriott had offered a spectacle as engrossing, in its way, as the sight of Noriega's "Dobermans" (as his riot troops proudly call themselves) clubbing unarmed women protesters, shooting water cannons filled with acid at churchgoers, and teargassing patients in hospital wards.

As Panama became the great foreign news story of the hour, and hundreds of reporters converged to cover what few seemed to doubt was the imminent, in evitable fall of General Noriega, the Marriott became the hotel where every journalist had to stay. By day they dashed back and forth across the hotel's mockMediterranean lobby—racing out to demonstrations and press conferences, racing back to satellite film and fax stories to their editors. Then, each evening, as scores of correspondents gathered, the fountain in the lobby would gurgle. The pianist in the lobby would play "Bridge over Troubled Water." And constant as the gurgling fountain, persistent as a tune you can't get out of your head, the day's "news" would circulate from table to table.

Mrs. Noriega saitTThen I cut her on the face and breast."

The general would leave tomorrow. (The general would leave next week.) Noriega would go to Spain. (He would go to Paraguay.) The American ambassador (the papal nuncio) was putting the finishing touches on Noriega's exit.

Other hotels offered similar amenities. So why this journalistic implosion?

I discovered what I had in places like Manila and Beirut. The press did not pack into this one particular place to get closer to the story. (Of all the major hotels, the Marriott was the most remote from downtown Panama City, and the major news events unfolding there.) They converged because there was safety in numbers.

Safety, first and foremost, from the danger of failing to report what everyone else was reporting: here, no scoop was a scoop for more than fifteen minutes. No "exclusive" interview remained exclusive past the cocktail hour. But the Marriott also offered another kind of safety. Downtown, you might get roughed up by the Dobermans. But if the "security forces" laid a hand on any journalist here, all the other journalists, within minutes, would be sending a torrent of pictures and words to the outside world, proving that this was a regime that would stop at nothing. Not even General Noriega, it was assumed, cared to inflict on himself a public-relations disaster of that magnitude.

But to understand someone, you must put yourself in that person's position. And if you do, you can see precisely why, for Noriega, the Marriott was such an irresistible target.

For weeks the State Department had been assuring the press—and so the press had been reporting—that Washington had but to snap its fingers for Panama's strongman to submit to the Reagan administration's will.

How to correct this baneful misimpression? The Civic Crusade—a democratic, nonviolent anti-Noriega alliance of some two hundred civic organizations—had called a press conference for five that evening at the Marriott. As

usual, it was pushing six P.M. and nothing had happened; if the Crusade didn't get its act together, the feeds to the network news shows would be lost.

Dozens of tired, irritable journalists were milling around the hotel when Noriega's soldiers attacked—smashing cameras, grabbing film, kicking some correspondents to the ground, punching others in the face.

Some local journalists tried to help their foreign counterparts, so the troops grabbed one of these Panamanians by the feet. As they dragged him across the tile-floored lobby, then down the cement steps outside, his head banged against the tiles and cement. Other soldiers, carrying shopping bags, were breaking into hotel rooms, seizing film, tapes, and documents, stuffing them into the bags. At gunpoint, they rounded up as many journalists as they could find.

The film Missing, along with The Year of Living Dangerously, had been showing on Panamanian cable TV all that week; possibly that provided the inspiration for what happened next. Prodded into caged vans with rifle butts, the reporters were taken to a sports stadium and given a lecture on journalistic ethics—especially on the press's duty to tell the truth.

By eleven, most of the journalists were back in the lobby, laughing at their brush with the kind of terror Panamanians have faced for years. But the next night the crowd in the Marriott was much smaller. Some journalists had moved to other hotels. A good number, after weeks of waiting for Noriega to fall, decided it was time to go to Miami for a little R&R. The real success of the Marriott attack, however, was to be seen in what was now written and broadcast from Panama.

Over the next few days the Noriega on the Way Out stories modulated into stories about Noriega Toughing It Out. Features on the general's wrongdoing became features about the impotence of the Civic Crusade. A TV correspondent I'd grown accustomed to seeing twice a day—first in the morning, talking into a camera in front of some photogenic disturbance; then at night, on a TV screen, with the disturbance as a backdrop— went for his usual evening stroll. Three men demanded money. Then, after he had given them his money, they cut him slowly, carefully, with a knife. "The comandancia's passed the word to the underworld," a Panamanian source told me. "You reporters are fair game now."

fl ^ anama is famous for its bantamH H weight boxers. And as Noriega

■ bobbed and weaved around the mW ring, slashing his opponents I with head blows and kidney ■ jabs, two incidents, more than H any others, seemed to measure the man.

In a confrontation with a dissident officer, Noriega was urged to go into exile for the sake of Panama and its people. He listened quietly. Then he walked over to the man and hit him in the face. Noriega's spies had given the general nearly a week to prepare for this moment. Now, by prearrangement, other officers surrounded the dissenting officer and wrapped him in a large American flag. Then they played a reverse game of blindman's buff—taunting and slapping the man wrapped in the American flag as he was dragged off.

Following this confrontation, Noriega emerged from his labyrinthine military headquarters. Rumors were coursing through Panama that he had been overthrown. Reporters had gathered; so had the TV cameras.

Noriega blew kisses into the cameras.

A short time later, at the general's invitation, a high-ranking U.S. delegation arrived in Panama, headed by a State Department official named William Walker. In addition to making headlines, the occasion had historical resonance. Walker is the namesake of a nineteenth-century American filibusterer who marauded across Central America destroying towns, burning crops, and overthrowing governments. Central Americans still vividly remember him as a man who sowed chaos in the name of freedom.

This time the roles were reversed. Walker and the U.S. delegation met twice with Noriega. In the morning, they offered the general what he had let them assume he wanted—a safe, easy, honorable way out. Spain would provide Noriega and his followers comfortable asylum. The United States would drop its criminal indictments against him. The general could leave with his pride; he could leave with his money. The U.S. would let him off scot-free.

At this initial meeting, Noriega once again listened almost deferentially. Then the Americans withdrew, to give him time to consider. When they returned, Noriega subjected the diplomats to what one of them described to me as "a three-and-a-half-hour harangue." Then he curtly dismissed these plenipotentiaries of the United States.

Shortly after Noriega wrapped his military critic in the American flag and sent the Walker mission packing, a confidant of the general's telephoned. Would I care to come over to the hotel suite he kept for "unofficial appointments" and watch a little TV?

In Panama, if you're close to the general, you don't pay bills. You sign them. As one of his female "assistants" ordered drinks from room service, the official put a tape in the VCR the way you or I might put on a treasured old episode of Saturday Night Live.

It was his Elliott Abrams tape. My host guffawed as he watched Abrams's prognostications on Panama, but he hadn't invited me up just for laughs. He wanted information.

"Is this the guy who thought the contras could beat the Sandinistas?" he asked. I nodded. "And is he the one who was mixed up with Poindexter and North?" I said yes. "Isn't he also the one Congress caught lying?"

"That's what they claim," I equivocated, knowing, almost certainly, that what I said was being recorded.

"And he thinks he can kick Tony Noriega around?" As I nodded again, he uttered a quick series of expletives in Spanish. I looked at him curiously, and in slow, accented English, he provided his own translation: "Fucking faggot. We'll bugger him too."

By then, in truth, the Reagan administration was already getting screwed. Days, then weeks, passed, following Elliott Abrams's prediction. The headlines were still all of the crisis in Panama. But, for the time being, the real crisis was in Washington.

A regime that would attack U.S. civilians in the Marriott hotel would attack U.S. troops still billeted in hotels around Panama City. A regime that would stop at nothing would not stop at attacks on the Panama Canal. (Indeed, under the very eyes of U.S. forces, Noriega's troops had already run a "training exercise" in which they effortlessly captured one of the canal's most vulnerable locks.)

Clearly Noriega planned to remain dictator of Panama until such time as it

suited him to consummate his rape of the nation and withdraw. As that realiza-

tion sank in, there was naive despond among U.S. officials in Panama. ("But it was he who asked us to negotiate," one official complained, still not comprehending how thoroughly he'd been had.)

In Washington there was hysteria. The U.S. might kidnap Noriega, anonymous, "well-informed" sources declared, or foment a coup. But American intelligence had no reliable knowledge of who, if anyone, in the Panama Defense Forces now opposed Noriega—no idea in advance of where the general would go that day, or sleep that night.

Of course, there was always the possibility that a lucky bullet might get him, or that some unknown cabal would, for its own reasons, save Washington from its latest bogeyman. There was also the chance that American economic sanctions might somehow bring Noriega, whose personal fortune is estimated at anywhere from three hundred million to a billion dollars, to heel.

But these were not policy options. Like the TV pronouncements, they were only results devoutly, desperately, to be hoped for—deus ex machina happy endings to the nightmare.

There was, to be sure, another "option." The U.S. could invade Panama. It could turn the canal into Noriega's battlefield. It could turn the 50,000 U.S. citizens in Panama into Noriega's hostages. But, as the Pentagon pointedly informed the State Department when State demanded an invasion, even an invasion might not work.

All by himself, Tony Noriega had seemingly reduced U.S. policy options to a simple choice—between certain humiliation and possible apocalypse.

General Noriega is an earthly accident in time and space.

Actually, Noriega's rise to power had a kind of inevitability about it. It also possessed historical symmetry because Panama, a nation today ruled by thieves, was a nation created by theft.

The famous palindrome tells the story: A man; a plan; a canal; Panama! The man was President Theodore Roosevelt. The plan was to steal Panama from Colombia, then steal the Canal Zone from Panama. This task accomplished, Roosevelt's underlings bestowed on him praise Tony Noriega might envy. "Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality!" his attorney general, Philander C. Knox, exclaimed. That didn't keep Teddy from trying. "Well," he asked his secretary of war, Elihu Root, after one attempt to justify the unjustifiable, "have I answered the charges?"

"You certainly have, Mr. President," Root replied. "You...were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape."

For generations after that, Panama was a U.S. colony in all but name, and long before Noriega came to power, rape without taint of legality was the law of the land.

The Canal Zone itself was a veritable colony—a little American universe of manicured lawns and gracious bungalows, just fifty-five miles long and ten miles wide, which nonetheless stretched, like America itself, from sea to shining sea. Here if you were white and American, you were paid in gold. If you were brown and Panamanian, you were paid in silver. Blacks, even if they were U.S. citizens, were consigned to ghettos.

Right next to the Zone—so close that Panamanians in tin-roofed shanties could watch Americans taking their ease on colonial verandas—were the republic's two major cities, Colon and Panama City.

Just as the Canal Zone existed for the convenience of Americans, so the Republic of Panama existed to enrich the rich. In the salons of Panama City's Union Club, a small elite regulated to its exclusive profit the economic and political affairs of the republic. The vast majority of Panama's people hardly figured in this political-economic system. Only in the poor barrios of Panama City—where Manuel Antonio Noriega was born in 1934—could one find the seeds of ferment. There a hardscrabble populace made its living off the sailors, off the Americans, however it could. But even those too poor to go to U.S. movies once a week could watch the gringos themselves every night.

Americans filled the bars and the whorehouses. They drove down the narrow streets of Casco Viejo—colonial Panama—in cars so wide they seemed to stretch from curb to curb. And when their business was done, they drove their cars across Fourth of July Avenue, where the transvestite prostitutes beckoned, back into a dreamland of big houses and beautiful lawns where everyone was happy, rich, and white.

"Everything in the Zone was so clean and beautiful,'' a middle-aged Panamanian woman told me recently. "When I was a little girl I thought if only you could live there you would never die.''

Panama began to change in 1940. That year, in one of Panama's few completely free elections, a firebrand na-, tionalist named Amulfo Arias was over, whelmingly elected president. His surreal career could inspire, and did, more than one rococo novel of Latin political intrigue. Today, almost fifty years after he was first elected president, Arias, at eighty-seven, is still Panama's single most popular and important politician. Indeed, if Panama has such a thing as a legitimate president, it isn't Eric Arturo Delvalle, the "president" the U.S. supports, or Manuel Solis Palma, Noriega's puppet head of state. It's Amulfo Arias, who currently lives in exile in a Miami condominium.

flO isJneieai CflDhIDiI pIOiieI North jg 1 44eoeral Noriega?

As president, Anas appalled the elite and alarmed the Americans with such "revolutionary" reforms as planning a social-security system and giving women the vote. The final straw came when Arias moved to replace the U.S. dollar with Panama's own currency. A Panama nationalistic enough to print its own money was sure, in due course, to become a Panama nationalistic enough to take over its own canal—and, back then, this was a "threat" which no U.S. president would tolerate.

So, with tacit U.S. support, Panama's democratically chosen, constitutional head of state was overthrown.

The 1941 coup set Panama on the road that brought Noriega to power and the United States to its present impasse—and for a very simple reason. Until then, Panama's National Guard had been nothing but a little police force, an auxiliary to the American M.P.'s. It would take a real army—a strong, American-backed military—to overthrow governments on a regular basis and keep Amulfo's brand of nationalism from "threatening" U.S. interests.

Amulfo wouldn't give up. Four times in all, over a period of forty-four years, Amulfo Arias ran for president of Panama, was elected president of Panama, and was then deposed. This only strengthened the nationalist movement to "liberate" the canal. Panama was a nation caught between a colonial past it resented and a future full of degradations it could not foresee.

hese were long, frustrating years for Noriega too. In 1952, he'd graduated near the top of his class from the National Institute, the first high school in Panama where a youth of humble origins

■ could get a decent education. In his graduation yearbook, Noriega expressed ambitions previously unthinkable for someone of his circumstances and class.

He wanted to be a psychiatrist, he wrote, also president. But at that time medical school, let alone politics, was out of the question for someone like him. Noriega, who one day would change presidents the way others change dentists, eventually found work as a laboratory technician.

According to most accounts, he never knew his mother, and throughout his childhood lived with his older brother in a single room in the old part of Panama City, near the Canal Zone boundary. The short, stubby youth's face was so deeply scarred by acne that taunters gave him the nickname that still pursues him: Pineapple Face.

Noriega nonetheless had one advantage that opened doors for him. His brother, Luis Carlos Noriega, was by all reports a charming man with a knack for making useful friends. "His hobby was discovering good, cheap restaurants where he could eat well and find out what people were thinking," a member of a wealthy family told me. "It was a

Panama, if you're close to the general, you don't pay bills.

lot of fun going around with Luis. If you came from a background like mine, he'd show you a Panama you'd never seen before."

Later, when he became more pros perous, Luis would give "at homes," where poor, interesting people could meet socially adventurous members of the Panama elite. "Tony Noriega would come to these lunches," a very wellknown politician told me. "He didn't say too much, but he watched everyone very closely. Of course, you read big things into little incidents now," he added. "At that time it just seemed to me Luis's kid brother showed up because he could use the meal."

Luis Noriega had another social advantage. In macho Panama, he was an open homosexual. And while on one level, violation of the sexual norms invited contempt, on another it offered opportunity. Influential men and women who otherwise would have felt threatened or compromised by Luis Noriega (and, by association, his younger, bisexual brother) instead found him unthreatening, entertaining—someone worth helping.

By the late 1950s, Luis Noriega's status in this Panamanian demimonde led to a small appointment that would produce immense results. He was given a minor post in the Panamanian Embassy in Lima, Peru. He was also given one minor piece of patronage to dispense: a military engineering scholarship to a geodesic institute in Peru.

There was only one problem in passing this small plum on to his brother. Tony Noriega was now too old to be eligible. This technicality was handled easily, with a false birth certificate, but even today it creates confusion. While General Noriega's official age is fifty, he is actually fifty-four. The military career of this military dictator who never planned to be a soldier was launched, at last, with a lie.

But even after he returned from Peru, Noriega still found himself at loose ends. Thanks to ongoing U.S. military aid, Panama's National Guard had already become a powerful, exclusive force. You needed important friends to become an officer, and he had no such connections.

Fortunately, lies and libel feed in their own stew.

Today the Panamanian military celebrates October 11 as its most solemn anniversary.

It is revered as the historically decisive date, in 1968, when Panama's valiant military, under the leadership of Omar Torrijos, the greatest man in Panama's history, overthrew a corrupt oligarchy, thwarted the vicious designs of U.S. imperialism, and, in the definitive triumph of Panamanian nationalism, forced the Yankees to give up the canal.

This version of events is a fraud—a theft of the truth, and of history. Which is only appropriate, for it completes the symmetry linking Panama's creation with what, quite possibly, could become its destruction.

All that really happened was that Arnulfo Arias, once again elected president, once again was overthrown— though there was one difference. The United States had neither encouraged nor approved this third coup, because by then Amulfo had made his peace with the Americans. And Washington was already preparing to hand the canal over to the Panamanians. The only question was when, under what circumstances, and to whom.

The coup answered that question. The Panamanian armed forces—the supposed instrument of U.S. control— had become a rogue force, a law unto itself. The military would inherit the canal, along with the rest of Panama.

Nor did Omar Torrijos really launch the October 11 "revolution." The coup was led by an officer named Boris Martinez, who today works in an airline cargo department in Miami. Omar Torrijos spent October 11, 1968, drunk.

As for Tony Noriega, he did what he would do throughout his rise to power. He watched; he waited; he listened. He analyzed the weaknesses of others. He had become the model of a new kind of oligarch-in-the-making: the ambitious young man who gains enormous wealth and power by serving a wealthy, powerful military patron.

Noriega first met Omar Torrijos, several people told me, in a bar in Colon in February 1963, during Carnival. As always, to meet Torrijos was to encounter willing women, enormous quantities of alcohol—also wild ideas, soaring speculations propelled, on many occasions, by drugs, including cocaine.

Torrijos was already on the rise— tall, fair-skinned, handsome, charismatic. According to the accounts I heard, he instantly saw possibilities in the shy, deferential Noriega, who, approaching thirty, at a stage when most Panamanian men's lives are set in stone, was still unmarried, whose career so far had consisted of odd jobs, chance encounters, promising connections that led nowhere.

Noriega explained his predicament to Torrijos. How could someone like him become an officer in the National Guard?

"I can't get you a commission now," Torrijos said. "But I'll take care of you."

Noriega also took care of Torrijos. In 1965, when Torrijos got himself in serious trouble, Noriega offered to take the rap. According to one account, Torrijos faced rape charges. According to another, Torrijos, who loved such pranks, shot a man with blank bullets, and so frightened him that he died of a heart attack. In any event, the transgression, like all others the military committed, was hushed up.

But the incident cemented what one of Noriega's own aides called "a strange relationship—half friendship, half family," which would last until the end of Torrijos's life. Torrijos got Noriega his

spy. Like all good spies, Noriega is ruthless. He is amoral."

commission. Then, when he was named commander of Chiriqui province, in western Panama, he brought Noriega along as his chief spy.

By then bizarre stories were already circulating about Noriega as well as about his boss. The fact that Noriega was known to have mistresses, and reputed to have occasional male lovers, was not what made people remember these stories. It was the tincture of sadistic sexual violence they contained.

"In Chiriqui, people Noriega interrogated would be roughed up," a Panamanian officer who knew Noriega well in those years told me. "That was not unusual. But some prisoners were also buggered with nightsticks, and that was shocking in Panama back then. Torrijos did nothing to stop it," he added.

In the same period, Noriega wed a local girl, Felicidad, the daughter of a respected artisan and mason. It began what was, by every account you hear in Panama, a very melodramatic marriage. I was told that Noriega's current girlfriend, Vicky, not yet thirty, is ensconced in a beach house near theirs. That he has a son by his previous amour, a Yugoslav named Magda. One could fill countless gossip columns with the stories I heard, but they all followed the same pattern: male betrayal, female rage.

A woman who was completely reliable in every matter I could directly verify offered what seemed the definitive example of these stories.

"At that time, I went to the same beauty salon as Mrs. Noriega," she told me. "One day there she received a telephone call. She listened carefully. Then she said to her hairdresser, 'Keep my place. I'll be back.'

"She returned after forty-five minutes, picked up the phone, and, apparently, called the person who had called her. 'I broke the crystal. I tore the wallpaper from the wall,' she said. 'Then I cut her on the face and breast.'

"A few minutes later, the telephone rang again. The receptionist said Mrs. Noriega's husband was calling. She went to the phone.

" 'I know why you're calling,' Mrs. Noriega said, 'but I can't talk now. I'm having my hair done.' " Several other people besides this woman told me the mistress in question had then been sent, at Noriega's expense, to Europe for plastic surgery.

She was not the only one to receive an airline ticket. "In the old days, Noriega would come to the ballet often," another woman told me, "and to the cast parties afterwards. I observed him often, and so I can tell you truthfully that, unlike his brother, he is essentially heterosexual. He loved the ballerinas, but one time he did fall for one of the men dancers, a gorgeous black. Later this boy wanted to go to Europe, to continue his training, and he told me Noriega paid his way."

Others told me Noriega had a trusted black retainer who was his masseur, and still another retainer who was a transvestite. In overwhelmingly Catholic Panama, Noriega, from his youth, had no known religious affiliation. I was told he later embraced Buddhism— though to what extent he has actually practiced that religion, which abhors violence and reveres life, is unclear. People who know him well also say that he practiced witchcraft and today retains a Brazilian sorcerer named Ivan Trilha to hex his enemies.

Whatever the specifics of these stories, which are impossible to verify, for more than twenty years they all have revolved around the same themes.

"These are the themes of violation and betrayal," said an American who has known Noriega for nearly thirty years. "He has created an anal-sadistic dictatorship."

When people in Panama say such things, they don't mean it figuratively. "I once wrote a column that drove Noriega up the wall," a Panamanian writer told me. "Soldiers came to the house at night and dragged me to prison. Then they brought in a transvestite named Carolina, and I was forced to watch while more than a dozen men raped him. The message was clear: next time this will happen to you. It was a very frightening experience, especially now that there is AIDS in Panama."

Such tactics were often unnecessary. Noriega's reputation was enough. "One time I ran into Noriega at a party," an American who now lives in Miami told me. "I'd had too much to drink and I called Noriega a crook and torturer to his face. When I finished, Noriega just said, 'Make sure you and your family are out of the country by this time tomorrow.' We packed that night. I'd lived there eleven years. I had a business, but I knew if we didn't leave something terrible would happen."

Violation of the traditional Panamanian orthodoxies—social, political, sexual, even religious—provided one theme in Noriega's career from the beginning.

B nother very important theme was

JB also there from the start. This

IB was loyal subservience to a

IB more powerful male. In his youth Noriega had lived in his I B older brother's shadow. Now he f B lived in Torrijos's shadow, and an extraordinary shadow it was.

Until 1981, Omar Torrijos was, indisputably, "Maximum Chief" of Panama. And Noriega was the Maximum Chief's maximum chief spy—the one whose business it was to know where the bodies, and the money, were buried, in Washington as well as Panama.

In March 1969, Boris Martinez, the real author of the October 11 "revolution," arrived for a meeting with Torrijos, Noriega, and other officers. He was surrounded, disarmed, handcuffed, blindfolded, and had his mouth taped shut. He was then put on an airplane and flown to Miami.

The Maximum Chief consolidated his position the following December when, loyally forewarned by Noriega of a coup attempt, he crushed all his other rivals in the military. The State Department suspected Torrijos and his intelligence chief had promoted the conspiracy, to lure their opponents into the open.

From then on, Omar Torrijos was boss. And Noriega was both Torrijos's William Casey and Torrijos's Ollie North—the man who flourished in the shadows, keeping the boss's secrets and doing the boss's dirty work.

On my way to Panama, I stopped off in Miami and invited Boris Martinez up to my hotel room for a drink. The more salacious aspects of Noriega's personal life were by then making headlines.

"Most of those stories have been true for twenty years," Martinez told me, "but they don't explain much. If you really want to understand Noriega, you must understand that he is a spy, a very good spy, and so he has all the personal attributes a spy must have.

"Like all good spies, Noriega is ruthless. He is amoral. He has no respect for the law, and he cares nothing for human life, though he has no particular interest in killing. He kills as he lies, you see, not for pleasure, but as necessity dictates. Like a good spy, he has a very good grasp of information, detail, and organization. Perhaps his greatest resource is that he is such an excellent judge of the weaknesses of others."

If Noriega was so crafty, I wondered, how had he made himself so many enemies? A truly successful dictator, I suggested, would have stolen a little less, not double-crossed quite so many powerful people.

"Ah, but you see," Martinez interjected, "that is always the downfall of the spy. Because the true spy has no moral framework, he has no sense of limitations, except those others impose on him, so the true spy never knows when to stop. Every conspiracy leads to another conspiracy. Every crime leads to another crime. And the purpose of the conspiracies, of the crimes, is not to achieve some purpose, only to keep the 'enterprise' going.

"Look at your own country. Why do so many American scandals come down to the question of control over spies? Now, imagine such a spy loose in a country like Panama, which has no rule of law."

Martinez grew reflective as he remembered his dealings with Noriega. "He was a useful man," he said, "so long as there was someone to keep him under control."

In 1981 Torrijos, the man who controlled Noriega, died in a plane crash. Noriega took orders from no one now. He was Maximum Chief.

As long as there is somebody ready to sell his country, there will be someone ready to buy it.

It wasn't entirely effortless; it didn't happen overnight. But, over and over again, the conspiracies coiled around themselves like snakes. Then they struck. Steadily the whole nation, not just the National Guard, became Noriega's "enterprise."

The Medellin Cartel and other drug organizations gave him millions. The C.I.A. paid him a mere $200,000 annually—the same salary as the president of the United States.

There were guns to be sold—to "proCommunist" Salvadoran guerrillas one year, to "anti-Communist" Nicaraguan guerrillas the next. There was also— and the significance of this particular traffic is still not fully appreciated—the traffic in technology.

Exotic computers and electronic monitoring devices. Mundane spare parts for tractors and tanks. Nicaragua, Cuba, the Soviet Union—any nation wishing to break the Reagan administration's "anti-Communist boycott" had but to ingratiate itself with Panama's U.S.-backed strongman to get what it wanted. He had many friends now. Prominent European statesmen and powerful Japanese bankers forged close relations with Noriega. So, for still not entirely explored reasons, did the Israelis.

Noriega had always seemed happiest when he had some stronger, well-connected male to act as mentor. Now that both his brother, Luis, and Torrijos were dead, Mike Harari, an ex-Mossad agent with substantial business interests in Panama, assumed that role. Thanks to Harari, Noriega's personal bodyguards were trained by Israelis. Noriega's children studied Hebrew at the Albert Einstein School in Panama. Harari also arranged for Noriega to visit Israel, and be decorated by the Israeli government.

Noriega had inherited Torrijos's yacht, and often he and Harari would go for sunset sails. Sometimes other people would be invited to join them.

"I think I was first invited because I had been such close friends with Noriega's brother," one Panamanian told me. "It's funny," he said. "Noriega isn't what I remember. He never said much. He drank a great deal. He listened. What he seemed to like most was watching TV. It was hard to keep a conversation going, so most times I wound up talking with Mike Harari. Most of the time it was boring.

"All they talked about was things. They didn't talk about what things meant. For example, one time they were talking about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This was before it actually happened. It was very secret; maybe not even the C.I.A. knew that early. But Noriega and Harari were talking about it. They talked about the technical details—how the Israelis wouldn't stop at the Litani River. They'd hit Beirut. The thing to do was to reduce Beirut to rubble, they agreed.

"They never talked about what Israel invading Lebanon might mean."

By then Noriega was very rich—far richer than the traditional oligarchs who, according to official mythology, had bled Panama white until the October 11 "revolution" changed all that. Yet the manifestations of this wealth were surprisingly modest—as though it was power and money for their own sake, not for what they could achieve or buy, that Noriega really valued.

In the Golf Heights section of Panama City, which resembles a Sunbelt suburb, Noriega's one-story house gradually became a three-story house. The lot expanded to include much of the block. Noriega's art collection was installed on the top floor. I asked a curator who had examined this collection what it was like. "Panamanian paintings," she told me, "both historic and contemporary, by artists the experts have decided are the best. You don't look at it and say, 'Now I understand the man who owns these.' "

Of course, this was not his only home. There was also a ranch, a mountain hideaway, a beach house, and Noriega's "bunker," a heavily fortified island at the end of a causeway off Panama City. He acquired substantial holdings in the Dominican Republic, and also developed a French connection, though it had nothing to do with drugs. "Noriega is a Francophile," a man who had traveled with him in Europe told me, "but not in the snobby sense. He just likes French food and French wine because they taste good."

Electoral vice is one thing and electoral fraud is another.

Electoral vice is performed in all our tropical democracies.

' 7S EVERYBODY HAPPY?' '

Guillermo Sanchez Borbon, a nationally respected writer Noriega hounded into exile, roared with laughter as he said that.

"That," he went on, "was the real reason Noriega was so successful so long. He kept the C.I.A. happy. He kept Castro happy. He kept the drug cartels happy. He kept the Drug Enforcement Administration happy."

Everybody was happy because Noriega was willing to cut a deal with anybody. Legality did not matter. Certainly ideology did not. Panama had become a country—possibly the only country— with a government that was, in the exact sense of the word, completely amoral. Within such a system, rigging elections, torturing and murdering political opponents, and taking multimillion-dollar bribes weren't crimes.

For both Noriega and those he made happy, they were technicalities—mere details.

In 1984, both General Noriega and the U.S. government decided Panama should hold a presidential election. Noriega wanted a fig leaf. The Reagan administration wanted another Central American democracy to defend. But there was a problem—a problem with a familiar face and familiar name. Arnulfo Arias was running for president yet again. And if Amulfo won, people ranging from Daniel Ortega to William Casey would face a serious "threat."

Some electoral vice was clearly in order.

So an American-educated economist named Nicolas Ardito Barletta—who had the added advantage of being a protege of U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz—was chosen to run against the old fire-eater. And an extraordinary collection of political bedfellows clubbed together to help "Nicky," as everyone called him, beat Amulfo.

Nicky got C.I.A. money. He got drug money. He may have been the only political candidate in history whom both Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro wanted to win. And of course there were all those Noriega soldiers and all that Noriega money to help ensure a successful "transition to democracy." In the end, however, electoral vice proved insufficient. Amulfo won anyway. Outright fraud was necessary to achieve the desired results of this exercise in "tropical democracy." So the counting was stopped. Ballot boxes were impounded.

Nicky was proclaimed the winner, by a margin of 1,713 votes. The Reagan administration warmly congratulated Panama on its successful "transition."

he leisurely torture, then decapitation, of Hugo Spadafora was another "detail."

Spadafora's problem was that he was a very noisy democrat who absolutely delighted in international intrigue. He was both a physician and a freelance freedom fighter. And if the warrior physician wasn't supporting some foreign liberation movement, he was speaking out loudly, very loudly, against General Noriega.

His headless body was found in a U.S. postal sack on the Costa Rican border less than a year after the "transition." Photographs and autopsy reports exist documenting exactly what happened. But as a friend of Spadafora's, who'd examined them, and then thrown them out because he couldn't sleep at night knowing these photographs and documents were in his house, told me, "The only thing you really have to know is that the first thing they did was sever his thigh muscles. That way he couldn't try to protect his genitals with his legs."

Like honest elections, Spadafora was a nuisance. So the nuisance was eliminated—but only at the cost of creating yet another one. Shortly after the murder, President Nicky Barletta attended a meeting at the United Nations in New York.

Who killed Spadafora? people asked. Nicky didn't know. But since he was, after all, president of Panama, he announced he would appoint a commission to investigate. As soon as Noriega received word of this latest nuisance, he ordered the president home. He summoned him to his headquarters at the comandancia. He held the president of Panama prisoner until he agreed to resign.

"Noriega came and went periodically," Barletta later said. "Other officers applied the brunt of the pressure. They were polite at first, but by the end they were impatient. They said, 'Mr. President, your family is out there. You must think of their safety as well as your own.'

"I kept waiting for the Americans to do something," Barletta said. "I kept hoping the Americans would do something."

But Washington seemed perfectly happy, year after year. Like killing Spadafora and firing Nicky, the rental, for the sum of $5 million, of part of Darien province to the Medellin Cartel for the manufacture of cocaine was also only a detail—nothing for Washington to get upset about. After all, in return for his $200,000 C.I.A. retainer, wasn't Noriega also helping the Reagan administration wage its war on drugs?

The United States did not protest the Spadafora murder. It did not protest Barletta's ouster. Even after The New York Times, in 1986, published reports fully detailing Noriega's illegal enterprises, it still was happy.

"Dear General Noriega: .. .1 would like to take this opportunity to reiterate my deep appreciation for the vigorous anti-drug trafficking policy that you have adopted," wrote John C. Lawn, the D.E.A. administrator. And in a later letter: "Your long-standing support of the Drug Enforcement Administration is greatly appreciated."

If for nothing else, Tony Noriega certainly can be forgiven for assuming there was no crime he could commit which the Reagan administration would not condone.

Not everybody was delighted, however. The U.S. attorney's office in Miami had begun examining evidence of Noriega's involvement in the drug trade, and it certainly was not happy. Members of the U.S. Senate also had started investigating, and they were not happy.

Though the people of Panama hardly figured in either Noriega's or Washington's calculations, they weren't happy either. In fact, they were disgusted—so disgusted that they launched a vast popular campaign to restore democracy and decency themselves.

"Justice!" cried the demonstrators. "Liberty!"

"Down with Pineapple Face!"

They beat on pots and pans. They waved white handkerchiefs.

Faced with this latest nuisance, General Noriega outlined the policy to which, to this day, he still adheres: "Not one step backward! If they shit on me, I'll shit on this country."

torture, then decapitation, of Spadafora was another "detail."

So the people marched, and the marchers were beaten. The people protested, and the protesters were teargassed. They held vigils, and hunger strikes, in churches. So the Dobermans desecrated the churches.

Still the people marched, and protested—again and again, month after month.

None of this had any effect on the Maximum Chief. But in the United States, a presidential election was approaching. The U.S. attorney's indictments were about to come down. The Senate investigations were about to create sensational headlines.

After nearly two full terms in office, President Reagan and those around him were soon to make a discovery that would seem astonishing, new, a revelation: Manuel Antonio Noriega was not their friend after all.

"Noriega must have been mystified by the Reagan switch," said former U.S. ambassador to Panama Ambler Moss. "North knew. Abrams knew. Everybody had known everything for years.

"Noriega must have felt betrayed."

In fact, the general later indicated to me that his quarrel was not with the American people, or even really with Reagan: "I blame Elliott Abrams, with his politics of lies, confusion, and leaks . . .his demonic plans."

Pain started with humanity and, from that moment the physician was born and he was born a warrior because a tribe was formed when warlocks were doctors under the chief s command and the development of humanity has not changed its witch doctor; it has enabled that very same doctor to continue being the same warlock, whom the patient in its suffering consults as a divine solution. material, weird, and necessary.

Though the U.S. sanctions mostly hurt his opponents, even Tony Noriega was beginning to feel some pain now, as the measures emptied Panama's markets and destroyed the economy. Even so, Noriega's mad schema was not true!

Panama, in its suffering, had not turned to the very same doctor, the very same warlock. It could no longer, however, turn to the warrior-physician. His thigh muscles had been severed, his headless body stuffed into a U.S. postal sack.

So the warlock witch doctor still flourished. I knew this because every day I could see the big lazy vultures circling over Panama City and, beyond them, see the smoke from the fires circling the city like the vultures. I could see the streets where the warlocks under the chief's command marauded.

Most of all, I knew Panama had not escaped its pain. I could see the fatigue in my Panamanian friends' eyes. I could hear the hope wavering in their voices as their country disintegrated around them, and still he would not withdraw. He would not go.

For ten months they had done all the decent, democratic, peaceful things we Americans say people should do to create decency, democracy, and peace. But it was as though Noriega had only gained new strength from their suffering—just as Washington's sudden new hatred gave him buoyancy and hope. Could it possibly be that, after all their suffering, in spite of all their courage, he would win?

Whatever the case, the Reagan measures had achieved one thing. They had brought Panama a kind of unity. AntiNoriega Panamanians, pro-Noriega Panamanians: all Panamanians were united in their utter mystification at why the United States acts as it does.

Street protesters said it. Members of the Crusade said it. A Noriega underling said it best.

"Why can't you Americans ever be consistent?" demanded Mario Rognoni, Noriega's chief spokesman on U.S. network television and his minister of commerce. Some served Noriega for the money. Others served him because he had something on them. After several meetings, I concluded that Rognoni served Noriega because he liked going on TV.

"Ted Koppel called me after I was on Mightline last night," Rognoni told me. "He said I was great." Then he returned to his main point.

"The United States is being very unfair to General Noriega. Under Torrijos, a Catholic priest was murdered because he was causing trouble. But Washington didn't fuss about it, because Torrijos was helping them with the canal treaties. Yet now Noriega is accused of being a criminal just because Hugo Spadafora was killed.

"There was also drug traffic under Torrijos," he continued, "but that didn't stop Americans—very famous, respectable Americans—from liking Torrijos just as much as they hate Noriega today. Why, even John Wayne loved Torrijos."

"Is there really no difference between them?" I asked.

"Absolutely none!" he replied. "Except Noriega is less hypocritical."

Rognoni excused himself for a few minutes; he had to do a spot on CNN. When he returned, he started pacing up and down.

"What am I trying to say?" Noriega's spokesman was wearing a Pierre Cardin shirt. In the pocket of the shirt were three Yves Saint Laurent pens. "I'm saying that no matter how you try to dress it up, this U.S. vendetta against General Noriega is imperialism."

Rognoni's office is on the twentyfirst floor of the National Lottery Building. Outside, in the city below, you could see fires burning, lights blinking out. You could see a city of skyscrapers and photocopiers and fax machines coping with the realization: if this goes on, we will revert to jungle.

I asked Rognoni why he didn't just get on a plane and go to Miami.

"Oh," he laughed, "I'll do that if we lose. But think if we win! This government could go on for another ten years!"

Downstairs, I found a taxi and told the driver to drive around. The electricity was out. The stench

burning tires filled

the air. The stores and shops were

all closed, but in the heart of the old city, thousands of people were milling around, waiting—hoping— for some solution, any solution.

There was no traffic, so I told the driver to stop in the middle of the street. On one side was the National Assembly, which has as its fagade an immense mural. The mural shows brown-skinned Panamanians triumphantly repulsing fairskinned Yankee aggressors. On the other side was the Relax Streep-Tease bar.

"Gringo/" a man in blue jeans and a sleeveless undershirt called out as I headed toward the crowd. "Where are your soldiers? Why don't you save us?"

Actually it was I who needed saving. The Dobermans, in gas masks, were coming in my direction down one street. Driving their water cannon down the other street were the Pitufos. Pitufo is a cartoon character, a Hispanic Smurf which the riot police have adopted as their mascot and appliqued on their water cannons. It looked so funny as the cannon sprayed acid on the people, and the people ran choking and trying to brush the burning acid water from their bodies. People were dashing about— shouting, screaming, seeking cover— and what made it seem so funny was that the water cannon moved so slowly. It rumbled down the street as slowly as a New York street-cleaning machine.

"Journalist/" I shouted back to the man in Spanish. Suddenly this man and some others were running out into the line of fire, protecting the journalist by surrounding him, then running with him to the safety of an open door in a graffiti-spattered building.

Everything seemed to speed up after the Pitufo attack. I was jogging back toward the National Assembly. Some of the men were jogging beside me.

"Tell America we are hungry," said one man.

"Journalist," said another, "tell Reagan we need help."

"Where to next?" the taxi driver asked. He'd sat there waiting in his cab, in the middle of the street, windows up, as the Dobermans had passed him on the right going in one direction and the Pitufos had passed him on the left going in the other.

The driver had shifted the car into reverse, even before I started choking on tear gas, and was gunning it backward down an alley. Soon we were heading out the Avenida Balboa—him driving fast, me leaning out the window, hacking and spitting and choking as we went past the big statue of Balboa discovering the Pacific Ocean. "The Yanqui aggressors will not pass!" said the graffiti Noriega's men had spray-painted on the seawall. "Viva Noriega!" And I realized these last ten minutes had revealed Noriega's ultimate violation, his ultimate betrayal, of Panama's nationalism.

He had turned this intc a nation yearning for a U.S. invasion.

"Marriott?" asked the driver.

"No," I said. "Turn around. I want to look at the canal."

The big ships looked peaceful and distant as, in a long stately line, they came out of the Miraflores lock and entered the Pacific Ocean. Every American should see it once, because to look at the Panama Canal is to see all the genius and folly of our civilization. Here we had turned mountains into a pathway between oceans, but we had not created freedom. Here we had eradicated malaria and yellow fever, but not militarism. Whatever Noriega had made of it, this was our creation. The Republic of Panama is the only foreign state the United States has ever, entirely, invented.

When I got out, I handed the driver a ten-dollar bill. "Mucho gusto," he said, and handed me back two ones as change.

I was not bom to last as seed.

As I left for the airport, it was my greatest hope for Panama and its people that this, of all Noriega's statements, would prove true.

However the sorry spectacle in Washington worked itself out, here in Panama I hoped the seeds of violence, of corruption, I saw being sown everywhere would not last—would not sprout and take root, then bear new fruit, more fruit, and (Continued on page 166) (Continued from page 158) multiply again.

I hoped this because I had seen what neither Noriega nor Reagan seemed to understand.

Panama was not a corrupt, violent nation. It was only a country that had been corrupted. It was only a people who had had violence, over and over and over, inflicted upon them.

Terror is curious. When it totally surrounds you, you scarcely notice it. Only when you sense some prospect of escaping terror does it start to chafe your face and scratch your wrists.

So only as I entered the Omar Torrijos airport to leave the country did I feel what the marchers, the demonstrators, feel every day: joy and fright.

It was so close. After so many weeks I could almost see the seat-belt sign and the plastic cups the stewardesses passed. It was so close I could almost reach out and touch the freedom.

"You have overstayed your visa," the soldier said in Spanish. I would have to go back to the city, to the comandancia— Noriega's headquarters—and request an exit permit. "There is no way you can leave Panama without one."

I asked him to examine my passport again.

"Oh," he said. "You arrived on the

eleventh, not the first." He waved me through.

At the X-ray machine, the soldier ran my hand baggage through twice. In between he made a telephone call. When his superior officer arrived, he ordered the hand baggage opened. I knew why. There were knives in there.

It was only some silverware, I tried to explain in Spanish. Because of the disturbances, a friend had asked me to carry the family sterling back to New York. The officer held up the knives. He examined them closely.

"Even so," he said, "you will have to check them."

Inside the airplane, one of the world's most beautiful women smiled at me. Impulsively, I kissed her on the cheek. Seated beside her was a man paralyzed from the neck down. I patted his motionless hand.

Dame Margot Fonteyn, the legendary ballerina, was flying to New York with her husband, Tito Arias, who is himself a legend in Panamanian politics, and I had arranged to fly with them.

Tito was shot many years ago, in one of Panama's political vendettas, but the assassin was incompetent. Tito was not killed, only paralyzed, and so Margot— the world ballet legend—had also become, in Panama, a legend of courage and love. She could go anywhere. She could have anything, anyone. But she lived in Panama because in Panama she had Tito, and he had her.

There are only two seats across in first class, so as the plane left Panama behind,

I sat at the feet of these two legends, on the pillow the stewardess gave me, sipping champagne. Tito drank champagne too. Whenever he wanted some, Margot held the glass to his lips.

Tito cannot move. He can barely talk. So Margot "translated"—converting Tito's soft murmurings into sentences, ideas, as he answered my questions.

"Noriega's so smart he outsmarts everyone, including himself," Tito said with Margot's voice.

Would Panama find peace?

To me his answer sounded like a gurgle. She understood.

"Oh, yes, peace is coming—the peace of the cemetery."

More sounds.

"The only question is, who will be boss of the cemetery: Noriega or the Americans?"

We laughed and talked and drank champagne all the way to New York. How would a ballet score have described our little party?

Allegro, Dame Margot suggested.

Yes, that was it. We were light and airy. We were free as birds.

Besides, I didn't believe Tito, and not just because I did not want to.

He was Panamanian. He, more than anyone else, had reason to know—how even after they've wounded you, you still can find hope and peace, and life and love.