Battalion 2000 casualties were heavy.
STABILITY OPERATIONS
U.S. forces broke the PDF—and Noriega’s ability to control his forces—during the first hour of combat. By the end of D Day, most of the fighting was over—though Panama was by no means safe. Many of the PDF had changed into Levi’s and slipped into the city, where they banded together to continue making trouble.
There was no law and order.
Have-nots, armed bands of hoodlums, Dignity Battalions, and PDF displaced by the fighting—and sometimes a mix of all the above—started looting and causing mayhem.
This had been anticipated by American planners; the Task Force Atlantic and Task Force Pacific division commanders had orders to move into the city and begin stability operations to secure key facilities and mop up resistance.
By dawn of the twentieth, there were already 3,000 refugees in the Balboa High School athletic field, including many PDF who had infiltrated in civilian clothes. There were also 1,500 detainees in a camp being established on a rifle range halfway up the Canal—a number that grew to 4,600 within a week, as more detainees were brought in from the combat units.
Meanwhile, hospitals had to be reopened and sanitation services restarted.
A CBS News poll later determined that 93 percent of the Panamanian people supported U.S. operations—yet the same people had instant expectations that their new government could not soon fulfill, since the removal of Noriega’s appointees had decapitated most of the vital institutions.
Though additional units from the 7th Special Forces Group and civil affairs were being brought in to handle these needs, the demand was now, and it could only be satisfied in the near term by the military personnel already on the ground.
The immediate tasks were:Mopping up and bringing security to the major cities, particularly Panama City and Colon.
Neutralizing the PDF and Dignity Battalions in the remainder of Panama.
Reestablishing law and order.
Taking care of refugees and displaced persons.
Meanwhile, all major military objectives had been achieved: The PDF had been neutralized, the PDF command and control no longer functioned, Noriega was no longer in control, and the new government had been installed.
On the downside, Noriega had not been captured, and U.S. forces had no idea where to find him.
MA BELL
Throughout D Day, heavy-lift transports had been landing at Howard Air Force Base and Torrijos-Tocumen, bringing in Major General Carmen Cavezza and two additional brigades from the 7th Infantry Division, as well as the 16th MP Brigade from Fort Bragg, to bring stability to Panama City and Colon, while extending operations to the west to neutralize the remaining PDF main force units. The 75th Ranger Regiment could now be “freed up” to join in liberating the west and clearing the area north of Panama City.
On December 20, the new government asked General Thurman to send a force to liberate political prisoners at Penomone Prison, sixty-five miles southwest of Panama City.
Wayne Downing got the call. That morning, he had flown to Rio Hato to visit Buck Kernan and his Rangers. Later that day, Stiner called him: “I want you and Kernan’s rangers to conduct a battalion-size air assault tonight to liberate the political prisoners.”
Meanwhile, A Company 1st Battalion, 7th SFG, which was already stationed in Panama, was to operate toward the west with the Rangers and the 2nd Brigade of the 7th Division. Later that afternoon, Major Gilberto Perez, the commander, flew his company to Rio Hato, where it would stage for these operations.
Downing and Kernan decided to fly out and take a look at the prison—which turned out to be located in a populated area. Taking it could easily result in collateral damage and civilian casualties. Later, as Downing and Kcrnan prepared the units for the assault, they kept telling themselves, “There has to be a better way to do this.”
At about that time, Perez linked up with Downing and Kcrnan. Since he was already familiar with the country, they asked if he had any helpful ideas about liberating Penomone.
“I just happen to know the major who commands the prison,” he told them. “So why don’t you let me call him? I’ll tell him what’s about to happen and see if he’ll surrender.”
“That’s a real gamble,” Downing said after he and Kcrnan had talked this over. “We have to keep preparing for the assault tonight. But go ahead and call him up, and see what he says.”
Perez got on the phone and called the major. “Did you see what happened to the Comandancia last night?” he asked the major in Spanish.
“Yes, it was terrible, wasn’t it?” The major answered.
“You’re exactly right,” Perez said, “and the same thing is going to happen to you tonight.”
“What do you mean? ”
“The Rangers are planning to assault the prison tonight, but if you are agreeable to their terms, you can avoid loss of life.”
“What do they want me to do?”
“You can send someone down here,” Perez told him, “and we’ll give him the terms and conditions.”
“I will come myself. Where are you?”
“At Rio Hato,” Perez answered.
The major showed up an hour and a half later, and Downing laid out the terms for surrender: “At eight o’clock tonight, you’ll leave enough guards to keep the prisoners under control, march all the rest down to the air strip”—near the prison—“lay down your arms, and raise the white flag.
“To keep you honest, an AC-130 gunship circling overhead will sec your every move, and relay hack to me exactly what you are doing and if you are living up to the terms of the agreement. If you do what I said, no one will get hurt.”
The major agreed to the terms and returned to the prison.
Meanwhile, Downing had told Kernan: “Even if this works, I want you to run the operation as planned—except with no gunfire—in order to send the message to the other PDF installations.”
At 8:00 that night, Downing and Perez set up an observation post near the prison, Kernan prepared his Ranger battalion for the assault, and the AC-130 watched the prison. A few minutes after 8:00, prison guards were marching down the hill toward the airstrip. At the airstrip, they placed their weapons in a ditch alongside the runway, then got into a formation and raised the white flag.
Downing and Perez accepted the surrender ten minutes before the air assault hit the prison. The awed PDF watched as Little Bird gunships hovered over the prison compound and Rangers fast-roped down. Not one of them believed the major had made the wrong decision.
WHAT happened at Penomone was repeated elsewhere in western Panama, became standard operating procedure, and was known as “Ma Bell.”
It worked this way: One of Major Perez’s A-Detachments would make contact with a PDF cuartel to find out if the commander was willing to surrender. A rifle company from Colonel Lin Burney’s 2nd Brigade, 7th Infantry Division,29 would fly in to accept the surrender—but was prepared for combat. After surrender, both the A-Detachment and the company would remain as a guard and stabilizing force until the government decided what to do with the cuartel. This was their mission: (1) To secure the cuartel and ensure that no PDF got away. (2) To gather intelligence on the weapons caches of the PDF and Dignity Battalions who had not yet surrendered. (3) To help the local civilian leaders gain control of the town. (4) To assess the local infrastructure—hospital, public utilities, law and order—and establish priorities for follow-on civil-military operations. (5) To conduct joint Panamanian/U.S. patrols throughout the area.
The second and third “Ma Bell” missions secured the cuartels at Santiago and Chitre. Each PDF commander surrendered without resistance, and one of Burney’s rifle companies took control.
On Christmas Day, Perez and his team flew into Las Tablas, the capital of Las Santos Province. Perez telephoned the local commander, who willingly surrendered. As Perez and his team were searching the cuartel, a crowd of civilians gathered outside the wall—presenting Perez wi
th an opportunity. He assembled the PDF on the parade field and had his own troops line up beside them. He then called the combined force to attention, ordered “present arms,” and had the Panamanian flag raised on the cuartel’s flagpole—thus demonstrating that the United States was not a conqueror, but a liberator, and gaining civilian support for follow-on U.S. efforts.
That same day, Lieutenant Colonel Joe I Iunt and his 3rd Battalion of the 75th Rangers air-assaulted into Malek airfield near David, the capital of Chiriqui Province.
DAVID was the home of Lieutenant Colonel Del Cid, who commanded its largest PDF installation. Del Cid was the second-most-powerful man in Panama and a close friend of Noriega’s—the man tagged by the dictator to carry out his plan for guerrilla warfare in the mountains. Like Noriega, he had been indicted for drug trafficking.
On December 21, as the Rangers were preparing their air assault against David, Marc Cisneros phoned Del Cid and gave him unconditional surrender terms. The following day, he agreed to the terms, and a white flag appeared over his headquarters. He was picked up by the Rangers on Christmas Day, flown to Howard Air Force Base, and arrested by the DEA. He was then flown to Homestead and on to Miami for arraignment.
Meanwhile, Burney and his brigade provided security and support throughout central and western Panama. As a result of the rapport they established, civilians provided valuable intelligence that helped locate weapons caches, people on the most wanted list, and PDF and Dignity Battalion members who had not yet been captured—and no more than eight shots had been fired in that part of Panama.
ELSEWHERE, U.S. forces were closing the noose on armed bands of holdouts, and intensifying operations against Dignity Battalions in Panama City.
Until two days into the operation, when documents were captured during a raid on a headquarters, not much was known about this mysterious organization, except that they were baddies—Noriega’s control and enforcement force—who had terrorized the people enough to make them afraid even to talk about them.
According to the captured documents, there were eighteen Dignity Battalions, and they were the best paid of Noriega’s forces—including quarters for both members and their families. A list of leaders—also provided by the documents—added many names to the most-wanted list.
During the next days, Downing and his special mission units worked tirelessly to uproot and dismantle the Dignity Battalions, and track down their leaders. Their success soon inspired the locals to reveal where Dignity Battalion members were holed up. And by December 23, that threat had pretty much ended.
By then, the equivalent of four combat brigades and fifteen hundred military police had brought stability to Panama City, Colon, and most of the rest of the country, and all the PDF regional commanders had surrendered. One major task remained—capturing Noriega.
THE SEARCH FOR NORIEGA
At H-hour, Wayne Downing launched one of the most intensive manhunts in history, when he went to work to disassemble Noriega’s infrastructure (the most-wanted list) and capture the elusive Noriega.
Downing’s Panzer Cruppe—now two Sheridan armored reconnaissance vehicles, two U.S. Marine Corps LAVs, five Army APCs, four confiscated PDF two-and-a-half-ton trucks, and an old yellow school bus—together with his air assets, would give him maximum flexibility responding to leads.
Task Force Green, commanded by Colonel “Pete,” and Task Force Blue, his Navy special mission unit, commanded by Navy SEAL Captain “Rick,” supported by quick reaction helicopters and AC-130 gunships, had been given the difficult job of capturing the Dictator. The first mission of both task forces was to search Noriega’s plush apartments and houses scattered throughout Panama. Task Force Green operated within Panama City. Task Force Blue was assigned the Colon area and western Panama.
WAYNE Downing continues:
Rolling up the infrastructure accomplished two goals: The Noriega gang was all bad; we had to bring them to justice. And we needed to deny Noriega options. We wanted him to have nowhere to lay his head: And so we went after every Noriega crony and hangout we could find, and we rolled them up.
These people were incredible. There are so many tales, people walking around with thousands of dollars in hundred-dollar bills in their pockets—drug money. And mistresses, girlfriends—we ran into just about anything you can think of. These were dirty people.
Here is an example of how we did it—though it’s not exactly typical.
There was one guy that everyone in the neighborhood feared, rich and ruthless, the baddest of the bad; no one dared to speak against him. So our guys went to his place to pick him up.
It was like a movie. They came up and the door was very heavy, very fancy, with a gold doorknob, and locked. So they put a door charge on it, to blow the door open.
Inside, the bad guy was in his living room, where he had built an enormous, 5,000-gallon aquarium; it took up an entire wall and was filled with all kinds of exotic fish. When he heard our troops outside, he panicked and started to run, crouched down and bent over, with his arms protecting his head. That was when they blew the door. The doorknob shot out across the room, drove up into his rectum, and got wedged up there.
Meanwhile, shards from the blown-down door were flying around, and some of them shattered the aquarium. So when our troops came in, they found this bad guy hopping around with a gold doorknob up his rear, and fish flopping all over the floor and stuck to the ceiling. This wasn’t intentional—we were sorry for the fish—but it made a story our guys will tell their grandchildren.
A few minutes after all this, the local people were out in the street cheering. Because this guy was so bad.
After a lot of operations like this (most of them not so vivid), the SEALs and Special Forces from the special missions units broke Noriega’s infrastructure. And he could not escape. Every place he went, he ran into where we had been. We’d covered every possible safe haven.
DOWN IN G’S people worked day and night, and they were amazingly successful.
Raids on Noriega’s offices and houses had captured almost $8 million in U.S. currency, a briefcase containing a list of bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, and diaries laying out his involvement in witchcraft and voodoo worship. The money and documents were temporarily turned over to SOUTHCOM until a proper place could be found for securing them.
Two days after H-hour, nearly everyone on the most wanted list had been picked up and interrogated. Most of them—looking out for their own skin—cooperated with the interrogators and provided names of other key people in Noriega’s infrastructure who had not yet been identified. A list of about a hundred people was developed from this information, and Downing’s forces immediately set out to find them.
And yet, by the morning of December 23, Noriega was still missing.
CARL Stiner continues:
The first break came midmorning on December 23 when one of Noriega’s inner circle of bodyguards appeared at the main gate at Fort Clayton with a proposition for Marc Cisneros: He had information about Noriega that he would exchange for protection for himself and his family. Though these guys were all real thugs, he got his guarantee, and it was his information that filled in the details of Noriega’s movements on the evening before H-hour—his diversion on the way back from Colon, his rendezvous with the prostitute at the Ceremi rest camp, his escape from the Ranger’s roadblock.
This was good news. It meant Noriega was still in Panama City; we would continue relentless pressure until he could be cornered. Part of the pressure involved our watching embassies where he might find asylum.
At 8:30 the next morning, another Noriega bodyguard showed up with the same proposition. When he met Cisneros, he said, “I just now slipped away from Noriega and his other bodyguards. He’s at the end of his rope, he’s taking drugs and alcohol, and he’s crazy as hell. He’ll kill us all.
“I can tell you where he is, but you have to hurry. They’re about to move on. When 1 left, bags were packed. They’re driving a blue Mo
ntero SUV”
Within minutes, Downing was on the scene with his Panzer Gruppe.
They found the place abandoned, but the coffeepot was still hot, and cigarettes were still burning in the ashtrays. A call to all units was immediately put out to watch for the Montero.
Marc Cisneros and I spent most of the day checking on stability operations, but arranged to return to headquarters at 3:00 P.M. At 3:00, I went directly to my operations center, and Cisneros went to his office on the second floor of the same building. When he got there, he learned he had an urgent phone call from Monsignor Laboa, the Papal Nuncio. This was Laboa’s second call; he had something important on his mind. Cisneros took the phone.
“Noriega is here,” Laboa whispered, “in the Papal Nunciatore. I called you earlier, hoping you could intercept him. Come over here. I need to talk to you.” The Papal Nunciatore was the Vatican’s Embassy in Panama City, and had the same immunities as any other embassy recognized by the U.S. government.
Cisneros hurried to me with the news.
“Go ahead and see Laboa,” 1 told him. “Call me as soon as you have details. I’ll tell General Thurman and Downing.”
I immediately called Downing: “We’ve got a problem,” I said. “Noriega’s in the Nunciatore—a sanctuary. Get over there right away and take charge of the situation. Secure it.”
Then I called Thurman.
Within minutes, Downing had surrounded the Nunciatore with his troops.
The Nunciatore, located in one of the wealthier parts of the city, was a two-story stucco building with a pleasant, well-groomed yard, all surrounded by a seven-foot-high concrete wall.