Word: panamas
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...early as 1972, a U.S. antinarcotics official had a suggestion for cutting down the shipment of drugs through Panama into the U.S.: assassinate Manuel Antonio Noriega. Not only was that proposal rejected; some time later Noriega, then head of his country's intelligence service, went on the payroll of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Among his bosses: George Bush, director of the CIA in 1976. As late as 1983, Vice President Bush used Noriega to pass a message to Fidel Castro. And as late as 1987, the Reagan Administration was arguing that Noriega had been "fully cooperative" with U.S. antidrug...
Noriega's relations with Washington were always ambivalent: he seemed to be a triple or quadruple agent. There appeared to be good grounds for the CIA to hire him: he was a shrewd intelligence operative, and Panama is an excellent listening post for developments throughout Central America and the Caribbean. But from early on, Noriega seemed to play Uncle Sam for a prize sucker. U.S. Customs Commissioner William von Raab once remarked that "occasionally, they ((Noriega & Co.)) swing some poor slob out, in effect give him away to make us feel they're cooperating." And once in a while Noriega...
Noriega won Washington's gratitude by allowing the U.S.-supported Nicaraguan contra rebels to train on Coiba Island, off Panama. In 1985 he made an offer to Marine Lieut. Colonel Oliver North, then on the National Security Council staff, to assassinate Nicaraguan Sandinista leaders and carry out sabotage inside the country. All the time, though, Noriega was allegedly running arms to the Sandinistas and to leftist rebels in Colombia and El Salvador, supplying CIA information to Cuba and helping Cubans smuggle U.S. high- technology equipment through Panama to the Soviet bloc. Said Jose Blandon, a former intimate of Noriega...
...Grenada in 1983. He asked Noriega to warn Fidel Castro that if Cuba tried to stop the invasion or to retaliate, it would get the same -- or worse. Noriega made the call, and shortly afterward Bush visited him. Blandon says Bush lectured Noriega on the need for democracy in Panama, but also thanked him for helping contain communism...
...arms smuggling. But the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration stood by him, even as the DEA developed the evidence leading to his indictments. The State Department was split between a get-Noriega faction and diplomats who were nervous about the potential loss of intelligence assets in Panama. By the time of the indictments, though, it was obvious that Noriega had gone out of U.S. control. Investigators assert that the millions he was by then receiving from the Medellin drug cartel dwarfed his CIA payoffs...