-[suspenseful music playing] -[birds calling]
[man 1] The president has directed United States forces
to execute… a.m. this morning
preplanned missions in Panama to protect American lives,
restore the democratic process,
preserve the integrity of the Panama Canal treaties,
and apprehend Manuel Noriega.
[suspenseful music continues]
The U.S. essentially built the Panama Canal,
and owned and operated it for years,
until the Carter administration enacted the treaty
to hand it over to Panama.
Then Manuel Noriega rose to power.
He was actually working for the U.S. government
in a more or less counter-narcotics role
while he was simultaneously helping the narcotraffickers.
[man 2] We were giving the canal to the Panamanians,
so we could not do it while we had a dictator like Noriega,
who was all-powerful and involved in narcotics trafficking.
[man 3] Prior to the execution of Just Cause,
all the intel we received said
that we know where Noriega is 24 hours a day.
As soon as we got down there, nobody knew where he was.
[suspenseful music continues]
[indistinct chatter]
[man 4] There we are. The big, big prize, Noriega.
We can't find him.
And so the hunt starts.
[tense music plays]
[music fades]
[boat horn drones]
[reporter] Linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans,
the Panama Canal was opened in 1914.
The United States built the canal,
chopping through miles of jungle and importing thousands of workers
from as far away as China and Italy.
[man 5] The Panama Canal was completed in 1914.
Earlier in the year,
the United States had convinced Panama to become independent from Colombia.
And the area where the canal is was the narrowest point
between both oceans.
Although the sea levels are different, but it's the narrowest point.
[boat horn blows]
The French had tried to build a canal, and, because of disease,
malaria and so forth, were not able to complete it.
We took it over, and the United States was successful in completing it.
And so the United States government created a Canal Zone,
which is about 20 miles wide
and about 40 miles long.
[tense music playing]
The agreement with Panama and the canal,
and this is where the controversy came in,
was that the canal would be almost as if it was United States property.
Canal Zone had its own government, its own law, its own jails.
And so if a Panamanian was transiting through the canal
on the highway that they had,
they would be subject to U.S. jurisdiction.
[angry shouting and chanting]
So eventually, it became a very conflictive point
where, when Carter came in,
he agreed to end the Zone
and turn it over to Panama.
[ominous music playing]
[Carter] Under these accords, Panama will play
an increasingly important role
to the operation and defense of the canal
during the next 23 years.
And after that, the United States will still be able to counter any threat
to the canal's neutrality and openness for use.
[applause]
[Cisneros] When the treaty with Carter was made,
we set up a division in the operations called "Joint Treaty."
And that was under me.
I was chief of operations of South Comm.
Panama had to recognize that we had military there,
and we were in the canal up to the year 2000.
I had 12,000 troops under me, which was the largest of 'em.
But we had about 12,000 military civilian dependents.
And we had about another 20,000 Zonians that were American citizens.
[engine revving]
The CIA and the U.S. military
were the biggest stakesholders in Panama.
[suspenseful music plays]
Panama is very important to the U.S. because of the Panama Canal in particular,
and because all the commerce that goes through the canal.
So it's a vital place for us.
The Panama Canal Agreement was done with Torrijos.
[suspenseful music continues]
Torrijos was a dictator.
Very charismatic guy.
Very nationalist.
Well-liked.
We dealt with him effectively.
Noriega was the chief of intelligence for Torrijos.
He recognized the importance of propaganda, for example,
and deception, and sources, and networks.
They called him "Pineapple Face"
because he had pockmarks from childhood.
And, uh, they were all over his face.
It was a derogatory term towards him.
I'm sure he didn't like it, but that's the way it was.
Manuel Noriega had a very, very interesting,
um, childhood and adolescent.
He was a son of a maid.
And the mother had always tried to provide for him
the best she possibly could.
In his high school years, he was sent to a military academy in Peru
where he excelled and he did really well.
When he came back to Panama as a lieutenant,
he then was assigned under Omar Torrijos.
And Torrijos took him under his arm and began being his mentor.
That relationship fostered, uh, quite a bit.
He rose in 1971 to become the chief of the secret service.
[Rodriguez] He was very helpful to us during the Central American wars,
supporting our regional policies and giving us access to hard targets,
which we appreciated very much.
[Reagan] Freedom fighters in Nicaragua
can win the day for democracy
in Central America.
But our support is needed now.
Tomorrow will be too late.
What was going on at that time on a bigger scale in Central America…
we were involved in fighting the Sandinistas.
They were supported by the Cubans.
And, of course, the Cubans were a satellite state
of the Soviet Union.
So we were very concerned about it.
Noriega had a good relationship with the Cubans.
He could give us inside information about these contacts,
and what he learned from them.
[dramatic music playing]
On the other hand, however, he was double-dealing
and probably selling… telling them what we were up to
and what we were doing.
There was a question as to how reliable he was overall.
I knew that the CIA was paying Noriega $200,000 a year for information.
[Rodriguez] Noriega did receive compensation,
but it was compensation to pay for, uh,
for things that he was doing for us
in terms of collecting information,
in terms of setting up equipment that we used
to collect intelligence on, uh, hard targets.
But there was always a problem with Noriega and corruption.
He knew the country. He knew the players.
So he was an important part of the Panamanian government at the time,
and Torrijos in particular.
[boat horns blaring]
[seagulls squawking]
[reporter] Omar Torrijos was killed in a fiery plane crash.
[foreboding music plays]
The circumstances of the incident are unclear.
Authorities said that his plane crashed into the side of a mountain,
but witnesses said that the plane exploded in flight.
Although his death was officially declared an accident,
many suspect that he was assassinated.
[in Spanish] When General Torrijos died in Cerro Marta on July 31, 1981…
[crowd yelling]
…a situation of national uncertainty arose.
Torrijos was not President of the Republic.
Torrijos was head of the government.
So in that transition,
General Noriega takes over the National Guard, called the Defense Forces.
He was the one who ordered the transition.
[Rodriguez in English] He became head of the Panamanian Defense Force,
and was able to consolidate power, eventually,
and become the strongman.
He was not the president, but he was the main person,
the dictator in Panama.
[suspenseful music playing]
He had good knowledge of where the money was,
and the rich people,
and got involved in all kinds of different types of corruption.
I think that probably the worst, of course, was narcotics trafficking.
[indistinct shouting]
[distant police sirens]
[inaudible]
Noriega was able to use Panama as a transit point for drugs.
So he had control of the waterways
with Colombia, getting into Miami,
routes into Europe.
And he developed that network working with the individuals
from the various cartels.
And he was paid very well for that.
If the cartels want safe passage through the canal,
or support,
he can make it happen.
So, for the cartels, it's an important relationship to have.
So it was a perfect haven for drug trafficking
and other kinds of corruption.
[suspenseful music playing]
Well, our country had become very concerned about the narcotics trade.
In 1986, President Reagan directed the Central Intelligence Agency
to get better intelligence on how to take down the trafficking organizations.
We formed the Panama Task Force
in order to enhance our intelligence collection.
And that was the situation when I arrived there on my second tour
in 1986.
I asked the embassy to give me a list of all those companies
who you're doing business with,
and I wanted a report of how many of those had links with Noriega.
All of them had links with Noriega.
Noriega had his claws in them.
So I wanted to ban all business with those companies
and import it from the United States. Thought that was inherent in my mission.
Get rid of Noriega.
And so Noriega and I became archenemies.
[soldiers chattering]
Most countries don't like foreign troops in their country,
so it'll eventually get under their skin.
[Rodriguez] Pretty quickly, Noriega started to question
whether we were the best partners to have,
the best friends to have,
and started to oppose us in different ways.
[tense music playing]
[in Spanish] Poindexter asked General Noriega
to intervene on behalf of the Contras in Nicaragua.
He even asked Noriega
to lend part of the territory of Panama
to train the Contras
to go fight in Nicaragua.
General Noriega said no, he was not going to allow that.
They saw in General Manuel Antonio Noriega an obstacle
to the materialization
of those geostrategic and political objectives.
[Rodriguez in English] He became antagonistic and even confrontational,
and almost belligerent towards the U.S.
And he started to undermine our Central American policies.
[in Spanish] This machete represents the dignity and courage
of the Panamanian people.
It says not one step back.
[police sirens blare]
[Rodriguez in English] And he started to oppress,
suppress, the political establishment in Panama.
He started to torture and kill his political opponents.
[crowd screaming]
Well, at some point, we knew we could not turn a blind eye anymore.
We knew we had to do something about it.
Uh, and that's when it was decided that we would cut relations with him.
[Duncan] President George Bush, Sr.
stopped economic and military aid to Panama.
So things were out of control.
-[suspenseful music plays] -[indistinct chatter]
-[gunfire] -[shouting]
[Duncan] In 1988, Noriega was on federal charges
for drug trafficking in the United States.
[suspenseful music continues]
[reporter] It's in a helicopter originally supplied by the Americans,
but the ruler, who has now been charged with drug smuggling,
still flies around his country.
General Manuel Noriega is commander of the army,
and the most powerful man in Panama.
[Rodriguez] As the head of the task force, I was going to the deputies' meetings
at the White House, the National Security Council meetings.
The objective was to have him step down from power peacefully
and turn it over to a democratic government at some point.
[tense music playing]
[reporter] …Noriega out?
I would love to see them get him out. We'd like to see him out of there.
[Duncan] In 1989, there was a coup attempt, March of that year,
by some of his own military members.
And they were put down, executed.
General Noriega was, for a long time, on the CIA payroll,
and he knows a trick or two about propaganda.
Once again, he's rebuffed an attempt to unseat him.
And as desperately as the Americans want him to leave,
his grip on power still looks as strong as ever.
We weren't looking to have a coup.
We were not giving them weapons or training them in any way.
We just persuade the military to put pressure on Noriega to step down.
[suspenseful music plays]
Kurt Muse was an American citizen whose family had gone to Panama.
His father had a graphics business,
and he was working for his father.
Uh, his children were going to Panamanian schools.
He was part of the community there.
Integrated into the Panamanian community.
But he, like others, friends of his, Panamanian friends,
became very concerned with Noriega and his abuse of authority.
They called themselves Radio Voz de la Libertad.
They were able to discover that they could intercept
commercial radio transmission from commercial radio stations
from downtown Panama City
and take it over, basically hijack the signal…
and broadcast their own program.
And at the time, they were broadcasting sporadically,
very short messages that were anti-Noriega and pro-democracy.
[man in Spanish] The Voice of Freedom.
[fanfare music playing on radio]
[Rodriguez] And we gave them money, funds, to rent safe houses
in downtown Panama City in different places,
where we gave them the state-of-the-art equipment,
where they could be programmed to take over radio stations
at a given time.
[crowd shouting]
[rhythmic clapping]
And then we decided that we would use this capability
to push back against Noriega,
because we knew that he was going to cheat.
He was going to manipulate the election process.
[suspenseful music playing]
We would set up our equipment,
and we would wait for election day.
And on election day, we would receive the results of exit polls.
And we would then read the script that we put together.
"Attention, attention, attention. Urgent, urgent."
"We are interrupting this broadcast
to bring you the real results of the elections
based on exit polling."
And we would quickly go through the information that we had received
from the exit polling,
and then shut down and monitor Panamanian military communications
to make sure they weren't looking for us.
It worked like a charm.
[tense music playing]
We spent most of the afternoon and part of the evening
doing our messages, intercepting the radio communications.
But eventually what happened was that Noriega stopped the count.
[no audible dialogue]
And a day or two later, he basically annulled the election.
And his reason for annulling: there was foreign interference.
[foreboding music plays]
[Colamarco in Spanish] The Dignity Battalions were the expression
of an important group of Panamanian citizens
who voluntarily decided to organize themselves as a civil militia,
as a second line of support for the Defense Forces.
What we wanted was to prevent a foreign military intervention from taking place.
[in Spanish] My name is Amadís Jiménez Sandoval.
I was a captain in the Defense Force during the time of the invasion.
I have known Benjamín Colamarco for many years,
and like many young men of his time,
he was a very idealistic man.
And I think that he believed a lot in the matter of nationalism
and Panama's sovereignty.
He was the commander of the Dignity Battalions.
[in English] After the period of the elections were negated
and there were the mass civilian protests,
Noriega had put out the word to the Panamanian Defense Forces,
and also to the Dignity Battalions
to attack the men who had been legitimately elected.
[crowds shouting]
One of those was Billy Ford.
He was attacked in the streets.
His bodyguard driver was killed, and Ford was severely beaten.
[reporter] Violence in Panama today as pro-Noriega forces
attacked opposition leaders and their followers.
The opposition presidential candidate, Guillermo Endara, was beaten unconscious.
His vice presidential candidates were also badly mauled.
But he showed his true colors.
He showed that he was a dictator.
And that was the beginning of the end for him.
[somber music playing]
[Duncan] I was assigned to this special operations unit.
It was called a Joint Intelligence Fusion Cell.
The mandate for the unit was to find, fix, and predict Noriega's moves.
So we were sent down as a team in November to do this.
[suspenseful music playing]
I would jog down Amador Causeway,
which is the same area where his headquarters was located,
talk to the guards to see what information could be gained,
and then report back on anything that I had heard.
Upon my arrival, one of the things that I started developing
was a networking of sources who may have seen or heard
of Noriega's whereabouts,
so that we were able to predict his every move.
I knew that he had a mistress, Vicky Amado.
And I went down to one of the nail parlors that she would frequent
to see if I could pick up some rumors from there.
And there was also a home that he frequented
that was known to be the witch's home.
He was very, very involved in voodoo, called Santería in Spanish.
He thought that these powers would be extended to him
through these rituals, and give him greater powers.
[tense music playing]
We were holding our Christmas ball,
and our commander, General Cisneros, called a halt to our evening.
[Cisneros] I went up to the microphone and I said,
"I'm sorry to have to cancel this event,
but we just had an incident,
and I'm ordering all of you officers to go drop your family off
and report for duty back at the base."
I was notified by my aid that there was an incident that occurred
where a marine lieutenant had been killed.
THE 'MARINE' KILLED IN PANAMA WAS COLOMBIAN
He had gone out, and with two other friends,
they drove by the Panamanian headquarters. There was a roadblock.
-And that's when they told them to halt. -[dogs barking]
[men shouting angrily]
[Cisneros] He ran through the blockade. They shot him and killed him.
[gunshot]
A very reliable story I got that when they briefed Bush,
they also briefed him that subsequent to that marine getting killed,
there was a Navy lieutenant who also shouldn't have been there, with his wife,
driving by the same place, and they stopped him.
They got him out, rough-treated him, and pawned his wife.
So that's when Bush ordered the operation to be done.
It was called Just Cause then.
The Panamanians called it an American invasion.
That's what I'm gonna refer to it: the American invasion of Panama.
Because that's what it was.
[tense music playing]
[in Spanish] I was returning home around ten when I received a call
from Captain Moisés Cortizo,
whose base was in Fort Amador.
Captain Cortizo told me,
"Benjamín, strange things are happening."
"We have lost communication with the American counterpart
of the United States Army in Panama."
That night, when we arrived, passing the lights of the checkpoint,
they were broken and there was no soldier in the checkpoint,
neither Panamanian nor American.
And the entire left area of the base, which was where the Americans were,
which was the United States Navy Command area, was dark.
Completely blacked out.
[Haney in English] I was the command sergeant major
of the U.S. infantry battalion stationed there,
the 5th Battalion 87th Infantry.
Delta Force participated in the, uh, invasion of Panama
on Operation Just Cause for a couple of reasons.
One, they had had a team tracking Noriega for a number of months.
Second one was Kurt Muse.
Kurt Muse, who had been part of this Panamanian group, Voz de la Libertad.
He had traveled to the U.S.
and had returned to Panama.
The group had been betrayed by someone, uh, known to them.
And they had wrapped up Kurt, put him in jail.
[Haney] Kurt was being held at the Modelo prison
in downtown El Chorrillo,
right across from the Comandancia, the PDF headquarters.
[Rodriguez] It became clear for the U.S. government
that as a first step in the invasion was to get Kurt out.
That mission was called Acid Gambit.
[tense music playing]
[man] At the time of Operation Just Cause,
I was assigned to an army special mission unit.
So a special mission unit is the Army's designation
of different units that are classified.
[Rodriguez] Delta Force are the elite of our troops.
They can go into any situation and take care of business and come out.
We wanted to get Kurt Muse out of prison safely
because we knew the longer he stayed there,
the more at risk he was.
Little birds from Delta
had been putting this one together for quite a long time.
I knew Lee when he came to go through selection
through the operator's training course at Delta.
They landed on top of Modelo prison…
[gunfire]
…fought their way inside…
[gunfire continues]
…blowing doors and cells open…
with some charges that they had for that purpose.
Grabbed Kurt Muse and drug him up and stuck him on a helicopter.
[Cisneros] When the helicopter left, they fired at it.
Got damaged, and crashed down on the street below.
[Rodriguez] The military sent in reinforcements.
[Cisneros] And all the shooting going on, an armored personnel carrier from us
went up there, drove up, rescued him, and drove him back to the Army base.
[Rodriguez] It was a pretty dramatic escape from prison.
The Delta Forces, a couple of them got shot.
But everybody survived, and it was a happy ending.
On a scale of one to ten, it's a ten.
[dramatic music playing, fades]
[Cisneros] Meanwhile, H-hour, the rest of the battalion
was gonna helicopter into Fort Amador
and secure Fort Amador, then we launched the operation.
[suspenseful music playing]
The operation plan had simultaneous attacks
on the Canal Zone,
Fort Amador,
Panamanian airport, Torrijos,
Fort Cimarron.
And Rio Hato, which was way up north by itself.
They had the 82nd Airborne Division had come down.
The Navy SEALs had parachuted into Panamá Viejo.
And, unfortunately, it was during the time of low tide,
and when that occurs, the tide is very, very distant,
you know, from the mainland.
And, unfortunately, we lost four Navy SEALs during that event.
But it was a very, very chaotic time.
For us, it wasn't an invasion. It was a walk out the back door.
[suspenseful music continues]
[in Spanish] The truth is that the limit between the Panama base
and the United States Army base was the street.
They had to cross a street to invade our country.
[in English] The most important one was to immediately take out
any of the Panamanian Defense Force locations in the city,
to isolate them and to knock them out.
[percussive music playing]
[men shouting in Spanish]
[Haney] The Comandancia was pounded like a drum.
It was hit by AC-130 gunships just firing on that.
Just pounding the place.
And then later cleared by a company of rangers.
[rapid gunfire]
[explosion]
[Arsdale] We knew that Noriega wasn't there,
or we would have gone in with boots on the ground
as opposed to bombs and rockets from the air.
So it was essentially destroyed when the operation first kicked off.
[Cisneros] That's where the majority of the deaths occurred, right there.
-[artillery fire] -In that fight at the Comandancia.
That's where we caught fire on the four houses that were there.
[man in Spanish] Wherever you were in the city, you could see the beam of light
that the fire from El Chorrillo made.
We weren't sure if our house would even still be there when we returned.
It was very, very scary.
[tense music playing]
[Haney in English] We burned Chorrillo to the ground.
Twelve square blocks, a little more.
People were just streaming out of there.
Those buildings had been built by the French
during the French Canal project.
It was heart pine timber from Savannah, Georgia.
If you've ever seen heart pine go up, I mean, it just… whoosh!
And if you were slow, or old, or crippled, or little,
you didn't get out of that damn place.
[tense music crescendos, fades]
[Jiménez in Spanish] On the night of December 19,
I was the commander of the Coco Solo Marine Infantry Company.
I had just been promoted to captain,
and that was the day I took command of this new company.
I didn't even know the unit's phone number.
I didn't know the name of the soldiers I had there.
[overlapping gunfire]
Soldiers in that unit were very young.
They were 18, 19, 20-year-old kids,
and when the bombing started, they were very scared.
They had us all surrounded.
Then the soldier that was next to me says,
"Do not go outside because you will get killed,"
and I said to the soldier, "The only way is to try to save ourselves,
because the enemy's force against us is far superior."
"So I will try to surrender."
The moment I tried to surrender and get out,
a hand grenade blows up.
The soldier and I went down. He didn't find cover in time
and was hit by the grenade. He died in my arms.
[helicopter blades whirring]
[Colamarco in Spanish] There are reports that in the first hours alone
there were more than 480 bombs detonated
in the capital area, specifically in the area of El Chorrillo.
[in English] In my opinion, the fighting was over in about an hour.
[Jiménez in Spanish] I was at the Davis prisoner camp.
I did not know that the new president of Panama was President Endara.
[reporter] The new government installed by the invasion
was headed by the U.S.-backed candidates from the aborted national election.
Endara…
[Jiménez in Spanish] President Endara talked with General Cisneros
and asked Cisneros about me.
That is when I met with General Cisneros
in a safe house in Fort Davis.
[grim music playing]
[Cisneros in English] Could see the hatred in his eyes.
Of course, nobody likes to be invaded and shot down.
[Jiménez in Spanish] At the time, I was upset and I told him
that I wanted to go back to the prisoner camp
and that I did not want to participate in absolutely anything.
[Cisneros] But I told them, "Listen, it's all over."
"Noriega's running. He has betrayed you all."
"There's no need to do any more dying or destruction."
"I need you to help me."
[Jiménez in Spanish] Cisneros tells me that there was a fire in El Chorrillo,
and that there was a number of people left homeless.
The other American generals wanted to bomb Colón,
and they were planning to bomb Colón that night.
And asked me to help him to get officers and troops in Colón to surrender.
We were on the same page about avoiding unnecessary bloodshed.
Then we made a telephone call together.
They talk to me, they talk to Captain Cisneros,
and he asks them very respectfully, in a very correct manner, to surrender,
that what he wants is to avoid bombing the city of Colón.
I said, "Listen, I will not bomb you. If you give up all your weapons,
fly a white flag,
you will not be hurt."
[Jiménez in Spanish] A few hours went by and officers started to exit
toward the American troops' checkpoint
and with this, they avoid the bombing of Colón.
[in English] That happened to about 75% of the Panamanian Force.
Surrendered by day three.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Arsdale] Prior to the execution of Just Cause,
all the intel we received
said that we know where Noriega is 24 hours a day.
"Tell us when you're going, we'll tell you where he is."
As soon as we got down there, nobody knew where he was.
The individuals that were tracking him had noted that he had been at meetings
on the Atlantic side, in Colón.
Then he came to the Pacific side,
where he was at a hotel close to the airport.
And then they lost track of him.
[Arsdale] We found out that the reason no one knew where he was
is because he was in a bordello when Just Cause went down.
And so he's there seeing the aircraft,
and the noises, and the explosions, and he went to ground.
[Haney] Noriega was a clever man. He knew that we were gonna kill him.
Because we were going to kill him.
Had we been able to catch him anywhere during the fighting,
he was a dead man.
So he was going place to place, hiding.
He's in civilian clothes. Had a driver, someone stuck with him.
And he couldn't stay anywhere very long, because Delta was on him.
[indistinct chatter]
[Arsdale] We did over 20 missions in a six-day period
of places where he either might likely have been
or where he was reported to be.
But it was the same story everywhere. No Noriega.
[somber music plays]
[Duncan] In my mind,
I felt that Noriega was too much of a coward
to really run into the jungles.
He loved comfort too much.
He loved his mistress, Vicky Amado, too much.
And I then began developing, in my mind,
that perhaps Vicky Amado knew where he was
in the chaos that had ensued.
I got the Yellow Pages. Back then we had Yellow Pages.
And I looked for the Amado residence. And I made the phone call.
This was late on 21st December.
Her mother, Norma, answered the phone.
And I introduced myself as Maria,
and I had a message from Manuel Noriega for Vicky.
Vicky gets to the phone and she's just out of breath,
and just asks me, "Is he safe? Where is he?"
So that let me know that neither one of them
knew where Noriega was.
So I just proceeded to tell Vicky that the message that I had from Manuel:
if she did not feel safe, that she could contact me, Maria,
and I would help her to safety.
That was the end of the conversation on December 21st.
On the afternoon of December 22nd,
I received a call.
She told me she was scared for her life.
I told her that I would arrange to go pick her up.
[tense music playing]
On 23rd December,
met her at the prescribed location.
But then when she notices that the vehicle is going into the old Canal Zone
and we are approaching a military gate,
she looks at me and she says, "Where are we going?"
And, um, I said, "To a safe place."
I did inform her that I was not a Noriega ally.
You know, I was on the side of the U.S. forces,
and it was time for Noriega to be brought to justice.
And the country needed her support in order to help this occur.
So I think, you know, in the next few days,
she started feeling her role in this was really very, very important.
And she had the life of her children to think about.
And I think that was probably foremost in her mind.
Vicky Amado's downfall was that she just liked to be part of high society.
Her mother, Norma, she ran a bar,
and was known to fix Noriega's meals for him
because he was afraid of getting poisoned.
So that was Vicky's mother.
Vicky, on the other hand, just lived a style
that she never had the opportunity to do so
until she met up with Manuel Noriega.
Interestingly enough, we did not know where Noriega was
at the time that I brought Vicky to the safe house,
which was on 23rd December.
[dramatic music playing]
The evening of 24th December,
Noriega calls the nuncio and asks for refuge.
Noriega sought refuge in the nuncio because it's a sanctuary
that's established by the Catholic Church.
The Pope says nobody can be touched as long as they are in the papal nuncio.
He had called from a Tastee-Freez ice cream shop.
[man] Okay, right over here is the parking lot.
Adjacent right across is the Vatican.
You see the two men standing up inside the parking… The open bay there?
Directly right across is supposed to be Noriega's room.
That is where Noriega's staying, right there.
And then he's surrounded, of course…
[in Spanish] There are people who said that when he entered the Vatican embassy,
he was dressed as a nun.
Others say that he was dressed as a woman.
Then there is a third version that says that Father Villanueva
got him into the nunciature. I really do not know.
[ominous music playing]
[Arsdale] So we hightailed it there. We're the first ones on the scene.
We secured the embassy itself to keep him from escaping.
And then there were numerous concentric circles of security
put around us.
We had him locked up tight.
[Duncan] We then set up communications, a direct line,
on about 26th, 27th December from the safe house into the nuncio,
so that we had direct contact phone conversations
between Vicky and Noriega.
[Cisneros] We tapped the phone,
and I heard Noriega talking to Vicky Amado.
[Duncan] So the conversation basically with her and Noriega was,
you know, you can't stay in there forever.
[Haney] In the meantime, as she's talking to him on and off,
we're amping up the pressure.
Big Army loudspeakers blasting rock music.
The favorite one was, "I Fought the Law and the Law Won."
They'd just be blaring…
And we knew the room he was staying in,
so we put some speakers just really close to the wall.
Right there, to just blast him day and night, no rest.
General Assembly adopted a resolution deploring the U.S. invasion of Panama
as a quote, "flagrant violation of international law."
The vote: 75-20.
[in Spanish] The United Nations General Assembly
approved Resolution 44/240,
which indicates that the administration of the U.S. government,
at that time, of President Bush,
violated international law
and violated the sovereignty of the Republic of Panama.
I went that morning back to my headquarters,
and on the way back there was a large crowd
about a mile from the nunciature, Panamanians demonstrating.
[crowd shouting]
As soon as they saw my car, they were, "Ah!"
You know, I was very popular then.
And they told me, "General, if you just let us in there,
we'll drag Noriega out."
I went back to the headquarters, called the nuncio, and I said,
"You know, there's a large group of Panamanians out there
that want to come in and take care of Noriega."
He got the light, and went and called Noriega from the bedroom upstairs.
This is exactly how he told me. He said, "I told Noriega,
'If you don't give yourself up,
that crowd is gonna come in and hang you like Mussolini.'"
Said, "That's what's gonna happen if you don't give yourself up to Cisneros
because Cisneros is required to protect you once you're in his custody."
Which was true.
[Duncan] Prior to this, I had really talked to Vicky
about what kind of man Noriega was.
And she said that, you know, he was a very, very proud man.
He was very happy and proud of his military accomplishments.
He did not like humiliations at all.
And that's when I had the idea that, you know,
maybe bringing him in his uniform out of there
would be something that he could come out and not feel the humiliation.
And the conversation with Noriega was that,
"Put your uniform on, you come out of the nuncio,
your pride restored."
You know, you just can't stay the way it is now.
We had our military forces that had gone to one of Noriega's residences
to get the uniform,
and ironed it, and had it all prepped up and clean for him.
And it was delivered that way.
When he saw the curtain was up, he agreed to come out.
One of the things he said was,
"I will give myself up and surrender myself to General Cisneros."
So I passed that on to General Thurman. He said, "No, you shouldn't be up there."
So I was not at the gate.
A Special Forces detachment were there to check him and so forth.
And I stayed back.
[tense music playing]
[Duncan] And at 8:50 that evening,
Noriega did come out of the nuncio in his military uniform.
[Arsdale] So he came out.
We were trying to present a calm appearance so as not to spook him.
I didn't want him to get to the gate and then panic and turn around,
and then we're back to square one.
He came out through the gate. I remember grabbing him
by the upper arm so we could turn him around and search him.
And he asked, "Where is General Cisneros?"
He says, "¿Dónde está General Cisneros?"
And I told him, "He's right over there across the street."
We cuffed him, walked him over to a Black Hawk helicopter.
Put him in the helicopter and they handcuffed him,
and he started rocking.
He thought we were gonna throw him out of the helicopter.
I'm convinced that's why.
He started going, "Ah, ah."
He was afraid. A coward. He's nothing but a coward.
[tense music continues]
It was not until Noriega left the papal nuncio
and I saw him be turned over to the DEA agents,
I just had a sigh of relief.
[Arsdale] There were a lot of moving parts in Just Cause.
It wasn't flawless. You know, people made mistakes.
Sometimes the enemy gets a vote, and the weather gets a vote,
and broken vehicles get a vote.
So nothing is ever flawless.
But for the size and scope of this operation,
it was pretty amazing how it was carried off.
[Cisneros] Regarding the invasion of Panama, the military operation,
I have no regrets that I participated.
In fact, I'm glad I did because I know I saved a lot of lives.
[in Spanish] What was a real surprise for us, or at least for me,
was that Noriega had worked until the last minute with the CIA.
That I risked my life,
that my military unit almost got killed…
It was bitter to find out that until the very last minute he had been working
for the enemy that was attacking me.
It is very hard to see people next to you die.
What marked me the most is having very clear
that there is no good war, as there is no bad peace.
That is what has marked me the most.
[in Spanish] We still don't know the number of deaths that occurred
during the invasion.
We calculate about 2,000 to 3,000 dead.
But there were no records of that.
[Cisneros] Noriega was sentenced to 40 years in jail
as a prisoner of the United States.
Then he went to prison in France because a French law was broken.
Then they released him to Panama,
and they put him in a former Canal Zone jail.
Then they found out he had cancer, and he died.
But I think overall, Noriega was treated much better
than he deserved to be treated.
Noriega was a very cruel man.
[Rodriguez] Panama is one of those success stories
because they've been democratic,
they took over the canal, they've run it well, they've made money.
But we need to be careful not to engage in military takeovers
in the future like this.
[angry shouting]
Not only did they result in the death of many young soldiers,
but a loss of treasure and standing in the world.
So, uh, hopefully the days of invading other countries is over.
[somber music playing]
[theme music plays]