Panama December 21, 1989
I could hear the pinging of the bullets over the rotor sound of the military helicopter I was on as we headed from Albrook Air Force base to one of self-appointed President General Manuel Antonio Noriega’s residences. We were on our way to search the residence hoping to find the President himself or evidence tying him to drug trafficking. I would normally say that we were on our way to serve a search warrant, but given that the U.S. had invaded Panama hours before and we were in an active war zone, no warrant was needed.
Less than 24 hours before, I had been at my desk at the El Paso Intelligence Center, which is a multi-federal agency tactical intelligence center where I headed up the South America section within the Tactical Support Unit – a fancy name for spending all day listening to and interpreting intercepted radio communications in Spanish between different drug traffickers in South America trying to determine their location.
I had been watching the invasion on television when I received a call from DEA headquarters instructing me to pack for 7 days as I was going to Panama that same evening. Little did I know, it would be more than 7 months before I finally returned home.
I landed at Albrook Air Force Base 6 hours later and had just enough time to dump my bags and hop on the helicopter. Now here I was, flying over an active war zone with a bunch of soldiers and fellow DEA, on my way to search the house of a sitting president. Bullets were pinging off the aircraft while a gunner was hanging out of the open door returning fire. Smoke was coming off several buildings and pockets of insurgents were skirmishing below with the better trained and better equipped U.S. forces. And the only thought that kept running though my 27-year-old mind was “Who’s got it better than me?”
The search was a bust. Noriega wasn’t there, and neither was his family. As a matter of fact, the only ones present were 5 guards and 2 maids who were more than happy to simply walk away when they saw us coming. We searched the house from top to bottom, but nothing interesting was found – except for a female blow-up doll in one of his daughters’ rooms (I’m still trying to figure out how that was used). At one point, one of the soldiers thought that he found cocaine wrapped in a banana leaf in the freezer, but we quickly determined that it was only a tamale (a dish made of dough that is steamed in a banana leaf).
Two additional teams were off searching Noriega’s other main residences, so we returned back to base, a little deflated over the lack of success, but excited nonetheless with the knowledge that we were still in the chase. Noriega’s whereabouts remained unknown and pressure was mounting that he be found.