How the US Captured Manuel Noriega in 1989

In the early-morning hours of December 20, 1989, more than 24,000 U.S. troops, supported by hundreds of helicopters and bombers, launched a full-scale invasion of Panama. Their mission was to capture and arrest General Manuel Noriega, a military dictator and indicted drug trafficker who had once been a U.S. ally and trusted informant for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

As American bombs fell on Panama City and U.S. troops quickly took control of Panamanian military installations and ports, President George H.W. Bush addressed the nation.

“Last night, I ordered U.S. military forces to Panama,” said Bush. “No president takes such action lightly. This morning, I want to tell you what I did and why I did it.”

Bush cited four reasons why the U.S. had invaded Panama, home to the U.S.-built Panama Canal and several U.S. military bases: to safeguard the lives of Americans living in Panama (roughly 40,000), to defend democracy in Panama, to combat drug trafficking and to protect the integrity of the Panama Canal treaties.

Within 72 hours, the overwhelming show of American military force known as Operation Just Cause had captured all its strategic objectives, except for one—Noriega was still at large. The general evaded U.S. forces and holed up in the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See in Panama City, where he sought asylum.

U.S. General Maxwell "Mad Max" Thurman surrounded the embassy with loudspeakers and blared rock music around the clock, including "Panama" by Van Halen and “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins. Noriega surrendered on January 3, 1990, and was taken into custody by officers from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Noriega’s sudden downfall came as a surprise to longtime observers of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. Noriega was one of the highest-ranking and longest-serving CIA informants in the region. Starting in the 1960s, a young Noriega provided the U.S. with key intelligence about communist Cuba. And when the U.S. needed an ally to combat the leftist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, Noriega stepped up.

While George H.W. Bush was the director of the CIA in the late 1970s, the U.S. was paying Noriega $110,000 a year for his services.

“Manuel Noriega was a very useful Cold War ally of the United States from the earliest phases of his career,” says Michael Grow, a historian of Latin America and professor emeritus at Ohio University. “He had a very good working relationship with U.S. intelligence and the U.S. military, and was delivering all kinds of valuable intelligence to the United States.”

Ironically, Noriega also served on the frontlines of the U.S. “war on drugs” in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. The DEA awarded Noriega multiple commendations for arresting cocaine traffickers and money launderers in Panama. As late as 1987, the DEA Administrator John C. Lawn saluted Noriega’s “personal commitment to anti-drug efforts.”

In reality, Noriega was far from a loyal friend to the United States. The entire time that Noriega was working with the CIA and the DEA, he was also an informant for Fidel Castro's government in Cuba and on the payroll of the powerful Medellín drug cartel in Colombia.

“Noriega was working both sides of the street all the time,” says Grow. “He was working with the Cubans while he was working with the Reagan administration. He was hand in glove with the cartels in Colombia while he was considered a trusted collaborator and ally of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. He was in bed with anybody who’d pay him money.”

Noriega made a killing in kickbacks for helping the Colombian cartels fly cocaine into the United States. Noriega pocketed $100,000 to $200,000 for each planeload of drugs that passed through Panama on its way to the U.S., plus a monthly commission of up to $4 million from the Medellín cartel. Noriega’s estimated net worth by 1989 was between $200 million to $800 million, according to Grow, author of U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War.

U.S. intelligence knew about Noriega’s double dealings as early as the 1970s, but American presidents were willing to turn a blind eye to Noriega’s drug-running and disloyalty as long as the general continued to assist with anticommunist operations in places like Nicaragua.

William Casey, CIA director under President Ronald Reagan, once said of Noriega: “He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.”

America's uneasy relationship with Noriega started to unravel in 1986. That’s when journalist Seymour Hersh published an investigation in The New York Times exposing Noriega’s decades of drug trafficking and human rights abuses as Panama’s hard-line dictator.

"Noriega got such bad press in the States that the Reagan and Bush administrations could no longer justify retaining him as an ally,” says Grow.

Pressure really mounted in 1989, Bush’s first year in office. During a presidential election in Panama, Noriega suspended voting when it looked like his political opponents were going to win. Protesters took to the streets of Panama City and were brutally attacked by Noriega’s “Dignity Battalions,” goon squads armed with metal pipes and rubber hoses.

Then, in October of 1989, anti-Noriega elements in the Panamanian military attempted a coup to topple the dictator. The Bush administration, taken by surprise, failed to act quickly, and Noriega was able to put down the insurrection. Bush was excoriated in the press as “a model of incompetence” who was “absolutely paralyzed” when the opportunity to oust Noriega presented itself.

Embarrassed by the fumbled coup, the Bush administration started planning a large-scale military action against Noriega. But Bush and his generals also knew that they needed a clear pretext to justify the deployment of U.S. troops. Lieutenant General Carl Stiner later said, “It would take some kind of trigger that would be acceptable as morally justifiable—like protecting lives—in the minds of the American people and the world.”

That “trigger event” came on December 16, 1989, when an off-duty U.S. Marine was shot and killed after refusing to stop for a Panamanian military roadblock. Two other Americans who witnessed the shooting—a U.S. Naval officer and his wife—were detained and beaten by Noriega’s Panama Defense Forces.

Bush now had his moral justification for invading Panama, aptly named Operation Just Cause.

Technically, the U.S. invasion of Panama wasn’t an act of war, but rather a DEA operation to arrest Noriega for drug trafficking. In 1988, Noriega was indicted by a federal grand jury in Florida on multiple charges of drug smuggling and money laundering. Because it was a law enforcement operation, Bush didn’t need to get congressional authorization under the War Powers Resolution.

According to Brigadier General John S. Brown, a U.S. Army historian, Noriega was visiting a prostitute when the first bombs fell on Panama. The dictator—not known for his religious piety—took refuge in the Apostolic Nunciature (the Vatican’s diplomatic mission) in Panama City, where he pleaded for political asylum.

Unwilling to invade the embassy and forcefully extract Noriega, U.S. forces opted for an unconventional approach. For three days, soldiers blasted rock music outside Noriega’s window as a form of psychological warfare. When Noriega finally turned himself in to DEA agents on January 3, 1990, the dictator’s arrest was accompanied by “I Fought the Law” from the Clash.

Noriega was transported to the United States where a federal judge in Miami sentenced the deposed Panamanian leader to 40 years in prison on eight counts of drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering. His sentence was later reduced. Noriega was moved to a Panamanian prison in 2011 and died there in 2017.

For Panamanians, the U.S. invasion of 1989 was both liberating and devastating. Although Noriega was reviled in Panama for his criminality and brutality, the military operation to depose him resulted in widespread civilian deaths in Panama City. Hundreds of American bombs fell on impoverished neighborhoods like El Chorrillo, Marañón and Caledonia, leveling homes and igniting raging fires.

There is no definitive data on the number of civilian casualties during Operation Just Cause, but estimates range from 500 to several thousand. Twenty U.S. soldiers also died in the fighting.