The agreement that prosecutors reached last month to get testimony from Colombian drug lord Carlos Lehder Rivas-now serving life plus 135 years in federal prison-seemed surprising. But the U.S. attorney’s office has taken a “kitchen sink” approach to the trial, assembling a parade of “flipped” alleged co-conspirators, agents and informants–as many as 80 people in all–to buttress the 10-count indictment. Admitted drug pilot Floyd Carlton will probably get the ball rolling. Convicted BCCI official Amjad Awan, once Noriega’s personal banker, is expected to bolster incriminating charges of “unexplained wealth,” the millions Noriega is said to have taken in bribes to allow drugs into Panama. The prosecution’s heavy reliance on drug-world witnesses, a routine feature of narcotics trials, could backfire against so prominent a defendant. Defense lawyers will point to reduced sentences being offered for testimony against Noriega and payments to witnesses already totaling $1.5 million. The kitchen-sink approach opens up avenues for a counterattack. One mention of Fidel Castro in the indictment, for instance, will allow the defense to show that Noriega kept the CIA fully briefed on his meetings with the Cuban leader.
A main defense contention will be that former CIA director William Casey and Ollie North asked Noriega to look the other way at contra arms-supply flights; if some of the planes carried drugs, the defense will argue, Noriega was not responsible. But Noriega is aware that pulling in his old intelligence allies could be a two-edged sword. Prosecution and defense alike have been quiet about Micha (Mike) Harari, a onetime senior Israeli intelligence officer who was at Noriega’s right hand through the 1980s and is now out of sight back home. Indeed, there are growing suspicions that Noriega is holding back some potentially explosive information, even from his own lawyers. The speculation is that he figures Washington will accept nothing less than a conviction, and that his own interests will be best served by keeping the secrets, protecting old friends and playing for time. “Life is a circle,” Noriega whispered to a Panamanian journalist last week, before marshals waved him off. “Everything comes back.”
There might have been. Last month prosecutors admitted that Noriega’s former chief attorney, Ray Takiff, had been used as an undercover informant in an unrelated Miami corruption probe. They and Takiff insist no damage was done. But in a pretrial hearing, defense lawyers claimed Takiff sought to “curry favor” with Miami prosecutors by sabotaging an llth-hour Bush administration offer that, they say, would have put Noriega beyond the prosecutors’ reach. The secret overture, defense co-counsel Frank Rubino told NEWSWEEK, came in a never-disclosed October 1989 meeting in Washington between himself and senior State and Justice department officials.
The terms, Rubino says, were simple: Noriega would not be pursued if he peacefully gave up power. But, he says, Noriega spurned the overture, and talks broke off. Two months later, U.S. troops invaded. Takiff, who, citing health reasons, resigned as counsel the day Noriega was brought to Florida, insists he did nothing improper. Judge William Hoeveler now has to decide whether to grant the defense’s request for what could be a Pandora’s-box inquiry into the preinvasion talks.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Atlanta, rarely reverses. But due to the novelty of many of the issues, says Hoeveler, “there are plenty of things here somebody might want to have another look at.” Most obvious would be the question of jurisdiction-whether U.S. courts had any-and whether Washington overstepped its bounds in launching an invasion to bring one man to heel. Noriega’s right to counsel may have been violated by the secret taping of his prison phone calls and the use of his lawyer as a government agent. If he is acquitted, those questions would be moot. But if he loses in Miami, it will be next stop Atlanta.
